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Tetrogrammaton. Tetrogram.
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When I was in college, this guy told me, you know, you'll go to Lake George and work there for the summer. Don't go home. Stay in a resort town. I was a bellhop first.
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And it was like uh the bailab where all these gamblers from the Saratoga track would stay. They were big tippers.
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But I met these guys who came from Aspen.
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They would be in Aspen in the winter and they were what they called on the circuit.
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They would work in resort towns.
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They were bartenders or they became weed smugglers or they became just free spirits.
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I learned from these guys and watching them that they they didn't have a career path.
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their their career path was not to have a path at all.
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To improvise your life, experience would count more than anything else.
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And I learned more there probably than anything I did in college.
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And I decided it would be a lot more interesting to live my life sort of on the side of the road than going down the middle >> and take some years off and trying to mask experiences.
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At the same time, I was consumed with the beat literature.
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So that was all about the journey is the destination kind of stuff >> on the road.
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>> And I was on the road and I went on the road.
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I mean when I got out of I went to graduate school to beat the draft cuz I was an early baby boomer.
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I was born on November 22nd.
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I turned 18 the day of the Kennedy assassination. >> Wow.
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>> That was like the day people thought the 60s started.
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So I was kind of going into adulthood then.
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>> What do you remember about that moment?
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>> I was a freshman in college.
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I remember coming out of this class like around 1:30 or something.
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I was in Vermont and you heard the news and you were just like, "What?"
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You know, we hadn't had assassinations before. >> It seemed impossible. >> Seemed impossible.
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And then you're going to want to go watch the television.
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Well, the only television was in a four-story dormatory.
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There's one black and white TV.
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>> So that's where you spend the next three days watching this whole thing unfold.
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But people would say that that's when the 60s began.
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The whole country went into this profound depression which was sort of awoken from with the arrival of the Beatles the following February. >> Yeah.
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>> Which was a national salvation. Wow. People are happy.
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Things could be good again.
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And they brought the country kind of out of this sort of depressive state.
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And then we were off into the 60s.
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I decided early on I would want to like not have a mainstream life.
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I wanted to have a life of adventure and experience and largely that's what I've been able to do doing different things. >> It's amazing.
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Do you think the guys who lived that life were they all inspired by the beat mix? >> No, I don't think so.
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They were they were inspired first of all they were all kind of ski freaks. So they love to ski.
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So they loved an aspen and aspen in that era was because I I I would when I got out of school I would I would work there.
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I remember I was a dishwasher and I had all these menial jobs when I got out of graduate school, but they they weren't inspired.
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So, they weren't like readers. >> Yeah. >> They were like doers.
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They were chasing girls having fun.
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>> So, they would be like ski bums, which later became surf bums.
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>> Ski bums, search bums, beach bums. They were bums. Yeah.
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>> But then, you know, they were they >> they were after something. >> Yeah.
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they were after and they'd like to make money without having to work in a straight job.
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In those days, having a straight job was sort of to this crowd that was like arsenic, man.
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That was the last thing you want to do is give your life up, work for somebody else on some conveyor belt. >> Yeah.
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>> Life seems a lot more interesting not doing that.
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So, and then I moved to New York City in 1967.
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So, I was sort of in the cradle of the of the birth of the counterculture in a way.
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So, >> describe New York City.
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You arrive in ' 67, what do you see?
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>> I see dog [ __ ] all over the sidewalks.
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That was the first thing that struck me cuz we didn't have that pickup law yet.
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And that just used, God, there's a [ __ ] thousands of dogs [ __ ] on the sidewalk every day. Nobody's picking it up. But it was cheap.
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It was like such a rush, you know?
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It was like I was I felt like I was at the crucible of all these things that were happening.
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I was living in Greenwich Village.
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Everything was affordable.
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I mean, I had an apartment.
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And I found an apartment for $90 with two bedrooms. >> Wow.
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>> Which was a rent control thing.
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>> Was the city fairly rund down then or? >> Yeah.
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Yeah, it was run down and it was dirty, but it wasn't really like hitting sort of the crack epidemic state that it got into in the 80s.
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It was just rundown, dirty, inexpensive, and but there was what was going on.
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There was a lot of political action because of the anti-war movement, civil rights movement.
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you know, you you're sort of on the the sexual revolution was kicking into gear, which was a wonderful thing.
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[snorts] And I had just spent four years in Vermont, so this to me was like an emancipation at the of the greatest level. Yeah.
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>> And would you go out at night and see music? >> Yeah. Oh, yeah.
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I mean, at the time on St.
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Mark's Place, there was this place called the Dom Andy Warhol used to run with someone else, but the the Velvet Underground would be like the house band. Drinks were 50 cents.
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and they would project those Warh Hall movies on the Velvets and other bands went through there too.
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But then upstairs was the Electric Circus which I'm sure you know about.
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But in the early days, the Electric Circus was kind of place you wanted to take acid, get high and you I remember going in there the first time I went in and the Chambers brothers were on stage, you know, and I was like, "Wow, this like after two weeks in New York City." >> Yeah.
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There was that whole uptown straight world that was going on, but in the village it was people could come and live there.
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I worry about the city about that now. It's just so expensive.
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You know, you see what we got the new mayor and all, but I mean apartments are $5 $6,000.
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I don't know how a young person could come and be in New York and and particularly if you want to be an artist or have a kind of artful life or have to be if you're off the conveyor belt, it's tough, you know. Yeah.
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>> And even the places that have been in in Brooklyn, everything, they've all been gentrified.
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So, [snorts] >> did you ever go uptown when you lived downtown or?
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>> Yeah, I I got an apartment on East 58th Street and that was I would just go there and then I would go right back downtown.
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So, I was mostly all downtown, but I had I lived in lower Fifth Avenue, but I was mostly and and the school that I went to because I went to business school.
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I figured I had to get out of the draft.
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I was going to get sent to the army.
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When I got out of college, they said, "Hey, man.
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You're going to you're going to be in Vietnam by August, so you better do something about your draft status."
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And so, why don't you go to graduate school?
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And I said, "Well, you know, I don't want to be a doctor.
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I don't want to be a lawyer.
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I mean, I don't know what he said.
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Well, why don't you go to business school?"
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I didn't even know there was such a thing.
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This is how out of it I was. Yeah.
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They said, "Oh, yeah, you can go to two-year business school." So, I applied to NYU.
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I got in and the business school itself was down on Wall Street.
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Then, it was down by the American Stock Exchange behind which they were digging a hole for the World Trade Center.
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So, I was mostly downtown. Yeah.
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>> And how much of what you learned in business school had any relevance to your life in business going forward? >> Yeah, it did.
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you know, because one, I got I kind of always coasted through school.
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When I got to business school, I had this professor and it was the the standards were higher, the the students were smarter, and if I failed, I knew I'd get drafted.
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So, I had this professor, Peter Ducker.
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He was sort of a management guru of the time. He was the guy.
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And he had all these classes on innovation and change.
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And he would talk about the central things in a business are are really kind of artistic thing.
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Marketing and innovation.
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Innovation was finding things that existed already and putting them together in a new way.
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It wasn't like an invention.
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That was like a spark plug going off in my head.
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And then I tried to figure out, well, we have this new demographic, as marketers would say, this new youth culture coming in.
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I was curious as to who would be the people who would find the cracks in the system and create businesses that could deal with this and and do business with this upand cominging new anti-war the whole laundry list of >> people like you. >> Yeah.
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How is this going to work?
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And because these would be fun things. >> Yeah.
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>> But anyway, so I learned a lot about him about spotting innovation.
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And you know what also thing it gave me was confidence.
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I had confidence that I had this diploma.
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I I knew how business worked. I could read a P&L.
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So I I didn't feel like some idiot.
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So life's largely about going around and building up your confidence in several ways. So that worked for that.
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>> What was your first job after that?
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>> I got out of there and I I became a dishwasher in Aspen, Colorado. >> Back to your >> Yeah.
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I went back I got because I then I I also went in I got out of the military the same time I got out of graduate school and I didn't look for a job and I didn't want to get a straight job that was an anathema.
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So I thought I was going to go on the road.
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I' only been in school my whole life. So I went to Aspen.
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I had some friends out there.
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I got hired as a dishwasher.
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Work my up the way up the ladder to waiter.
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And then I split and went to San Francisco. Went to Mexico.
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Ended up in the Virgin Islands. I a bartender there. That was wonderful. Had a great time.
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drew you to the Virgin Islands?
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>> I could work there and it was warm and it was winter.
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I could have gone to Mexico thinking I could get a job like naively.
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So I said, "Where's a really warm place where I could?" And St.
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Thomas sounded pretty good.
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So I got a job there as a bartender in a really nice place >> and met a whole other crew of crazy people who were there at the time.
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And then I the the guy then I got fired.
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The only I got fired twice in my life.
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The guy wanted to give my job to his buddy who just got out of prison.
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So I ended up going to Martha's Vineyard.
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Again, this was like being in places all of these places.
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This is before mass tourism.
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So it was before the vineyard was ruined.
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Not ruined, but you know, before they had a jetport and before Aspen got commercialized, became like a billionaire's playground.
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And the Virgin Islands, this is before cruise ships and all of that.
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So you could still buy Rome for a dollar a bottle.
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And there was a lot of like interesting characters around. So I did a year of that. I got a job.
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Then I went back to New York.
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I got a job at an ad agency.
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>> How was that experience?
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>> It was interesting, but I didn't do it that long. I I worked on GI Joe.
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This is at the height of the Vietnam War.
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Now I'm pedaling war toys. Yeah.
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>> But we had to change GI G. I.
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Joe had come to America the same month as the Beatles.
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He's a bestselling war tour in history.
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But they we had to change him, reposition Joe as a action man because the war thing wasn't working out.
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So we gave him a discharge and he became looking for mummies tombs and go to outer space. >> Cool.
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>> And then I got assigned I did work for scope mouthwash which just drove me crazy cuz I would say mouthwash doesn't really work.
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But then they wanted to assign me to Charman toilet paper.
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This is what really changed my life.
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Rick, they said we like you.
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We think you're on the fast track.
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we think you'd be great on the Charmin toilet paper count. They had this guy, Mr. Whipple.
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>> I remember >> I just said, man, I just I was already alienated.
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And I was like so susceptible to getting back on the road and traveling.
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You know, Joanie Mitchell's Blue album had just come out.
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I just saw a movie Walkabout.
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Everywhere I looked, it was about hitting the road and taking off.
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And then they gave me all this research one weekend to read and it divided America into three categories of toilet paper users.
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Rollers, folders, and crumplers.
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And with all this cycle and an analytic stuff about the cycle was crazy.
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And of course, we're going after the crumplers because they use the most.
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[laughter] They use the most and they go more often.
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And those people live in cities.
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I'm thinking my neighbors in this building are probably all crumplers.
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you know, they don't have time to sit around a can all day.
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So, my old girlfriend called me from Paris and she said, "Oh, man. You can't do that. You can't do that. Come with me.
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I'm going to go across the Sahara Desert.
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I'm going to We're going to hitchhike.
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Maybe make it to the Canary Islands."
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I was on a plane like a week later. Yeah. >> And that was it. We did that. Eye opener.
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We spent a couple months together.
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Went down through the Sahara. I slept on some boat.
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We ended up in the Canary. She took off.
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And then for the next 10 months, I hitchhiked all over the world by myself. Great.
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>> It was incredible life-changing year.
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I mean, I didn't make a phone call in one year. There was no email.
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Obviously, there was nothing. I would send a home.
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And then when I was in Greece on a beach, a girl told me, you know, you should go to India.
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I saw her in this cafe and she was selling all these beautiful dresses and things and to that she would make. She lived in Catmandeue.
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She lived there for four years.
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She was from New York, Long Island.
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and she had quit being a regular designer and she said India is the greatest show on earth on my own vertically integrated enterprise. Look what I do.
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I design and make this stuff. I take it overland.
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I sell it in Italy and in Greece.
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I file that away and I decided I'd go to India.
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I went there and I went overland hitchhiked across Asia through Iran and Turkey.
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And then when I went into Afghanistan, I was that was just like get you know I'm I've been involved in Afghanistan now for 50 years.
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I went to Afghanistan India but this was the 70s.
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These countries Afghanistan people think of some waring nation now but then it was it was like there was no cars. There was no signs.
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There was no advertising. It was exotic. It was beautiful.
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The people were friendly.
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They were optimistic about their future.
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And I decided I would try and start a business there.
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And then I went to India which even though it had half the population of today it still had 5600 million people was like a mad house.
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I did all that and I met some people I thought could be partners.
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>> How do you communicate with people with the different languages?
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>> Well in in India is not a problem generally because India the English left them the English language.
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So many anyone you're kind of dealing with could speak some level of English.
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In Afghanistan, it was a little more difficult.
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Most people that you would deal with would speak a form of Dari, which is a dialect of parsy, but you know, you could pick up a couple thousand words rather quickly.
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So, you could deal, but people I would deal with also spoke English.
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>> So, I found partners and I decided I got a and I got a partner in the states and we set up and started a company.
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The idea would be let's I knew nothing about this but I said I wanted to live here.
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I want to get a house in India.
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This is where I want to live.
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And I did this for eight years.
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Then we made a company >> lived in India for eight years >> in Afghanistan. Yeah.
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>> We started a company and we became very successful out of the box and we were always in Vogue and Madamemoiselle. I hired a designer. It >> was a fashion. >> Yeah.
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We used to make high fashion clothes for stores like Bloomingdales or Bendals and it wasn't like the lower market, lower margin stuff, but I hired a good designer.
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We set up a showroom in Manhattan.
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We just did it as we went along.
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And you know, I was like a millionaire in my 20s and I was living like a king.
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I had this house with servants and I would go back and forth.
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I had a Royal Enfield motorcycle in New Delhi. Every day was fantastic.
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It was like every day I traveled that year I took off was just I never knew what adventure awaited me.
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But India was the most difficult thing I ever did because nothing worked there in any of this place.
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So it really required a lot of elbow grease and planning.
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Tell me about the difference between living in New York City and living in New Delhi.
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>> They're both very crowded, busy, >> crowded.
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New Delhi would be more crowded and lower rise.
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It didn't have the high-rise intensity of New York.
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When I lived there, it was 6 million people. I was just there now. It's 30 million people.
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You could see blue sky then.
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Now, you can't see anything because of the pollution.
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But it was it was the most tumultuous decade in in India's history were the 70s.
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There was riots and blackouts and they had a constipated government system.
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It was very socialist incarnation.
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They've since liberalized in the '9s and things changed a lot.
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But the difference was New York's full of eye candy.
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But nothing can beat India.
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It's the greatest show on earth.
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I mean you go around a corner, could be a marching band, it could be an elephant.
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I mean and then making friends there and getting learning how to navigate things which are so complex and complicated was really for me really satisfying and I used it as a base cuz I traveled to every state in India.
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They only had 14 states then, but I would go to all of them.
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And at one point, the Maharajas were running out of rupees, so they started changing their palaces into hotels.
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And I'd always find them and go live to be like a Maharaja for a weekend.
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>> And I it was inexpensive.
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I mean, things were so cheap, but it it was endlessly fascinating.
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And my fascination with India and with Afghanistan, you know, continues to this day.
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I would read everything I could about both of these countries.
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And but eventually my my business got closed down.
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I had to everything I had was blown up.
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So well in Afghanistan in 78 there was a coup d'etab by these two crazy communist parties that they were like gangs that couldn't shoot straight.
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They overthrew the government and even the the the Russians they didn't believe this was happening but they they decided that Afghanistan was was going to go communist.
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was like the last country in the world to go communist to give it a shot and that was bad news for my partner and me and everything you know we were we were not in the communist program and then they had a coup and then the coup was kind of dangerous there was like tanks
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in the street people shot and everything I made it out of there went out through the kyber pass and made it back to my house in Delhi and I said wow well that was my sense of invincibility was really broken >> how old were you then >> it was 78 I must have been 27 27 years old. My Indian business, which was the bigger
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My Indian business, which was the bigger part of my business, we were really cooking.
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And in 1978, this was like months afterwards, we had never been so busy.
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And we had this big promotion coming up with Bloomingdale's called Fantasy India, it was called, and we were going to be in all their windows, everything.
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And Jimmy Carter announced that they were going to be an embargo, not a tariff, on all imports from India.
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He was under pressure from domestic manufacturers. This comes out one day.
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You're just told this one day.
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And I had all this money tied up in production.
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And my whole life, I've been working at this for six, seven years, seven years already.
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So I shipped three tons of clothing to Canada.
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[snorts] And then I smuggled it all in over the St.
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Lawrence River with a Canadian client of mine whose father used to be a rumr runner through the Thousand Islands. I'm not kidding you. >> Believe you.
19:30
This would end up helping me get a job later at MTV with Bob, a guy named Bob Pitman.
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This story, we would go loaded on a boat and go to this island was so easy.
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This American island on the Thousand Islands had a bridge to the mainland.
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So you could end on a dock, load in the truck and drive back to New York.
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And so I did that, but that really meant the end of my business. That was my last gas.
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That just put a small dent in my debt.
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So I came back, I was 33.
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I had made and lost a fortune.
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And I had a little empire. It was all gone.
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And I'm like, >> it wasn't gone because of anything that you did.
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It was just geopolitical.
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>> A series of unfortunate events. Yes. Nothing that I did.
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We were we were hotter than ever in both places.
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Everything was going great.
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You know, of course, we had cash flow problems and it was really difficult all the time to do business there.
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But I was saying after cobras and riots and dysentery and all these things that would happen to us, it's Jimmy Carter puts me out of business. >> Unbelievable.
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>> So I had to come back and start over.
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And I saw this book in a window says, "What color is your parachute?"
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It's the only book, self-help book I ever bought in my life.
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And it made this case that you have transferable skills.
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It's the kind of book you could have written.
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that you have skills that you can apply in different areas and you really only should be working on things you love.
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So, how can we match your skills with what you love and where you think you're good?
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So, they give you a couple exercises that came out to me, well, rock and roll, music.
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My brother worked for Columbia Records and one of the tips was look for companies that are ascendant that are likely to be on a curve of getting higher because mobility would be good.
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So, I see this interview in Billboard by a guy saying, "We're going to start this video music channel." This is in 79.
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>> And the inspiration to look for these things is from this self-help book that you just happened to see in a bookstore window. >> Yes. >> And pick up.
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>> I said, "Well, I I need a little career advice here."
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You know, I'm thinking cuz people were think, "Where you been for eight years, man?" Yeah.
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>> You've been running around Asia in flipflops and you're back here.
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Meanwhile, all these people that I knew, they'd all gone on in their lives, married, kids, and everything. am 33. So I see this interview.
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My brother knows a guy who works there in this small embriionic company.
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They had just started Nickelodeon in the movie channel.
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And I get an interview and the guy says, "We're looking for people with no experience in television cuz we're starting a revolution here.
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We can't afford to pay people who, you know, from NBC or ABC." This is 1980 now.
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So I said I don't have any experience with television where I was living for eight years.
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I didn't even have television.
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So I made the case I'm an entrepreneur.
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I knew my music inside out.
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I can operate on a low level. I'm entrepreneurial.
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I show them this business that I had built and all the I would be in Vogue and Madamemoiselle and all these magazine articles.
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And Bob Pitman said to me, he's putting together the team of eight people.
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He says, "What were you doing? You smuggling hashes?" And I go, "Not really. Not really.
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That means you were He goes, "You're hired."
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[laughter] So, I got hired to be like the marketing guy of a team of eight that had to put the whole idea of MTV together and get it on the air like an eight or nine months.
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>> Was that the first time you met Pitman? >> Yeah.
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He [clears throat] was 26. I was 33.
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I was the only guy over 30 on this group.
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>> I mean, we were all crusaders.
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>> Oh, you had the credentials.
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>> I had credentials, but you know, >> you were a smuggler. >> Yeah.
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He thought that was a cool thing. >> Yeah.
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you know, you were a real smuggler.
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And I'm thinking, well, I wasn't really a big dope smuggler.
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I had a substantial business.
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But hey, if that's what lights your light up, that's fine. Go ahead and think it. >> Yeah.
23:17
Who was that first cast of characters?
23:20
>> You might know John Sykes, >> of course.
23:22
>> Yeah, I'm still friends with him.
23:22
There was John There was a woman named Gail Sparrow.
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Yeah, you God, you were in there early yourself.
23:27
Gail Sparrow, who I love. She passed recently.
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>> Carolyn Baker, I think she's passed.
23:33
There was a guy named Steve Casey.
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He was out of the radio world.
23:35
There was a bunch of radio guys and there was Robert Morton.
23:40
You must know Morty who was who the day we went on the air he quit to go says I'm out of here.
23:45
He got us up with our studio and everything. He says I've did my job.
23:48
I'm going to go work for this guy who's starring a TV show.
23:50
It's in development in NBC named David Letterman.
23:54
So Morty just did that for years.
23:57
Now he's selling real estate in Malibu. >> Wow. >> He's he's great.
24:00
But anyway, that was the original group and you know we all were making no money.
24:03
We all worked out of a hotel room.
24:05
We just ate pizza, hung out as day and night.
24:07
It was like it was a classic startup.
24:11
>> How long was it from that until something hit the air? >> Nine months. >> Wow.
24:17
>> Fred Cybert was the other one. He was the key guy.
24:19
He was our creative director.
24:20
And we decided we wanted to look unlike anything else that had ever been made.
24:24
And we would try and grab our energy from the downtown New York art scene and the downtown New York music scene and music videos that had not been no w seen by most Americans. It was a new thing.
24:36
I mean, there were clubs downtown like the Ritz that would play music videos and we tried to garner some of that energy and positioning ourselves as sort of this underground force that's really different.
24:46
Now, it's hard, but if you go back and think wasn't flying car stuff, but back in 1981,882, the idea of cable and something like MTV was pretty radical. >> Yeah.
25:01
>> People would look at it and go, "What is this?"
25:03
And >> it wasn't so long that they were just three networks and they were all pretty much the same. >> Yeah.
25:07
And they were all playing Loveboat and they all And so now, now cable starting.
25:12
So, you have CNN and ESPN. You have these networks.
25:14
These were the new things, the narrow casters.
25:16
We're going to do one thing all the time for a single audience, not for everybody.
25:22
>> And there were maybe 70 or 80 channels then, you think? >> No, there was 25. Oh, >> 25 at first.
25:27
>> It was It was really started small.
25:27
Then the big thing was in the mid 80s it went up to 54 and then said one day they were going to have a 100 channels.
25:33
Someone said there was a song someone had about 500 channels.
25:36
But now, of course, that whole monoculture and gatekeeper thing where editors and programmers had all this control has all dissolved and gone away because of digital and social media, etc.
25:48
But anyway, so I was there for the heyday.
25:52
The the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s were like the heydays of the cable TV revolution, which then became the digital revolution.
26:01
>> Did MTV start national or no?
26:01
Yeah, cuz we we would bounce over satellite so the foot the whole country you could get it.
26:07
The problem was the cable operators were the gate.
26:10
They had to agree to carry us and pay us 10 cents, but no one wanted to do that.
26:13
There was only a few places where we did it.
26:16
So for a couple of years, we ran along with only 2 million subscribers.
26:21
>> Where were the places? >> Middle America.
26:22
Like Tulsa would be our biggest system. 100,000 homes.
26:25
De Moines, Witchah, Syracuse, New York.
26:30
Nothing in any of the big markets, New York or LA.
26:31
[snorts] And >> it's interesting because of the downtown nature of the programming to end up in middle America was probably a bit of a stretch for middle America.
26:41
Don't you think >> it was?
26:42
It seems like >> it really was a it really was a stretch.
26:46
I mean, we didn't get in any of the big cities cuz they didn't have cable. >> Yeah.
26:49
>> The cable guys hadn't come yet.
26:49
You know, they hadn't built out the cable systems, but in these middle America systems, they had cable largely for reception purposes because there was bad reception, distance signals. We can amp it up.
26:59
And so when we hit Tulsa, it was like a bomb went off.
27:03
And no one in New York or LA ever felt it.
27:06
It was like a neutron bomb.
27:08
But I did because I was the marketing guy and I would go to these towns and I can remember just showing up at the airport to rent a car and I had an MTV button on and the lady behind the counter goes, "Wow, where did you get that?"
27:20
I said, "How do you know about MTV?"
27:22
He says, "Everybody knows about MTV.
27:23
It's been here a month and a half now.
27:26
It's all anyone talks about."
27:28
And then I remember going to a radio station.
27:31
They were telling me how much more easy it is for them to play new music.
27:34
And then he takes me to a bar.
27:37
It's like like a sports bar and there's a TV on. It's like a Trinitron.
27:41
>> And they're all watching MTV in this bar like it's a Knicks game or something.
27:46
And I was just standing there trembling.
27:48
I'm thinking no one else at the company knows this is happening. Nobody gets it at home. No one feels the vibe.
27:51
I'm actually in a market where this is really going on.
27:55
And so people were going in asking for haircuts like some of these bands from England.
28:00
We had a lot of indie bands.
28:02
The early days of MTV were all these lowfi videos and it was fun.
28:06
It was DVO and so ultimately we were going out of business and we had to get these cable operators who were older guys didn't want to pay us the money and they they thought that we were sort of a tool of the devil in a way some of them. >> Wow.
28:21
>> And that's how the I want my MTV campaign came along.
28:23
Let's There's one group that likes us.
28:26
The record companies didn't like us.
28:28
The the advertisers didn't like us and the cable guys didn't like us.
28:33
But who liked us were the fans, the music fans, and let's have them call their cable company and say, "I want my MTV."
28:40
It's >> a great campaign.
28:43
>> It started in the 50s.
28:43
There was a campaign called I want my Mapo. and that idea.
28:48
There was this guy George Lois who was this crazy advertising guy, the Madison guy. >> Yeah.
28:56
>> And he did the covers of >> he had cover. Yeah. George was a character.
29:00
I used to go down to his house.
29:01
He'd like wake up at 3:00 in the morning.
29:03
He'd have like four hours sleep at night.
29:04
He had a whole other life from like 3:00 to 7, >> you know.
29:07
It was a guy who lived a long time.
29:09
He was this foul-mouthed Greek dude. Very funny.
29:12
So he just said, "Hey, [ __ ] these cable operators."
29:15
We brought him in with this guy named Dale Pond.
29:19
You guys are getting nowhere being next to the cable operator. [ __ ] them. It's I want my MTV.
29:22
Let's get the world's biggest rock stars to validate this and let's put a campaign together and let's roll in these markets and let's advertise at really high levels like it's a blockbuster film that's coming. Wow.
29:34
>> And these cable operators are going to surrender quickly, put up the white flag and add MTV to their cable lineups like that.
29:40
So we had he said you need who we get cuz he had done it with Mapo.
29:42
He done it with Will Chamberlain and Mickey Man, all these big sports stars. Yeah.
29:47
>> Said he says, "You got to get [ __ ] MC Jagger.
29:49
He's the biggest star of the world."
29:53
>> So me and Sykes and this guy Les Garland, we all le got MC Jagger.
29:55
Sykes had to get Pete Towns and I had to get David Bowie and we all went out to get these guys.
30:02
And sure enough, I did these things for a couple of years.
30:05
We would add a million subscribers a month for two years. Wow.
30:09
>> And we got fully distributed and it was go to the fans. >> Yeah. How long did it take?
30:14
>> Took a couple years to ramp up to like big big distribution.
30:16
We knew it was just a question of time.
30:18
We could only do so many markets at once.
30:19
And >> once it got started, it was like a, you know, and then we had, you know, things like uh live a came along and music videos became a a thing. So yeah, it was fun.
30:32
>> Why do you think record companies didn't like MTV considering they would pay people to play music on radio?
30:39
>> You would think, Rick, >> you'd think this is the best.
30:40
the the promotion guys loved us. >> Yeah.
30:44
>> But the lawyers who you've seen, remember how the lawyers jumped in front of digital when that came around with everything, you know, they they didn't want to give us music videos for free.
30:55
And we said, "Look, these are like three-minute commercials for your records."
30:58
And they didn't want to do deals with us.
31:00
Ultimately, they had to cuz the artists wanted to do it and the the promotion guys, the record and they knew it sold a lot of records.
31:08
I mean those were the days we could sell millions of records.
31:13
>> So >> you'd think that would be what they would want the record companies.
31:16
>> You know the business affairs and record companies historically have been like the department of no. >> Yeah.
31:22
>> After Napster there was all these other people came out with digital ideas.
31:26
Their strategy was shut them all down.
31:28
Now it's going to be interesting to see how they deal with AI.
31:32
It's like the next turn of the screw.
31:34
But finally and we ended up paying the record companies money in the end.
31:36
But in the in the beginning, we didn't.
31:38
They thought we were building a business on their backs cuz we were so successful.
31:43
And we also had Nickelodeon and Comedy Central and all these other network.
31:48
They they said, "You're playing our music and you're worth all this money on Wall Street and we're just some bupkus record company.
31:55
We're like a distributor. That's not right.
31:56
I'm going to get all the Bob Morgado told me who ran Warner Electra Asylum at one point, drove it into the wall.
32:02
So, I'm going to get all the record companies together and we're going to take you down." Wow. >> Which he never did.
32:07
Eventually, the record companies got wise.
32:09
The iPod came along and iTunes came along and now they're they're making money again, but they're always looking around the corner cuz AI is coming down the pike.
32:21
>> After the I want my MTV campaign, what would you say the next big breakthrough for MTV was?
32:27
>> The big biggest one was Live Aid. Gelof came around.
32:30
We're going to do this show.
32:32
It's going to be in Wembley and it's going to be in Philly and we're going to have this big lineup.
32:37
We're going to raise this money for Ethiopia.
32:39
There's this famine going on and see if you'd like to carry it.
32:42
We got nothing else to do.
32:45
I mean, of course, we'll do it.
32:46
We'd love to >> a music channel this big concert.
32:49
>> But they said, "Well, you know, we'd already done this deal with ABC.
32:50
They want they only wanted a three-hour highlight show."
32:54
I said, "Well, we'll run the whole thing." >> Great.
32:56
>> So, that was a big thing.
32:56
And that kind of elevated us again.
32:58
And then it was like Michael Jackson, Thriller, Beat It, all those.
33:03
The music videos got better.
33:07
And then after Live 8 happened, next thing you know, we're on the cover of Newsweek and Time magazine.
33:09
And then we kept going and trying to reinvent it and toolled it up. We brought hiphop on. >> Mhm. >> With the MTV Raps. >> Yo, MTV Raps.
33:21
I mean, back then BLS wasn't playing it.
33:24
You know, the Nobody was playing it.
33:26
We said, "Well, we'll play it."
33:27
You must have known Ted and Peter Dhy. >> Yeah. I knew him well.
33:31
>> So they cooked up a little pilot.
33:31
They put it on and got huge ratings just with no promotion.
33:36
It like wasn't with the highest rated music.
33:39
>> It was the only place you could hear hip-hop music >> and we were putting it in people's living rooms in De Moine and Middle America and they had never seen anything like it.
33:45
So it brought a whole new cast of characters into our life and a whole new music thing kind of got started and it was so fun and it was I mean the the whole thing it could crystallize into the Walk This Way video.
33:56
So that kind of sanctified hiphop for the rock audience the young rock audience who in many ways people just never look back again.
34:05
And then you know I was very instrumental in the international roll out of MTV because in the late 80s we saw that countries were loosening up and allowing cable and satellite to happen and even in England they they had no music shows they just had the BBC pretty much barely just started with channel 4.
34:23
So we took MTV around the world of doing we had 50 different versions of it in different languages around the world and for me that was a lot of fun and for me it was easy because I had that international experience way back.
34:37
So what I found was that my earlier life of working in hard scrabble king of the road kind of meanial labor jobs going to a business school and then working in Asia for eight years.
34:54
It was a perfect setup for me to work for an eccentric media organization that wanted to be sort of left of center.
35:02
I don't mean politically, but you know, sort of and experimental and open to take chances and willing to improvise and just kind of work off the by the seat of our pants.
35:15
>> So for me it it was a perfect destination was all the things I loved was in that job.
35:20
Animation, film, music, video, international travel, working with a lot of odd people, building relationships with people at the record labels or with artists. It was a lot of fun.
35:32
How would you describe the qualities of the most creative people you've come in contact with over the course of your life? >> Curiosity.
35:42
They were good editors, had good instincts. They trusted them.
35:48
They were maniacally obsessed with the space they were in.
35:53
They were also good people pickers.
35:58
One thing I found is in a creative organization, if you pick a any organization, I guess if you pick a bad person, they're going to pick other bad people.
36:07
And next thing you know, without you knowing it, you're deconstructing your own organization.
36:12
I always wanted the main aptitude of our little enterprise, which we called MTV networks, to be creativity.
36:17
So I would put always a creative person in charge of the network rather than a salesperson which was the traditional way >> cuz I wanted people to know that that is what we aspire to be that we are about creativity.
36:32
We're kind of making our own road and we're improvising.
36:34
We're going to take risks and if we get the creative process right and we can connect with whoever we're trying to connect with.
36:42
all the things in our business that need to happen will fall into place if we're successful.
36:49
So that was sort of a guiding principle of mine.
36:53
I had like people like Judy McGrath, she was wonderful in every way, shape or form as a creative executive and also she had hands-on skills.
37:01
So she she'd always say, "We have to continue to hire the aberant ones because that's where we're going to get our ideas from.
37:08
They're going to come from the street.
37:09
We're dealing in popular culture.
37:09
these ideas are coming off the bottom.
37:11
Doug Herszog was another example.
37:13
You know, he came to work for us when he was 23 at MTV and then he ended up running Comedy Central sort of in his prime when we running John and Steven Cobear and everybody and John Sykes.
37:23
He took what had been a sort of fowler running VH1 and brought in Bill Flanigan and we did like Behind the Music and we did 120 of those and >> we we did a whole bunch of series popup video and got VH1 into a viable business.
37:39
And then there was Nickelodeon.
37:40
We used the same strategy there, which was we want to be the Disney of the '9s. We want to be cool.
37:46
We're going to find animators who don't work in the in the Hollywood animation system of Hannah Barbara, but have characters living in their heads.
37:52
We're going to build an animation facility and then we're going to plug them into it so they can just think and do it and we can we can run out what they have conceptualized.
38:02
So you look at Spongebob and Rugrats or you go Ren and Stimpy and we had quite a hit parade that came out of Nick and then you look at Beas and Buttad with Mike Judge.
38:10
I mean we had people who were good to be a good executive you needed to have good instincts in hiring people and picking material.
38:18
You need to be a bit of a diplomat.
38:19
You had to have a sense of good strategy and a bit of emotional intelligence.
38:24
>> How different would you say the culture of MTV was from CBS?
38:27
Let's say just to pick another network, >> hugely different. We were much younger.
38:36
I mean, I'd say in our prime there, I mean, the average age was probably low 30s, high 20s.
38:42
We had the worst dressed group of people going in and out of any Manhattan office building you could imagine.
38:51
>> People saying, "What's going on?" >> No suits. >> No suits.
38:54
>> The only dress code rule we had was no frontal nudity.
38:56
This was an era where at CBS you had to wear a suit and a tie.
39:02
There was many layers of management.
39:02
We try to keep things really flat so we could move quickly.
39:06
Some doesn't work, we'll fix it or throw it out and we'll move on and do something else because none of the things we would do really involved an absolute amount of huge amount of money.
39:16
So we could afford to just throw something out and just keep working.
39:20
If something doesn't work, no one's going to hold it against us.
39:21
The idea that we would be experimental is not something you would see at a broadcast network which had in fairness to them.
39:31
They had a big legacy business and they couldn't just operate sort of like we did off the cuff and improvise so much because they had to keep their business growing up year by year and if they had things that work they had to continue to build on those and very strategically build another one.
39:45
So they were a lot more deliberate.
39:47
I'd say we had more of a Bbop culture and they were more like a classical orchestra.
39:54
>> Tell me about the state of music video when MTV started.
39:56
There were not loads of videos yet, were there?
40:01
>> No, they were mostly made in Europe because in Europe there was no real form of commercial radio to play your record and the only way you need to get on top of the pops in the UK or something.
40:09
So people would make music videos and they would play them in record stores.
40:13
That's where I first came across them.
40:15
I spent one summer in Berlin.
40:17
I had a girlfriend and when she'd go to work, I go to the local record store where you could actually get a record and go into a booth and play it, see if you like it.
40:27
But they also had a little TV, little tiny TV show, they play these music videos.
40:30
And I go, I go, "Wow, that is pretty amazing, you know, that they do this."
40:35
Cuz it was sort of a whole new video vocabulary, new video style.
40:37
In the early days, they were more fun, lowfi, people were experimental.
40:42
the you know nothing was really awfully sophisticated but at their heart they were fun.
40:48
No one was making like dark music videos.
40:51
There was like Duran Durans running around some boat with a bunch of pretty girls or you had the Evo going around saying whip it and whipping people's skirts off.
41:00
I mean it was really just lowkey.
41:01
Some people were serious about it early on like David Bowie.
41:06
I mean, he really saw himself as a video artist also.
41:08
But in the early days, it was cheap and we only went on the air with 160 videos.
41:13
They largely came out of the UK.
41:16
Independent labels would have them.
41:20
>> So, it wasn't music that was already really popular on the radio for the most part.
41:24
>> You know, these were bands that had >> alternative music.
41:27
>> It was alternative music by alternative bands.
41:29
And there was no radio over there, but there wasn't popular on the radio here.
41:33
No, cuz we were was like AO radio.
41:36
This format of they're still banging the classic rock.
41:38
They weren't calling it classic rock yet cuz it wasn't yet classic, but it was that same group of artists.
41:44
Fleetwood, Max, Stones, Beatles, etc.
41:46
Whereas these new bands, they got categorized in the early ' 80s as New Wave.
41:52
>> They'd be maybe on college radio.
41:53
>> That would be the domain of college radio.
41:55
That's who we were playing. Yes.
41:56
But it turned out there was with videos, they could tap into a mainstream or a larger audience because when people see a video that they like, they get familiar with the music more quickly and next thing you know, they're humming something uh you know by Crowded House and they're going to buy the record.
42:13
So the whole process of the music video could telescope the familiarity period to get people to ultimately go out and buy the record.
42:22
How would you say music video changed the music business?
42:29
>> It changed it in good and bad ways.
42:29
It made the era of the international superstar possible, even the domestic superstar possible.
42:35
It made subg genres of music like alternative and heavy metal and hip hop.
42:41
It allowed them to elevate and become more national and move out of that sort of marginal space into becoming a more broad appeal kind of music form.
42:51
It made image more important in some cases than the music.
42:57
I mean, you look at Millie Vanilli, there's the classic cases, Vanilla Ice, you know, but video was just one more thing you could do wrong.
43:03
But, um, there were, you know, you had Madonna and people who looked at it as an art form that would complement their music and help them build the image that they wanted for themselves in a way that they thought was smart.
43:14
Do you think Prince or Madonna or Michael Jackson would have become who they were without MTV?
43:23
>> This sounds arrogant, but I think MTV helped them become bigger faster without a doubt.
43:31
Those are all real artists and you're not going to knock them down and they're they would find if there wasn't a music video, they would find other ways to get popular.
43:38
But MTV and music videos was a way to kind of help shortcircuit the system and the the path to superstardom.
43:46
>> What was the first non-m music show on MTV?
43:51
>> Well, at one point in the mid 80s, we decided we got to kind of change things up a bit.
43:55
And the first real show I guess was Remote Control.
43:58
There was a guy named Joe Dvola.
44:00
I don't know if you knew Joe. >> Yeah.
44:03
>> And they made a thing in somebody's basement.
44:05
So, let's do a quiz show, you know, and Adam Sandler got his start there.
44:10
And we made it for like $10 to $15,000 an episode. That was a big hit.
44:15
And people said, "What are you doing that for?"
44:16
That has nothing to do with music. But it got good ratings.
44:18
I mean, then the creative cadre at MTV was always looking to be more ambitious.
44:25
Well, let's not just play music videos, let's do other things.
44:27
And meanwhile, Fox had launched the Fox Network, which was a broadcast network, a fourth one that was targeting younger people. They had Melrose Plays.
44:35
They had a couple of these soap operas.
44:37
We said, "Well, maybe we can do a form of soap opera."
44:39
So, we develop they developed this thing and they brought it to me and I said, you know, we can't do this.
44:46
It requires a lot of writers.
44:48
We we just don't have that kind of money.
44:49
So, went back to John Buna Murray was the production company.
44:53
And we came back and he said, we got another idea.
44:55
We're really good at post-prouction.
44:58
Why don't we rent a loft in Soho, put like eight or nine kids in there, and we'll just have a cameras going, and then we'll assemble it afterwards into this episodic television series.
45:08
We'll call it The Real World.
45:09
It was the first real reality show series.
45:11
And that didn't come about because of some brainstorm.
45:16
Let's let's invent a new genre.
45:16
It was like we were just too cheap to hire writers.
45:21
And we thought of another way to do this.
45:22
And it turned out to be a whole new genre for the whole television industry which plagues us to this day.
45:29
>> When was the Osbornes in the story?
45:31
>> The Osborne started in like I say 1990 and that was really classic.
45:35
Brian Graden was in a car with we were shooting something with Azie and Sharon and he said something, "Oh Sharon, your life is crazy."
45:45
He says, "You know, if you had a camera crew following me around, you wouldn't [ __ ] believe what my life is."
45:50
So, well, okay, let's do it.
45:53
So, that that was like a one minute pitch that was a 15-second pitch.
45:57
So, that became the first celebrity reality show, and that was a big hit.
46:02
>> And then I remember you used to do big events around spring break that were kind of a big deal. >> Yes.
46:07
We found out that when we decided to shake things up around ' 86, 87, I had Pitman on the way out cuz he left and appointed me president.
46:14
He said, "Well, let's set up a bunch of groups to figure out where do we go from here?"
46:17
We had to we had to I was convinced we had to continue to reinvent ourselves and reimagine ourselves.
46:22
We can't just play music videos back to back with a couple of tour dates that we could be we could be more substantive and we could we could grow this business if we do other things.
46:32
And let's get out of the studio because they're just cooped up in there.
46:36
Let's go to events and tag on to events. Let's do spring break.
46:38
And we would do a whole bunch of spring break.
46:41
>> Just pick places where kids would go. >> Yeah.
46:42
And kids, what we found out was kids love to see themselves on camera.
46:47
Hence that sort of led to the reality show appeal.
46:49
You know, we would get all these bands. Mr.
46:51
Mister would come and people would play at spring break and we'd never be invited back.
46:55
I mean, we did Daytona Beach.
46:57
They would pay us money to come and set up and the city fathers would throw us out and then we go to some other town and you know, we were gradually being banned in all these towns, but other towns kept thinking, well, we'll give it a try.
47:09
So, it was it was liberating for people to get out of the studio and for us to do these types of things.
47:15
And it was good for the for the production people cuz they got really good at this.
47:19
We were really good at putting on events.
47:21
I mean the video music awards, the movie awards, all these types of shows would be also the video music awards could bring in $75 million in one night.
47:31
>> How did the VMAs come to be?
47:33
>> In 1984, we said we're doing all right now.
47:35
we said we're doing all right now. Let's see if we could create a show that sort of puts music videos on a stage and sort of maybe we do something that's the antithesis of the Grammys which at that point in time was a very stale show and Let's Make It a Reverend and our first
47:50
one was in Radio City Music Hall in 1984 with Dan Akroyd and B Midler were the hosts and that's when Madonna came out and did Like a Virgin and we'd always have these sort of seinal moments at the shows and so it became really popular and it was good because again it was our people became more proficient producers. >> Why did Pitman decide to leave MTV?
48:10
>> Why did Pitman decide to leave MTV?
48:14
>> We had tried to do a leverage buyout in the last days.
48:17
We tried to buy the company ourselves because we were owned by Warner Communications and American Express.
48:22
American Express wanted out.
48:25
Warner Communications was suffering because of the Atari debacles. They had to sell stuff.
48:28
So they wanted to sell us.
48:30
So we said, "Well, we'll sell it to us."
48:32
So we got involved with Teddy Forceman of Forceman Little trying to do a leverage buyout. This is 1986.
48:39
And then instead Steve Ross decided to sell it to these fellas who had a company called Viacom.
48:46
>> Why did he decide that?
48:47
>> Cuz they wanted to pay a few dollars more. >> I see.
48:50
>> He got on a helicopter in New York City and when he got off in East Hampton, he had changed his mind.
48:53
And that said, >> he told you he would sell it to you first. >> We were close.
48:58
I mean, and Bob was kind of doing the deal. So this was Bob's deal. >> I see.
49:03
>> And it was like, "Okay, [ __ ] this.
49:03
I I Everyone was thinking maybe the Bloom's off the rose at MTV.
49:10
I got to get out of here."
49:10
So John Sykes left, Les Garland left, a lot of the original people left.
49:13
But before Pitman left, he made me president.
49:15
And I'm thinking, hey, I just got out of Afghanistan and India for eight years. This is a good idea.
49:19
I'm going to see if we can uh I'm going to stay here. >> Keep it alive. Yeah. Yeah. >> Keep it alive.
49:26
I mean, we're going to have another incarnation.
49:27
We We're just getting warmed up.
49:29
But the problem was we had these owners who were really kind of old school and they were not fun and they >> What was Viacom's business at that time?
49:38
>> At that time they they owned a series of TV stations.
49:41
They they were formed because they had the spin-off from CBS.
49:45
They had all the syndicated library from CBS.
49:46
Government mandated that.
49:46
So they had bought Showtime.
49:49
Then they had about a million cable subscribers and various ca small cable systems.
49:53
They had a few radio stations, a few television stations.
49:57
But they were not from our world. They didn't get us.
49:59
So they came in and they didn't last long.
50:01
I was made president and the guy didn't he said, "You need a co-president to help you." They came out to see us.
50:10
We We're having a management retreat in Gurnie and Bonttok rather than tell us we're really happy to own you. >> Yeah.
50:20
>> You've built this great thing.
50:20
We see this great future for you.
50:21
We know you have a lot of stock options and I don't our lawyers tell us we don't have to pay them off.
50:27
That was the only silver lining of this deal.
50:28
This is what they told us.
50:30
And by the way, you spend too much money running your operation.
50:32
These guys were sort of penny pinchers.
50:33
So they were displaced by Sumar Redstone. >> How soon? >> Within a year. >> Wow.
50:42
>> Bob Pitman called me up one day.
50:42
He'd already left and he said, "Listen, there I just met this billionaire Sumar Redstone.
50:47
He's at the Carile Hotel.
50:47
He's trying to buy Viacom.
50:50
He thinks the guys running it are running it into the ground.
50:53
He's this crusty guy and he wants to he needs this inside information.
50:57
I had been told a week earlier that if any of us got caught talking to him, we'd be fired.
51:00
But I was ready to sort of leave myself.
51:03
They were making my life miserable.
51:05
So I snuck into the Carile Hotel with Jerry Lebornne who ran Nick and we saw him and gave him the whole pitch that we had given these guys saying that there's a whole world that's opening up and we could be like the leader in kids, teens, and young adult programming and cable and satellite by investing money in this and taking it somewhere great.
51:27
We can do films and this that and the other thing.
51:31
And I basically I was trying to sell a company we didn't own to a man we didn't know.
51:36
Thinking that maybe this guy is better than these guys. So who knows? We have nothing to lose. Yeah.
51:42
>> So he ended up stepping up and buying Viacom in a big famous takeover battle in the late 80s.
51:46
And I became sort of Sumar's golden boy in a way.
51:51
>> What was your relationship with him like?
51:52
like? was if one of the first things he did when he got the company was hire this guy Frank Beyond who kind of beat HBO who became my he was the CEO of Viacom Sner was sort of the chairman and Sner for the first few years would defer to Frank I got to learn how the whole
52:10
business worked because now I'm on like the operating committee and I loved Frank but Frank got fired because he was getting credit for making a lot of good moves and Ser wasn't getting he's sort of Trumpy he wasn't getting the kind of credit he felt he deserved. So he fired
52:22
So he fired Frank and he said, "I'm going to have two other guys run it and report to me."
52:29
>> What did Frank do after?
52:31
>> Frank got a job, worked for Universal.
52:34
He became a CEO out there and he did a bunch of other things.
52:36
He ended up living next to OJ Simpson.
52:37
I always That's what I always remember [laughter] my main takeaway. But I love Frank. I loved his wife.
52:44
>> It seems crazy that something's working and growing and taking that apart. It's just a wild idea. >> Ego.
52:49
Yeah, >> it's all about ego.
52:50
And you could be predisposed not to like somebody cuz you think they're taking some of this sunshine away from you and you overlook the fact that >> it's his sunshine. He owns it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Right. You're petty.
53:02
You want to get credit for everything is is the butt.
53:07
Frank ran us with a really light hand.
53:11
I was for 67 quarters when I was like the head of MTV networks.
53:14
Every quarter we were up what they would say on Wall Street double digits.
53:18
So we were the least of their problems.
53:20
So they kind of left us alone.
53:23
>> Sumner had meanwhile acquired Paramount Pictures.
53:26
So he had a seat at the Hollywood table.
53:28
Then he went out and acquired CBS.
53:32
>> What was Sner doing before all this?
53:34
>> He ran drive-in movie theaters.
53:34
He was a theater exhibitor.
53:36
Started with a handful of drive-ins and then moved in into, you know, he became a pretty national amusements, some of the nicer movie theaters in the country.
53:43
You know, we were 65 when he bought Viacom.
53:45
He wanted to become a Hollywood player and build a entertainment conglomerate at that age which at that point in time I thought wow man that's old.
53:52
Little did I know but he was very tenacious and latigious and he was always nice to me.
54:01
I realized that people who tried to really get close to him ultimately would would leave early. They would not last.
54:07
So I just was in my own little environment.
54:13
We were in a different building and I would endear myself to him like, "Hey, we're going to do a Unplug with Tony Bennett, >> your P, you know, from your era." Yeah.
54:22
So, you know, he got to meet Tony Bennett.
54:23
He just love that kind of stuff.
54:25
>> Man, tell me more about Unplugged. That was a great series. What was the first one? Do you remember?
54:29
>> The first one was like we were we were had Bon Joy booked to do a video music awards at the Universal Amphitheater.
54:35
And then John said, "Well, you know, couple of guys in the band can't make it.
54:40
It's just me and Richie."
54:41
And then I think it was Alex Kleti.
54:43
I don't know if you know Alex. >> Great guy.
54:45
He said, "Well, look, we'll have a B stage out there.
54:49
Why don't you and Richie come out and play acoustically?"
54:52
It was a huge It turned out to be one of the highlights of the show cuz we were at the height of all this, not heavy metal, but I mean, you know, all those bands with the W.
54:59
Warren and Winger and all this kind of hair, the hair band era.
55:03
It's like, >> let's bring the temperature down.
55:04
Let's do [clears throat] something a little more authentic that has some credibility, stuff that we liked.
55:08
So we did one with Paul McCartney and we did hundreds of them.
55:13
That became a real hit to the point where Eric Clapton's Unplugged sold 25 million records. >> Yeah. Tears in Heaven.
55:21
>> Tears in Heaven and Bob Dylan did it.
55:23
>> I think there was a great Neil Young one. >> Neil Young.
55:24
They did one at the Ed Sullivan Theater.
55:27
This before Colobar took it over.
55:29
They really rolled out the carpet and did a great job and he had that band playing with him.
55:34
And then they decided they got back and looked at it and said, "We must have been a little kooky or something. We're going to redo it. So they redid it in LA.
55:40
I remember going to both tapings.
55:42
I was a big Neil Young fan.
55:44
Yeah, he had a great one.
55:44
And then one of the best ones was Nirvana, of course, with Kurt.
55:48
[snorts] >> That was one of the epic ones.
55:49
There was, you know, so many of them were great.
55:52
And I keep wondering why they weren't playing them.
55:54
I mean, you know, they the the the Paramount people, they changed their name to Paramount and MTV.
56:00
They just things all stayed on shelves.
56:03
They didn't play any music.
56:03
All the music people there left.
56:05
They they stopped playing music.
56:07
It was just a bunch of sea level reality shows.
56:08
It had no vibe and it had no reason to exist and they just kind of disbanded it.
56:19
>> Do you know how the dire straits song Money for Nothing came about.
56:23
>> Yes, I have a good story about that in the book. >> Tell me.
56:26
>> That was like the gift that kept giving.
56:30
Mark Knoffler wrote it sort of as a takedown of MTV.
56:32
He was in a TV store and look at these little yo-yos.
56:34
That's the way they do it.
56:37
Money for nothing, chicks for free.
56:38
So he wrote this song, >> sarcastic song, >> sarcastic song like we couldn't care less.
56:44
But that turned out he get Sting to do the chorus and it became an international hit.
56:50
Now this was the era in 1985 of the international super groups, international pop stars be famous everywhere.
56:59
This is before a lot of these countries had their own local stars to deal with.
57:02
So everywhere you would go, this song was there.
57:05
So when I would go like to countries in Asia or in Europe, they knew about MTV from this song.
57:14
We're very happy to have that song, but it was started as a takedown. Yeah, >> that's great.
57:19
I love it when songs take on a life of their own that no one can guess or control when it even reverses its original mission.
57:27
It's just such a great joke.
57:29
>> Well, this was a great example of that.
57:31
to reverse its original mission rather than rather than knocking MTV and people going, "Oh, screw that."
57:35
It was like, "Well, where do I get it?" >> Yeah.
57:37
We became the calling card of MTV. It's amazing.
57:41
>> Tell me more about some of the early creative choices in the look and feel of the network. >> Yeah.
57:47
We wanted it to look unlike anything else.
57:50
And we wanted to draw from the sort of [sighs] you'd say that mashup of punk and graffiti and everything that was going down in arts down in the early 80s.
57:59
In fact, we even had Andy Warhol and John Michelle do artbreaks for us.
58:03
But we wanted to draw from that talent pool.
58:06
We wanted to use full cell animation.
58:07
Just the logo itself we thought made a great statement.
58:12
We we developed that logo and we decided it's going to be a container and we're going to fill it up and change it all the time.
58:19
It's not going to be static.
58:20
it's going to break all the rules of logo making that had ever existed.
58:25
>> It would always change >> and turned it became one of the most famous logos of all time.
58:27
So that was sort of a signature that let you know this was not like you know a normal kind of television network.
58:33
And then we would try and just do really odd things that kind of worked as nonsequator.
58:38
So in terms of the style, the content it was like we would do strange offbeat funny things.
58:46
We try to have a sense of humor about us.
58:48
about us. we would we could make fun of ourselves and it was effective cuz people people loved you if you've talked to people to this day they would say oh what I liked about MTV especially in its early incarnation was a lot of the funny animated stuff they would put up between
59:04
the videos and the promos that we do we would have some like hey kids don't watch that watch this I mean it would be simple little things and we just throw them in there and was it was really effective because we were even though we were working out of a Midtown office building. We were trying to draw from
59:22
We were trying to draw from that downtown vibrant collision of all that stuff that was going on.
59:29
>> Tell me about the idea of having VJS.
59:32
Was that always there from the beginning?
59:34
>> There was, you know, a lot of the early MTV people came from radio, Bob Pitman among them. >> Mhm. >> They had DJs. So they were DJs, BJs.
59:44
They were sort of a traffic cop.
59:44
That was the original role was seen for them to be sort of like a traffic up.
59:48
That was this is talk a little bit about this.
59:51
Talk a little about that.
59:51
But it didn't really work as well as it did on a radio station because in a radio station a DJ sort of there in real time.
59:59
He could take all calls from the audience. Yeah.
1:00:02
>> Here you're taping stuff out of sequence that's going to be dropped in.
1:00:04
You're not actually doing it.
1:00:06
But we hired a cross-section of people to be the VJS.
1:00:12
And it was felt put a human face on the network.
1:00:14
we needed to have some another form to to bolster our identity.
1:00:16
VJs came and went and we had credible music DJs like Mark Goodman was a came out of the DJ world and and others at one point I remember we even hired Frankie Crocker. >> Wow.
1:00:29
>> To work on VH1 and and Don Imus who were big >> big radio guys. >> Big radio guys.
1:00:34
>> Was it obvious that you were going to be the guy to run MTV for the long haul or was that not the case early on?
1:00:42
Yeah, after Bob left, I was like the guy and I did that for 17 years.
1:00:44
But then as the business got bigger and we launched like Comedy Central and TV Land and other networks and got another business, I became sort of the head of MTV network.
1:00:54
So I wasn't really running MTV per se.
1:00:57
I had brought in Judy McGrath and she was running MTV and then also VH1 was under her umbrella and a couple of other things, some of our digital enterprises.
1:01:08
So I was and that was probably in the somewhere in the '9s.
1:01:10
So my hands-on role as we got to be bigger and bigger was less and less.
1:01:18
>> Was the corporate job as much fun as the hands getting dirty job?
1:01:22
>> The no the corporate job at MTV networks was good because I was really dealing with all of our networks.
1:01:26
But when I got the corporate job, when Sar Redstone fired Mel Karmas in he made Les Moonveves and I co-presidents of the company and that meant I was really in a whole other world.
1:01:41
I was now going to deal with Wall Street guys.
1:01:42
I was going to deal with bankers.
1:01:44
I was going to deal with >> full corporate job.
1:01:48
>> It was a full kind of corporate job.
1:01:48
I still had my people reporting to me and I loved them and I still would go to shows and but I wasn't in there like I was and it wasn't as much fun.
1:01:59
But I figured, hey, I'll give this a shot.
1:02:00
I can learn a new trick or two and I did.
1:02:04
But then we split up the company into two pieces and I became the CEO of just Viacom and Les became the CEO of CBS Inc. two companies. >> Why did that happen?
1:02:14
>> Our stock had stalled.
1:02:14
We were like in now in the mid 2000 2005 and what was happening was that Apple and Yahoo and and all of these digital companies were ascendant and they were really making a dent in our business.
1:02:28
We were now called Legacy Media and we really had to figure out a way to compete in this world.
1:02:35
And at one point, Sumar said, "Well, look, we're going to cut this company in half and we have the growth companies, which was MTV Networks, BET, Music Publishing, a couple of other things, and you'll be that because we're going to grow and we're going to morph into digital."
1:02:51
And then the other part of the company which was assembled over the years included Simon and Schustster and Showtime and stuff that wasn't really growing fast.
1:03:04
Said there's two categories to stock.
1:03:05
The value stocks that just throw off money and then the growth stocks.
1:03:07
So they said the best way to do this because buyers are confused.
1:03:11
This was [ __ ] sold to us by investment bankers >> was make two companies.
1:03:16
It was the exact wrong thing to do at the exact wrong time because at that time other companies were doubling up.
1:03:23
They're figured I'm gonna I'm gonna make my business whatever legacy business I'm in.
1:03:27
I'm gonna make it bigger. Look at Disney.
1:03:29
Bob Iger went out and bought Lucasfilm. He bought Pixar. He bought Marvel.
1:03:33
I know we're content makers, but let's just be better at that.
1:03:35
We're not going to get into social media.
1:03:37
We're not going to do these kind of things.
1:03:40
And that turned out to be a better strategy, which was to bulk up rather than to kind of slim down.
1:03:45
>> But that was the pitch of it. >> That was the pitch.
1:03:46
the same guys who collected a lot of fees assembling this conglomerate.
1:03:51
Like what do you got a movie studio for?
1:03:52
That's not going to grow.
1:03:54
What do you got Simon and Schustster for?
1:03:55
That's not going to grow.
1:03:57
But they were sold as good things to buy at the time.
1:04:01
>> They were bluechip companies as well, weren't they?
1:04:03
>> Yeah, they were bluechip companies, but they weren't >> fast growth.
1:04:06
>> They weren't fast growing like these digital guys.
1:04:08
And we were never going to catch up to these digital guys.
1:04:09
But Sumner was a man who was obsessed not so much about the operations of his company and how it worked the way that say a Rupert Murdoch, his arch nemesis would.
1:04:23
He was obsessed with the stock price because that would bring his net worth up.
1:04:26
And and they told him that the way the stock price is going to rise is if you disassociate yourself with these valuedriven companies whose stocks aren't going high.
1:04:37
So he was sold a bill of goods and followed it through.
1:04:39
And there were people on my team who said, "Well, I think we'd be better off that way because it's kind of messy dealing with less Moonveves's guys because we got to agree on certain things.
1:04:52
We can't move fast and let's just be on our own track, if you will."
1:04:57
>> So then what was under your world?
1:05:00
famous music publishing, MTV networks, which was MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, Comedy Central, the whole international enterprise.
1:05:07
We had a big consumer products business.
1:05:09
We bought some digital websites, but it was mostly MTV networks, famous music, and BET.
1:05:18
>> How did BET get in the picture?
1:05:18
BET [clears throat] was bought by Mel Mel Karmmason bought it for $3 billion in the early 90s because Bob Johnson wanted to get out and Mel said, "Well, listen, this is a good business.
1:05:30
It could be doing better.
1:05:32
I could buy it and fit it in with the other basic cable networks I have because it's a good fit.
1:05:36
We could eliminate some jobs in the back office."
1:05:39
Sort of a classic consolidation play.
1:05:42
>> And that's how BET came to be.
1:05:42
So Bob wrote off with a good payout and Deborah Lee came in to run it.
1:05:49
>> What was the story of Comedy Central? How did that come to be?
1:05:53
>> We were having a staff meeting one day and someone slips me a piece of paper that says HBO is announcing a basic cable comedy channel called The Comedy Channel.
1:06:03
They're announcing this today.
1:06:05
And I go, "Oh man, that's bad news."
1:06:05
HBO was like the most funded.
1:06:09
They had an army of Ivy League educated people all over the country running around with cable systems.
1:06:16
They did all these comedy specials with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams and so forth.
1:06:21
And they're getting in the basic cable business, which is a very different business from the pay cable business.
1:06:26
And if this works, they're going to come after us with a music channel and a kids channel cuz we were making loads of money and they were looking for a way to grow their business.
1:06:35
So within a couple of minutes, there was a fellow named Fred Cybert. We talked.
1:06:39
He says, "Well, let's announce the comedy channel."
1:06:41
Said, "You know, if we announce a comedy channel today, the day of their release, we will be in every press release as a competitor to them."
1:06:49
So, they won't be able to say they're the first ones and they have a clear runway. >> Wow.
1:06:55
>> We could throw a monkey wrench into their plans. We need to do it today.
1:06:57
We don't have to have everything lined up, but we can just leak it and put it out there, and by the end of the week, we'll have a name.
1:07:04
We'll have a format, and we can talk some kind of bullshiting with mirrors and things.
1:07:08
So I called my boss and put him on the speaker phone, Frank Beyond, who had been fired by Michael Fuches and this comedy channel was his brainchild and and Frank Frank remembered and I said, "Frank, I'm here with my team.
1:07:21
I'm going to put you on the box. You know, talk to him.
1:07:25
We think that the entrance of your pal Michael Fuches and HBO into our business is treacherous.
1:07:30
They've announced this thing and what we want to do is announce our own thing even though we have no idea what it is." >> Yeah.
1:07:36
but let's get in the game.
1:07:36
Let's put our hat in the ring. And he goes, "Do it." So we did it.
1:07:40
And so this began what people would call the Comedy Wars.
1:07:46
And they said, "Well, their idea was to rip funny clips from standup sitcoms, movies, and kind of run it like MTV where you'd have a comedy jockey, whatever they would call it, and it would be sort of a random thing like what we did with music."
1:07:59
But we had tried that on VH1. We knew it didn't work.
1:08:03
So we had that, you know, kind of tucked away in our brain and I said, you know, we also had a thing called Nick at Night, which was we took a lot of old line sitcoms and stuff and kind of sexed them up and did some brilliant, you know, we did a lot of fun animation and stuff in between it.
1:08:18
So >> that's what we decided to do.
1:08:19
We would be a t we we called ourselves HA the TV comedy network.
1:08:23
I went out, we got the Mary Tyler Moore Library.
1:08:25
We did deals with like Brian Graaser and Ron Howard at Imagine.
1:08:30
We did deals with Rob Reiner and Castle Rock and I hired Fred Silverman who was the big programmer of the big three networks.
1:08:37
A lot of smoke and mirrors to make it look like we were really doing something even though we weren't going to go on the air for another year and a half.
1:08:43
We announced advertiser deals with advertisers we had.
1:08:47
So the bottom line was none of the cable operators would take either of us cuz we were the two big cabled programming companies and they didn't want to piss us either one off.
1:08:56
So we were all sitting there with these ideas and HBO had launched but no subscribers sort of like what MTV was going through in the early 80s.
1:09:06
So at the end of the day after we each spent hundreds of millions of dollars Frank and Michael Fuches called it a truce and they said why are you going to do a deal with John Malone for half of your company to get distribution?
1:09:20
We should just be doing this together.
1:09:22
Let's put our hatchets away and go at it.
1:09:23
So we announced Comedy Central.
1:09:26
So the day before it was going to be announced, Frank calls me up and says, "Well, I got interesting piece of news, Michael Fuches says that before we consume the deal, he doesn't want you to be at the press conference.
1:09:38
He doesn't want you in the room."
1:09:39
So I have obviously annoyed him.
1:09:41
And I said, "Well, that's like a first grader.
1:09:46
That's [ __ ] I run the division. I'm in charge of it. I can't be in the room."
1:09:49
And he goes, "Well, you know, I want to get the deal done and it's no big deal.
1:09:53
Let's just get it over with."
1:09:55
So I, you know, I I squatted and that's what happened.
1:09:58
And so we started Comedy Central.
1:09:59
And then a couple years later, Fuches was gone and called it then Comedy Central.
1:10:06
And you know, we had a few things there that put us on the radar.
1:10:10
Matt and Trey, South Park, which Doug Herszug, that was like a threeminute pitch that became a big hit show for us.
1:10:16
So it to such a big hit that even though we had six episodes, millions of people signed up for Comedy Central just to see that.
1:10:23
>> Those six episodes, that was it. Yes.
1:10:25
And then we started the Daily Show and we had this guy Craig Kilborn for two years.
1:10:29
Les Moonveves hired him away to be late night on CBS and we got John Stewart who we work with before and John's idea was let's do a show on political humor and people were saying I don't know you know political humor >> but we're a creator-based company.
1:10:44
Let's see what John has up his sleeve.
1:10:47
And it turned out it was the Daily Show and this incarnation that's run like dozens of Emmys and everything like that and spawned Steven Coar and Steve Carell and John Oliver and this whole cast of characters who now inhabit television and a bunch of other places. >> Amazing.
1:11:05
>> And then HBO sold their half to us. So we owned all of it. Yeah.
1:11:08
Comedy Central was a lot of fun. Yeah.
1:11:10
Bill Maher started his career there.
1:11:12
Jimmy Kimmel started his career there.
1:11:14
Dave Chappelle, he started with the Chappelle show on Comedy Central.
1:11:18
So again, sort of like MTV, a good eye for emerging talent and a a willingness to stick with that talent and let them perform and we'll be the beneficiaries hopefully of what they're doing.
1:11:32
>> And I love that also started as we don't want the competition taking this space, so we'll just throw our hats in the ring and it turns into this >> Yeah.
1:11:43
>> juggernaut >> worth billions of dollars.
1:11:44
And it turn it turned out, you know, we didn't have any idea what it would be.
1:11:47
You can't really know in advance. >> Yeah.
1:11:51
>> But you just That's right.
1:11:51
make the best choice you can in the moment. >> Let's improvise. Use our instincts.
1:11:56
Let's put our hat in the game.
1:11:56
What's the worst thing that could happen? We fail, we pull out.
1:11:59
We were good at hiding our bluff.
1:12:02
>> Tell me about writing the book.
1:12:04
>> I never thought I'd ever write a book, but I had written a bunch of magazine articles. I like to write.
1:12:07
So, I said, "Well, I don't want to make this a business book, you know, that's kind of boring, but I would let me just find a series of stories.
1:12:14
is to make it more of an adventure book that covers a little bit of my young life, but then a lot about my business in Asia and my travel experiences and adventures and what sort of made me and what my values became to be.
1:12:29
And then the MTV networks and Viacom piece and then I get fired and I go off and I go back to Afghanistan for 12 more years. >> Really? >> Yes.
1:12:38
I went back for 12 more years to to work at a TV network.
1:12:41
this fellow I had met in my last years of Viacom. This incredible guy.
1:12:46
He's still one of my best friends. He grew up in Australia. He was an Afghan.
1:12:50
His father had been ambassador to Sad Mussini.
1:12:53
His father had been ambassador to Japan.
1:12:55
And when the communist coup happened in 78, he was a young kid living in Japan.
1:13:00
They got put out on the street.
1:13:01
They were like homeless homeless Afghan diplomats.
1:13:06
And then they went they went to Australia, you know, grew up, went to college.
1:13:08
He went back to Afghanistan and got a license to open a radio station.
1:13:13
Then he got a license to run a TV station.
1:13:14
Knew nothing about any of this.
1:13:16
Meanwhile, he got in touch with me cuz his his girlfriend heard that there was some guy at MTV who used to have a clothing business in Afghanistan and she was starting one.
1:13:25
So, she wanted to meet me and I couldn't wait to meet her because I hadn't talked to anybody from that country in years.
1:13:30
And she said at one point, "Well, you got to meet my boyfriend.
1:13:34
He's the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan."
1:13:36
At which point I like coughed up my pelgrino. I go, "What?" Yes.
1:13:39
He's starting the first TV network there.
1:13:41
So we became fast friends.
1:13:41
And when I got fired from Viacom by Redstone, he after Bono called me, he called me.
1:13:50
He said, "Come back to Afghanistan."
1:13:51
And I'm thinking perfect circle.
1:13:53
I started my career there.
1:13:53
I left because of the a coup and the communists.
1:14:00
I went into a media business, learned it, and now I'm getting cashiered again.
1:14:04
And uh what better to go back to a country that I love story and help people there because this enterprise did more to change the attitudes of Afghans than all the $2 trillion we wasted.
1:14:16
You know, connect Afghans to each other for the first time, connect them to the outside world.
1:14:21
Let's help socialize them and do things and we we had versions of the Daily Show, a big news operation.
1:14:25
So, I love going back there.
1:14:28
I mean, I wouldn't be there all the time, but I would get four trips a year.
1:14:32
I remember telling my wife Kathy, I said, "I'm so happy.
1:14:33
I'm working with SAD now. I'm on the board. I'm mentoring people.
1:14:36
I'm a consultant and I get four free trips to Afghanistan."
1:14:41
And she goes, "What's second prize? Five free trips."
1:14:46
[laughter] But I was back there in my element.
1:14:47
So rather than take another big job at a big company that's going to pay me boatloads of money, I said about follow my uh spirit. I want to go back there.
1:14:55
I mean, Kabell was so changed and they had been through this 40 years of war and the Taliban and so forth.
1:15:03
And then we also started business in Yemen.
1:15:05
We started a business in Ethiopia, which I loved cuz the music scene in Ethiopia was fantastic.
1:15:12
And there was there was no war going on there.
1:15:14
So, I really like going there.
1:15:16
At one point, I had even a satellite network going into Iran. >> That's amazing.
1:15:20
Why did you get fired from MTV?
1:15:23
Sumar hired me to be the CEO of Viacom and I was for eight months because he was upset that I did not buy MySpace.
1:15:32
Our big challenge in the mid 2000s was the paradigm has changed totally now.
1:15:37
We have things like YouTube where people can upload, share, and comment and have a peer-to-peer relationship.
1:15:44
The gatekeeper status of what we used to do is over.
1:15:46
If people want to see, say, a music video, they can just watch Nirvana with their mouse.
1:15:51
They don't have to wait for it to come around on a linear network.
1:15:52
So, how do we get into this new action?
1:15:54
Well, I we met with Mark Zuckerberg.
1:15:57
We were the first people to make a bid for Facebook.
1:16:01
He came in to see us in 2005. We bid $1. 8 billion. >> Can you imagine that?
1:16:06
That's like walking around money for him.
1:16:07
Of course, he turned us down. >> Yeah.
1:16:10
>> And then MySpace had been out there.
1:16:10
We had looked at it and kicked the tires.
1:16:13
We weren't convinced we were going to buy it.
1:16:14
But Rupert Murdoch came in and bought it over a weekend when I was in Hawaii with my family.
1:16:18
and he bought it with no due diligence.
1:16:21
He thought that MySpace was the future.
1:16:23
Social media was the future. He was right.
1:16:25
But when they bought it, they just junked it up with advertising and the whole thing fell apart.
1:16:30
He sold it for $35 million. But Sumner was upset.
1:16:33
He had never even heard of MySpace.
1:16:35
But he heard that Rupert Murdoch, his archeneemy, bought it.
1:16:38
And I had been looking at it and didn't buy it.
1:16:40
And Rupert's now on the cover of all these magazines as some kind of digital genius. And he isn't.
1:16:46
And plus he had his estate lawyer, Philipe Duman, was very eager to have my job.
1:16:51
As it turns out, I was running Paramount also. Paramount Pictures. >> What was that like? >> That was interesting.
1:16:56
You know, I had to hire a new studio head and we had been a producer there.
1:17:01
We had made like 40 movies. Yeah.
1:17:04
>> Under the guidance of Sher Lancing who was at Paramount.
1:17:06
But when Don Dolan left, Sherry became the head of Paramount, reporting to me.
1:17:12
I love Sherry, but she decided she was going to leave.
1:17:18
So, I had to find out who else I was going to hire.
1:17:19
I also had to figure out how do I learn the movie business. I'm like a cable guy.
1:17:23
And Bob Daly from Warner Brothers when he was with Terry Seml, they ran Warner Brothers Pictures for decades.
1:17:29
They were the kings of Hollywood. >> Yes.
1:17:32
>> They tried to hire me to run the Warner Music Group.
1:17:34
So, I had a relationship with them. I didn't take that job.
1:17:36
So, I asked Bob Daly if he would be my mentor and teach me the business.
1:17:40
So I would always spend the summers in our offices in LA.
1:17:44
So I would go over from our Santa Monica office to his house in Bair and he was like the Bob Dailyaly film school.
1:17:50
P&L's financing international distribution.
1:17:53
So I kind of got smart smart enough to pretend I knew the business and then it turns out I had to hire a new studio head and I thought that the culture at Paramount could use some upgrading. It was a bit old school.
1:18:07
So, I was in Beirut one day trying to sell MTV to people there to do a Middle Eastern version of it with someone and I have been out all night with a horrible hangover and David Geffen calls me from Hollywood and I'm like looking over out my window squinting at the Mediterranean and he says, "I got the perfect guy to run Paramount." I go, "Good. I need it."
1:18:28
I we've been interviewing people but none of them all the people I wanted like Stacy Snder were under contract.
1:18:34
I need somebody says we have to get someone from outside the business.
1:18:38
We're not going to get a former studio head. Brad Gray.
1:18:42
Brad Gray ran Grillilstein Gray at the he was at the peak of his power.
1:18:47
Sopranos Bill Maher show.
1:18:50
So I had several meetings with Brad. He made a good case.
1:18:53
I would sneak over and meet him at his house in the Palisades. I had him meet Sumner. I had him meet Bob Daly.
1:18:59
Bob gave him the thumbs up, so went with Brad.
1:19:02
And Brad became the new studio head.
1:19:05
Brad was an ambitious guy, and he he kept that ambition kind of quiet.
1:19:09
He had impeccable credentials from a distance.
1:19:12
But just as he's getting into the job, this Pelicano scandal reared its head.
1:19:17
And he had two front page stories about how he had hired Anthony Pelicano for Gary Shanling and some other things. He didn't look good.
1:19:24
He looked like he was a part of a nasty story which really kind of got him off to the wrong foot in Hollywood.
1:19:28
On the other hand, we decided we needed to scale up.
1:19:33
We needed more movies in the pipeline and we could buy the DreamWorks library.
1:19:37
They had a library of 60 films, Apollo 13, bunch of >> good films. >> Good films. >> Yeah.
1:19:43
>> And it was Geffen and Kassenberg and Spielberg.
1:19:46
I knew Geffen really well.
1:19:46
I knew Kassenberg very well.
1:19:48
He was like our biggest client for years with DreamWorks Animation.
1:19:51
But we ended up buying DreamWorks and putting it together with Paramount, which I thought was brilliant.
1:19:59
And that's when I got fired right after that happened.
1:20:01
And then when I left, that relationship, which I had such high hopes for, kind of fell apart because Brad did things that were annoying and pissed off David and Steven Spielberg and they eventually bought their way out of it.
1:20:18
and Philipe Dean, my successor, kind of said, you know, if DreamWorks leaves, they don't matter to us.
1:20:25
That's not the kind of thing you want to say in Hollywood.
1:20:28
>> No, >> but this is not my problem anymore cuz I have fled the coupe.
1:20:32
>> Did your relationship with Sumner continue after you left?
1:20:36
>> He fired me on a Labor Day weekend.
1:20:36
He liked to fire people on holiday weekends.
1:20:40
He fired Frank on a Fourth of July.
1:20:43
He fired Mel on a Memorial Day.
1:20:43
I used to say if I can make it through Labor Day, I'm good for another year.
1:20:50
But sure enough, he called me on Labor Day.
1:20:52
I had been playing tennis up in Malibu and I came back.
1:20:54
I had all these damn messages on my machine like, "Where the [ __ ] are you?"
1:20:58
But anyway, I went over there.
1:21:01
I knew I was going to get fired because I called the the head of lawyer who worked for me, the general counsel.
1:21:07
He said, "Well, you better call Sar. He's looking for you. I can say I can see." So, yeah.
1:21:10
I said, "Is this the ultimate conversation, Mike?"
1:21:12
He goes, "Well, I'll leave that up to Ser."
1:21:14
So, I knew then I was getting fired. >> Yeah.
1:21:18
>> So, he told me, "Uh, I've got bad news for you and me."
1:21:20
Sit down on an ottoman across from him in his in his Franklin Canyon home.
1:21:27
And the bad news is the board wants me to fire you.
1:21:29
And I just got up and left. That was it.
1:21:32
And I didn't see him for years till I saw him at a restaurant and he came over and grabbed me at the shoulders and I said hello.
1:21:38
But then I never really had a relationship with him after that.
1:21:43
I couldn't believe that would happen, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
1:21:47
Now I'm off on another chapter. >> Yeah, it's amazing.
1:21:50
>> Yeah, >> it seems like each of the things that maybe seemed like didn't go well always led to something more interesting after.
1:21:57
>> Which leaves me to be blindly ambitious about some other thing going wrong.
1:21:59
I've been very blessed to be born at the right time when kind of figure you win the birth lottery being born in the United States in the middle of the 20th century as a white guy.
1:22:10
Did you learn about yourself at all through writing the book? >> Yeah. >> Tell me about that.
1:22:17
>> I had always been going so fast, Rick.
1:22:17
I never really had time to pull back and look.
1:22:20
I wasn't stripping things out.
1:22:20
And I realized this all seemed like it was almost part of a master plan.
1:22:25
Everything kind of led perfectly from one thing to another with the timing being right.
1:22:28
And I the values that I developed and learned in these early years when I was either sort of king of the road bartending around or working and living in in really tumultuous Asia in those years really equipped me really well when paired up with my passion for music and whatnot for my job at MTV networks in Viacom.
1:22:49
And then when I left, I thought I'd rather than take a big job at another company, I'd do a bunch of things with people that I liked.
1:22:58
And I did a thing with Oprah.
1:23:00
Bono called me to run the one campaign and read.
1:23:02
And that got me back into Africa, which I love to do.
1:23:07
And I had been really affected by extreme poverty in my years in Asia.
1:23:11
And so I was really excited to do that.
1:23:14
I've been been the board chair there for 18 years.
1:23:15
I went back to Afghanistan for 12 years.
1:23:18
So, the Taliban sort of put a video out about me and I said it wasn't safe to go back. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's wild.
1:23:28
>> Well, they said I was the teacher of Sad Moseni who runs this godless bunch of television networks and I was a CIA spy in in Afghanistan in the 70s, which I said I should not probably shouldn't go back for a while.
1:23:45
When are expertise and experience negatives?
1:23:51
>> I think they could be negatives when you're dealing with a new thing.
1:23:53
If you're dealing with something that could be new and innovative, you might bring a little too much of that with you that could cloud your >> Yeah. >> cloud your ideas.
1:24:03
That's why John Lack said to me, "We're looking for people with no experience in television." >> Yeah.
1:24:10
Let's hire a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing, who are smart and entrepreneurial.
1:24:15
And if you have too much expertise and experience, you could get a little full of yourself anyway.
1:24:20
>> Think you know something? >> Yeah.
1:24:21
You You've lose your humility. >> It's dangerous.
1:24:22
How would you compare MTV to Sesame Street?
1:24:29
>> Well, they both went after discreet audiences and that's all they did. I mean, for kids.
1:24:34
And Sesame Street was distinctly pro-social on top of being really cleverly animated.
1:24:39
We did a Sesame Street deal in in Afghanistan. >> I didn't know that.
1:24:44
>> Yeah, we we we got the Sesame Street thing.
1:24:46
We did a whole version in Farsy. >> That's great.
1:24:50
>> And we had to add a couple of other characters.
1:24:51
We couldn't keep the count because in Afghanistan they don't like vampires.
1:24:55
But they were self-contained creative units.
1:24:59
So they were quite similar.
1:25:02
They created most of their programming themselves.
1:25:07
In the case of MTV, yes, we licensed music videos, but the bulk of the other stuff we did ourselves and we relied on a cast of characters and we were on for long periods of time.
1:25:18
And I feel like there's some parallel there in just how new Sesame Street was when it came out and how new MTV was when it came out.
1:25:29
And they were both doing things in a new way.
1:25:31
And both had this meteoric rise.
1:25:34
>> In both cases, you would say, "Why didn't someone think of that earlier?" >> Yeah.
1:25:38
>> Such an obvious thing.
1:25:40
>> Tell me the difference between entrepreneurs, which you were before you got into corporate life, and the mentality of the corporate people.
1:25:49
>> Entrepreneurs will look for openings, will move quickly, do not thrive well in really structured organizations.
1:25:58
They're generally good at people picking and they have a lot of energy.
1:26:00
Whereas if you're in a big corporation, you're like you're not necessarily a cog in a machine.
1:26:05
It depends how the corporation set up, but it's a less lively life and it's more procedural and more drawn out.
1:26:13
Things don't move as fast.
1:26:13
Something's in development or we're going to put it in turnaround or let me ask so and so, let's have a meeting.
1:26:19
There's a lot of meetings when you're in a corporate life.
1:26:22
where if you if you're around entrepreneurs, they don't like a lot of meetings if they have them.
1:26:27
They want them to be quick.
1:26:29
>> And it sounds like the example of throwing your hat in the ring for comedy was not a typical corporate move. >> No.
1:26:36
And we always was conscious of that, like how do we maintain be a spry entrepreneurial company that can improvise and take risks and not be something stuck in its past?
1:26:46
Let's continue to reinvent whatever we're doing and let's just try new things.
1:26:53
Let's take risks and let's not be a stodgy old company.
1:26:56
Let's not have a dress code.
1:26:58
Let's not do a lot of things that regular companies do.
1:26:59
If we have a Christmas party, let's make it really wild. Tell me about Vice. Ah, Vice.
1:27:07
[sighs and gasps] When I was the CEO of Viacom, Spike Jones came to me and with two guys from Vice, Shane Smith and Eddie Moretti.
1:27:16
And Spike, who I loved, was a great source.
1:27:19
He brought us the Jackass Gang way back.
1:27:20
He loved all these kind of genre magazines and marginal people and looking around.
1:27:25
So he thought the Vice Guys were great.
1:27:28
And they were at the time trying to do a deal with MTV for some kind of digital thing and they were having troubles and they thought that the MTV guys didn't get it.
1:27:38
So they went to Spike and Spike said, "Well, look, maybe let me get you a meeting with Tom.
1:27:42
Maybe we can break the log jam."
1:27:44
So, they come into my office and they sit down.
1:27:46
They tell me what they're doing.
1:27:48
And Spike said, "You know, these guys are like uh they're like the truffle pigs of cool. They're on the edge.
1:27:56
They're doing stuff nobody else is doing. They have their eye out. They're entrepreneurs. They built a business.
1:28:01
They want to migrate it up to a bigger level."
1:28:03
And Shane got up and made a presentation.
1:28:07
He said, "You know, we we're in all the trouble spots.
1:28:10
We think that the birth of YouTube is the biggest thing to happen.
1:28:15
This is like the same year YouTube debuted.
1:28:16
You know, they're going to need content.
1:28:18
And I'm thinking in the back of my head, well, I need content.
1:28:21
I need someone who can make content for me that's compelling and doesn't cost a fortune. Yeah.
1:28:26
I mean, the people at MTV now, some of them have agents.
1:28:28
It's really gotten inflated and bureaucratized in a way.
1:28:31
So, these guys were raw entrepreneurs. They operated lean.
1:28:36
They were doing things in places I really cared about.
1:28:39
So they said, "We got a video we'll show you."
1:28:42
So they showed me this video and on the cover of the video was an Afghan truck.
1:28:45
The video consisted of three segments they had done.
1:28:50
They had gone to this border town between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which used to sell all opium and hashish and now sells weapons.
1:28:57
And they're in there shooting off AK-47s and doing all this Gonzo stuff, dressed up like Afghans.
1:29:04
And I'm thinking, "This is hilarious."
1:29:06
And then they go to Chernobyl and they're going to go around looking for werewolves with weapons.
1:29:09
This is before the Ukraine war, obviously. Yeah.
1:29:12
They have cocktails with them.
1:29:14
And then they have one about like we're visiting pygmies in the Congo.
1:29:19
>> I go, this is weird stuff.
1:29:19
So, okay, let's do a separate deal on your video business. We'll call it VBS. tv. That would be it.
1:29:27
And you keep your your magazine business as it is. I said we would fund it. And I did it. And then I got fired. So, I'm gone.
1:29:34
They didn't get along at all with my successor. Shane is a character.
1:29:39
Meanwhile, in 2009, three years after I left, I get a text from Shane.
1:29:44
He goes, "Tommy Gunn," he used to call me, "We need to have some drinks.
1:29:48
Meet me in Williamsburg."
1:29:51
So, I'm like, I go over and meet him in Williamsburg.
1:29:53
I said, "What has happened since we last chatted?
1:29:55
They've built a business.
1:29:57
They built this suite of digital channels.
1:29:59
They're getting millions of views.
1:30:01
They have a library of the weirdest stuff you can imagine."
1:30:04
He was with Eddie Moretti again and he when I came into the bar it was like there were three shots of tequila in front of me.
1:30:10
It was at a place in Williamsburg.
1:30:11
He goes, "Say hello to your three little friends.
1:30:13
Drink those and we'll talk."
1:30:14
So it was that kind of night.
1:30:17
And then I remember they took me to a restaurant and then next thing they threw me into a black car. We go to the box.
1:30:23
Everybody at the box they you would think the president United States showed up.
1:30:27
I'm thinking who are these guys, man?
1:30:28
So anyway, well we we're trying to really amp up the business now.
1:30:32
why don't you come on board, help us raise some money and I I got him involved with this company, Rain.
1:30:39
>> They got him like 20 $30 million from Rain and they put me on the board, made me an adviser, and I got I said, "This is fun.
1:30:45
This reminds me of me in the old days.
1:30:47
This really remind me Shane was surrounded by all these bearded guys living in these warehouses in Brooklyn with they all had the gold vice ring."
1:30:56
>> So, I really enjoyed it.
1:30:56
They wanted to start a TV network, which I told them was a mistake.
1:31:00
Shane was a hard person to be a mentor to.
1:31:02
He's an amazing sales person, but he was he was transfixed with doing deals, deals, deals, deals, deals, deals.
1:31:09
I mean, we had deals with news corporation.
1:31:11
We had deals with Disney.
1:31:13
I mean, had all A&E invested, all these Silicon Valley people invest.
1:31:18
People kept investing money in this thing.
1:31:20
And he huffed and puffed it and blew it up like no one else could have.
1:31:24
Then it just kind they had an opportunity to sell it to Disney and they blew it.
1:31:27
Then then he for more money they did a deal with TPG, this really tough as nails private equity company and they basically borrowed a lot of money that they said was an investment but that had to pay like at a high interest rate and kind of put the company into a death spiral and people began to leave and it was not a happy ending.
1:31:46
>> But you were attracted to getting back to the counterculture. >> Exactly.
1:31:50
And not getting back to doing a good job at it.
1:31:52
They look Shane for all his faults, he had an amazing amount of good points.
1:31:59
I mean, he really wanted to inform a younger generation about what was going on in the rest of the world that they had largely ignored.
1:32:03
This was a part of the world that I was heavily emotionally invested in and had spent time in.
1:32:08
I had him get the deal at HBO.
1:32:11
Went took him to Pleper and Pleuper signed him up, brought in Fariza Carrier, brought in Bill Maher and that really put him >> That was one of the most popular shows on HBO. >> Yeah.
1:32:19
And we ran it for six years.
1:32:19
Then we got Josh Triangle to come in and be the producer. >> Josh is great.
1:32:23
So all of this was going great until there was just an over ask, an overfocus on deals and all of a sudden we're not operating like an entrepreneurial outfit.
1:32:33
It's like a thing where we're pissing away a lot of money, wasting a lot of time, spending money on things you shouldn't be spending money on, and someone wants to buy you and you overnegotiate it and goodbye.
1:32:46
But it was a fun ride, >> I bet.
1:32:49
I mean a lot of billions of dollars were lost.
1:32:53
>> How does corporate culture eventually undermine successful creative ventures?
1:32:59
>> It does if the corporate culture is the wrong culture.
1:33:03
You know your corporate culture if it's one that stays nimble and respects creativity and isn't involved in just trying to grow a tree to the sky.
1:33:13
And if you have a healthy culture and in that company are a lot of creative people and there's a line outside your door of young people who want to come work there, you've got a culture that could continue to work.
1:33:22
The problem has been is companies that existed like that, which you saw a lot of in the record business.
1:33:29
You had a lot of these independent labels like Island and&M and they all got gobbled up into these rollups.
1:33:36
So now when we started MTV, there was 40 record company sellers, two and a half.
1:33:40
I don't think that's been good for creativity because everybody now is facing this thing about earnings.
1:33:46
Our earnings have to be up there.
1:33:46
We can't have a lot of mistakes.
1:33:47
Puts a lot of pressure on people which causes people to slow down.
1:33:52
A lot of the creative cultures kind of tended to fade away because the places that had them that we knew got assimilated into larger public companies where all of a sudden you're playing now by public company rules. >> Absolutely.
1:34:08
And it sounds like you were lucky that over the years, even in your corporate situations, there'd be someone like Frank Bondi that you resonated with and they allowed you to do your thing, >> right?
1:34:20
Cuz two things would happen.
1:34:20
Like Frank was a good and smart guy and he knew we were doing something he didn't fully understand, but it was working. Yeah.
1:34:28
And it was the same with Mel Carmason who had a reputation as a really hard ass business guy running radio stations, but he also kind of let us go with a light hand.
1:34:36
Even if you're delivering good results, there's a probability that you're going to get a boss who says, "Well, I want to get in there, roll up my sleeves."
1:34:43
That's sort of what happened when I left.
1:34:45
I'm going to roll up my sleeves and see, do we really need Steven Cobear and John Stewart?
1:34:50
Do we really need two of those guys?
1:34:52
You start hearing stuff like that and you know everybody's going to leave.
1:34:57
>> Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.
1:35:03
I guess I didn't believe when I was young that the world was going to change the way it has.
1:35:06
I was unable to foresee some of the big geopolitical shifts and things.
1:35:12
I think part of that was just that I was young.
1:35:14
I didn't believe that you could get a job in the entertainment business and have such fun.
1:35:19
I didn't believe that I could have a career that actually would be fun and adventurous.
1:35:23
I always thought that growing up and getting out of school and getting a grown-up job was going to consign me [music] to a life of conformity and being the organization man.
1:35:32
It wouldn't be as joyful.
1:35:34
But it turned out that wasn't true. [music] different. [music]