Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is Tom Fresker. He was chairman of
Speaker 1: MTV Networks, chairman of Viacom, is chairman of the board
Speaker 1: of the One Campaign. Tom. Great to have you here.
Speaker 1: Great to be here, Bob. So what's going on with
Speaker 1: the One Campaign. Well, we're in full mode these days
Speaker 1: with the pandemic. We've kind of pivoted you know, One
Speaker 1: the One campaigns and activists organizations, so basically think of
Speaker 1: it like as the n r A for the extreme poor.
Speaker 1: We're trying to lobby politicians either directly or through people
Speaker 1: who are you know, activists, who who who worked with
Speaker 1: which are millions of people, and to get them to
Speaker 1: do the right things for the people, the poorest people
Speaker 1: on the planet. And we focus on Africa, and since
Speaker 1: March it's been COVID COVID but the whole time and
Speaker 1: these days it's all about vaccine equity, which you read about.
Speaker 1: You know, the fourteen percent of the people have seventy
Speaker 1: percent of the orders in for the vaccines. There's hardly
Speaker 1: any in Africa. And until everybody on this planet is activated,
Speaker 1: is inoculated, or we reached some kind of herd immunity.
Speaker 1: This thing is going to continue to mutate, could come
Speaker 1: back and bite us in They asked us fourteen percent
Speaker 1: of the people in the northern countries. So we're all
Speaker 1: about that and we've been you know, it's been a
Speaker 1: real uh change with Trump leaving and Biden coming in,
Speaker 1: because right away he committed to six billion dollars for
Speaker 1: vaccines for people in uh less developed countries. And that's
Speaker 1: sort of what I'm doing. It's all vaccines, all the time.
Speaker 1: Tell me more about the organization, the history and how
Speaker 1: many people are working in fundraising, etcetera. Well, you know it.
Speaker 1: Bano started it, and uh he had had a thing
Speaker 1: called the One Campaign, and he had a thing called Red,
Speaker 1: which was a different organization that sort of was an
Speaker 1: arm into the private sector. And then he had another
Speaker 1: organization called Data, which sort of assembled a lot of
Speaker 1: data essentially about what was going on in the world.
Speaker 1: This is back in two thousand and five. So he
Speaker 1: started this organization and the idea was, let's see how
Speaker 1: many members we can get and let's begin to put
Speaker 1: pressure on some of these key legislatures in the States
Speaker 1: and elsewhere. He was able to assemble basically a gaggle
Speaker 1: of billionaires to fund this. I mean, we it's are.
Speaker 1: What we say is we don't want your money, we
Speaker 1: want your voice. But we've got Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates,
Speaker 1: Susie Buffett, you know, Jeff Skull, John Door, there's a
Speaker 1: whole he's a great door opener, let's put it that way.
Speaker 1: So it's funded privately. We've got about a hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy employees. We've got twelve offices, uh main one is
Speaker 1: in d C. But then we've got five or six
Speaker 1: in uh in Africa, and we're you know, we're in Brussels,
Speaker 1: were in Berlin, were in London, we're in Paris, we're
Speaker 1: in Johannesburg, in Dakar, and the population of the people
Speaker 1: who worked there are largely activists. I mean, we're not
Speaker 1: not for profit. And uh, they're young, and they're smart
Speaker 1: as hell, and they have swung literally billions and billions
Speaker 1: of dollars from uh, you know, government budgets. Two Uh
Speaker 1: do the right thing in a smart way. And I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about a you know, uh foreign aid necessarily,
Speaker 1: but it's been it's been very focused on health, also
Speaker 1: agriculture and governance. So, um, we've got a board. I've
Speaker 1: been the board chair for god, I guess it's like
Speaker 1: thirteen or fourteen years. Now we've got an interesting board
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, it's very fulfilling work for me
Speaker 1: and very different. You know what I found when I
Speaker 1: left MTV Networks and Viacom. You know, Bonna was the
Speaker 1: first guy to call me up when I got fired.
Speaker 1: He called me from dub and the next day we
Speaker 1: had had her We had a we were friends and
Speaker 1: had been together for a long time, not together, but
Speaker 1: I mean MTV and you two kind of came up
Speaker 1: and he said, why don't you come run Red, which
Speaker 1: I barely knew about any I said, you know, I
Speaker 1: just got fired last night. I'm not I'm not not
Speaker 1: ready or really to make any big decisions right now
Speaker 1: that he has. Bill Gates called me Steve's jobs call
Speaker 1: me anyway. I put it off, And then about three
Speaker 1: months later I went and saw him Paul at Paul
Speaker 1: McGinnis is asking saying, please help this things kind of
Speaker 1: you know, kind of coming apart. I said I would
Speaker 1: study work for three months and see if we could
Speaker 1: reorganize things, which I did do and in the process,
Speaker 1: fell in love with the organization, fell in love with
Speaker 1: what they did, and uh, it was like a whole
Speaker 1: different group of young people, you know what I which
Speaker 1: I have been working with for most of my career.
Speaker 1: But they were they were activists. So I said I'd
Speaker 1: stay on as the board chair and there I am today,
Speaker 1: still doing it. How much of your time does it require? Well,
Speaker 1: now it's about a third, I'd say. You know, our
Speaker 1: CEO was just taken from us by Biden. He just
Speaker 1: hired her, uh to come in and be sort of
Speaker 1: the special envoy on vaccines. All the things we're advocating
Speaker 1: for the USA to do, we now go to her
Speaker 1: because she's in power and can and make those kind
Speaker 1: of decisions. So it's inconvenient to lose your CEO. But
Speaker 1: when you find out that she actually has the job,
Speaker 1: that is the key to the highway, so to speak
Speaker 1: for you know, helping us move along the vaccine equity spectrum.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's good, but it's not full time. Historically,
Speaker 1: there's been an issue of getting the money from the donors,
Speaker 1: whether it be countries or individuals, into the hands of
Speaker 1: the end user. I'm talking about foreign aid in general.
Speaker 1: So what happens with the vaccines, Well, the vaccines go
Speaker 1: through they get distributed. It depends by country, but basically
Speaker 1: again they get distributed through the ministries of health in
Speaker 1: these various countries who you know, and and funny in Africa,
Speaker 1: because they've had a lot of experience with a bola
Speaker 1: and other things, they actually are pretty set up for pandemics.
Speaker 1: They have some experience in this area. So this is
Speaker 1: not the type of thing that's likely to fall astray
Speaker 1: and where you lose a lot of money. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're getting vaccines, they're not getting they're not getting money,
Speaker 1: but they you know, they and they already have existing
Speaker 1: staffs and they can mobilize people to do these inoculations.
Speaker 1: But that's not to say it's going to be an
Speaker 1: easy task. And what is the status as we speak?
Speaker 1: The virus is raging in India, to what degree is
Speaker 1: it under control? And are there vaccinations in Africa? The
Speaker 1: thing in India is really a mind blower because the
Speaker 1: people thought Indian sort of had come through this. But
Speaker 1: in Africa, Africa has so far gotten off a lot
Speaker 1: easier than people thought they were. That's not to say
Speaker 1: it hasn't been bad. In South Africa in particular, it
Speaker 1: has been bad, but you know, they have a very
Speaker 1: young population, uh and there's a lot of anybody's running
Speaker 1: around from other infections people might have had, so they
Speaker 1: have not had the death rates the hospitalization rates that
Speaker 1: we've seen, say in America, of course no one's seen that,
Speaker 1: but uh they are. You know, I think countries have
Speaker 1: maybe twenty thousand vaccines done. That would be a high amount,
Speaker 1: you know in a country like Ghana, now you see.
Speaker 1: But but we've there's a big public relations efforts, so
Speaker 1: to speak, to address this, and people are realizing that
Speaker 1: it's on our own self interest to have this happen.
Speaker 1: And now, like America, we have all the sexcess vaccines already.
Speaker 1: I mean, anybody can get a vaccination we have. Canada
Speaker 1: has four times as many vaccines as they have people.
Speaker 1: These are they haven't all been delivered yet, mind you,
Speaker 1: but that's what they have on order. And it's about
Speaker 1: the same for the United States. I mean, we have,
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of millions of extra vaccines to go.
Speaker 1: So at some point it wasn't really uh kosher to
Speaker 1: be pleading for these vaccines to go to Africa. Before
Speaker 1: we got our own population under control and vaccinated and
Speaker 1: people felt comfortable. But we're at that point now, certainly
Speaker 1: in the States. Since you're a king of marketers, we
Speaker 1: have the issue in America where many people do not
Speaker 1: want to get the vaccine. What can be done and
Speaker 1: what what you might have done, you know, putting on
Speaker 1: your hat of marketing not only the young people but
Speaker 1: the public at large. Well, I mean, if you really
Speaker 1: look where the and there's there's the anti vax people
Speaker 1: that have sort of existed before, but you know, now
Speaker 1: you see really the vaccine hesitant people are largely in
Speaker 1: the Republican Party and they're largely evangelical. Those are the
Speaker 1: two biggest groups. I mean, if someone like Donald Trump
Speaker 1: came out and uh did p s A is along
Speaker 1: the lines of what Elvis Presley did with polio back
Speaker 1: in the fifties, that would be good to a lot
Speaker 1: of these people. You can't really you know, you can't
Speaker 1: really dissuade them with facts. Uh, there's this hardcore there's
Speaker 1: probably never gonna get vaccinated, but there is this group
Speaker 1: that can't be moved, and it's gonna take marketing and uh,
Speaker 1: some kind of promotion. A doctor that I know in
Speaker 1: Boston told me that when they were vaccinating people over
Speaker 1: seventy they could get the six and they hit like
Speaker 1: a dead end. So they started basically doing promotions. They said,
Speaker 1: if you bring somebody with you to get vaccinated, if
Speaker 1: you're over seventy, will vaccinate them too. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like dex they'll be giving out toasters. But they were
Speaker 1: able to drive it from like six up to seventy percent.
Speaker 1: I don't know where they are now, but it shows
Speaker 1: you things can be done. I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: it is gonna be uh you know what. They need
Speaker 1: people to They need people that they respect and like
Speaker 1: like Donald Trump in this case, or leading evangelical to
Speaker 1: say it's okay, don't worry about it. So if one
Speaker 1: third year time is with the one campaign, what are
Speaker 1: you doing with the rest of your time? Generally speaking,
Speaker 1: obviously everything's crazy during COVID. Well, I've been spending a
Speaker 1: lot of time, you know, these years since I work
Speaker 1: with the Vice Media. Another thing that I've been working with,
Speaker 1: I've work with this company called Mobi Media, which has
Speaker 1: been based in Afghanistan, and I really went and I
Speaker 1: used to live in Afghanistan before I ever had a
Speaker 1: career at and MTV networks, and I kind of went
Speaker 1: moved back there too, because they started these television networks
Speaker 1: which are now, you know, really the leading ones in
Speaker 1: the market. There was no television there under the Taliban.
Speaker 1: So I'm spending a lot of time with them now
Speaker 1: because of course we're looking at the Taliban maybe coming
Speaker 1: back into Afghanistan, which is not going to be a
Speaker 1: pretty picture. I work on that. I work on Red
Speaker 1: UH and UH you know few other projects. I worked
Speaker 1: with this company called Rain. They're a private equity company
Speaker 1: and they do I've led investments like can Imagine Imagine
Speaker 1: Entertainment with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, uh Matt and
Speaker 1: Trey you know, the South Park guys. You know. So
Speaker 1: UH RAIN will take a position in them and then
Speaker 1: I'll you know, help work with their teams on things.
Speaker 1: So I bounced around. I used to travel a lot, Bob,
Speaker 1: I mean, I travel like four months a year, but
Speaker 1: this last year has been grounded. Like everybody, let's go
Speaker 1: back to Afghanistan. The last time we discussed this, you
Speaker 1: had been going to Afghanistan, but then things changed and
Speaker 1: the person was actually running your operation, UH was avoiding
Speaker 1: killers So what is the status today of the stations
Speaker 1: and the people running them. Well, it's worse. Uh, we've
Speaker 1: kinda you know, they've they've killed a lot of our journalists.
Speaker 1: They've set off, you know, suicide bombers have attack some
Speaker 1: of our commuter us is to take people and it's
Speaker 1: not you know, one of the success stories in Afghanistan
Speaker 1: has been independent media and the independent media there is
Speaker 1: more independent than is rated, even so more so than
Speaker 1: in countries like India or Turkey. The Taliban does not
Speaker 1: like this. We have a substantial news organization and the
Speaker 1: people are really consumed by news when they're living in
Speaker 1: a war zone, which they've been doing for forty years now. Uh,
Speaker 1: but they've now had to basically enclose themselves in their
Speaker 1: own many green zone. So when uh, my friend Satmossini,
Speaker 1: who's the CEO, brilliant character, when he will go in,
Speaker 1: I mean he goes in unannounced and he goes rather
Speaker 1: than live in his house, he goes that is heavily
Speaker 1: fortified compound and people come to see him there and
Speaker 1: he'll stay a week and then leave on an unannounced basis.
Speaker 1: So it's really hard for people to go anywhere. There's
Speaker 1: the Taliban of the start of this assassination program. As
Speaker 1: a result of their negotiations during the Trump hear they
Speaker 1: sort of said they would no longer do mass terror, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, things blowing up banks and public squares and
Speaker 1: so forth. So they've sort of switched to just knocking
Speaker 1: off Supreme Court justices, reporters, politicians, have people who work
Speaker 1: at m G O s uh and uh. Anybody who
Speaker 1: works at Too Low TV, which is the actual name
Speaker 1: of it, there is you know, has to be very
Speaker 1: careful and what is the reach of that TV network?
Speaker 1: It reach us the whole country. There's right now there's
Speaker 1: a there well when there was no television, now there's
Speaker 1: a TV stations and loads of radio stations, and the
Speaker 1: thing is and there's a lot of print publications. So
Speaker 1: for the first time in its history, these Afghans are
Speaker 1: connected to the outside world, which has made a big difference.
Speaker 1: They're connected to each other. Layer on top of that,
Speaker 1: the fact that where there was eleven thousand cell phones
Speaker 1: when the Taliban ran Afghanistan, there's now thirty five million
Speaker 1: of them, so people aren nected with each other. So
Speaker 1: they've there's been like this twenty year period where this
Speaker 1: war has been going on, but we've been working kind
Speaker 1: of going over the head of the war for this insurgency,
Speaker 1: and they've been they've really developed a lot of relative
Speaker 1: freedoms that they've never had before. They've been connected to
Speaker 1: each other, there's been a lot of social change. Women
Speaker 1: are more liberated and empowered, and Uh, the sad thing
Speaker 1: is right now, you've got about fifteen percent of the
Speaker 1: population likes the Taliban. That's it. Of the people like
Speaker 1: the government. The government's corrupt and predatory, and you know
Speaker 1: figured that the Taliban is still like an armed religious
Speaker 1: fanatic organization, still tied and intermarried with Al Qaeda. So
Speaker 1: the there's my friend would tell me the best case
Speaker 1: he sees in Afghanistan now is a civil war because
Speaker 1: there's not going to be some kind of coalition government.
Speaker 1: That seems extremely unlikely. And these characters have been living
Speaker 1: up in the hills or in Pakistan for twenty years
Speaker 1: and life has really changed. I mean, they're gonna be
Speaker 1: like Rip van Winkle when they come back in the
Speaker 1: cobble and they see people are on Facebook and they're tweeting,
Speaker 1: and they all have phones and they're talking to each other.
Speaker 1: So it's gonna be Uh, it's gonna be interesting to
Speaker 1: see how this plays out. And I foresee it's not
Speaker 1: gonna play out in a in a really uplifting fashion. Um,
Speaker 1: should America ever have gone in and should they have
Speaker 1: gotten now quicker? What do we know? Before the US
Speaker 1: Russia was an Afghanistan and they ultimately pulled out without
Speaker 1: any great achievements. Yeah, they they lost. They killed a
Speaker 1: million Afghans this play six million others had this horrible ward.
Speaker 1: You know they're not they're they're like, just just raise villages. Uh.
Speaker 1: And before them, the British were throwing up Afghanistan. There's
Speaker 1: a long history of this, the Graveyard of Empires, as
Speaker 1: they like to say. We went in and vanquished the Taliban,
Speaker 1: and we immediately set out and made threshold mistakes. That
Speaker 1: kind of of uh kind of destined. It's kind of
Speaker 1: was destined. What was gonna happen When it was over,
Speaker 1: the Taliban wanted to negotiate a surrender to be part
Speaker 1: of the process of the new government, and Donald Rumsfeld said, no,
Speaker 1: we're not going to negotiate with you your terrorists. Now.
Speaker 1: Mind you, when people have civil wars or things like
Speaker 1: this is not uncommon. We've seen it in South African
Speaker 1: other places. The opposing sides get together and work something out. Uh,
Speaker 1: that didn't happen. So the Taliban was sort of shun
Speaker 1: it off to Pakistan and uh, you know, resentful, and
Speaker 1: Pakistan would fuel them. Uh. And then we we set
Speaker 1: about putting in place. They centralized government for the country
Speaker 1: in their new constitution, which they've never had before, which made,
Speaker 1: of course corruption easier to do. We empower a lot
Speaker 1: of old guys who actually they were so bad, these
Speaker 1: warloades that they their behavior led to the Taliban in
Speaker 1: the first place, and then we just dumped a lot
Speaker 1: of money at it. You know, there's American hubris and
Speaker 1: naivete and uh, we were like destined to fail. I
Speaker 1: can understand why Biden wants to get out because I
Speaker 1: don't see that things are going to change. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like pushing a string there. It's just I don't
Speaker 1: know what's gonna happen. Some miracle really needs to happen
Speaker 1: for the Taliban to try and assimilate into what has
Speaker 1: been this newer, more modern culture that's turned up at
Speaker 1: least in urban Afghanistan. So you were in Afghanistans decades before.
Speaker 1: And you said, this was before they had a lot
Speaker 1: of technology, and you've been there. Now the average American
Speaker 1: doesn't even have a passport. But what was the appeal
Speaker 1: of Afghanistan for you? Well, I had I have been
Speaker 1: working at the time. I had been I had quit
Speaker 1: a job at an ad agency in New York. I
Speaker 1: just couldn't take it anymore. And uh, they they were
Speaker 1: gonna assign me to Sharman toilet paper. And I realized
Speaker 1: that and I had been already been working on g
Speaker 1: I Joe. Mind you, this was during the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: so I was just an alienated guy. And an old
Speaker 1: girlfriend called me up from Paris and said, Hey, I
Speaker 1: want to go across the Sahara Desert. I was on
Speaker 1: a plane like a week and a half later, and
Speaker 1: I met her. We did do that. We broke up
Speaker 1: like a little we're a little bit Florida. How do
Speaker 1: you go across the Sahara Desert in those days? I
Speaker 1: went all the way down from Paris through Spain and
Speaker 1: Morocco to the very southern point of Morocco where the
Speaker 1: road stopped, and then you get into what was basically
Speaker 1: the back of a Ford truck pickup truck, not a
Speaker 1: pickup truck. It was like, you know, a dump truck
Speaker 1: and you drive a hundred and fifty miles at the
Speaker 1: border of what was then a place called the Spanish Sahara.
Speaker 1: It was Spain's last colony and you had to camp
Speaker 1: out for a few days. So they opened the border
Speaker 1: and then you'd go in and then you'd uh, you know,
Speaker 1: tool around the Sahara. And I I did that for
Speaker 1: about a month and ended up we split up, and
Speaker 1: I ended up continue to travel for a year and
Speaker 1: I met somebody in Greece, this girl in Greece, and
Speaker 1: she said, you know, you gotta go to India. That
Speaker 1: was the Holy Grail. This is like nineteen seventy two, Bob.
Speaker 1: So when I went to it, it was like the
Speaker 1: day I went to Afghanistan. My life sort of changed
Speaker 1: because I was having a great time and soaking it
Speaker 1: all in. I mean it was hitchhiking around and riding
Speaker 1: on the back of trucks. I was a kid basically.
Speaker 1: But when I when I showed up at the Afghan
Speaker 1: Iran border, I went through Iran, Uh, it was like
Speaker 1: I was in another world and a whole other planet
Speaker 1: that the guy who was an immigration stamping passports he
Speaker 1: was wearing his jacket was there was a jacket from
Speaker 1: the high school band at the Akron High School. You know. So,
Speaker 1: and what's often lost with people because they think Afghanistan's
Speaker 1: just a place of continual war and terrorists. The Afghans
Speaker 1: are actually hilarious and people go there. One of the
Speaker 1: reasons we probably stayed this longest because at the top
Speaker 1: military levels they all you get entranced then really engaged
Speaker 1: with the Afghans. They're wonderful people. They got this great
Speaker 1: soul and uh I fell for that and about that.
Speaker 1: This was the most exotic place I'd been and I
Speaker 1: wanted to try and figure out a way to support
Speaker 1: myself and live there. And I basically I started a
Speaker 1: company and I lived there for eight years there in India,
Speaker 1: where I also started another company. Does a whole other,
Speaker 1: a whole other lifetime, ago, a whole other career. It
Speaker 1: was those are my defining great years. I love them. Okay,
Speaker 1: what'd your parents say when you jettison the path and
Speaker 1: went off across the god? You know, they were already
Speaker 1: annoyed because uh I had gotten out of college. I
Speaker 1: was gonna get drafted. I went to graduate school, which
Speaker 1: was still possible. I wanted to get Someone said I said,
Speaker 1: I got to get drafted, and said, we gotta go
Speaker 1: to graduate school. Since well, I don't want to be
Speaker 1: a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer. Sai, why
Speaker 1: don't you go to business school? I was so out
Speaker 1: of it, Bob, I didn't know there was such a thing,
Speaker 1: you know, get an m b A. So I signed up,
Speaker 1: went to n y U. And that's sort of when
Speaker 1: I got out of there, I decided, Uh, I had
Speaker 1: gotten out of the draft. How'd you get out of
Speaker 1: the draft? Well? In then, at the end of my
Speaker 1: first year of a two year program, they said, okay,
Speaker 1: he's graduate school. Deferments are over. I'm back in the
Speaker 1: draft pool. I said, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta.
Speaker 1: I can't do that. So I I found a guy.
Speaker 1: I knew a guy. The only thing that I got
Speaker 1: in the Navy Reserve, which had it was one year
Speaker 1: of meetings and then you had to go an active
Speaker 1: duty for two years. And I had been working in
Speaker 1: Lake George with this guy who ran a bar, but
Speaker 1: he also ran a big steamship which used to be.
Speaker 1: You know, in World War two they had cut it
Speaker 1: up and brought it up to Lake George, and he
Speaker 1: was in the Naval Reserve and he was able to
Speaker 1: get me in. I mean, think about that. And then
Speaker 1: I once I got in, I it was determined I
Speaker 1: had some medical problems, so I gotta I got at
Speaker 1: the ferment. And then just when I graduated, my parents said,
Speaker 1: he's getting on the conveyor belt. He's gonna get a
Speaker 1: grown up job. I split for a year. I went
Speaker 1: to ask him and uh the Virgin Islands. And then,
Speaker 1: you know, they were not happy about that. But then
Speaker 1: I got a job at ben in ball Holes, which
Speaker 1: they were elated about. And that lasted about two years,
Speaker 1: and uh, I was just alien it. And then I
Speaker 1: quit again. I took five thousand dollars and left, and
Speaker 1: they were just sort of slack jawed. But you know,
Speaker 1: what can they do. I was, you know, twenty two
Speaker 1: or something like that, twenty three. What did your father
Speaker 1: do for a living? Your mother? He was, Uh. I
Speaker 1: grew up in in Fairfield County, not far from you.
Speaker 1: I was from Rowait in Connecticut, of course, just a
Speaker 1: little down the line. And my father, actually he was
Speaker 1: in one of the mad Men guys. He worked in uh,
Speaker 1: in public relations for a paper bag company called Union Bag,
Speaker 1: which meant all my life I got free lunch bags.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't have to recycle him like my
Speaker 1: fellow students did. So he you know, and he had
Speaker 1: a lot of friends that are awaiting who were sort
Speaker 1: of in that world of advertising public relations, and they
Speaker 1: were what I saw. There was a window of what
Speaker 1: I could. I I saw that was possible to be
Speaker 1: in business and actually have a good time and do
Speaker 1: something like these people were creative. I wanted to always
Speaker 1: be around creative people. So anyway, they took it and
Speaker 1: stride when I left, and then they became proud of
Speaker 1: me because my company became very successful. I had no
Speaker 1: idea what I was doing, but we build warehouses and showrooms,
Speaker 1: and then of course I got wiped out and lost everything. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's go back to the beating for a second. How
Speaker 1: many kids in the family. There was me and my brother.
Speaker 1: I'm a younger brother, right And what's he up to
Speaker 1: right now? I mean I met up a couple of times.
Speaker 1: For the people who don't know, uh, he's started retired.
Speaker 1: You know, he was just Libby. He was he had
Speaker 1: had it with the pandemic, so he got vaccinated and
Speaker 1: went to beck Way, which is an island in the Grenadines. St.
Speaker 1: Vincent and the Grenadines is one of the last island
Speaker 1: nations in the Caribbean. It sounds like a rock band.
Speaker 1: And he was the island of beck Way, and he
Speaker 1: had rented a place for three months and he was
Speaker 1: enjoying it there. He likes living on islands. But then
Speaker 1: they had just had this volcano in St. Vincent. So
Speaker 1: he got a vacuated by the American government and a
Speaker 1: cruise liner that took him to Saint Martin. So he's
Speaker 1: back in New York now a little up perturb, I said, Bill,
Speaker 1: only you could get, you know, run from a pandemic
Speaker 1: and then you have to get evacuated because of a volcano. Okay,
Speaker 1: did you go to public school or prep school? I
Speaker 1: went to a combination. I went to public schools in
Speaker 1: Connecticut until my father wanted me to have a good
Speaker 1: Catholic education. See, so he said, sent me to Fairfield Prep.
Speaker 1: Right down the street. I mean literally right down the
Speaker 1: street pass if we only knew, you know, that's where
Speaker 1: I saw my first concert Ray Charles at Fairfield University.
Speaker 1: I saw the Beach Boys at Fearfield University. Enough you
Speaker 1: were there and there was another concert with the Young Rascals.
Speaker 1: This was in the sixties. I think you might have
Speaker 1: been in college at that point. Yeah. Well, after two
Speaker 1: years of that, and I wasn't that happy because you know,
Speaker 1: I have it's an hour and a half up there
Speaker 1: and back, and you know, all my friends I didn't
Speaker 1: really have. I kind of was contact with my local friends.
Speaker 1: And my father said, I'll make you deal. I'll let
Speaker 1: you transfer to the local high school and finish here
Speaker 1: because I can see you wanted to play hockey, you
Speaker 1: wanted to do this, meet some girls, and you know,
Speaker 1: I want to be happy, but we gotta make a deal.
Speaker 1: If I do this, you have to commit to me
Speaker 1: that you go to a Catholic college. Wow. So I
Speaker 1: had to. I took the deal that was on the table. Bob,
Speaker 1: I said, I'll deal with that other one later, you know.
Speaker 1: So he said, uh, that's that's what he said. So
Speaker 1: when it came time to apply to college, my choices
Speaker 1: were a lot more limited than the other kids that
Speaker 1: were in school with and I I, you know, I
Speaker 1: ended up going to a small college in Vermont, which
Speaker 1: I never even visited. At that point in my life,
Speaker 1: I've only been in two states, New York and Connecticut,
Speaker 1: so you know, so I went to a combination and
Speaker 1: so you went to St. Michael's in Vermont. There were
Speaker 1: no women there, right exactly, but they had a important point,
Speaker 1: a recurring theme with these ethnic schools. But there was
Speaker 1: a There was a a school called Trinity College or
Speaker 1: sort of the sister college in Burlington, right across the river.
Speaker 1: But there were a lot of other colleges. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of uh, there was sort of a college
Speaker 1: town Burlington. It was a really cool town to go
Speaker 1: to school. And if you weren't in St. Michael's, but
Speaker 1: you could meet girls. I made a point of that. Okay,
Speaker 1: growing up, were you like the leader of the group?
Speaker 1: Were you popular? And then when you get to college,
Speaker 1: were you, you know, the guy who was hanging with
Speaker 1: everybody or you were more independent? What kind of kid
Speaker 1: were you like growing up? I was independent. I mean
Speaker 1: I really wasn't in any big click or anything like that.
Speaker 1: But I was well liked and I got along. I
Speaker 1: got a well, I I got I can get along
Speaker 1: with anybody, so I would get along with everybody. Was
Speaker 1: just a big bruiser guy, a bully. I could somehow
Speaker 1: befriend him. And when I went to college, like I
Speaker 1: made a fortune. I was. I took a cut and pay.
Speaker 1: When I graduated, I was. I had all kinds of
Speaker 1: jobs from dishwasher to where because I had had to
Speaker 1: kind of work my way through college. But but I
Speaker 1: got a little money in the system. So uh, but
Speaker 1: there I was. Most of the other kids in that
Speaker 1: school were from Upper New England. There was only a
Speaker 1: few of us from the Tri City area who we
Speaker 1: thought we were hit but we were nothing. You know.
Speaker 1: All I really knew was like listening to New York
Speaker 1: City radio growing up in terms of you know, never
Speaker 1: really went into the city much. So I went to
Speaker 1: graduate school. Okay, you were an Aspen We never discussed this.
Speaker 1: You were a big skier. You mean, that's the reason
Speaker 1: to go to Aspen, especially back then, although Aspen was different.
Speaker 1: That was before all the chain stores were there. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: like people hadn't even heard of Aspen in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: But what have you know. Sometimes you can remember something
Speaker 1: with total clarity, and I can remember at the beginning
Speaker 1: of my sophomore year in college, I was at a
Speaker 1: part I went before school started. I was at the
Speaker 1: University of Ramondic of fraternity and I had made friends
Speaker 1: there too. And then this guy I knew kind of
Speaker 1: this is in the afternoon, he's on a Bonneville motorcycle.
Speaker 1: He kind of comes through and he I said, Hey, Tom,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? This is his name is Tom too.
Speaker 1: He says, Oh, Man, I just had the greatest summer.
Speaker 1: I was down in this place, Lake George. It's while
Speaker 1: down there. You know, there's all these girls. You can
Speaker 1: make a lot of money. It's a beautiful place, and
Speaker 1: you know you're crazy to go home and for the summertime.
Speaker 1: I decided right then and there, this is what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do. I'm gonna finally be free, away from my parents,
Speaker 1: away from the rules of college. So I went there.
Speaker 1: And when I was there, like the cool gang in
Speaker 1: that town where all these guys from Aspen they would
Speaker 1: they would like be on the circuit. They would work
Speaker 1: in Lake George, they would work in ask when they
Speaker 1: go to the Caribbean, then run pot. They ran bars.
Speaker 1: But they were like bohemians. My first real encounter with
Speaker 1: and they there, they theyre they didn't even think of
Speaker 1: having a career. They were, but they struck a nerve
Speaker 1: with me, and I saw like a window for me
Speaker 1: to have a more interesting life. But they always said, hey, man,
Speaker 1: come out and finsess this in a Aspen. So as
Speaker 1: soon as I got out of school, I bought a
Speaker 1: car for like a hundred bucks and drove to Aspen
Speaker 1: and showed up at the It was in the Aspen
Speaker 1: and it was now the rich Carlton stands in its place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I went in. I say where's Gary? And Gary
Speaker 1: comes out and I said. He says, Tom, what are
Speaker 1: you doing here? I said, well, this was a pilgrimage
Speaker 1: for me. I wanted to check it out. You got anything,
Speaker 1: you got any nice job for a for a hard
Speaker 1: working man. He says, everyone filled up. You shouldn't let
Speaker 1: me know, but you could be a dishwasher. And this
Speaker 1: was like the nitty Gritty dirt band would play there
Speaker 1: and Steve Martin and it was. It was a hopping place,
Speaker 1: but I knew all the guys who kind of ran it. Well.
Speaker 1: I worked my way up and I spent uh. Then
Speaker 1: he sends me to go get a room at the
Speaker 1: Independence Lodge, which is at the base of Ajax. It's
Speaker 1: now a Ralph the Ren store, and they gave me
Speaker 1: a room with no window. And then the guy says
Speaker 1: to me, you're not gonna need a window if you're
Speaker 1: working at the s spen in. I go, what is that?
Speaker 1: He says, because those guys are wild. You'll be They'll
Speaker 1: have you all night at some parties in Red Mountain
Speaker 1: and you'll be thanking me that the sun's not waking
Speaker 1: you up. You can sleep all day. So that turned
Speaker 1: out to be, you know, that turned out to pretty
Speaker 1: much be the case. But I I was there. I
Speaker 1: skied a few times, but I had to rent all
Speaker 1: my equipment, so it was really uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't have my own stuff. Wasn't a great skier, but
Speaker 1: it was. I really fell in love with the town.
Speaker 1: But I realized after three months I had to get
Speaker 1: out of there. I go crazy. That was sort of
Speaker 1: my brief psychedelic period. There was a lot of bad
Speaker 1: things going on and Aspen in those days. I mean
Speaker 1: it was Hunter Thompson had just run for it was
Speaker 1: about to run for sheriff, but he had started that
Speaker 1: freak party thing which you probably knew all about. They
Speaker 1: were gonna fight the developers, the greedhogs, who ultimately turned
Speaker 1: Aspen into what it is today. Okay, so you leave Aspen,
Speaker 1: and then the next stop is I went through San
Speaker 1: Francisco and down do Big Sir Her and they went
Speaker 1: to uh San Diego. Had a friend of mine who
Speaker 1: was in the Navy. He lived in Mission Beach, hung
Speaker 1: out there a while. Then I I I tried to
Speaker 1: dry I finally I couldn't drive my car in Mexico,
Speaker 1: so I sold it in, flew to Port of the
Speaker 1: Art and went to San Blass. I was there for
Speaker 1: not long, and then her friend called me. I was says, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm in the I'm in the Virgin Islands, and you
Speaker 1: could probably get a job here at Tendon Bar. So
Speaker 1: I went there and spent three months in the Virgin
Speaker 1: Islands doing that. That was a whole other adventure. And
Speaker 1: then from there I went to Martha's Vineyard and got
Speaker 1: a job in the lamp post. And this was when
Speaker 1: I met Tom Rush, who you just had on and
Speaker 1: I met Jill Lumpkin who we talked about on your podcast,
Speaker 1: who was his girlfriend on the Circle Game, who I
Speaker 1: hired as a designer to work for me at my company,
Speaker 1: Hindu Kush. She used to be a bar to waitress
Speaker 1: at max Is in the city and she's living in
Speaker 1: Indian now. I I had, I had, I said. I
Speaker 1: sent her a copy of the link to your podcast.
Speaker 1: I said, well, Tom's really talk talking about you so small,
Speaker 1: small world. Why did your business in Afghanistan in India crash? Well?
Speaker 1: As good as it was and we were, we were
Speaker 1: making not crappy clothes, but really kind of stylish things. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, the Afghanistan they had a communist coup. You know,
Speaker 1: generally not good for business. I mean, we were going around.
Speaker 1: It was a big surprise to everybody in town, including
Speaker 1: pretty much the Soviets, because these guys weren't ready for
Speaker 1: prime time. And that was in April seventy eight. So
Speaker 1: I kind of bailed. I have been there for a
Speaker 1: coup in seventy three when they took out the king,
Speaker 1: but that was like there's one oligarch to another. This
Speaker 1: was the These were communists and they were not big
Speaker 1: on doing business. So I kind of gathered some stuff
Speaker 1: together and I said, let's, uh, let's go through the
Speaker 1: Cobra Pass. And stay in pish hour and this thing
Speaker 1: blows over, and uh with Jill and whatnot, and it
Speaker 1: never it still hasn't blown over, Bob. They've been fighting
Speaker 1: for forty three years. But then the Soviets invaded, god worse.
Speaker 1: So I had a business in India at a house
Speaker 1: in Delhi. I doubled down on that. But then like
Speaker 1: six months later, Jimmy Carter, under pressure from the domestic
Speaker 1: uh you know, apparel people put a quota and an
Speaker 1: embargo on close from India and you had to get
Speaker 1: quota from the Indian government. Since I was one of
Speaker 1: the only kind of Caucasians doing this and didn't have
Speaker 1: the government connectors, I didn't get anything. So I went
Speaker 1: out of business, and uh I I came back with
Speaker 1: my tail between my legs, trying to get a job.
Speaker 1: And that's where when I ended up at MTV. Okay,
Speaker 1: since you said you'd only been to New York in Connecticut,
Speaker 1: where did all this wanderlusts come from? I think it
Speaker 1: was just pan up. You know. My dad was in
Speaker 1: the Navy in the Pacific War, and he used to
Speaker 1: drive those boats that went up on the Pacific Islands.
Speaker 1: The door would come down Statar, Bryan Ryan, and you
Speaker 1: know of the guys get killed in Eily, he had
Speaker 1: they called it shell shop then. But he went from
Speaker 1: a guy in my side like a hundred and ninety
Speaker 1: pounds to just pounds. And he spent the rest of
Speaker 1: the war like a year and a half in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: and he was he just never wanted He never said
Speaker 1: a word to me about the war. I can never
Speaker 1: get him to watch like Victory at Sea or anything
Speaker 1: like that. And uh, he never wanted to go anywhere.
Speaker 1: The only trip we ever took as a family was
Speaker 1: a day trip to the Mystic Seaport. And uh So
Speaker 1: when I went to Vermont to college, I you know,
Speaker 1: I just got the jones I can do this. I
Speaker 1: just felt exhilarated to travel. And then I would hear
Speaker 1: all these stories like from these guys about Aspen in
Speaker 1: other places in the Caribbean, and it seemed so romantic
Speaker 1: to me, and I said, I want to do this.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile I kind of beefed up my you know,
Speaker 1: my reading with the beats and all of that. And
Speaker 1: you know, I just was into expanding experiences I might encounter.
Speaker 1: And uh, I gotta say this, all the traveling that
Speaker 1: I've done has been really the defining thing in my life.
Speaker 1: I mean in terms of you know, confidence and comfort
Speaker 1: about myself and uh, empathy for other people. I mean
Speaker 1: you said in the beginning less than half of Americans
Speaker 1: have passports. So true, and that's that's really sort of
Speaker 1: central to our problem as a nation. I think. You know,
Speaker 1: so you never have that ability to look at America
Speaker 1: through someone else's prism. But anyway I had. I just
Speaker 1: love to travel, Okay. You know it's amazing because when
Speaker 1: you go to other countries, you're like UK. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a nation of travelers, will go to go. Oh,
Speaker 1: We'll go, you know, things that people wouldn't even think
Speaker 1: of in America. But were you so successful because of
Speaker 1: what you learned in business school? Well, I had an
Speaker 1: innate drive and ability to put things together and do it.
Speaker 1: What I did learn in business school is I really
Speaker 1: straightened out. I mean I really applied myself in business.
Speaker 1: I mean on my studies. I kind of coasted through
Speaker 1: high school like hosted through college. I still made like
Speaker 1: the honor roll when I got to when I got
Speaker 1: to business school, I just got so turned on. I
Speaker 1: got I was number one of my class. I graduated
Speaker 1: number one of my class. I had this one professor,
Speaker 1: that's guy named Peter Drucker, who legendary. He was a
Speaker 1: legend and he was you know, he'd hold these classes
Speaker 1: and they were all about innovation and change. And I
Speaker 1: got someone that I said, there's a window for me.
Speaker 1: This is a this is you know, innovation and change
Speaker 1: is what kind of drives America had. And I realized
Speaker 1: if I could work on things that were new and interesting,
Speaker 1: put things together in an interesting way, that's a creative way,
Speaker 1: I could be a business person. So I was able
Speaker 1: to apply some of the things I learned there. But
Speaker 1: my success there I had no idea. What I was
Speaker 1: doing was just done through hustle. I mean, I knew
Speaker 1: when I was working there, Bob, nothing that I would
Speaker 1: ever do in my life would be more complicated or
Speaker 1: difficult than that, And that's been the case. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, you had the bride people, nothing was delivered
Speaker 1: on times, stuff was done wrong. You know, there was
Speaker 1: you know, this was really premass tourism. These places were
Speaker 1: the uh you know, I think India had like seventy
Speaker 1: thousand tourists a year or something at that point. So
Speaker 1: you really had to hustle. So it was through determination,
Speaker 1: which I guess was in bred in me. Okay, and
Speaker 1: where have you not been that you want to go.
Speaker 1: I haven't been to New Zealand. Love to go there.
Speaker 1: I've been in Westralia, but only once. I'm I'm surprised,
Speaker 1: since you know it's a long way down there. I'll
Speaker 1: believe me. I know if I've been a few times,
Speaker 1: I know it's I'd love to go to way Antarctica,
Speaker 1: you know now I sent away The other day. I
Speaker 1: was browsing through Amazon. I said, Lonely Planet has a
Speaker 1: book on Antarctica. I said, well, I want to get that.
Speaker 1: Find out what's the cool hotel there. So I'm studying
Speaker 1: up on Antarctica. I haven't been to uh. You know,
Speaker 1: I've been to almost every country in Asia. I've been
Speaker 1: to half of the fifty countries in Africa. There's still
Speaker 1: I want to go to the Central African Republic Um.
Speaker 1: You know, the northern part of Japan. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've been to Hokkaido Island, the one in the
Speaker 1: north where Sapporo is. They make that good beer up
Speaker 1: there and they do all that skiing. That's supposed to
Speaker 1: be amazing. That was where I was going to go
Speaker 1: if it wasn't for the pandemic. That was my I
Speaker 1: always like having a trip in the back of my
Speaker 1: head that I can, you know, fantasize about. That's gonna
Speaker 1: be coming up sometime over the horizon. So if you
Speaker 1: told someone who really hadn't been anywhere two countries to
Speaker 1: go to, what would you say? You Well, depend I
Speaker 1: guess on a type of person, but let's put the
Speaker 1: pandemic inside. I would always put India on top of
Speaker 1: the list. It's the greatest show on Earth. I mean,
Speaker 1: anything could happen any that's just a mind blower no
Speaker 1: matter what. Uh India would be there. Greece, I mean,
Speaker 1: I've been going to Greece. I've been renting a house
Speaker 1: in Greece in the summers, is on a little island
Speaker 1: where it's a lot less expensive than the Hampton's and
Speaker 1: Greece that the people are wonderful, the light is great.
Speaker 1: Greecent Italy pretty cool in Europe, and in in in
Speaker 1: uh Africa, Senegal, you know, great, great music scene. And
Speaker 1: Ethiopia is the other one who has a whole different
Speaker 1: music scene. I'm very much into you know, African music,
Speaker 1: and you know it's just a daily occurrence going to
Speaker 1: clubs there and meeting and seeing musicians. And for the
Speaker 1: American how safe is it in Africa? Say, oh, it's
Speaker 1: safe and very safe. I would assume in all your
Speaker 1: travels though around the world, you've had a couple of
Speaker 1: scary experiences. Yes, yes, I have, and I had the
Speaker 1: worst one was in Africa. Actually I went to uh
Speaker 1: this thing called the festival in the desert and north
Speaker 1: the Timbuck too. I was once again back in the
Speaker 1: Sahara I went. I I assembled a group to go.
Speaker 1: Is that they've been doing this thing for a bunch
Speaker 1: of years. And I got Chris Blackwell to go and
Speaker 1: Jimmy Buffett to go because number one, he loves to travel,
Speaker 1: but he also had a jet. So we flew to
Speaker 1: tim Buck two and we hired some guides and you
Speaker 1: better have to drive like six eight hours in the
Speaker 1: desert to get there. And the look. We had a
Speaker 1: couple of people who came with us from from Bombaco
Speaker 1: to Capital. But there was this guy from tim Buck
Speaker 1: two who was gonna steer us in the wrong direction
Speaker 1: and have us kidnapped, which happens frequently there by people
Speaker 1: who ended up being in al Qaeda, who had just
Speaker 1: killed some German tourists. Now we didn't know this at
Speaker 1: the time, but after about four or five hours, we're
Speaker 1: going to go, where the hell are we? We were
Speaker 1: gonna get there, and then they jammed the brakes on.
Speaker 1: We had like a little caravan going through, just blowing on,
Speaker 1: you know, just going over these sand dunes, and uh,
Speaker 1: they get out and this guy pulls out a gun
Speaker 1: to this local local guy's head. He's like he's gonna
Speaker 1: kill him. He says, you're you're cheating on me, You're
Speaker 1: taking us in the wrong place. So they we we
Speaker 1: we left him in the desert and turned around and
Speaker 1: head of the other way and made it to the
Speaker 1: fast stable. But I'm saying, oh, man, I just would
Speaker 1: imagine every day we were these people that they kidnapped,
Speaker 1: they were taking to Mauritania. They keep you like for
Speaker 1: a year or two, you know. I just imagine waking
Speaker 1: up every day and Chris enemy you and your fucking ideas,
Speaker 1: you know, your big ideas. So that was that was scary.
Speaker 1: But I didn't know how scary it was actually until afterwards. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's go back to Vice. Vice was a media in
Speaker 1: stock Darling and then it all kind of blew up
Speaker 1: in Shane Smith was a bad actor. You brought in
Speaker 1: a new ceo. What what's the status of Vice today?
Speaker 1: You know, it took a few hits. It was I
Speaker 1: loved the Vice guys and originally, you know, I met
Speaker 1: them when I was a CEO of I when I
Speaker 1: was CEO of viacom and and and did a deal
Speaker 1: with them. They had a vision, they had a voice.
Speaker 1: They were from the streets. They were running up business
Speaker 1: on borrowed furniture. So I really like these guys. They
Speaker 1: could make they were ready for YouTube was breaking and
Speaker 1: they were gonna be able to do video at a cost.
Speaker 1: And they really had a good ear for eye for
Speaker 1: stories and uh an ear for stories and an eye
Speaker 1: for making them good. And then you know, they kinda
Speaker 1: we got a little Huber's in there. They took some
Speaker 1: meat too, bumps. And then we saw you know, which
Speaker 1: decimated sort of the upper ranks if you will, of
Speaker 1: some colorful characters. And that was a big hit. And
Speaker 1: then we had the whole thing. If you're a publisher,
Speaker 1: you know this in UH online where Google and Facebook
Speaker 1: are taking eighty to nine of all the advertising revenue,
Speaker 1: taking a lot of companies and putting them out of business,
Speaker 1: a lot of people doing good work. They just couldn't
Speaker 1: have a business model that worked, so we had to
Speaker 1: kind of dig ourselves out of the hole. Now. Oddly enough,
Speaker 1: coincidentally and I was on a board meeting today and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we were profitable last year they recast. Uh
Speaker 1: we had a hot run with HBO that left. Now
Speaker 1: we've got the news operation on showtime and we also
Speaker 1: have a sizeable presence online. But their engagement with people
Speaker 1: is up thirty. They're profitable. They're sort of they're they're
Speaker 1: they're back. I mean you may not know it, but uh,
Speaker 1: you know they they they ran really hot and then
Speaker 1: they cooled down. And Nancy Dubuke, who's the CEO there
Speaker 1: now very talented as brought in pretty much a whole
Speaker 1: new crew. And of course they've had the work remotely
Speaker 1: all this year, but they've made they've made good progress.
Speaker 1: It was it was an encouraging call. Okay, let's talk
Speaker 1: about the landscape, first, the news landscape, then the media landscape.
Speaker 1: What's going to happen in the news landscape on some level,
Speaker 1: we have consolidation in newspapers such that there's the Big
Speaker 1: three and you know, not really everybody else. When it
Speaker 1: comes to network news, that is dying, and cable news
Speaker 1: doesn't reach that many people. You know, for a long time,
Speaker 1: it looked like Vice was going to be the alternative.
Speaker 1: How do you see it playing out? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: all the guys on table, the three networks we all watch,
Speaker 1: I guess there's four or five now, I mean they've
Speaker 1: all kind of take they're all in the Trump slam.
Speaker 1: I mean they were really cooking, as was you know,
Speaker 1: the you know, Washington Post and the New York Times
Speaker 1: everything during the Trump period because everything was hot all
Speaker 1: the time. So they've got a they gotta figure out
Speaker 1: that they've created a model, which pretty much is economically
Speaker 1: it's just talking heads. No one's really out doing any stories.
Speaker 1: There's talking to people in the studio. That's where I
Speaker 1: thought Advice had a real angle of young people. They're
Speaker 1: really going to be interested, they can take a different
Speaker 1: take on the news, and to some extent that was
Speaker 1: largely true. Uh, but what happens now, I don't know.
Speaker 1: The real shame is, like on the local level, local stations,
Speaker 1: local uh newspapers. I mean, they're just consolidating, consolidating, sucking
Speaker 1: costs out there really isn't much there. I spent a
Speaker 1: good part of the of the pandemic up in Santa Barbara,
Speaker 1: and they have up there. It's so bad that three
Speaker 1: the three broadcast stations have joined together to have the
Speaker 1: same weather report, and they're they're sharing news stories, which
Speaker 1: are not many much of a news story to begin with.
Speaker 1: So and and the money sort of has been just
Speaker 1: sucked out of the that the linear television business and
Speaker 1: from every aspect. So it doesn't look too good for
Speaker 1: local news, and it doesn't look too good for uh
Speaker 1: local newspapers. The problem there, of course, is we're gonna
Speaker 1: have an even more ignorant siloed you know, populus, who
Speaker 1: knows even less about what's going on than they then
Speaker 1: they then then you. Now, I don't know what the
Speaker 1: answer is, Bob. I mean, it seems like if you're
Speaker 1: a big if you can hire reporters and really put
Speaker 1: out good editorial product, like the Wall Street Journal or
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, you can set up a digital business
Speaker 1: that you know would sustain you. And those guys all
Speaker 1: have done that. I mean, they have paying subscribers. Now,
Speaker 1: they aren't that reliant on advertising, but they're like national
Speaker 1: papers in a sense, I don't know what happens down
Speaker 1: below them. To straighten that out, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: prop up the past just doesn't work, like trying to
Speaker 1: keep the physical bookstore alive, although they had a rebound
Speaker 1: prior to COVID. You have to look to the future.
Speaker 1: Just one other thing that may or may not be
Speaker 1: on your radar in terms of you know, music, we
Speaker 1: have it all figured out. Music was in the canary
Speaker 1: in the coal mine. It was the first disrupted for
Speaker 1: no other reason. The files were small, but there are
Speaker 1: multiple outlets. For essentially ten dollars a month, you can
Speaker 1: get all the history of recorded music. Whereas TV visual
Speaker 1: entertainment has been completely balkanized. How does that play out?
Speaker 1: Because one thing we know, people are not going to
Speaker 1: subscribe to all these services like being pecked to death
Speaker 1: by ducks. Yeah, they wanted to break up the cable bundle,
Speaker 1: and now you've got the streamer bundle. Basically it's costs
Speaker 1: you more than the cable bundle. Right, of course you're
Speaker 1: getting better product and uh, you know, it's on demand
Speaker 1: and there's no advertising, but I mean, the whole world
Speaker 1: of interrupted television that still exists, the linear TV model
Speaker 1: is just gonna collapse. I mean, there's not gonna be
Speaker 1: much to hold it up after a while. The next
Speaker 1: thing that's gonna happen is we're gonna see Netflix bid
Speaker 1: on the NFL, you know, and we're gonna start seeing sports,
Speaker 1: which is long with news. The mainstays of what's left
Speaker 1: of the you know, broadcast cable sort of ecosystem. Those
Speaker 1: two must have things are gonna be pecked away by
Speaker 1: the by the more, by the richer streaming services. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna be looking at what streaming service do you buy?
Speaker 1: How many do you need? And right now you've got
Speaker 1: Paramount has under Viacom has one with a lot of
Speaker 1: paramount product, Warner Brothers has, you know, like all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, it's all balk and that's what the hell
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not gonna buy all of these things.
Speaker 1: It's gonna cost me a fortune. I would think that
Speaker 1: there's gonna be some consolidation that's gonna happen. We know
Speaker 1: that Disney Plus has it made, and Amazon and uh
Speaker 1: and Hulu and uh Netflix all had sort of first
Speaker 1: mover advantages. But what happens with the other guys. On
Speaker 1: one hand, Discovery might have a shot because they have
Speaker 1: a low price and they're sort of out of the
Speaker 1: head to head competition the other guys with their own
Speaker 1: own product. It's sort of in the nonfiction space, it's
Speaker 1: sort of a niche business. AMC has all these independent movies,
Speaker 1: a little niche business. I mean, if they can get
Speaker 1: eight ten million subs, maybe they'll be happy. But if
Speaker 1: you're a viewer, you know it's gonna be frustrating if
Speaker 1: you want to watch a movie one night and it's
Speaker 1: on another streaming service. You know, I don't see a
Speaker 1: lot of people. I think some people now have three,
Speaker 1: four and five, but I don't see that continuing as
Speaker 1: a head scratcher. Okay, since you worked in Hollywood, has
Speaker 1: there been a shifting of power? I mean when we
Speaker 1: were growing up, certainly living in l A, you knew
Speaker 1: the heads of every studio. Now the people in l
Speaker 1: A don't even know the heads of the studio, but
Speaker 1: they certainly know Read Hastings in Tim Cook. You know
Speaker 1: Tim Cook has in you know unlimited checkbook. What you know,
Speaker 1: Apple TV Plus at this point is basically given away free,
Speaker 1: and they can afford to give it away free. But
Speaker 1: are those that people who really have the power and
Speaker 1: the people in Hollywood who operate completely differently, have they
Speaker 1: fallen behind? Because in Silicon that's a data driven business,
Speaker 1: real business, where Hollywood's a schmooze business. Has it? Finally,
Speaker 1: if they is time, if times caught up with them, well,
Speaker 1: in a sense, you know, if you were if you
Speaker 1: didn't have a legacy studio business with all that overhead
Speaker 1: that goes with it, and you were a triple a
Speaker 1: independent producduction company like say Imagine Entertainment, Grazer and Ron Howard,
Speaker 1: where you can regularly create content of high quality, you
Speaker 1: you can say this is great. I'm like an arms dealer.
Speaker 1: Now instead of going around to these studios, I can
Speaker 1: I can on the basis of my repute Asian, I
Speaker 1: can get a big deal with Netflix or with Apple
Speaker 1: or something. So they have a lot of places to
Speaker 1: sell stuff, and they have good stuff. For someone like them,
Speaker 1: they are, i could argue, more empowered, and they can
Speaker 1: be more and more of a talent magnet to get
Speaker 1: because they can get stuff on the air. It's it's
Speaker 1: but the whole schmoozing Hollywood agent thing is is sort
Speaker 1: of being deconstructed, Bob. I mean you really can see
Speaker 1: that happening. Uh. Um, it's not. Uh, it's not. Making
Speaker 1: movies is not the most profitable business right now. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know you saw what happened with the oscars. But
Speaker 1: I would say being a being a good independent production
Speaker 1: company doesn't have a lot of legacy costs going along
Speaker 1: with you, is Okay. The problem there, though, is these
Speaker 1: streamers don't really leave you any back end. So if
Speaker 1: you have a big hit, you know, say you make
Speaker 1: a Seinfeld, You're not gonna have a Larry David pay
Speaker 1: day at the end of it. Because they keep a
Speaker 1: hund percent ut of the i P. You can get
Speaker 1: bigger fees, like maybe a three percent fee and maybe
Speaker 1: some more on top of that, more than in the past,
Speaker 1: so you're sort of just an indentured guy. You know.
Speaker 1: That might change in the future, maybe if it gets
Speaker 1: more competitive of some of these streamers would be willing
Speaker 1: to grant certain producers some back end positions on the
Speaker 1: stuff that they make. Okay, when MTV was in its heyday,
Speaker 1: it was a mono culture what mtv A certainly said
Speaker 1: on records, never mind the culture at large. Literally around
Speaker 1: the world people knew. Now it's more bulk bulk and
Speaker 1: I it's so balk and I that my question would be,
Speaker 1: is something like the Oscars. Is it essentially done? Is
Speaker 1: there no way to revive? Have people have their eyeballs
Speaker 1: elsewhere nothing has critical mass? Is that where we're driving
Speaker 1: and where do we end up? I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's not done. I mean one of the
Speaker 1: reasons it keeps going is because for the Grammys and
Speaker 1: for the Oscars, there's these huge licensing deals from ABC
Speaker 1: and c B. Yes, like twenty five million, mean insane
Speaker 1: amounts of money they pay, and you know they have
Speaker 1: to keep doing it to make the money. If same
Speaker 1: Netflix or Hulu or somebody were to take these and
Speaker 1: they can run the Oscars without commercials, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that there's always gonna be an audience for it,
Speaker 1: And uh, I don't think it's necessarily dead, but I
Speaker 1: mean people have sort of been award awards showed to
Speaker 1: death in a way. But I mean, this is the Oscars.
Speaker 1: It's the top of the line feature film in a way.
Speaker 1: Is still king, although that's even arguable these days because
Speaker 1: one of the things you've noticed, and it's accelerated during
Speaker 1: the pandemic, is how people they aren't satisfied with the
Speaker 1: ninety or two hour, ninety minute, two hour movie. They
Speaker 1: want to dig into these characters and go on for seasons.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's crazy. Binge viewing is the other thing
Speaker 1: that's really made TV a lot more interesting than films.
Speaker 1: Films are basically you know these uh you know, big
Speaker 1: event films that can be franchised into sequels with comic
Speaker 1: book characters. So let me ask a little differently, though
Speaker 1: certainly when you were an MTV they were these international
Speaker 1: stars built you mentioned you too, are those days done?
Speaker 1: Let me put it this way, Uh, at this point
Speaker 1: in time, Taylor's We've put out two records. I would
Speaker 1: argue that the majority of Americans have never heard a
Speaker 1: single song, Whereas when we grew up in the sixties,
Speaker 1: I knew Louis Armstrong, Hello Dolly because I had to
Speaker 1: wait for the Beatles. So so now is things continue
Speaker 1: to separate irrelevant of the money involved. Is something like
Speaker 1: the oscars. Oscars are just representative, but whether it be
Speaker 1: a musician, whether it be anything a news outlet, is
Speaker 1: everybody's market share essentially going to go down. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: more choices and people have more access, immediate access to
Speaker 1: all those choices, and all kinds of rabbit holes you
Speaker 1: can fall down when you get in digging in Spotify
Speaker 1: or I mean, how do you even find good new music?
Speaker 1: It's hard word of mouth or whatever. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a challenge from now. I used to look forward to
Speaker 1: getting like Rolling Stone or something. You finally, what's a
Speaker 1: good new who's got some albums out? It's very difficult
Speaker 1: to you hear something on the radio, you know, terrestrial radio.
Speaker 1: It's still out there. It's like the cock roads of
Speaker 1: the media business and it just can't die. Uh and
Speaker 1: serious is there. But you know, it's like your music,
Speaker 1: you're you're oversaturated with choices. So it's hard to be
Speaker 1: a megastar. And what we also saw the days of
Speaker 1: the Anglo American dire straits, these people who could be
Speaker 1: real worldwide stars that began to fall away as these
Speaker 1: countries began to develop their own musical scenes and ecosystems
Speaker 1: India and places like that, so they they're everything is
Speaker 1: sort of local in a way. You know, an uber
Speaker 1: star that's worth you know, that is huge all around
Speaker 1: the world, hard to find these days. It's certainly not
Speaker 1: Taylor Swift. Okay, Earlier you mentioned right up front, with
Speaker 1: no prompting, that you got fired with Viacom. This is
Speaker 1: a business where every but he lies. They lie about
Speaker 1: their age. You know, David Geffin lied to get a
Speaker 1: job at what was then William Morris, you have embraced it.
Speaker 1: You know, how do you feel about getting fired and
Speaker 1: what was it like at the time, and why are
Speaker 1: you so up front with it? Well, I kind of
Speaker 1: got fired under the best possible circumstances. I got fired
Speaker 1: by a guy who was known to fire pretty much
Speaker 1: everybody who would work for him before. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: like novel I mean had although I think I think
Speaker 1: he just drove mail karmas and out the door. People
Speaker 1: assume Meil got fired, but Mel just couldn't take it anymore.
Speaker 1: I fired Frank BEYONDI. These were bosses that I worked
Speaker 1: for that I really liked. So I was reticent to
Speaker 1: take this job from him because I kind of I
Speaker 1: would leave a job that was perfect for me. It
Speaker 1: was all the things I loved in one place, and
Speaker 1: we had created it so and we were doing all right.
Speaker 1: You know. He split the company into two, which was
Speaker 1: a bad move to make, just when all the all
Speaker 1: the digital guy these were like the last days of
Speaker 1: the legacy media companies, the last hey days. I mean,
Speaker 1: then the new guys were banging on the door. Google
Speaker 1: and Apple and Facebook. They all the changes were in
Speaker 1: the wind. But he called me over. He was piste
Speaker 1: off about I had. I had worked for him for
Speaker 1: I had figured it out, Bob. I think seventy one
Speaker 1: quarters and every quarter we had what they would say
Speaker 1: in the finance ray double digit earnings growth. You know.
Speaker 1: We went public and we had like one my first
Speaker 1: quarter when we were black Viacommon I was the CEO,
Speaker 1: went down a bit. But he fired me because basically
Speaker 1: he was going to install Philippe Dumont and I wasn't.
Speaker 1: He really liked me and treated me well for a
Speaker 1: lot of years, but uh, he called me over after
Speaker 1: Labor Day and just said, you know, I got terrible
Speaker 1: news for you. The board of directors wants me to
Speaker 1: fire you immediately, which I really had to laugh, right
Speaker 1: because I mean he is the board of director and Uh.
Speaker 1: I found out afterwards that there have been a coup
Speaker 1: brewing all of on. Uh so I just got up
Speaker 1: and left. And a coup against you or a coup well,
Speaker 1: I mean I think no, it was a coup against
Speaker 1: me by Philippe, my my successor, who changed it all
Speaker 1: into a sort of a legal strategy to run instead
Speaker 1: of making it, you know, exalting the creative people and
Speaker 1: trying to start for good creative work. And we're gonna
Speaker 1: sue YouTube, We're gonna sue everybody. And that wasn't a
Speaker 1: that wasn't a proper strategy, as it turned out. But
Speaker 1: I I figured I had been there twenty six years,
Speaker 1: I had a great run. I would have stayed. I
Speaker 1: loved the people there. I I would have stayed. But
Speaker 1: I figured out I was I was sixty when it happened.
Speaker 1: I figured, you know, this is a new opportunity. Um,
Speaker 1: there's that old addas one door closes and a lot
Speaker 1: more open and all of a sudden, this stage of
Speaker 1: my life has been a whole new chapter than I
Speaker 1: had that chapter in in Asia. And so this chapter
Speaker 1: has been just terrific. You know, I haven't had to
Speaker 1: deal with that fucking guy I mean I would come
Speaker 1: in the morning and there'd be a stack of facts
Speaker 1: is on my chair about you know, he was holed
Speaker 1: up in his house in Beverly Park as stack what
Speaker 1: are you gonna do about the stock price? You know,
Speaker 1: they looked like bomb threats. I fingured he had the
Speaker 1: last fax machine on the planet. He was sending him over.
Speaker 1: So I got fired and everybody knew it, so uh,
Speaker 1: and he fired me. The reason was, well, I didn't
Speaker 1: buy my Space. And what really annoyed him he never
Speaker 1: even fucking heard him my Space. What annoyed him was
Speaker 1: that Rupert Murdoch bought it. We weren't even really we
Speaker 1: never even made an offer on it. I we had
Speaker 1: looked at Friendster and you know, that kind of came
Speaker 1: and went. And at the time Facebook was just really
Speaker 1: only college students, so it was still kind of an
Speaker 1: unproven thing. But anyway, Rupert Murdoch came in one weekend
Speaker 1: and just bought the thing for five seventy million dollars,
Speaker 1: No due diligence, no nothing, And he ends up as
Speaker 1: like the new the new media guru, and he's on
Speaker 1: the cover of all these magazines. He was some RS
Speaker 1: arch enemy Rupert didn't think that way, but some of
Speaker 1: who had a lot of envy for Rupert, uh anyway
Speaker 1: that you know, so you know, he would say he
Speaker 1: going on. Charlie Rosen said he had the prize and
Speaker 1: he lost it. I didn't have the prize. We weren't
Speaker 1: even really, you know, really seriously looking at buying it.
Speaker 1: And then when Rupert sold it for thirty five million dollars,
Speaker 1: I had a good laugh. I keep thinking I wasna
Speaker 1: get a thank you note, but it never happened. Did
Speaker 1: you ever talk to Sumner subsequent to your exit? There
Speaker 1: was one time I was in a restaurant in l
Speaker 1: a And he was having dinner. I didn't even know
Speaker 1: he was there. He was having dinner with Bob Evans,
Speaker 1: who character who I happened to like. But at the
Speaker 1: end of the meal, I feel these hands on my
Speaker 1: shoulder and he says, aren't you gonna get up and
Speaker 1: say hello? You know? And I got up and said hello.
Speaker 1: But that was pretty much the last time I ever
Speaker 1: saw him, and both of them are gone now. Evan
Speaker 1: Zan Sumner, So your your business fails overseas you come
Speaker 1: back to America. What happens and how to end up
Speaker 1: at what becomes him. I figured, man, that was rough.
Speaker 1: I mean I loved what I was doing. I was
Speaker 1: passionate about it. I mean I got it. I traveled everywhere.
Speaker 1: India had fourteen states, then I went to every one
Speaker 1: of them. I I just loved it. And then I
Speaker 1: got wiped out. Now I'm in debt like a half
Speaker 1: a million dollars, and who the fund is gonna hire me?
Speaker 1: Everyone I knew had moved along in their careers or whatever.
Speaker 1: But I knew one thing. I was gonna do something
Speaker 1: I loved. And I had deduced that what I loved
Speaker 1: was music. And I had been a fan, you know,
Speaker 1: like you. I mean I was a real fan. I
Speaker 1: really knew my stuff. So at one point I used
Speaker 1: to come back and my brother worked for Columbia Records
Speaker 1: in the mid seventies, and he'd say, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: Bruce King scenes at the bottom line, why don't you
Speaker 1: come along? And I see how these guys were riding
Speaker 1: around in limousines, and I said this, I could do this,
Speaker 1: This is easy. This is this was like the height
Speaker 1: of the of the of the of the record company business.
Speaker 1: So when I came back, I read an article that
Speaker 1: I got I got a copy. I got copy the billboard,
Speaker 1: and I would say what new companies were starting, because
Speaker 1: I wanted to fear if I started a new company,
Speaker 1: there'd be room to grow and I could maybe sell myself.
Speaker 1: So my I saw this article an interview with this
Speaker 1: guy named John Lax, and they're gonna start a music
Speaker 1: video channel on TV. I thought this was the greatest
Speaker 1: idea I ever heard of. This was fantastic. So I
Speaker 1: asked my brother if he knew anybody at this one
Speaker 1: er amics company, and it turns out he did. He
Speaker 1: knew that this guy Bob mcgrorty, and he got me
Speaker 1: an interview with Bob mcgroorty, and I got old. You know.
Speaker 1: I went in and saw him and I said, hey,
Speaker 1: you need entrepreneurs. I'm a music fan. I had this business.
Speaker 1: I showed him all these things from Vogue magazine. I
Speaker 1: could I can do stuff. This is the greatest idea ever.
Speaker 1: He says, we gotta go and to meet John Lack.
Speaker 1: So I go next sort of John Lax office, which
Speaker 1: was dark. He had like a cocktail table and he
Speaker 1: was like wearing slippers, and I told him where I
Speaker 1: had been. He said, so you were a drug smuggler, right,
Speaker 1: And I go, I'm not really and he he thought
Speaker 1: that was an asset. But then he said the magic phrase.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, we're starting to thing. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be like we're gonna do the FM radio. We're gonna
Speaker 1: do the AM radio. What FM did? He came out
Speaker 1: of the CBS Radio group, and this is a whole
Speaker 1: new video revolution. This is really the beginning of the
Speaker 1: modern cable era. He says. But I'm looking for people
Speaker 1: who have no experience in television. This was the magic
Speaker 1: words for me, somethinking who the fund is gonna hire me?
Speaker 1: I'm just like they think I was a drug smuggler,
Speaker 1: you know. So they hire me and I get on
Speaker 1: a team and he says, well, let's wait around. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, come on in and we're and we're not
Speaker 1: gonna we have to still get the green light, but
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this, So come on and we'll give
Speaker 1: me a job in the meantime helping to sell Nickelodeon
Speaker 1: and the movie Channel. So then he hires Bob Pittman
Speaker 1: and uh, I go to see Bob, he says, go
Speaker 1: see Bob Pittman. He's putting together a development team for
Speaker 1: wasn't called MTV then for this music channel. So I
Speaker 1: go in to see Bob, who was like twenty six
Speaker 1: I'm now thirty four, and he's the hippie kind of
Speaker 1: youth's whisperer. Everyone thought that smooth is talking bill best
Speaker 1: bullshit and guy. Ever then he's a brilliant, brilliant guy.
Speaker 1: We're still friends. But he said to me, so Black says,
Speaker 1: I should see you. I said, yeah, I think this
Speaker 1: is the greatest idea. I think it's I think it's
Speaker 1: a winner, and you know, I think I could really add.
Speaker 1: He says, well, we do. Now you were you were
Speaker 1: a drug smuggler. He's the second guy who accuses me
Speaker 1: of this and thinks it's a benefit. So he hired me,
Speaker 1: and I was part of a team of five that
Speaker 1: that you know, developed what became MTV. And then I
Speaker 1: stayed and uh stayed and stayed, and you know, Bob
Speaker 1: kept promoting me. And then when we tried to do
Speaker 1: an L B O uh and and and lost, Bob
Speaker 1: left the company. He left me president, and then Viacom
Speaker 1: bought us. But it wasn't the Viacom a Sumner Redstone.
Speaker 1: It was some other guys who's some of the redstone
Speaker 1: later displaced. But that's how I got the job. And
Speaker 1: I think God luck is so amazing and timing and
Speaker 1: so amazing. I mean I might have not had that
Speaker 1: copy of Billboard magazine, never seen that article, or maybe
Speaker 1: my brother didn't know you know this guy, Bob McGroarty,
Speaker 1: and you know, my whole life would have been different.
Speaker 1: What happened to the debt? Oh, I paid it off.
Speaker 1: You know when we were working there, I mean, no
Speaker 1: one we were all making that thirty grand. I mean
Speaker 1: we no one cared about money. It was like a startup.
Speaker 1: We're just eating pizzas. And you know, we had we
Speaker 1: had We had my my office I shared with John Psyche.
Speaker 1: We had coal waiting, we had one phone with call waiting.
Speaker 1: But I found out that I could got in this account.
Speaker 1: He says, you know, you could write some of that
Speaker 1: off as bad debt. And now you ever started making money,
Speaker 1: it's only really in it cost you like two fifty
Speaker 1: or three. So I gradually paid it off. Okay, So
Speaker 1: what year do you go to work for MTV? Okay?
Speaker 1: What year do you get married? Eighty? Okay, So if
Speaker 1: you're making thirty grand a year. What's going on there?
Speaker 1: My my then wife, she was working on Wall Street
Speaker 1: and she was making like three times what I was making.
Speaker 1: And you know, you know, you're just a rent paying
Speaker 1: person in Manhattan, and it was you know, money wasn't
Speaker 1: money didn't become a big thing to quite a while later,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, no one was making a ton
Speaker 1: of money. But we made enough to live and survive
Speaker 1: and ultimately bought an apartment down downtown and rebeca Okay,
Speaker 1: so Tauga's first one, MTV launches. What's the experience on
Speaker 1: the other side of the screen and what exactly is
Speaker 1: your job? At the beginning in the years to go by,
Speaker 1: I was ahead of marketing, so I was responsible for
Speaker 1: getting people to watch this thing. When we launched, it
Speaker 1: was unavailable in New York, it was unavailable in l A.
Speaker 1: I mean it really started. MTV was really born in
Speaker 1: the Midwest, and we we had a launch party and
Speaker 1: at like a one bar we could find who had
Speaker 1: some guy had like twenty cable customers, and it was
Speaker 1: in New Jersey, so we had a lawn party there.
Speaker 1: But what happened would be I these cities like Tulsa,
Speaker 1: de Moine, uh Wichita. They had big cable systems, they
Speaker 1: had room for MTV, the no One. So I would
Speaker 1: go out there and spend times that I want to
Speaker 1: immerse myself with the people who actually have this in
Speaker 1: real time and see what effect it had. It was.
Speaker 1: I was the first guy to know this was a
Speaker 1: slam Cold's solid hit because when I show up there,
Speaker 1: I have on a jacket with an MTV button at
Speaker 1: the rent a car place, and the girl says, where
Speaker 1: did you get that? How do I get that? I
Speaker 1: got a pocket full of buttons, I realized. And then
Speaker 1: I go to the radio stations to see what kind
Speaker 1: of impact it had had on request and airplay, went
Speaker 1: to record store and find out we were selling records.
Speaker 1: But then I would go to nightclubs and bars and
Speaker 1: just talk to people, and uh, it was the first
Speaker 1: time I ever really spent any time in the Midwest.
Speaker 1: But people were thrilled with this. They thought it was
Speaker 1: a great sign of the future, and it was. It
Speaker 1: was the beginning of the of the video revolution, which
Speaker 1: you know still continues, but was a whole new visual
Speaker 1: vocabulary for people. And at the beginning, as you know,
Speaker 1: we had all these acts, no one ever heard of
Speaker 1: you know, Duran, Duran and Culture Club and Cyndey Lauper
Speaker 1: and the you know. So the record guys and the
Speaker 1: record stores were saying, we're selling these records. People are
Speaker 1: coming in asking for the buggles. Uh. The radio stations
Speaker 1: would say, people are calling up requesting these songs. So
Speaker 1: the radio stations A O R stations more mainly they
Speaker 1: were in CHR stations, they would they would start playing
Speaker 1: these singles. So we were able to show the record companies,
Speaker 1: who didn't want to even make videos, that these things
Speaker 1: actually work to sell records. They were like three many commercials.
Speaker 1: So I did that, and then I worked on the
Speaker 1: I Want My MTV campaign because we were then running
Speaker 1: out of money and the cable operators were refusing to
Speaker 1: pay the ten cents a month for us. So what
Speaker 1: was their logic not paying the ten cent? We're gonna
Speaker 1: pay you ten cents for this? I mean, who then
Speaker 1: is gonna watch? No one's watching music on television? Who paid?
Speaker 1: You know, at that point in time, they were paying ESPN.
Speaker 1: ESPN was paying them to get carried. Now he has
Speaker 1: been charges like five bucks aside even more maybe, But
Speaker 1: then they had they the cable operators didn't want to
Speaker 1: pay for anything. And if there was eleven cable operators
Speaker 1: in the market, all these each of monopolists in his
Speaker 1: own territory, they kind of had a little thing together.
Speaker 1: So we decided based on the experience that people who
Speaker 1: like who get this love it, that people who get
Speaker 1: this are in our target audience, are really animated about it,
Speaker 1: have a lot of time on their hands. We came
Speaker 1: up with I Want my MTV. It was a Hail
Speaker 1: Mary passed. We had like thirty million dollars we were
Speaker 1: gonna go under, and we said, let's see if we
Speaker 1: could pull this thing. If we could get some rock star,
Speaker 1: some rock stars to say our name and validate us,
Speaker 1: maybe hold our logo and you know, say call your
Speaker 1: cable company and say I want my MTV. Maybe that
Speaker 1: would work to get these guys over the line. We'll
Speaker 1: sure enough. We started running these spots that like at
Speaker 1: the levels of which they you you would introduce a
Speaker 1: big movie, you know, a lot of rating points, and
Speaker 1: within a week, every cable operator in market would be
Speaker 1: calling us up and and and and taking it. So
Speaker 1: for a couple of years we just rolled out market
Speaker 1: by market until we got you know, we went from
Speaker 1: like eight million homes, so like you know, fifty sixty
Speaker 1: million to the get up to a hundred million. That
Speaker 1: was that was how we saved ourselves. That's what I did. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the marketing on some level, you could say you
Speaker 1: were cable related market you were dealing with the different
Speaker 1: cable systems, dealt with the cable systems. Uh yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: But one thing that MTV was famous for was their creativity. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know when John Melli Camp's Pink Cows and then
Speaker 1: they were who was coming up with those ideas? Well.
Speaker 1: We we had a small team, so we sort of
Speaker 1: worked together. Now John Sykes, who I split an office with,
Speaker 1: one of the world's great promotion man. He's you know
Speaker 1: his ideas. Look, we gotta give away stuff that radio
Speaker 1: stations aren't doing. Let's and John is the ultimate fan.
Speaker 1: So what I want to one night stand with the
Speaker 1: Fleetwood Mac, I mean, I want to be taken out
Speaker 1: of private jet and meet the band and come back
Speaker 1: home the same night or so. We would run those things.
Speaker 1: So we get millions of entries. In those days they
Speaker 1: come in postcards. We'd have whole offices full of fucking
Speaker 1: Duffel bags and stuff. What I liked about my job
Speaker 1: was that was it an nexus between the on air
Speaker 1: promotion people, the regular promotion people, the people who did
Speaker 1: the advertise in the ad sales guys, and the programmers
Speaker 1: who dealt the music. So almost everything came through me.
Speaker 1: So I got to you know, I got a lot
Speaker 1: of exposure, which really helped me as I moved up
Speaker 1: ultimately to like general manager of MTV and then v
Speaker 1: H one and so forth, so I would get involved,
Speaker 1: you know what I really wanted to do along with
Speaker 1: somehow be involved with the programming and be closer to
Speaker 1: the creative people. And I felt that we had an opportunity,
Speaker 1: since we couldn't really pay a lot of money, we
Speaker 1: have an opportunity to kind of turn that place into
Speaker 1: a creative hothouse by giving people certain latitude and freedom.
Speaker 1: We we were a reverend, We're a little you know,
Speaker 1: let people take chances on things and get like a
Speaker 1: long line of young people to come and work there.
Speaker 1: And we you know, at some pople we have like
Speaker 1: Judd Apatow as an intern, or Adam Sandler, John Stewart,
Speaker 1: we had we were able to really have a great
Speaker 1: creative resource, and I thought having a creative culture was
Speaker 1: a big competitive advantage over other people. We didn't rent
Speaker 1: shows from like uh uh you know, like from producers
Speaker 1: because we really couldn't afford it. We had to make
Speaker 1: our own stuff so we could make these channels kind
Speaker 1: of look you know, singularly, you know, like that everything
Speaker 1: kind of fit together, and uh, you know, that was
Speaker 1: that's what we did. I mean, we just wanted to
Speaker 1: be a little niche thing over on the side of
Speaker 1: the road. Obviously we became very powerful force in the
Speaker 1: music business. Yeah, so what happens is you launching eighty one,
Speaker 1: you have the I Want my MTV campaign, although ultimately
Speaker 1: you then have Culture Club. The real break is Duran Duran,
Speaker 1: Duran Duran makes an very expensive video. It becomes very successful.
Speaker 1: So at first the labels don't want to make videos, okay,
Speaker 1: then they're saying how much you're gonna pay for us.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, everything flips where you have all
Speaker 1: the power okay, and you made all the hits. What
Speaker 1: was the experience on your side of the screen, so
Speaker 1: to speak? It was something I mean, you know, you
Speaker 1: went from being a nobody and everybody wants to take
Speaker 1: you to lunch. And those days, the promotion people from
Speaker 1: the labels, they were they were something you know what
Speaker 1: I had to do, you know, attendance, the tendency of
Speaker 1: the people as to develop hubris and get arrogant. I
Speaker 1: always used to tell people were not as big as
Speaker 1: we think, We're not as good as we think. When
Speaker 1: we deal with the labels, you gotta look at it
Speaker 1: sort of as a partnership. They all want to break
Speaker 1: artists and do things, and we want things from them.
Speaker 1: So you know, we're gonna play stuff, but we're gonna
Speaker 1: be doing favors here or there, and it's gonna come
Speaker 1: back and get us. We don't want them. They're gonna
Speaker 1: be predisposed to want to hate us as we get
Speaker 1: more and more powerful, and we got to try and
Speaker 1: play against that and be nice. And we would rotate
Speaker 1: all these guys through the head of you know, the
Speaker 1: head of the music departments, because sooner or later they
Speaker 1: go off the deep end, and uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: think they were geniuses or something, but it would be
Speaker 1: you know, you go from like, God, is there more
Speaker 1: than three videos coming in this week to like, you're
Speaker 1: getting sixty five videos? And people are sending strippers to
Speaker 1: the office and there's all kinds of shenanigans going on.
Speaker 1: But it was it was a heavy thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're making videos. Then Lionel Richie's dance walking on the
Speaker 1: ceiling from a million dollar video, and they were big
Speaker 1: events and uh, we were able to deploy them worldwide
Speaker 1: and they kind of paid off. But that whole rocket
Speaker 1: ship of a ride was you know, you really sort
Speaker 1: of needed a seatbelt to keep a sense of yourself.
Speaker 1: But it was, it was. It was a great wide
Speaker 1: I gotta say, it's fun to be on the inside.
Speaker 1: A couple of very significant events happened a Live AID
Speaker 1: and then the vim AS Video Music Awards become a
Speaker 1: big thing. What's the history there, Well, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: It was a game changer for us Live AID. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they came around, Uh was geled off. They
Speaker 1: came around and said, you know we're gonna be doing
Speaker 1: this thing. It's gonna be in Wembley, We're gonna do
Speaker 1: it in JFK Stadium. We said, well, we'll run it
Speaker 1: the whole thing because well were we We have a
Speaker 1: deal with the ABC. ABC wants to do a three
Speaker 1: hour you know, sort of best stuff thing for later
Speaker 1: that night. I don't know do that. But the thing
Speaker 1: is we're in X million homes right now, the real
Speaker 1: experiences all of this. This is this phenomenal thing you're doing.
Speaker 1: So we were right up on the stage. We were
Speaker 1: just off you couldn't see us, but you know, I
Speaker 1: was right there, and I remember going, Uh. I drove
Speaker 1: down that day with Sykes and Uh in a rent
Speaker 1: a car and we didn't have any of our credentials
Speaker 1: or anything. We couldn't get in, so we ended up
Speaker 1: jumping the fence and you can believe it into what
Speaker 1: was the artist area. You see Bob Dylan, all these
Speaker 1: signs and every artists in the world. I'm thinking that
Speaker 1: they really got to step up their security. But we
Speaker 1: we got our credentials and that really was Uh. That
Speaker 1: was a big moment. A thriller was a big moment.
Speaker 1: And the Video Music Awards, where we could you know,
Speaker 1: have like some of these punctuation marks on our schedule
Speaker 1: where a lot of people who would not ordinarily watch
Speaker 1: us would come and then they would begin to come
Speaker 1: back and our over our average audience size would would grow.
Speaker 1: As with are just our residents in the culture. Okay,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of significant changes in the mid
Speaker 1: to late eighties. One was uh, not really scripted program
Speaker 1: but you have remote control, you had the game show.
Speaker 1: Now we both know the issue is keeping the people
Speaker 1: on attached to the channel so that you can get
Speaker 1: advertising at a higher rate. But the public couldn't understand this.
Speaker 1: So what was the decision. How did you make that decision? Well,
Speaker 1: we spent a lot of time on this because what
Speaker 1: we began to see, like around eight six, eighties seven,
Speaker 1: was that the vibrancy of just running video music hours
Speaker 1: ten videos an hour, the ratings were continuing to the
Speaker 1: clients or of the novelty had worn off. There was
Speaker 1: a hardcore audience, yes, but they could do other things
Speaker 1: because they knew they could always come back. So two
Speaker 1: things happened. We we we kind of said, well, you
Speaker 1: know and and and then music could periodically being a
Speaker 1: little you don't have Michael Jackson with a hot album
Speaker 1: everybody wants to see. Well, maybe we could also be
Speaker 1: we could be something bigger. We could be something that's
Speaker 1: not just about the music that will be our core thing,
Speaker 1: but we'll also be about a lot of the things
Speaker 1: that the music is about news fashion. That's how it started.
Speaker 1: So well, we hired Kurt Loder, We really stepped up
Speaker 1: our what was our news coverage. We hired Cindy Crawford
Speaker 1: in that house of style. These things got big numbers.
Speaker 1: We did the Weekend Rock. I mean, they would get
Speaker 1: bigger numbers in the video hours, and people would tell
Speaker 1: us that they liked that. Our overall ratings would go up.
Speaker 1: And then uh and then you know, there's sort of
Speaker 1: there was there was this uh ampetus from the creative
Speaker 1: group we had assembled to kind of stretch out and
Speaker 1: do more. We could do promos really well. L but
Speaker 1: you know, somebody came in one day so that I
Speaker 1: made this. I made this thing in my basement, you know,
Speaker 1: on a cheap cam. It's a game show called Remote Control.
Speaker 1: It's sort of an Irreverend's. It kind of fits MTV.
Speaker 1: It's gonna you know, it's Irreverend. It's a little wacky.
Speaker 1: It's not like any game show on television. And said, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: well let's let's make a few episodes and see what happened.
Speaker 1: So we hired Ken Ober and Colin Quinn and that
Speaker 1: became a hit. But that that began a process where uh,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like taking a heroin. You know, you
Speaker 1: would find that you were getting better numbers for stuff
Speaker 1: there wasn't music videos, but we didn't want to lose
Speaker 1: the music video franchise. We would then start a lot
Speaker 1: of genre shows like Headbanger's Ball A hundred twenty minutes
Speaker 1: got stepped up, where we would try and package music
Speaker 1: by genre. That helped a bit. Uh, but then you know,
Speaker 1: it kind of kept going and uh there would be
Speaker 1: successes and we were feeling pretty good about things. So
Speaker 1: we weren't getting a lot of pushback other than from
Speaker 1: the older original fans. The new audience. You know, the
Speaker 1: audience would cycle through MTV like in five years. You know,
Speaker 1: five years basically you had an audience that kind of
Speaker 1: came and left, and then you have a whole new
Speaker 1: group of people. So you had to continue to reinvent
Speaker 1: yourself for you're just gonna be you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of going stale. So uh. At one point, Doug, we
Speaker 1: had a meeting in Doug Herz said, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: we should do a soap opera. You know, young people
Speaker 1: love to see other young people. They get a lot
Speaker 1: of cues from them. Would be interesting. We could do
Speaker 1: a soap proper. So I gave them some money to
Speaker 1: develop a soap proper and they came back and said,
Speaker 1: you know, we're gonna have to hire writers. It's more
Speaker 1: expensive than than uh we can we can handle. We're
Speaker 1: gonna have to pay writers. That's something we never really did.
Speaker 1: I have real writers do things for an ongoing soap opera.
Speaker 1: So and someone said, well, you know, we can't afford it.
Speaker 1: They came back, well, we're really good at post production.
Speaker 1: We can put stuff together. Why don't we get aloft
Speaker 1: and soho, stick some cameras in there of some people
Speaker 1: in and that's created the Real World, which was like
Speaker 1: the biggest thing we've done almost ever. And I think
Speaker 1: they're still running the damn thing. Uh So that sort
Speaker 1: of was the start of reality TV, which unfortunately brought
Speaker 1: us to The Apprentice and other bad things. But that's
Speaker 1: sort of how it started. We didn't out a cheapness
Speaker 1: and a desire to experiment. We fell into something. It
Speaker 1: was very successful. So once we started, it was sort
Speaker 1: of hard to take it off. And we tried to
Speaker 1: keep the music, identity and image, you know, as well
Speaker 1: as we could while we tried to, you know, run
Speaker 1: this other stuff through the schedule, put music beds under
Speaker 1: you know, some of these shows, so there was always
Speaker 1: music there, but uh, you know, it did ruffle some
Speaker 1: of our older fans the wrong way. So then we
Speaker 1: started MTV two and we said, you know, if you
Speaker 1: really like music videos all the time, here's the channel
Speaker 1: that's just gonna do that. And we had Andy Shoen
Speaker 1: was there. Then we we started that. It was sort
Speaker 1: of sort of a freeform format. Okay, a couple of
Speaker 1: so when you went to long form programming, was there
Speaker 1: any pressure from above or was it organic or you
Speaker 1: knew there would be pressure from above reratings and advertising.
Speaker 1: One of the problems, uh, when you're embedded in a
Speaker 1: public company and we went from me in the smallest
Speaker 1: division to the biggest division, was you had to continue
Speaker 1: to show growth. So no one was telling us what
Speaker 1: the program or what to do. They were just saying,
Speaker 1: I want you to make this amount of money by
Speaker 1: the end of the year. So you figure it out.
Speaker 1: You're so fucking smart. So we try and we try
Speaker 1: and figure it out, and we go, well, you know
Speaker 1: a lot of this is they it's gonna be hard
Speaker 1: really to raise our race to the cable operators becauseis
Speaker 1: are like long term deals. You just can't go in
Speaker 1: and change them. So it's the advertising marketplace. And uh,
Speaker 1: people seem to like some of this longer format that
Speaker 1: this longer format show. So we would try and do it,
Speaker 1: but you know, and just charge more. And then we
Speaker 1: would add in the the MTV Video Music Awards would
Speaker 1: make us seventy five million dollars a night. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was huge. So then we said, well, why don't
Speaker 1: we do a movie awards? You know, So then you
Speaker 1: start going in the the the uh, the rabbit hole
Speaker 1: of award shows and try and do them in your way,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, I got tired of going to
Speaker 1: award shows, Bob. I'll tell you I've seen my share
Speaker 1: of them. Okay, you talked about the five years cycle
Speaker 1: in retrospect, you can certainly see it that way. But
Speaker 1: from the other side of the screen, it was shocking
Speaker 1: when the original VJs were canned. Whose decision was that?
Speaker 1: And was that conscious We're gonna stay with the demo
Speaker 1: as opposed to grow with our audience. How did that
Speaker 1: come about? That was my decision, and I had to
Speaker 1: overrule people who had built up relationships with Martha Quinn
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, and and uh others. But I
Speaker 1: decided that, you know, we just needed a new phase.
Speaker 1: These people are old, and there's the people want to see.
Speaker 1: If we really think we're an work for young people
Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty four, they're gonna want to see people
Speaker 1: who look to be approximately their age. That's gonna make
Speaker 1: them feel better about it. It It isn't like my big
Speaker 1: brothers MTV. So that's what we did. There was no pressure. Again,
Speaker 1: I would say one of the great things about running
Speaker 1: that company all those years was I didn't really get
Speaker 1: any pressure about programmers. Just deliver the numbers, and we
Speaker 1: always did and they left us alone. Okay, was it
Speaker 1: like you were lying in bed one night and you said, God,
Speaker 1: I got a can the VJs. I had come up
Speaker 1: with the idea. Well, I don't know if I was
Speaker 1: lying in bed, but it hadn't crossed my mind. I mean,
Speaker 1: one or two of them might have been annoying, and
Speaker 1: you say, you know, we're we we we gotta like
Speaker 1: look at this thing holistically. We should be changing the
Speaker 1: on air. Look, we should be changing the VJs. We
Speaker 1: should be changing the shows. We we we gotta reinvent
Speaker 1: this thing continually. And uh, I don't know when that
Speaker 1: epiphany came, but and we didn't do them all at once,
Speaker 1: but they kind of filtered away within a six month
Speaker 1: period and we hired other people. But I uh, and
Speaker 1: I know I see them all because they're all on
Speaker 1: they're all on serious radio. Now I went CHATL or another.
Speaker 1: So it's great here in their voices. Okay, under your management,
Speaker 1: MTV spread all over the world. I always figured that
Speaker 1: was because of your experience all over the world. Whose
Speaker 1: decision and what degree were you involved? Well, that was
Speaker 1: we did a joint venture in the UK for empty
Speaker 1: a thing called MTV Europe, and I uh, I had
Speaker 1: great confidence that I could go anywhere, that we could
Speaker 1: go anywhere, that we could go do business anywhere. At
Speaker 1: the same time, something important was happening, which is all
Speaker 1: of these European countries and then subsequently in Asia and
Speaker 1: Latin America, they were deregulating their television structure. Most of
Speaker 1: these countries had stayed owned television maybe one independent channel,
Speaker 1: and they were all terrestrial. Basically, they weren't there. They
Speaker 1: were very little cable or satellite. But they began to
Speaker 1: sort of open the doors and let private companies come
Speaker 1: in and run TV networks. Now, of course you've got
Speaker 1: Start TV and Asia or be sky b R Sky TV,
Speaker 1: you know. But in the early days we were a
Speaker 1: first mover, and um we were able to kind of
Speaker 1: chase that around from content to kinda. I really wanted
Speaker 1: to go back to Asia after we got set up
Speaker 1: in Europe. And when we went to Europe, by the way,
Speaker 1: the record companies are go, fuck you. We we don't
Speaker 1: need any Americans coming over here telling us what to do.
Speaker 1: And I say, this isn't gonna be the American MTV.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be run by Europeans. Wenna have Dutch people
Speaker 1: on and it's it's gonna be different. You're gonna like it,
Speaker 1: and no, no, no, no, no, no no. And it
Speaker 1: was harder to deal with the labels there because they
Speaker 1: all could legally get together against you. But we had
Speaker 1: on the air and we did all right, and finally
Speaker 1: they realized this was a good tool in their toolbox
Speaker 1: for promotion. But I wanted to go to Asia and
Speaker 1: and this amazing thing just got Richard Lee in Hong
Speaker 1: Kong launched this thing called Star TV, and he wanted.
Speaker 1: He was gonna put five channels up on a satellite,
Speaker 1: you know, to a small dish satellite that you could
Speaker 1: pick up, you know what they call at this time
Speaker 1: a high band satellite. It would the footprint cover all
Speaker 1: the way from Taiwan to like, you know, Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 1: The same signal would come down. So he got the BBC,
Speaker 1: a couple of Chinese channels and uh MTV and we
Speaker 1: we were able to get a licensing deal. So we
Speaker 1: were on there. And then the weirdest thing happened. Star
Speaker 1: TV number one was just a smash. People have been
Speaker 1: strangled with no television choices all their lives, you know,
Speaker 1: watching one or two channels if they even had that.
Speaker 1: And now if someone had a satellite dish, there was
Speaker 1: a whole new world open and up to them, even
Speaker 1: if it was only five channels and they didn't speak
Speaker 1: Kanthonese or Mandarin. But we would get all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: we a New York Times reporter would be in a
Speaker 1: in a cab of the Karin guerrillas on the Burmese
Speaker 1: Thai border and he would go to the Burmese camp
Speaker 1: and they have a satellite dish and all these guys
Speaker 1: are sitting around watching like hip hop videos and he said,
Speaker 1: this is like bizarre, and MTV became like a verb
Speaker 1: in their world, and you know, so we we gotta
Speaker 1: Then Murdoch bought Star TV, and I decided, we don't
Speaker 1: want to be doing a licensing deal. Let's start our
Speaker 1: own operated things. So we got a divorce from Murdoch
Speaker 1: and started from scratch and built up an appreciable business
Speaker 1: in Indian all the major territories, which was a blasphemy
Speaker 1: about to be back. And you know, we'd always go
Speaker 1: out on trips, and you know, we moved our headquarters
Speaker 1: to Singapore. I'd always tack on an adventure. After we
Speaker 1: were doing some business and met the guys in the
Speaker 1: music business in Asia. They were wild. I mean they
Speaker 1: those guys, they were something. But uh so we set
Speaker 1: up we were the first worldwide network. MTV was. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think and I don't know how much we used
Speaker 1: out a hundred networks at one point. And then we
Speaker 1: did the same thing in Latin America and then what
Speaker 1: what the greatest thing was we would have tried through
Speaker 1: these creative people from all these countries and then we
Speaker 1: could Ingram intermingle them and move them around. And I
Speaker 1: missed all I miss all that, but that's still that.
Speaker 1: The last one was Africa, and I go to Africa
Speaker 1: a lot now and MTV bas it plays all music.
Speaker 1: It's all hip hop, and it's the most powerful music
Speaker 1: force on the continent of Africa. Is MTV to this day? Wow?
Speaker 1: And we're all these outlets profitable? They are now. They
Speaker 1: weren't in the beginning, but they became profitable pretty quickly. Okay,
Speaker 1: so certainly from six on, maybe the Internet starts creeping in.
Speaker 1: Now you and me have a conversation at the time
Speaker 1: when everybody is saying they've gotta play more videos, you say,
Speaker 1: we're never gonna play videos because it's becoming on demand item.
Speaker 1: You were way ahead of the marketplace personally. However, in retrospect,
Speaker 1: one can say that MTV missed the Internet. So give
Speaker 1: us those two takes. Well, you're exactly right. I mean
Speaker 1: they came along and you can get all this music
Speaker 1: on demand. I mean, who needs to sit around and
Speaker 1: wait for Nirvan? I just you know, hit it and
Speaker 1: it comes up. I can watch it ten times in
Speaker 1: a row. The problem was the labels, and I had
Speaker 1: this conversation with Bob Morgado took me up to his office.
Speaker 1: I went to his office. I thought he was going
Speaker 1: to congratulate me for the quarter of a million dollars
Speaker 1: of retail sales of billion dollars of unplugged records. But no,
Speaker 1: he was to tell me fuck you. He'd already fired
Speaker 1: Moawston and all these people who we loved. Uh, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna get online. We're not giving you the rights.
Speaker 1: So MTV we were all set up with to just
Speaker 1: move our entire music video library online on demand on
Speaker 1: our websites, and the record companies wouldn't give it to us.
Speaker 1: They give it to launch, they give it to some
Speaker 1: new people. We we we don't want to be under
Speaker 1: the thumb of MTV and create like another monster who's
Speaker 1: building a business on our backs. Let's go to other people.
Speaker 1: So MTV was sort of locked out in a way,
Speaker 1: and that really allowed other people to come in and
Speaker 1: do it, and uh, you know it, really it really
Speaker 1: was a monkey wrench in our ability to increase our
Speaker 1: digital footprint and move into the digital age. Because our
Speaker 1: audience that like the canary in the colon, and they're
Speaker 1: the first people to migrate the digital um. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was tough news, and we could not get that to happen.
Speaker 1: We we wanted to, Laura knows, I mean it would
Speaker 1: be an idiot that wouldn't want to do that, but
Speaker 1: they wouldn't give us the rights. Now, but you did
Speaker 1: have a presence online and certainly about turn of the
Speaker 1: century it was not an insignificant audience. Was basically without
Speaker 1: videos you couldn't make it or was there another way
Speaker 1: to spin it so that you could have had a business.
Speaker 1: Well you could have used some short like needle drop
Speaker 1: lengths of music beds on things, but you know, we
Speaker 1: could we had we would have news and information about music.
Speaker 1: We had tour dates, we had everything about music, but
Speaker 1: the music. You know, it's like a head shop in
Speaker 1: the in the set in the sixties, they sold the
Speaker 1: papers and the pipes, but they didn't sell you the pot.
Speaker 1: We had everything but the music. Basically we tried to
Speaker 1: skirt it in circum benefit we'd always be busted, you know,
Speaker 1: and they were. They were nasty. I mean, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I was like a profit center for them busting down
Speaker 1: you know, people trying to take their music online. So
Speaker 1: you started thirty k you know, the old Viacom is
Speaker 1: sold to Sumner. At what point does everybody start making
Speaker 1: more money and are you negotiating for money or is
Speaker 1: it take it or leave it? Well, Sumner bought the
Speaker 1: company seven he bought it from these guys of the
Speaker 1: prior Viacom. He installed Frank Beyondi, who made me the
Speaker 1: CEO right away, and uh, he offered me a pile
Speaker 1: of money that was more than I had every I
Speaker 1: didn't I just I didn't even ask for it. He said,
Speaker 1: they're gonna give you this, and it was and like
Speaker 1: box car numbers like we see today. But from then on,
Speaker 1: as these companies in cable became these money machines, and
Speaker 1: you're embedded in these public companies, Uh, there was a
Speaker 1: game going on, like the Alan Grubin's of the world
Speaker 1: would be negotiating UH employees contracts at various companies, and
Speaker 1: they'd always say, well, we're gonna what are they paying
Speaker 1: at Disney, what are they paying at uh A Universal?
Speaker 1: And you would find out that the pay levels, like
Speaker 1: even in the record companies, were really high, So all
Speaker 1: of a sudden people could have their We would say, well,
Speaker 1: we're making more money than these guys in the record
Speaker 1: companies we're making, you know, we want to be paid
Speaker 1: on an equivalent basis. And then it was like someone
Speaker 1: would move up the uh, you know, move up the ladder.
Speaker 1: And then stock options became a big thing. Uh and
Speaker 1: people were being granted a lot of those, and it
Speaker 1: was always you were getting compared to players in similar
Speaker 1: type of companies. And uh, all of a sudden, money
Speaker 1: became everybody was rolling in potential salaries and bonuses and
Speaker 1: stock options, and it really changed the game. I mean,
Speaker 1: I gotta say, no one really came to work where
Speaker 1: we work for the money. You can get paid a
Speaker 1: lot more somewhere else for a lot fewer hours. It mean,
Speaker 1: it's almost like a lifestyle decision. But then money kind
Speaker 1: of came in, and uh, you know, you could argue
Speaker 1: kind of spoiled things a bit. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: nice to get it, Okay, all the I don't have
Speaker 1: I don't have a history of working for the corporation.
Speaker 1: But from my seat, my observer, you're the best corporate
Speaker 1: manager I've ever encountered in that you saw yourself as
Speaker 1: relatively equal to the people under you. You would not
Speaker 1: make a decision, you would never say to Judy, you
Speaker 1: have to put this. You have to do that because
Speaker 1: someone gave you a call. How and where did you
Speaker 1: develop your management style? Well, you're nice of you to
Speaker 1: say that it was I figured I was a team player.
Speaker 1: I had a team of people I trusted. People don't
Speaker 1: like to be if you have good people, they don't
Speaker 1: want to be overmanaged. And you know, there were times
Speaker 1: when I would call up and say, by the way,
Speaker 1: why aren't we playing guns and roases? I mean, what
Speaker 1: kind of idiots are you people? And this thing is
Speaker 1: you know, welcome to the jungle. You guys passed on that.
Speaker 1: I mean I would, I would, but it would be
Speaker 1: rare that I would really interfere too much with with
Speaker 1: specific programming choices. I would green light shows they wanted
Speaker 1: to do, and I would give advice, but I I uh,
Speaker 1: I would defer to people who I thought maybe knew
Speaker 1: more about it than me. I didn't want to step
Speaker 1: on their toes. I wanted more of a collegial atmosphere
Speaker 1: and as long as they were winning and doing okay,
Speaker 1: I mean I had to balance. You know, the people
Speaker 1: from Nickelodeon were very different from the people at MTV.
Speaker 1: There was all these different, like little mini silos of
Speaker 1: this place. The people at Comedy Central were different. I
Speaker 1: tried not you know, you can't when you get to
Speaker 1: a certain size, you can't micromana everything. So I would
Speaker 1: defer to people who worked for me and try to
Speaker 1: keep I tried to keep it egilitarian, and I most
Speaker 1: of all wanted to keep it fun. Okay, but from
Speaker 1: an outside perspective, and I've observed this, if someone said
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call Tom Freston to get it on or
Speaker 1: to do me a favor, that's not a game you played. No,
Speaker 1: with rare exceptions, very rare exceptions. Yeah, Because sometimes you
Speaker 1: call up and say, David Geffen just called me and
Speaker 1: he asked the reasonable question, you know, what's the rationalelle
Speaker 1: behind this? And they might say, well, I don't know
Speaker 1: if there was much, Yeah, maybe you want to take
Speaker 1: another look at something. And they might say yeah, or
Speaker 1: tell David Giffen the ghost of it, We're not gonna
Speaker 1: do it. But you know sometimes I mean I would
Speaker 1: get those calls, Bob. They would come in night, day,
Speaker 1: they would they have a whole bank of people calling
Speaker 1: people at MTV trying to move it around because we
Speaker 1: were in that you know, like sort of singular position. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I was always of the I said, you know,
Speaker 1: these people are our partners in a way, and we
Speaker 1: gotta there's gotta be a little give and take. There's
Speaker 1: gonna be a bit of give and take in our relationship.
Speaker 1: We can't just we can't just say, you know, take
Speaker 1: it or leave it all the time with everything. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're predisposed not to like us, So let's try and
Speaker 1: take a little bit of edge off that. By nature,
Speaker 1: I try and be a collegial person and not a
Speaker 1: dictatorial thing. I like to thinking of business like that.
Speaker 1: Decisions kind of come up from the bottom rather than
Speaker 1: you know, being like some authoritarian on top, which you
Speaker 1: know at certain scale is unmanageable anyway, unless you have
Speaker 1: a really small country company. Okay, So tell us about
Speaker 1: the switch to running all of Viacom and your experience
Speaker 1: doing that. Well. I was sitting in my office one day,
Speaker 1: perfectly happy. My phone rings. It's some to Redstone, he says,
Speaker 1: come up and see me in the Carlisle Hotel. It's
Speaker 1: a spring afternoon. So I getting a taxi. I go
Speaker 1: up to the Carlisle Hotel. I'm thinking, you know, Marilyn
Speaker 1: Monroe and Jack Kennedy. You know, he had an apartment there.
Speaker 1: It really wasn't a great apartment. It would looks like
Speaker 1: a corporate apartment. So you never know what redstone you're
Speaker 1: gonna get. He could be the screamer or the really
Speaker 1: nice guy and and the really he says. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm males not doing good. I'm thinking to myself, males
Speaker 1: doing great. We're like in an all time high. Gotta
Speaker 1: get rid of mail and uh and I would like
Speaker 1: you to be the new CEO of IM. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh fuck. I had just been joking with Jeff Bukas
Speaker 1: about this day before. One day we're gonna we have
Speaker 1: the best job running HBO and MT be the best
Speaker 1: job in New York City. On day it's gonna be over.
Speaker 1: They're gonna ask us to run these fucking companies. So
Speaker 1: now the ask comes in and and I go, oh god,
Speaker 1: how can I? Uh well, I don't really want to
Speaker 1: work for this man. That's gonna be gonna take me
Speaker 1: away from everything I love. You know, why can't I
Speaker 1: be like Lauren Michael's and just keep the same job
Speaker 1: forever and and and and and But you can't, So
Speaker 1: I told him. I asked him some questions. I said,
Speaker 1: let me think about it, give me twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: I'm so flattered that you thought of me somewhere. Let
Speaker 1: me think about it. So I went home. I said,
Speaker 1: I gotta talk about it with my wife. Who could
Speaker 1: you know, couldn't have cared. So I thought about it,
Speaker 1: and I said, oh God, I gotta take it, because
Speaker 1: if I don't take it, he's gonna give it to Less,
Speaker 1: and Less will fire me. And that's it, man, at
Speaker 1: the end of my career. And maybe maybe you know what,
Speaker 1: it'll be great. It'll be kind of good. I can
Speaker 1: learn some new tricks. I'm gonna be a public company CEO.
Speaker 1: It's like the gold ring. I got the gold ring.
Speaker 1: So I the next day I go to meet him.
Speaker 1: He's in radio set. He's in the Cargie hall. Uh.
Speaker 1: The CBS is having their upfront presentation. So he's got
Speaker 1: a seat next to him. It's on the aisle. I
Speaker 1: sit down next to him and he's watching the upfront
Speaker 1: and I said, Summer, I thought about it all night.
Speaker 1: I would love this job. I'd love to take the job.
Speaker 1: And he goes, it's too late. I go, what do
Speaker 1: you mean it's too LATEA I gave it to him,
Speaker 1: I go Less, He gave it to Less. You told him?
Speaker 1: I said, wait twenty four hours, it's only been like
Speaker 1: seventeen hours. You can't do that. It's as well he's had.
Speaker 1: I said, well, you into that to me? You know,
Speaker 1: fuck you. That's bad. That's bad. I got up and
Speaker 1: I sort of left. I said, you made a you know,
Speaker 1: we had a deal. Do you want me? You're not.
Speaker 1: So then like the next day he calls me and
Speaker 1: he goes time. I gave it to Less, I told Less.
Speaker 1: You know it's hard to take out. Can't be an
Speaker 1: Indian giver. So how about this, how about we split
Speaker 1: it and you unless become cos. I'll stay at CEO
Speaker 1: and you unless run it as co chief operating officers
Speaker 1: or whatever. So I said okay, And we did that
Speaker 1: for two years. Okay, but at that time responsibilities were divided.
Speaker 1: He was CBS, you were paramount, so he had an
Speaker 1: equal title, but you had different purviews. Yeah, but there
Speaker 1: was some things that that we had to fight over,
Speaker 1: like if I wanted to buy something out of the
Speaker 1: and use money from the corporate tail, he had to
Speaker 1: agree to it. So there was a lot of built
Speaker 1: in conflicts. I say, you know, we could be like
Speaker 1: Bob Daily and Terry Simmel Less We could have a
Speaker 1: perfect partnership. You got your thing, I got minors, and
Speaker 1: we'll try and be reasonable. But uh uh so there
Speaker 1: was areas where it did come together. But largely we
Speaker 1: were both running the same things we did before, and
Speaker 1: we took on all the corporate things, legal, human resources,
Speaker 1: all the sort of all those organizations and investor relations.
Speaker 1: So I got a lot of exposure to the investor community.
Speaker 1: It was a different job. I had to really less
Speaker 1: and I were the face of the company. But then,
Speaker 1: uh there was pressure from the people on both sides,
Speaker 1: you know, and the and these bankers would come around say,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the reasons your stock's not going
Speaker 1: up is because your your company is too big, it's
Speaker 1: too complicated. What you really need to do is split
Speaker 1: it up into two different companies. And uh, you know
Speaker 1: that logic was faulty, but we did it, and uh
Speaker 1: it was painful. I mean, so we had CBS Inc.
Speaker 1: And less So I now became the CEO of my
Speaker 1: separate public company, and so did less Moon Invest. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, through all it followed, they reunited and they're
Speaker 1: back together under Bob backage. But that's sort of the
Speaker 1: story of how it happened. But when I was I
Speaker 1: was only there for eight months until he fired me.
Speaker 1: I mean, basically I was still rearranging the furniture in
Speaker 1: my office. However, you suddenly had purview over Paramount, which
Speaker 1: had been in a bad spell, and you made some
Speaker 1: changes there. What were your experiences, what you learn in
Speaker 1: the movie business. Well, I didn't know a lot. You know,
Speaker 1: we had been making movies with Paramount for years, you know,
Speaker 1: MTV and Nickelodeon. But being a producer of a movie
Speaker 1: was not like running a movie studio. And I had
Speaker 1: I had been able to sit at the table with
Speaker 1: red Stone and and see John Dolton, who ran Paramount.
Speaker 1: I I would I was like being in some business
Speaker 1: school for running a media conglomorate. I learned a lot
Speaker 1: through observation, But when I got out there and I
Speaker 1: had to do it, I didn't know that Paramount was
Speaker 1: in trouble. They were on a cold streak. The culture
Speaker 1: wasn't particularly helpful, and the idea was well uh Sherry.
Speaker 1: Sherry Lansing became the head of it, but then she
Speaker 1: told me instead of John Dolton who left. But then
Speaker 1: Sherry said, you know, I want to retire. I'm sixty.
Speaker 1: I want out. So I had to find the new head.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, this is an opportunity to sort
Speaker 1: of maybe haven't turned the page and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: start a new era. And then I also realized that
Speaker 1: I'm like a cable weasel. I'm just a cable weasel.
Speaker 1: We're at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain and
Speaker 1: here I am running the studio. So I got Bob Daily,
Speaker 1: who I knew. Bob Daily and Terry. They had once
Speaker 1: offered me the job to run the Warner Music Group,
Speaker 1: which I turned down. But I developed a good relationship
Speaker 1: with both of them, and I asked Bob Daily if
Speaker 1: he would be a mentor for me and teach me
Speaker 1: the movie business. So for one summer, I would go
Speaker 1: from my office in Santa Monica to his house and
Speaker 1: we'd have classes. Basically, he'd give me homework. I learned
Speaker 1: about film p and l's, what kind of deals exist,
Speaker 1: how the movie business works. And I said, you know,
Speaker 1: we we we got to get someone to replace Sherry
Speaker 1: because she's gonna be out of here soon. So I
Speaker 1: tried hiring some of the people who were running movies
Speaker 1: to that that's the top job in Hollywood, as you know.
Speaker 1: And what happened was when someone get fired, generally a
Speaker 1: person for another movie studio who'd been running literacy. It's
Speaker 1: like musical chairs. So I tried to hire Stacy Snyder,
Speaker 1: who at the time was like the hottest I thought,
Speaker 1: and she was a woman, and she was lovely and
Speaker 1: smart and accomplished, and she couldn't get out of her contract.
Speaker 1: And then I would ask around other places, and people
Speaker 1: couldn't get out of their contracts. So then I would
Speaker 1: go around and talk to people who used to be
Speaker 1: near the top of a movie studio or had been,
Speaker 1: and I would interview them. But then I would have
Speaker 1: him come up to Bob Daily's house and have Bob
Speaker 1: talked to them. And we were sort of getting nowhere.
Speaker 1: I wasn't really turned on by anybody. And one day
Speaker 1: I was in Beiruts actually on an MTV business and
Speaker 1: David Geffin calls me. He says, I got the right
Speaker 1: person for you to run the Paramount. Perfect guy. Who's
Speaker 1: that Brad Gray? Really? Brad Gray? I knew Brad Gray.
Speaker 1: But Brad was then at the top of his game.
Speaker 1: He was, you know, a Millstein Gray. He was producer
Speaker 1: of soprano those and blah blah blah. He had good taste.
Speaker 1: He was this and that and intrigued me. And I
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time with Brad. I already knew him.
Speaker 1: Bob spent time with Brad, and then, uh, I thought
Speaker 1: that Brad would have risen to the occasion of realizing
Speaker 1: this is a really big company and it needs leadership,
Speaker 1: and you can't be locked up in your office just
Speaker 1: doing deals with the directors. You shouldn't be out there,
Speaker 1: you know, with the rank and file and make this
Speaker 1: culture of the place a little healthier. But you know,
Speaker 1: one good thing we did was by dream Works. We
Speaker 1: bought dream Works. But then I got fired, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, life went on the DreamWorks partnership, which I
Speaker 1: really thought was gonna be a game changer for us
Speaker 1: because it brought us a lot of movies that gave
Speaker 1: us Spielberg and Geffen and Cassenberg sort of in our
Speaker 1: tent that they were real players, could up our game.
Speaker 1: But that relationship sort of fell apart under Brad, you know,
Speaker 1: for for reasons that were no good and they ended
Speaker 1: up buying out and going away, which was sort of
Speaker 1: a big disappointment. I was gone by then, and anyway,
Speaker 1: what I learned was it's its own little world. As
Speaker 1: we all know, it's a very peculiar world. And I
Speaker 1: Brad was very able in many ways and did have
Speaker 1: good taste, and he did produce and some good movies
Speaker 1: and hire some good people, But it didn't accomplish the
Speaker 1: change of the full change I have been hoping for
Speaker 1: at the end of the day. Okay, there was obviously
Speaker 1: the MySpace public thing, but less uh, under promise and
Speaker 1: over delivered. It's a Wall Street game. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll give you low projections where you gave accurate projections.
Speaker 1: If you had to do it again, would you do
Speaker 1: it differently? Well, we sort of overdid, under promise and overdelivered.
Speaker 1: We delivered a lot. You know, we would we would,
Speaker 1: we would, uh if we had. We always took a
Speaker 1: little haircat over what we thought we could do, And
Speaker 1: it wasn't really an issue that, um, we hadn't been
Speaker 1: making our numbers. We'd, like I said, we've been making
Speaker 1: our numbers all those years. The one thing that fell
Speaker 1: out of whack. The first quarter was at MTV International,
Speaker 1: which had been growing like a weed kind of like,
Speaker 1: took a couple of big hits and sank, you know,
Speaker 1: sank our earnings down and sank the revenues down. And
Speaker 1: everyone was looking at our first earnings quarter under a microscope.
Speaker 1: So there must be something wrong. You know. The next quarter,
Speaker 1: by the way they were, we were up like so
Speaker 1: I I thought we were going to see a lot
Speaker 1: of growth going forward. But it didn't really turn out
Speaker 1: that why they were getting rid of me was because
Speaker 1: our numbers weren't good. There was just that I wasn't
Speaker 1: the right guy for that job. You know, I was
Speaker 1: not the mainstream businessman. In many ways, I wasn't, you know,
Speaker 1: I was. I was enjoying it and looking to sort
Speaker 1: of move up and try it. But you know, my
Speaker 1: my world and basically dealing with creative people had changed.
Speaker 1: Now I was dealing with Wall Street a good part
Speaker 1: of the time and dealing with other issues, which I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I was gonna give it a go. I
Speaker 1: I didn't think that just really came out of left
Speaker 1: field for me getting fired. Okay, so you do get fired,
Speaker 1: you say, you get a call from Bano where you
Speaker 1: offered other jobs because you said earlier you got a
Speaker 1: call from Morgado about running the Warner Music Group. We're
Speaker 1: people looking for you, Morgado from from Daily and Semmel Daily.
Speaker 1: And because Morgado and I were like sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: at at odds with each other, He's like, well, I
Speaker 1: could never hear I could never get along with that guy.
Speaker 1: A lot of other people couldn't either. My mistake. But
Speaker 1: after you leave via calm Are, there are other offers
Speaker 1: that you end up turning down. Yeah, a couple came in,
Speaker 1: A couple came in. But I what I figured out
Speaker 1: was I didn't want to be grafted on top of
Speaker 1: a company that I really didn't have that big emotional
Speaker 1: connection to. I was really unlikely to fall into the
Speaker 1: same type of beautiful place for me that the MTV Networks, Nickelodeon,
Speaker 1: Comedy Central was. That was everything I loved, all about
Speaker 1: all the things I loved, and I figured, you know,
Speaker 1: I'd given it a good run, why not try something else?
Speaker 1: So I thought I would do this portfolio approach to things,
Speaker 1: which is maybe do something not for profit work, maybe
Speaker 1: work with a private equity company. I went on the
Speaker 1: DreamWorks board. I worked for Oprah for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: I mean I did a lot of interesting things, Like
Speaker 1: I went back The first thing I did was really
Speaker 1: go back to Afghanistan. I went back there and started
Speaker 1: training people. It was like the early days of MTV,
Speaker 1: training people how to run a television network. That was fantastic.
Speaker 1: You know, when Oprah started her cable channel, everyone thought
Speaker 1: it would be a smashing success ratings wise. Why was
Speaker 1: it ultimately not that level of success. Well, once she
Speaker 1: wasn't on it, she was still in syndication, and uh,
Speaker 1: they had a series of growing pains. I was a
Speaker 1: consultant there, but she got the distribution and there was
Speaker 1: a series of grower pains. I think there was an
Speaker 1: element of overconfidence about things and they were on a
Speaker 1: learning curve. They've now stabilized it into a decent profitable business.
Speaker 1: But out of the box, the big thing was I'm
Speaker 1: turning on the Oprah Winfrey network. I'm looking around for Oprah,
Speaker 1: but Oprah couldn't really be on it legally. So small
Speaker 1: things like having a music channel with no music right. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: you're a guy from Roewaiton who goes to school in Vermont.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, you're an MTV You're meeting a
Speaker 1: lot of rock stars. Hey, were you ever intimidated? What
Speaker 1: was the process? Is there anybody who still makes you
Speaker 1: somewhat anxious, not only rock stars but other notable people
Speaker 1: in the world. You know, I got confident in myself
Speaker 1: early on. Yeah, and I never really had a problem
Speaker 1: meeting with any movie star or uh rock star where
Speaker 1: you'd be trembling and you couldn't open your mouth and
Speaker 1: say anything. They're clearly people when you're in the presence
Speaker 1: of someone you've idolized your whole life, you know that
Speaker 1: you know and you can see that that that special sauce,
Speaker 1: that charisma that lives in within that body you see
Speaker 1: Mick Jagger or something. But I I never was afraid
Speaker 1: to go in a meeting and meeting and talk to anybody.
Speaker 1: I try it to be. I just always try to
Speaker 1: be myself. Okay, who are the two most charismatic rock
Speaker 1: stars you met in your tenure? David Bowie, who I
Speaker 1: have a good story about, then lay it on us.
Speaker 1: This is one of my favorite stories of all my time. There.
Speaker 1: When I was doing the I Want a MTV camp
Speaker 1: and I was always after David to his person, Let's
Speaker 1: get David Bowie to do one that's like really huge. Now,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's he's he's in the Pantheon for Christ's sake,
Speaker 1: and he's making these great videos. So finally he says,
Speaker 1: I'll do it, but you gotta come and see me.
Speaker 1: Him and Stodd Switzerland skiing. I go. So I got
Speaker 1: this guy Dale Pond, who was you know, our ad agency, uh,
Speaker 1: and we all went over there and we got like
Speaker 1: and it basically it moved into like a youth hostel.
Speaker 1: You're in fancy old stad and David staying at the
Speaker 1: Palace hotel. So we see him. We we agree to
Speaker 1: go out one day and we set up in the
Speaker 1: snow and he comes skiing down and we did about
Speaker 1: five or ten rons. He skis down and you know
Speaker 1: this turns and stopped, says, I want my MTV. He
Speaker 1: was really enthusiastic about it. I had had some dealings
Speaker 1: with him before and really liked the guy. He was
Speaker 1: just just a pleasure to be with, and it would
Speaker 1: be he would always ask you about yourself, and you know,
Speaker 1: he was really an engaging character. And you know, after
Speaker 1: were we of course we would have a hold your
Speaker 1: hands like this because we sticked an animated logo in there.
Speaker 1: So when we're finished, he goes, hey, uh, what you
Speaker 1: want to go skiing? Sure? So I spent you know,
Speaker 1: spent the day, uh, the rest of the day or
Speaker 1: part of it, you know, skiing with David Bowie, which
Speaker 1: was fine. And then he says, listen, I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: at the Palace that I am taking a sauna if
Speaker 1: you want to come, you know, meet me at the
Speaker 1: Palace Hotel. So I go, sure, you know, I go
Speaker 1: back to my youth hostel and uh. And I go
Speaker 1: to the Palace Hotel and I go into the spa
Speaker 1: where the the the he's in there. And I walk
Speaker 1: into the steam room and uh or the sauna room
Speaker 1: and who and and it's it's just him and me
Speaker 1: and Paul McCartney and I go, wow, you got that
Speaker 1: maybe then and they we're all just wearing towels. That
Speaker 1: was That was a keeper. Okay, you must have a
Speaker 1: couple of others. I'll take a pass. But I had
Speaker 1: some wonderful times and a lot of the musical artists
Speaker 1: that we love and enjoy. It was. It was a
Speaker 1: privilege anybody you never met you wanted to. Well, you
Speaker 1: know I had in the rock pop business in our era.
Speaker 1: I think pretty much everybody came around. Uh. You know
Speaker 1: there was people that I idolized, and you know that
Speaker 1: I was fans of another musical genres that I would
Speaker 1: have loved to have met, and I didn't. Okay, So
Speaker 1: who were the exacts who impressed you, John Sykes? But
Speaker 1: I'm also talking record company exects, record companies. Uh. I
Speaker 1: love Gil Freezing because I thought Gil Freesing. I related
Speaker 1: to Gil guilfrees and ran an operation sort of like
Speaker 1: what I wanted to run. Those guys Chris Blackwell, uh,
Speaker 1: Chris Wright, these guys that ran these small companies and
Speaker 1: unfortunately all got disappeared in their logos, got folded into
Speaker 1: something or other, something nondescript. They ran creative companies like
Speaker 1: kind of place I wanted to be. You know, they
Speaker 1: were in it for the music and they want they
Speaker 1: believed in the artist and it wasn't like we got
Speaker 1: to crank a single out. And they were artists friendly
Speaker 1: and they were willing to take creative chances. So I
Speaker 1: love Gil Freezing. He was terrific. I love Mo Austin
Speaker 1: I thought Moe was wonderful. As crazy as he was.
Speaker 1: I loved crass now, I mean he would be a guy.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's one story about him. I always loved.
Speaker 1: As he goes to Spain, they take him out in
Speaker 1: some club one night. They they all get they're all
Speaker 1: drunk and the Gypsy Kings come on and he's like,
Speaker 1: goes nuts and he goes backstage. So I'll give you
Speaker 1: guys a million dollars and they took it. That was
Speaker 1: like how they would sign people. You know, it was
Speaker 1: that nuts. And of course he made him into a hit.
Speaker 1: They they produced. Jeff ear Off was a guy who
Speaker 1: was unusual in the uh you know, on the lower
Speaker 1: down below the label head because he was sort of
Speaker 1: a visually trained guy who really had wonderful taste. And
Speaker 1: he was responsible for you know, oh shepherding through you know,
Speaker 1: Madonna's Easy Top. A lot of these people, police and
Speaker 1: so forth who had really good videos. Uh he he uh.
Speaker 1: He was great. I'm trying to think there were so many.
Speaker 1: I love Doug Morris. Doug was soulful and I I
Speaker 1: didn't have Irving for his short tenure at uh. Remember
Speaker 1: he ran m c A for a while and after
Speaker 1: I'll tell her left, No, I'll tell her replaced him.
Speaker 1: He brought in all the replacement that was okay. You know,
Speaker 1: after a while, the memory gets a little weak. Oh listen,
Speaker 1: it's amazing how long it was ago. So obviously things
Speaker 1: have changed in the fifteen odd years since you've been gone.
Speaker 1: But is there any way to save MTV that you
Speaker 1: no longer called music television? They certainly are on the
Speaker 1: cable system. Is this just a fade out or can
Speaker 1: there be a renaissance? Well, some people at the top
Speaker 1: of these legacy companies would tell you, you know, all
Speaker 1: of these linear networks are gonna go away. They're gonna
Speaker 1: implode this the money is getting sucked out and they're
Speaker 1: not gonna be able to hold his Everything is going
Speaker 1: to the you know, streaming model. That's not to say
Speaker 1: MTV couldn't resurrect itself or be something else in the
Speaker 1: streaming world. All of these guys are gonna have to
Speaker 1: figure out our way to uh uh kind of transition.
Speaker 1: I'll say this, Um Bob Backish, who's now the CEO
Speaker 1: of Viacom CBS and who I hired him? I love
Speaker 1: he's a soulful guy. He's as smart as a smart
Speaker 1: guy and he has been dealt a week hand, but
Speaker 1: he's played it pretty well so far. They're never gonna
Speaker 1: make I don't think MTV into what it was, which
Speaker 1: was his music based phenomena, But they seem to have
Speaker 1: I don't pay a lot of attention to, but they
Speaker 1: seem to have reverted to this. We just have a
Speaker 1: bunch of shows on there, and if they have a
Speaker 1: hit show or another, you know, they can't they got
Speaker 1: some kind of incarnation and reincarnation of the Jersey Shore
Speaker 1: or maybe they can you know, make uh, some connection
Speaker 1: to the younger audiences out there today. I mean, it's America.
Speaker 1: Everybody comes back. It's never going to come back as
Speaker 1: what it was, but I would say it's you know,
Speaker 1: things have a hard time just totally dying off in
Speaker 1: the media business. I mean, look, terrestrial radio still around. Uh.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't I wouldn't know what to do, and I
Speaker 1: haven't really thought about it. I haven't watched it much.
Speaker 1: But they had some quick creative people there, and they
Speaker 1: had some money to do things with. It's entirely possible
Speaker 1: they could resurrect themselves. You know. Our biggest business was
Speaker 1: always Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon's taken a huge hit. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: in the beginning they started Philip they licensed all their
Speaker 1: product to Netflix. So you have all these little five
Speaker 1: six year old kids, they're watching SpongeBob. They just push
Speaker 1: a button and one SpongeBob or one rug Rust after another.
Speaker 1: You know, it's hard to get him to go back
Speaker 1: and watch commercials. You know. Oh, it's that that's gonna
Speaker 1: be the streaming generation. And so that took a big
Speaker 1: hunk out of their out of what they were. They
Speaker 1: had a great machine going on and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: consumer behavior really uh has been a big factor for them.
Speaker 1: So in your career, what was the personal peak when
Speaker 1: you felt the best some specific moment. I love being
Speaker 1: on the stage at Live aid Bob. That was something,
Speaker 1: you know that was really pretty special. Uh. When we
Speaker 1: launched MTV Europe initially we launched, we had a big
Speaker 1: party in Amsterdam and I remember being in a speedboat
Speaker 1: and going through the canals of Amsterdam with Elton John
Speaker 1: and all these people, and it was a beautiful night
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, man, this fantastic. Uh. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of moments I I told you in the beginning.
Speaker 1: When I left the advertising business, it was because they
Speaker 1: threatened to put me on the Sharman account with Don't
Speaker 1: Squeeze Charman. Mr Whipple. Well, when we launched, when we
Speaker 1: launched TV Land in the mid nineties, we went out
Speaker 1: of our way to find a lot of these old commercials,
Speaker 1: and I said, we'd be cool. Let's get a lot
Speaker 1: of old commercial let's clear the rights and we can
Speaker 1: run some old commercials with the old shows. So I'm
Speaker 1: at a party and I met Mr Whipple. Did you
Speaker 1: tell him your story? Yes, it just killed me. You
Speaker 1: don't Squeeze the Charman. This guy made a whole living
Speaker 1: on all these residuals on you know, being a guy
Speaker 1: squeeze and toilet paper. I almost got into his ecosystem.
Speaker 1: But I just thought that was an amazing piece of
Speaker 1: synchronicity that we finally run into each other. He let
Speaker 1: me because of Charman and Mr Whipple, I quit and
Speaker 1: left in this whole other world appeared exactly amazing. You say,
Speaker 1: another door opens, Thomas has been fantastic. You know, you
Speaker 1: really radiate your intelligence and your ability to speak. A
Speaker 1: lot of executives can't deliver. It's like I'm just wold,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting here and go can this stay this great?
Speaker 1: You were really ten of a ten skaler, as they
Speaker 1: would say in spinal Top and eleven. So thanks so
Speaker 1: much for doing this well. You asked me about things
Speaker 1: for a really great period. So pleasure and always good
Speaker 1: to see you, Bob. I don't know how you do it.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you do it. I'll say one
Speaker 1: last thing. I watched that Frank Zappa movie last night
Speaker 1: on your recommendation, so verdict. Yeah, the verdict was I
Speaker 1: loved it, you know, and I became I got to
Speaker 1: hang out with Frank brow because you know, I hired
Speaker 1: Weasel and Moon at one point, so I used to
Speaker 1: go up to their house for happy hours. I thought
Speaker 1: that the director, you know, who was not an ordinary
Speaker 1: documentary director, did a great job. It was almost and
Speaker 1: I read your thing you said it was almost impressionistic,
Speaker 1: which I think was a was a good judgment on it.
Speaker 1: And he was a guy who did it his way.
Speaker 1: He was an impressive man. You know, what was your
Speaker 1: experience with him since you were hanging out. Was he
Speaker 1: engaged or distant? He was good. I would go there
Speaker 1: and he was I didn't know he was sick at
Speaker 1: the time, and it might have been I don't think
Speaker 1: anybody knew. But my my main door to him was
Speaker 1: through Ale who I would call up Gail and I'd say, Gail,
Speaker 1: I want to come and see you. I'd love to
Speaker 1: hire Dweasel to be a fej and then uh and
Speaker 1: moon so and Gails such a flat out character. And
Speaker 1: through Gail we developed a bit of a bond and
Speaker 1: she said, you know, you gotta come up for happy hours.
Speaker 1: We had happy hours up on Woodrow Wilson Drive there
Speaker 1: and Laurel, can you go? You gotta be kidding me.
Speaker 1: I'm saying to myself. I used to go see them
Speaker 1: when I was living in New York that they were
Speaker 1: playing at that theater. Uh, And I said, well, Frank
Speaker 1: was like a legend and we've been through the PMRC
Speaker 1: and all that stuff, and uh, he was good, you know,
Speaker 1: but uh, he he had a he had a good
Speaker 1: sense of humor. He had a chip on his shoulder
Speaker 1: because he didn't feel he was successful like he deserved
Speaker 1: to be. I think, so, you know, he he played
Speaker 1: at that at a whole other level. And uh, not
Speaker 1: a lot of people got that. He was always a
Speaker 1: cult kind of artist. He was never going to be mainstream.
Speaker 1: I mean, what was his big hit was Valley Girl,
Speaker 1: right with Moon. That's the only tell me faith the
Speaker 1: singles charts. But I I wasn't. I was a thrill
Speaker 1: to meet him because I thought he was a real icon.
Speaker 1: And uh, I thought, I don't know much about because
Speaker 1: I never went into with anybody. But you know, to
Speaker 1: die at prostate cancer, you know, twenty years later that
Speaker 1: wouldn't have happened, but all of advances in prostate cancer
Speaker 1: treatments and so forth, you know, he's a tough one.
Speaker 1: Well it's weird because he died at fifty two. Now
Speaker 1: from our perch, that seems so young. It seemed young then,
Speaker 1: but now it's like in the prime of your life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly so. And then going going back to the movie,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, there are a lot of people trying
Speaker 1: to rewrite the sixties. Okay, but I thought that movie
Speaker 1: got the vibe of the sixties, the vibe of New York.
Speaker 1: When they actually showed the theater he played in New York,
Speaker 1: I didn't go to those gigs. I was just stunned
Speaker 1: how small it was. Now a little narrow theater but
Speaker 1: it is like it was like there Hamburg in a way.
Speaker 1: You know, they were playing for three months, they had
Speaker 1: a residency, and they kind of got their ship together,
Speaker 1: and they got this cult word of mouth thing, and
Speaker 1: you know, they god knows, they looked so sixties. And
Speaker 1: that first record album which he didn't like, the cover
Speaker 1: of which I thought was fantastic. I we all had
Speaker 1: it in college, freak out. People were rolling, you know,
Speaker 1: marijuana joints on it all over the country. It's like
Speaker 1: a discovery. I mean, he had that song you didn't
Speaker 1: try to call me, and then he did a slow
Speaker 1: version of Ruben just you know, I was primer in
Speaker 1: the right front fender and you didn't call me. It
Speaker 1: was both hilarious and poignant at the same time. Weasels
Speaker 1: ripped my flesh. Oh yeah, all right, Okay, I think
Speaker 1: we've covered it, So Tom until next time. Hopefully I
Speaker 1: see you soon. When this COVID insanity ends. It's ending
Speaker 1: at least here, I really think. So it's exciting to
Speaker 1: come back to New York and see the city filling
Speaker 1: up and coming alive, and all these people have vaccinated.
Speaker 1: So that's how let's hope. So well, you know, the
Speaker 1: story of the people moving a way turned out to
Speaker 1: be untrue. Yes, there were wealthy people who went to
Speaker 1: their country houses, but as far as people moving permanently
Speaker 1: didn't happen. Do you believe the issue of offices is
Speaker 1: a real thing or not a thing? Are people gonna
Speaker 1: end up coming to the office or are they gonna
Speaker 1: work remotely? Yeah? I think uh, I think they are.
Speaker 1: I think there's probably a combination of both. Maybe people
Speaker 1: don't need as much office space as they want. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the sixth Avenue was like a morgue now,
Speaker 1: but I think you're the people going in. People that
Speaker 1: I talked to say we're going back in September, or
Speaker 1: we're gonna try it in June. You know, you see
Speaker 1: people like Netflix and Amazon saying we want everyone in
Speaker 1: the office. If you're in a creative business, I don't
Speaker 1: see how you can do it. It's amazing to me
Speaker 1: that people have been able to do what they've done
Speaker 1: with Zoom and Blue Jeans through this whole pandemic. God
Speaker 1: help us that we didn't have the internet. But I
Speaker 1: think I don't know. You know, New York City, the
Speaker 1: whole concept of the idea of New York City was
Speaker 1: based on the idea congestion is good, you know, be together,
Speaker 1: be all jammed up, and good things will come out
Speaker 1: of that. And you'll run into people, you know. I
Speaker 1: don't think New York is gonna die, but it's it's
Speaker 1: in for some tough times. But some people must want
Speaker 1: to be back to work. If if you if you're
Speaker 1: vaccinated and everything is safe, and this thing's disappeared, you know,
Speaker 1: you just might want to get back and be with
Speaker 1: other people. What about Manhattan itself? When you were living
Speaker 1: in graduate school, you could be of lower income and
Speaker 1: live in Manhattan. That doesn't happen anymore. Well, what's happening now?
Speaker 1: At least I hope I'm seeing I you see all
Speaker 1: these storefronts they're out of you know, there there's no
Speaker 1: one in them anymore. And all these uh, all these
Speaker 1: rental buildings that they've over built, rents are going down.
Speaker 1: Maybe that maybe Manhattan is gonna be the new Williamsburg.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You could be a young artist and
Speaker 1: moved to New York again because things will be cheaper
Speaker 1: asked for those stores and those restaurants. Young people are
Speaker 1: gonna come in with new concepts. They got lower rents
Speaker 1: and they're gonna figure something cool out. There's gonna be
Speaker 1: a whole new thing. That's what I'm cat. That's sort
Speaker 1: of my dream that there's gonna be a great reincarnation
Speaker 1: that there are in twenty twenties. You know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: maybe it's maybe it's that's what's in store for us. Well,
Speaker 1: I think economically we're definitely coming back, you know, in
Speaker 1: terms of the buildings to the buildings have to be
Speaker 1: the companies who on the buildings have to go bankrupt
Speaker 1: and the bank's take them back and resell them so
Speaker 1: they can rent at a lower level. Because some people
Speaker 1: bought these buildings at such inflated prices that you know,
Speaker 1: the storefronts, they can only lower the price so far. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's what's gonna happen. Everything's gonna, you know,
Speaker 1: prices to jimmy down. And because a lot of people,
Speaker 1: no matter what happens, they're not gonna need as many
Speaker 1: floors as they've had before probably, So there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a surplus of rents and the people who are coming
Speaker 1: in are gonna want to renegotiate their deals lower. I
Speaker 1: just hope that when you look, go through midtown. You
Speaker 1: see all that retail that exists on the ground floor
Speaker 1: of the restaurants, the shoe stores and everything else. I
Speaker 1: just really worry are all those people because they through
Speaker 1: this whole COVID thing, They've had absolutely nobody there. It
Speaker 1: was like a ghost town. It's amazing how many companies
Speaker 1: going out of business. Like you go to a web site,
Speaker 1: well I want to. I remember it's like the hiking
Speaker 1: store and whist l A been there. My whole life
Speaker 1: just went. And it's like the last of that type. Okay,
Speaker 1: what's your take on l A, Because you do have
Speaker 1: a house in l A. I saw that. I got
Speaker 1: up in Santa herber Now, so you're in Montecito, Okay,
Speaker 1: how often are you in Monito? Well, usually two months
Speaker 1: a year. But I did eight of the eight of
Speaker 1: the uh I called him now the pandemic months. I
Speaker 1: did eight of them there, and I gotta say, I
Speaker 1: fell in love with California all over again. And you know,
Speaker 1: I just got out of that big place I'm up
Speaker 1: on up on a mountain in a wildfire zone. But
Speaker 1: it was it was nice. It was you know, se
Speaker 1: the season change, not traveling, it was it was like
Speaker 1: there was a silver lining to it all. But I
Speaker 1: I I fell back in love with California. You know,
Speaker 1: I love one thing I love about California and is
Speaker 1: all the East Coast bullshit doesn't exist. No one ever
Speaker 1: asked you what you got on your S A T S.
Speaker 1: Where you went to college. Everybody's so full of ship
Speaker 1: that if you come from the East Coast it's great,
Speaker 1: everybody's gonna make it and all this other stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: when you're playing an elite level, it's certainly something different. Okay, Tom,
Speaker 1: I'll let you go. This has been great. That's terrific.
Speaker 1: Bob Okay, really enjoyed myself. I got to see you.
Speaker 1: You're back until next time. This is Bob left sles