Speaker 1: You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey there are podcast listeners.
Speaker 1: I'm Monga's starticular ak Mango, and Will is off today.
Speaker 2: But I've gotten an incredible treat for you. If you've
Speaker 2: listened to the show, you know how much I loved
Speaker 2: Nickelodeon as a kid. My friends and I in third
Speaker 2: grade used to practice for Doubledare every day in the summer,
Speaker 2: just waiting for the execs to call spoiler alert. They
Speaker 2: never did, but I love the way Nickelodeon felt like
Speaker 2: it was talking to me and really providing this channel
Speaker 2: for me.
Speaker 1: And then years later it was the same with MTV
Speaker 1: and then Comedy Central, and weirdly enough, these channels were
Speaker 1: something that I thought a lot about when Will and
Speaker 1: I founded Mental Flaws years and years ago. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: reason I am telling you any of this is that
Speaker 1: for today's show, I am interviewing the wonderful Tom Freston,
Speaker 1: one of the co founders of a scrappy little TV
Speaker 1: channel called MTV, which grew into a massive, massive bohemo.
Speaker 1: From MTV, he became president of MTV Networks, guiding Nickelodeon
Speaker 1: VH one, Comedy Central, TV Land and all these other
Speaker 1: channels through incredible eras of creativity. He is such a
Speaker 1: hero to me. Then he became CEO Viacom. But the
Speaker 1: truth is, none of this is the most interesting stuff
Speaker 1: about him. After college, he hitchhiked across northern Africa. He
Speaker 1: spent years in India running a clothing company. He even
Speaker 1: helped launch a media network in Afghanistan. He is a
Speaker 1: world traveler, a philanthropist, and best of all, he is
Speaker 1: an incredible, incredible storyteller. So I was really excited when
Speaker 1: he agreed to sit down with me and talk about
Speaker 1: his new book. It's called Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Timbucktoo.
Speaker 1: It is so good, such a wonderful read, and we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about it here. Let's dive in.
Speaker 3: So I'm here with Tom Preston, author of Unplugged Adventures
Speaker 3: from MTV to Timbuck two. It's out now. It is
Speaker 3: an extraordinary book. I've got to say, this book reminded
Speaker 3: me of two books I really love. One is The
Speaker 3: Man Who Time Forgot and another one called Barbarian Days.
Speaker 3: And Barbarian Days is about like surfing and chasing this
Speaker 3: high of travel in a way. And the Man who
Speaker 3: Time Forgot is about britt Hadden, who was the co
Speaker 3: founder of Time magazine, and the way that they were
Speaker 3: just so creative and inventive in the way they started
Speaker 3: that magazine and so like, there's something about both of
Speaker 3: those that really was inspiring to me. But first I
Speaker 3: want to start with just who this book is made
Speaker 3: out to. It's made out to your brother and your sons.
Speaker 3: Can you tell me about why you dedicated to them?
Speaker 4: Well, I love my sons, that's obvious and it would
Speaker 4: be true for any father. And my dear brother who
Speaker 4: was my only sibling. He was a couple of years
Speaker 4: younger than me. He helped me out a lot in life,
Speaker 4: and he had a tragic death this last winter in
Speaker 4: the Caribbean. He fell down a flight of stairs. I mean,
Speaker 4: you never know when it hits you, and kind of
Speaker 4: went into a coma and never came out.
Speaker 3: And what do you want your sons to know from
Speaker 3: this book about your life?
Speaker 4: That their life is full of possibility, that they don't
Speaker 4: have to be trapped into one thing. They can change
Speaker 4: lines and find things that are maybe suited for them.
Speaker 4: This is a time of great change in the employment area,
Speaker 4: and a lot of businesses that have sort of lost
Speaker 4: their luster, new ones that are emerging, and they should
Speaker 4: not be afraid to start different chapters in their lives.
Speaker 3: I love that, you know. I love openings of books.
Speaker 3: And the opening to your book starts with the chainsaw,
Speaker 3: which is just such an incredible image. Can you can
Speaker 3: you talk a little bit about why you started your
Speaker 3: book there?
Speaker 4: Well, I started my book because the opening scene is
Speaker 4: me getting fired after you know, twenty six years at
Speaker 4: this company, the company that started MTV and evolved into
Speaker 4: something so much bigger, to several incarnations, and the chainsaw
Speaker 4: was sent to me years earlier. This is sometime in
Speaker 4: the nineties by the heavy metal band Anthrax. You know,
Speaker 4: they were heavy metal band. They'd all autographed it, and
Speaker 4: I used to get a lot of you know, gold
Speaker 4: records since that jacket, stuff like that. But this was
Speaker 4: a useful gift. And I was clearing out my office
Speaker 4: after I got fired. I got fired in Los Angeles.
Speaker 4: I came back to New York and I only wanted
Speaker 4: to take a few things that were sentimental. But I
Speaker 4: thought besides the sentimental photos and whatnot, you know, I
Speaker 4: could use that chain, so I didn't have one, and
Speaker 4: it'd be a useful gift, So I put it in
Speaker 4: a banker's box with a few other things that was
Speaker 4: a small one, and made my way down the elevator
Speaker 4: to a lobby to exit.
Speaker 3: You talk about the exit from Viacom and you merge
Speaker 3: there and they're just a sea of people waiting to
Speaker 3: say goodbye to you, and love for you is palpable.
Speaker 3: And it's funny because one of the producers on this
Speaker 3: show worked at Comedy Central after you'd left, and she says,
Speaker 3: like people still talk fondly about the Tom Freston era,
Speaker 3: which is so sweet and also just a testament to
Speaker 3: like all the fun and excitement and things you brought there.
Speaker 4: Well, we had a really unique culture, and I always
Speaker 4: put the idea of us having a creative culture and
Speaker 4: innovative culture really in the forefront. Is as how I
Speaker 4: wanted this company to be, to edgy, to be you know,
Speaker 4: casual and non hierarchical and risk taking and a place
Speaker 4: at treasured creativity. And in my exit, as CNBC said,
Speaker 4: there was like a thousand people in the lobby cheering
Speaker 4: me on, cheering me out, give me a Heroes exit.
Speaker 4: I had thought I could just sneak out, you know,
Speaker 4: I have a bit of the imposter syndrome and a
Speaker 4: mask had been ripped off now and I was depressed,
Speaker 4: no doubt about it. But this gave me a great
Speaker 4: lift off that still stays with me. I remember getting down,
Speaker 4: getting through the lobby was all in slow motion. Down
Speaker 4: the escalator into Times Square. I too my stuff into
Speaker 4: a taxi got in rolled by the Broadway theaters, and
Speaker 4: I said, you know, that was a good way to go.
Speaker 3: It's such an incredible career and obviously not where it stopped,
Speaker 3: because there are so many amazing things that go on
Speaker 3: after that. But take me back to the beginning of
Speaker 3: your first interactions with TV and what meant to have
Speaker 3: a TV in the household initially.
Speaker 4: Well, I kind of grew up in a Leave It
Speaker 4: to Beaver Way, if people out there remember what that
Speaker 4: was about. That was sort of an all American post
Speaker 4: war family, two brothers, a mother, and a husband, stay
Speaker 4: at home mom. I grew up in the fifties. I
Speaker 4: was an early baby boomer, and you know, television came
Speaker 4: out black and white. We had one TV and we
Speaker 4: would sit around and watch the shows of the day,
Speaker 4: and you know, I mean one of the great moments
Speaker 4: was in nineteen fifty six sitting around my family and
Speaker 4: seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show. I think
Speaker 4: there was like sixty million people watching. It was like
Speaker 4: like the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show years later,
Speaker 4: but it was like a hurricane passed through the room,
Speaker 4: and my mother and father were disgusted. My brother and
Speaker 4: I were elated, and we kind of knew. I was
Speaker 4: in sixth grade, we kind of knew that we were
Speaker 4: going to grow up in a different world, with our
Speaker 4: own music, with our own clothes, with our own style,
Speaker 4: and we were sort of part of a new generation
Speaker 4: that was really setting sale from the prior one, the
Speaker 4: generation they would call the Great American Generation, the people
Speaker 4: who fought in World War two and so forth. So
Speaker 4: television was always there, and I followed a lot of
Speaker 4: the shows, but I was in truth more interested in
Speaker 4: the music of the era and spent a lot more
Speaker 4: time listening to the early rock and roll radio stations.
Speaker 3: You know, one of the things that I've heard a
Speaker 3: lot about the early MTV days is that most of
Speaker 3: the people were hired were people who hated television. Did
Speaker 3: you fall into that category?
Speaker 4: Well, when I got my job interview, they said, you know,
Speaker 4: we're looking for people with absolutely no experience in television,
Speaker 4: which is an unlikely line at a television company. But
Speaker 4: it was the early stays of the cable programming era
Speaker 4: and we were sort of the tip of the speer
Speaker 4: out there with CNN, ESPN and cable was really just beginning.
Speaker 4: It was mostly in rural areas, but they couldn't afford
Speaker 4: to hire people who worked at the broadcast networks. There
Speaker 4: was really only three or four places to work in
Speaker 4: those days if you include PBS, and they didn't want
Speaker 4: anyone bringing along any kind of expensive production habits, so
Speaker 4: we had to sort of start from scratch, an event
Speaker 4: from zero, And in retrospect, it was a brilliant move
Speaker 4: to hire school teachers and people from radio stations and
Speaker 4: record companies and me I came out of eight years
Speaker 4: of living in Afghanistan and India, so it was a
Speaker 4: great mixing pot of eccentrics and people who wouldn't normally
Speaker 4: work in any kind of normal company. And we were
Speaker 4: all on crusade either to you know, take Nickelodeon or
Speaker 4: MTV across the nation and infuse it with our own
Speaker 4: spirit and make it a very obvious counterpoint to the
Speaker 4: traditional program that was being done on the networks. We
Speaker 4: were the early narrow casters, as we were known, just
Speaker 4: programming one thing to one audience as opposed to general
Speaker 4: interest stuff like ABC, NBC and CBS.
Speaker 3: It's funny, there's like an old Garfield comic where they're
Speaker 3: joking about narrowcasting and talking about like a food network,
Speaker 3: and it's just a picture of lasagna, and I'm like
Speaker 3: a picture of like a refrigerator or whatever, and not
Speaker 3: really realizing that like a food network could be a
Speaker 3: massive thing, or a music network could have a tremendous
Speaker 3: influence on the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we used to joke there could be a time network,
Speaker 4: there could be all kinds of useless networks. But I
Speaker 4: remember a man from the music industry, Bob Krasnow, came
Speaker 4: to me once. He says, I got the greatest idea
Speaker 4: in the world for you. This was nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 4: I was then the CEO of MTV Networks, which ruled
Speaker 4: over you know, Comedy Central and pH one and MTV
Speaker 4: and Nick and I got the greatest idea in the
Speaker 4: world for you. Says, food is going to be the
Speaker 4: new rock and roll. Chefs are going to be the
Speaker 4: new rock stars. I thought he was crazy. I was
Speaker 4: too trapped in my own thing and didn't have the
Speaker 4: vision to think that this could possibly be true. But
Speaker 4: sure enough, everything he said came out to be true.
Speaker 4: And I missed the boat on that one.
Speaker 3: Well, you mentioned that before where MTV you had been
Speaker 3: traveling abroad. You've been in Afghanistan. Tell me about you
Speaker 3: as a child. Were you adventurous? What were your thoughts
Speaker 3: about the world beyond Connecticut where you were growing up.
Speaker 4: You know, we never went anywhere. My father fought in
Speaker 4: World War Two and when he came back, he was
Speaker 4: in the Pacific Theater. He didn't want to go anywhere,
Speaker 4: and we only took one trip and that was like
Speaker 4: sixty miles from our house to a mystic Connecticut where
Speaker 4: they had some smelly old whaling ships. That was a
Speaker 4: day trip. That was our only trip. So I was
Speaker 4: sort of trapped there listening to radio from New York
Speaker 4: City and gradually buying some record albums. And I was
Speaker 4: a young boy. I was a stamp collector, and I
Speaker 4: was always fascinated by exotic stamps, from you know, Africa
Speaker 4: and Southeast Asia. I'd have stamps from Zanzibar and all
Speaker 4: these faraway places. And you know, that, mixed in with
Speaker 4: some shows of television about the French Foreign Legion in
Speaker 4: Algeria and so forth, really captured my interest. But I
Speaker 4: had only been in two states, New York and Connecticut
Speaker 4: when I left to go to college on a bus.
Speaker 3: And how is it that you end up working in
Speaker 3: bars and various vacation towns during and after college.
Speaker 4: Well, I went to graduate school primarily to get out
Speaker 4: of the draft. I went to business school, which turned
Speaker 4: out to be a blessing in disguise. And when that
Speaker 4: was done, I realized I'd been eighteen years in school.
Speaker 4: I could use a break. And I had been sort
Speaker 4: of entranced by the literature of the Beats, which was
Speaker 4: all about you know, experience is a key thing in life,
Speaker 4: not so much money, travel around. It's the world's greatest classroom,
Speaker 4: build up a body of experiences. So that was one thing.
Speaker 4: And then at the time, this was the late sixties
Speaker 4: early seventies, freedom was in the air. Every other song
Speaker 4: had something about hitting the road or leaving the road.
Speaker 4: Joni Mitchell had a big album out called Blue, which
Speaker 4: I loved and played incessantly. It was all about her
Speaker 4: internet adventures, and my appetite was sort of wet and
Speaker 4: ready to go. But I spent a year after school
Speaker 4: tending bar in various resort towns Aspen, Saint Thomas, and
Speaker 4: the Virgin Islands Martha's Vineyard that was known as sort
Speaker 4: of life on the circuit. This was before mass tourism,
Speaker 4: so I really was lucky in the sense that I
Speaker 4: had a window to be in the Caribbean before the
Speaker 4: big cruise ships and the resorts that you never leave.
Speaker 4: Martha's in her Nassen were nowhere near the lux vacation
Speaker 4: towns for billionaires. They were mostly filled with hippies and outlaws.
Speaker 3: Yes, hippies and outlaws, But you also ran into some
Speaker 3: incredible company when you were in some of these places,
Speaker 3: right like James Taylor shows off and some incredible musicians Sale.
Speaker 4: Or Well, he was the big on Martha's Vinyard. He
Speaker 4: had just sort of come out with his Sweet Baby
Speaker 4: James album, and you know, it was sort of the
Speaker 4: beginning of the year of the singer songwriters. And his
Speaker 4: brother Alex, who I grew to New he had a
Speaker 4: record store in town and they had speakers outside and
Speaker 4: they would play incessantly James's two records all the time.
Speaker 4: But I met James, I met Tom Rush, who was
Speaker 4: a folk singer, and some other people, and that would
Speaker 4: be something that that would be bumping into people for
Speaker 4: the rest of my life. Out of the music business.
Speaker 4: Twenty six years at this company, the company that started MTV,
Speaker 4: and we're evolved into something so much bigger.
Speaker 2: We've got to take a quick pause.
Speaker 1: But back with Tom Freston right after this break.
Speaker 3: You know, on one hand you mentioned this like imposter syndrome,
Speaker 3: and on the other hand you've talked about how your
Speaker 3: dad is like really charismatic in this book and can
Speaker 3: talk to anyone. Did you have a problem approaching celebrities
Speaker 3: and things like that or did you grow into a
Speaker 3: comfort with that. How did that emerge?
Speaker 4: You know, I was never a starstruck. I find it
Speaker 4: kind of natural to talk to him, because, you know,
Speaker 4: if you were able to get beyond the managers and
Speaker 4: the record companies and talk directly to artists, you'd find
Speaker 4: out they didn't have this huge aura around them. They
Speaker 4: were approachable and they liked to talk you'd talk to
Speaker 4: David Bowie, He'd want to know what books you were reading.
Speaker 4: They'd be interested in you as much as you be
Speaker 4: interested in them, so you could really speak to them
Speaker 4: as if they were normal people, even though they might
Speaker 4: have been traveling in many cases with a big entourage
Speaker 4: around them. But I would say, of the everybody I met,
Speaker 4: and over the years, I think I met every pop star,
Speaker 4: movie star, president, magazine editor and so forth, it was
Speaker 4: really the Beatles and David Bowie who were hitting shoulders
Speaker 4: above all else and sort of the musical pantheon. But
Speaker 4: even them, even those two, I got to know a
Speaker 4: bit over.
Speaker 3: Time, which just feels astounding the fact that you end
Speaker 3: up later in Asana with David Bowie and Paul McCartney
Speaker 3: and I want to talk about that, but before we
Speaker 3: get to that, I am so fascinated with My twin
Speaker 3: interests are like media and travel. Right Like, I was
Speaker 3: an anthropology major, and one of the things I love
Speaker 3: is just your ability to pick up and go to
Speaker 3: Morocco and start traveling from there, and what drove you
Speaker 3: to just leave everything and do that.
Speaker 4: Well, after I spent a year on the road on
Speaker 4: the circuit. If you will you know, tending bar and
Speaker 4: resort towns. I got a job in a big New
Speaker 4: York ad agency and I got on the fast track.
Speaker 4: My first account was Gi Joe. This is an anti
Speaker 4: war period, so we had to give him sort of
Speaker 4: an honorary discharge and make him an action man. And
Speaker 4: then I had a variety of other accounts that were
Speaker 4: Procter and Gamble accounts. That was a big piece of
Speaker 4: business for the agency. And I was going to be
Speaker 4: assigned to charman toilet Paper, who had a big campaign
Speaker 4: at a time called Don't Squeeze, a charman with this
Speaker 4: character named mister Whipple, who research would show by nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy three he was like the third most known and
Speaker 4: admired man in America, which seemed incredulous. But I couldn't
Speaker 4: really face the idea of selling toilet paper. And an
Speaker 4: old girlfriend who was in Paris called me up and said,
Speaker 4: you know you can't do that, Tom. Why don't you
Speaker 4: quit your job and come with me. I'm going to
Speaker 4: go across the Sahara Desert, which sounded really appealing to me,
Speaker 4: as like impetus I needed. I had five thousand dollars saved,
Speaker 4: so I was on a plane like a week later.
Speaker 4: That sort of set in place. One of the major
Speaker 4: decisions of my life kind of really freed me and
Speaker 4: I was able to go out into the greater world
Speaker 4: and learn a lot, build up my confidence, and learn
Speaker 4: things that would ultimately help me a lot in my
Speaker 4: business life.
Speaker 3: You know, It's funny. Before I went into magazines and
Speaker 3: my friends and I started a magazine, I had worked
Speaker 3: in advertising in India for a summer and I spent
Speaker 3: the whole summer making a washing machine ads and like,
Speaker 3: it was so creative and so fun and the people
Speaker 3: around me were just like brilliant creatives. And on the
Speaker 3: other hand, to spend your whole life making people feel
Speaker 3: like one washing machine was better than other washing machine
Speaker 3: when they were the same washing machine was just like
Speaker 3: hard to imagine. But it feels like you found a
Speaker 3: way to align your business and passions. Starting with being
Speaker 3: in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in my travels, I ended up in Afghanistan and India.
Speaker 4: India was sort of the holy Grail in those days
Speaker 4: in terms of traveling. And I had met this girl
Speaker 4: in Greece who had lived in Nepole and she used
Speaker 4: to make clothes in India and Afghanistan and put them
Speaker 4: in trunks and take them overland and sell them like
Speaker 4: in beach hotspots in Greece and Italy in the summertime.
Speaker 4: She had her own little vertically integrated enterprise. So I
Speaker 4: fell in love with Afghanistan from the first day I
Speaker 4: got there. It seemed like people think Afghanistan's a place
Speaker 4: at constant war, but this was a tail end of
Speaker 4: fifty years of what they called the Golden Age. There
Speaker 4: was no war. Afghanistan was steadily moving into trying to
Speaker 4: embrace a form of marginity, and the people were welcoming.
Speaker 4: And the few tourists would see a poster there that
Speaker 4: said visit Afghanistan and see the world's friendliest people. If
Speaker 4: you went, then that's what you would think. But there
Speaker 4: were no cars. You were totally there was no advertising.
Speaker 4: You were totally removed from modern life, which was sort
Speaker 4: of intoxicating for me. And there was just a grand
Speaker 4: you know, vistas and beautiful geography, and I developed a
Speaker 4: fascination with the people. That really led to like a
Speaker 4: five decade love affair for me. And I went on
Speaker 4: to India, which was like the crushing India of the
Speaker 4: seventies that was their most turbulent decade. Sixty percent of
Speaker 4: the population was below the poverty line, and it was crowded,
Speaker 4: and I was fascinated, though I was just skimming the service,
Speaker 4: but I thought, maybe there's something for me here. How
Speaker 4: could I start a business doing what that woman had done,
Speaker 4: scale it up and get a house in New Delhi
Speaker 4: and begin to live in a totally farign place and
Speaker 4: making design clothes and sell them to better stores in
Speaker 4: the US and elsewhere. And what was a dream became
Speaker 4: a really solid, multimillion dollar business. It grew faster than
Speaker 4: I ever had imagined. I had to hire staff, open showrooms, warehouses,
Speaker 4: and it ultimately consumed me. But in the end, having
Speaker 4: made a lot of money, I lost it. All bad
Speaker 4: things happened. We had the Russians invade Afghanistan, and then
Speaker 4: Jimmy Carter he put an embargo and huge tariffs on
Speaker 4: any clothing from India, much as like we see today
Speaker 4: with Trump, and my business went under. I came back
Speaker 4: to New York after eight years of that, with my
Speaker 4: tail between my legs, looking for a new career in
Speaker 4: a new leson life in a new lane.
Speaker 3: But what you accomplished was insane the way that you
Speaker 3: got these clothes into boutiques and larger stores. But did
Speaker 3: you imagine yourself living the rest of your life out
Speaker 3: in Asia at that time or had you thought always
Speaker 3: that you'd come back to the States.
Speaker 4: No, I thought i'd stay. I mean, listen, I was young,
Speaker 4: I have anything to lose, and I felt so alive there.
Speaker 4: Life is so vivid, and it was so different from
Speaker 4: the conformist Connecticut that I had grown up in. And
Speaker 4: I had a circle of friends. I had developed a lot,
Speaker 4: and there was a circle of foreigners around that were
Speaker 4: kind of like minded. I developed a wide circle of
Speaker 4: friends in Afghanistan and India who were local. I said, man,
Speaker 4: this is the life for me. You know, I'm with
Speaker 4: kindred spirits. I'm seeing new places. I wanted to learn
Speaker 4: as much as I can about those countries, travel as
Speaker 4: far within them as possible, and go on to Southeast Asia.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I thought this was it. I had stumbled
Speaker 4: into something that, you know, met all my needs. But
Speaker 4: it was not to be.
Speaker 3: So tell me about your interview with MTV.
Speaker 4: Well, when I got back, I I knew I had
Speaker 4: to start a new line of work, and I had
Speaker 4: bought the only self help book I ever bought in
Speaker 4: my life, What Color is Your Parachute, the premise of
Speaker 4: which was, you have transferable skills. You can do different
Speaker 4: things in your life. You can have different career paths,
Speaker 4: and you can transfer those skills, and you should align
Speaker 4: your skills again with something that you love. And they
Speaker 4: had a whole little analysis to help you figure out
Speaker 4: what that could possibly be. I had loved being in
Speaker 4: Asia and being there, but then this analysis show them
Speaker 4: my other love that I had some knowledge of was
Speaker 4: rock and roll. How do I get in on that?
Speaker 4: So I began looking for jobs in the music industry,
Speaker 4: which was, you know, at a difficult but interesting time
Speaker 4: in its evolution. My brother lined me up with an
Speaker 4: interview at a company that was going to start a
Speaker 4: series of specialized networks. It was called want Aramic Satellite
Speaker 4: Entertainment Company. They started the Movie Channel, they started Nickelodeon,
Speaker 4: they had plans to start a thing called a music channel.
Speaker 4: And my brother got me an interview there and they
Speaker 4: told me we're looking for people with no experience in television.
Speaker 4: So I kind of said, they didn't even have television
Speaker 4: where I'd come from. And I got hired as the
Speaker 4: head of marketing. I mean it was amazing, amazing confluence
Speaker 4: of time because if it had been a month later
Speaker 4: or a month before, these jobs wouldn't have been available. So,
Speaker 4: you know, serendipity kind of put me in the right
Speaker 4: place at the right time, and all those skills. As
Speaker 4: I said earlier, that I had developed sort of my
Speaker 4: heart scrabble close to the ground life in Asia, where
Speaker 4: I worked really hard would helped me out immensely in
Speaker 4: my career and where I ultimately was, you know, the
Speaker 4: CEO of a creative enterprise full of eccentric people.
Speaker 3: What was it about taking on the MTV job that
Speaker 3: might have felt intimidating and then what felt easy because
Speaker 3: you'd done it before.
Speaker 4: Well, I had a lot to learn about the media business,
Speaker 4: but I did a lot of research. I was always
Speaker 4: a good researcher. I would dig up Wall Street Analyst reports.
Speaker 4: People would send me about where this where the cable
Speaker 4: television programming world was going. I knew the music, I
Speaker 4: knew in tuitively. I had to figure out how we
Speaker 4: would promote this thing so people would want it. But
Speaker 4: that almost became a fatacom plea because when I would
Speaker 4: go out to the early markets. The few markets where
Speaker 4: we existed, people had seen MTV on television. It had
Speaker 4: kind of they woke up one day and it was
Speaker 4: on their cable system. They didn't have to sign up
Speaker 4: for it. It was in the basic package, and it
Speaker 4: was so groundbreaking and innovative. It's hard to imagine today
Speaker 4: that MTV was like that. This wasn't like a flying
Speaker 4: car or something, but it was something radically different on
Speaker 4: television that had a whole new visual style. It was music.
Speaker 4: If you liked music, you know, you couldn't tear yourself
Speaker 4: away from looking at music videos, which were really a
Speaker 4: whole new program form. At that point in time. Most
Speaker 4: people had had no exposure to music videos before the
Speaker 4: advent of MTV.
Speaker 3: I grew up an era where Nickelodeon had really found
Speaker 3: us footing and loved that and then graduated to MTV,
Speaker 3: and obviously it affected me a lot in terms of
Speaker 3: just like feeling like it was built for me. Both
Speaker 3: those things, both those brands really taught me a lot,
Speaker 3: I felt like as just a consumer. But then watching
Speaker 3: the way India was affected by MTV and the way
Speaker 3: that it sort of over the course of a summer
Speaker 3: changed how people dressed, how they thought about the world.
Speaker 3: It just showed me the power of the medium and
Speaker 3: just an extraordinary way that I'd never thought about before.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, with VH one and then later Comedy Central,
Speaker 4: we kind of built a business that was all about kids,
Speaker 4: teens and young adults, and we had a sizeable sort
Speaker 4: of research cohort. We would try and get into the
Speaker 4: minds of these people and find out what could we
Speaker 4: do that these people would find interesting, What could we
Speaker 4: do to be a step ahead of them, And really,
Speaker 4: if we could make that connection with the audience and
Speaker 4: build up loyalty in an era that was going to
Speaker 4: have more and more choices and be more and more competitive,
Speaker 4: if we could solidify that relationship and continue to refresh it,
Speaker 4: you know, everything else we needed in our business would
Speaker 4: kind of fall into place. So we really kept our
Speaker 4: finger on the pulse and we had a lot of
Speaker 4: creative people doing that. And when we went to India,
Speaker 4: which was a thrill for me to be back back
Speaker 4: on the street hawking something new in India, which was
Speaker 4: just coming out of an era where they had like
Speaker 4: one TV channel called Dordischan and now satellite and cable
Speaker 4: were taking over India, making it for a long time
Speaker 4: the most vibrant television market in the world. It was
Speaker 4: a thrill to hire young creative Indians who could put
Speaker 4: together their own version of what they thought an Indian
Speaker 4: MTV could look like. And yes, that and other channels
Speaker 4: really had a huge cultural impact on the country. Someone
Speaker 4: did a research study once saying that soap operas produced
Speaker 4: in what was then Bombay, in sort of middle class neighborhoods,
Speaker 4: when they were bound by satellite into Indian villages, which
Speaker 4: was where like seventy percent of the population lived, had
Speaker 4: a huge impact on women in terms of their desire
Speaker 4: to see their daughter educated, their desire to kind of shrink,
Speaker 4: their desired family size, aspirational things about what to wear
Speaker 4: and dress. And they said that like in one month
Speaker 4: you could get what normally would have been six months
Speaker 4: worth of social progress. So it was interesting and I
Speaker 4: believe that I saw that with my own eyes. Television
Speaker 4: is a great cultural influencer.
Speaker 1: We've got to take a quick pause, but back with
Speaker 1: Tom Freston right after this break.
Speaker 3: One of the things that's so fun about this is
Speaker 3: that the book is full of adventures and not just
Speaker 3: the travel adventures, but also the ones at MTV. And
Speaker 3: you talk about chasing down David Bowie to do a campaign.
Speaker 3: Will you tell that story here?
Speaker 4: Sure? Well, I wanted this book to be I didn't
Speaker 4: want it to be a business book because there's so
Speaker 4: many of those. I thought, well, if I could. The
Speaker 4: pandemic is when I wrote it, so I had time
Speaker 4: on my hands that if I can make this more
Speaker 4: of an adventure story, it'd be interesting to me. And
Speaker 4: let's pick out ten to fifteen of my favorite adventures,
Speaker 4: if you will. One involved how we kind of saved
Speaker 4: the network from the dustbin. We had got into like
Speaker 4: two million homes. But we found out that the cable operators,
Speaker 4: this is in the early eighties, who had geographic monopolies everywhere,
Speaker 4: they didn't want to add MTV out to their cable
Speaker 4: systems because they didn't believe one people would want to
Speaker 4: watch music on television. Two they want to pay us
Speaker 4: ten cents a month because that would cut into their
Speaker 4: profit margins. And three they didn't like the kind of
Speaker 4: music we were playing anyway. They were more like Elvis
Speaker 4: Presley fans. So we deduced that in places where we
Speaker 4: were the fans were very avid and Rabbit. If we
Speaker 4: could know harness them to demand that they cable companies
Speaker 4: they had would add MTV to their systems, it would
Speaker 4: conceive it would be the only thing that could save
Speaker 4: us from going out of business because we would use
Speaker 4: the customers to basically demand it, and then we would
Speaker 4: roll out across the country, which we did. So we
Speaker 4: ripped off an old campaign called I Want My MAPO,
Speaker 4: which Vermont kind of quasi oatmeal manufacturer had used to
Speaker 4: reach the young baby boomers to torment their parents so
Speaker 4: they would buy this cereal instead of corn flakes or
Speaker 4: something which worked. So we figured if we did that,
Speaker 4: it would help if we were legitimized by having the
Speaker 4: characters and the ads be rock stars. So we got
Speaker 4: Nick Jagger, we got Pete Townsend of The Who, David Bowie,
Speaker 4: Hall and Oates the Billy Idle. I mad go down
Speaker 4: a list because I was involved in making those advertisements
Speaker 4: for a couple of years. In three years, we basically
Speaker 4: wrapped up the whole country market by market. But in
Speaker 4: the case of David Bowie, which I was assigned to do,
Speaker 4: is like, well you get him to do this, and
Speaker 4: we had found out that it was easier to reach
Speaker 4: the artist. I called his manager and she said, well,
Speaker 4: he's skiing in Stott, Switzerland. He'll do it if you
Speaker 4: want to go over there. It won't take long. So
Speaker 4: he said, yeah, I got a crew. We jumped on
Speaker 4: a plane. We flew to Geneva, we got on a
Speaker 4: train to Stot. We went out to this little hillside
Speaker 4: outside the main ski area and met David and he
Speaker 4: was looking trim and in a good mood and blonde hair,
Speaker 4: and he was in his Let's Dance era and he
Speaker 4: wanted to ski down. He knew what he wanted to do.
Speaker 4: Ski down and then swish at the bottom and say
Speaker 4: I want my MTV. We did a few takes. We
Speaker 4: said we'll take that back and post production will put
Speaker 4: the logo in there. And he wanted the logo to
Speaker 4: be on skis. So when it was finished he said,
Speaker 4: anybody want to go skiing or hang out? And you know,
Speaker 4: I had nothing else to do. And then at the
Speaker 4: end of the day he said, hey, Tom, you want
Speaker 4: to go for a sauna later at the Palace Hotel,
Speaker 4: which was a Grondam hotel in Stadd. I said sure,
Speaker 4: So I went back to our hotel tell where the
Speaker 4: crew was staying, which was a couple of levels above
Speaker 4: a youth hostel. I said, I'll see you losers later,
Speaker 4: and I went to the spa and saw David and
Speaker 4: we got outfitted in our towels and went into the sauna.
Speaker 4: There was only one other person in there, and he
Speaker 4: was high up on a platform, and it was Paul McCartney.
Speaker 4: So here I am, this kid from Connecticut and now
Speaker 4: in a sauna with my two biggest heroes, you know,
Speaker 4: and wrapped in a towel. And they made it very
Speaker 4: comfortable for me. You know, we throw water on the fire.
Speaker 4: They wanted to know all about MTV, which was easy
Speaker 4: for me to talk about. You know, it was not
Speaker 4: intimidating at all. And I've been dining out on this
Speaker 4: story for years.
Speaker 3: That's just an incredible story. And you say that one
Speaker 3: of the things that's important to do is make a
Speaker 3: lot of mistakes. Can you tell me about some of
Speaker 3: the mistakes at MTV as you were trying to reinvent
Speaker 3: yourself and what you learn from them.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, we took a lot of risks, so
Speaker 4: we put a lot of shows on the air and
Speaker 4: they just wouldn't work. So they'd disappear, they would die
Speaker 4: a rapid death, and we back with something else that
Speaker 4: it would work better. It was the same with Nickelodeon
Speaker 4: and VH one and whatnot, and we certainly had our
Speaker 4: share of turkeys. I remember we had an animated show
Speaker 4: we really liked. It was by these guys in Scandinavia
Speaker 4: made it called The Grunt Brothers of All Things. We
Speaker 4: put that on the air. We thought that was going
Speaker 4: to be really cool and great. It was not. So
Speaker 4: Somewhere someone sitting around with six episodes of that in
Speaker 4: a drawer. Maybe they'll come back one day. I don't know.
Speaker 4: But why I encourage people to take risks, and that
Speaker 4: involved trying stuff because you never know what's going to work.
Speaker 4: I mean in the movie business they always used to say,
Speaker 4: you know, the most movies fail. On television, most shows
Speaker 4: don't succeed. We had a higher batting average in a
Speaker 4: lot of places, but still most of the stuff we
Speaker 4: tried didn't work, and it would just kind of go
Speaker 4: away and onto the next thing.
Speaker 3: How did you know when to put more money into
Speaker 3: something and when to keep the reins really tight and
Speaker 3: allow creativity to change a format or build something new.
Speaker 4: Well, we always had a budget we had to live under,
Speaker 4: and we dellocate money to certain things in development, and
Speaker 4: if we saw something was working, we'd put more money
Speaker 4: into it. Sometimes you had to put up a lot
Speaker 4: of money up front, and that was sometimes, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of less in our ability to do things. For example,
Speaker 4: at one point we had decided, at one point, if
Speaker 4: we took ten percent of the one hundred and sixty
Speaker 4: eight hours a week we were on and did things
Speaker 4: other than straight music videos, we can make MPTV a
Speaker 4: bigger place by being about some of the things that
Speaker 4: pop culture was about, something that the music was about,
Speaker 4: be that fashion or sports, or live events or movies.
Speaker 4: And at one point we someone came in and said,
Speaker 4: you know, Fox Network has started. They're targeting younger audiences.
Speaker 4: They have these great popular soap operas. Why don't we
Speaker 4: try doing a soap opera but make it a little edgier,
Speaker 4: a little more gritty. And it turns out for us
Speaker 4: to do it, we would have had to hire writers.
Speaker 4: They came to meet this fellow, Doug Herzog came to
Speaker 4: me with the presentation, and we could do a soap opera,
Speaker 4: produce something every day and we'd have to have writers
Speaker 4: and regular actors. And I said, you know, this is
Speaker 4: a great idea. We probably could do it, but we
Speaker 4: don't have the money. So they came back. He went
Speaker 4: to these producers Una Murray with their names, and they
Speaker 4: came back and said, well, okay, we were good at
Speaker 4: post production, so why don't we just rent Aloft and
Speaker 4: Soho and put some hidden cameras in there and get
Speaker 4: like six to eight people, you know, cast them real
Speaker 4: regular people, not stars, and have them live together and
Speaker 4: let's see what happens. Because we knew that young people
Speaker 4: love to see cues from people their age of how
Speaker 4: they were living and what they were thinking. You know,
Speaker 4: every time we turned the cameras on the audience, they
Speaker 4: really enjoyed that. So that was the birth of the
Speaker 4: Real World. And that started and kicked off really a
Speaker 4: whole movement towards reality television, which doesn't always bring out
Speaker 4: the best in American character, but nonetheless was a huge hit.
Speaker 4: And it was always driven by the fact that people
Speaker 4: wanted to see what kids their own age were doing.
Speaker 4: The problem was, as he went on, I mean the
Speaker 4: early cast, they had no idea what it was going
Speaker 4: to become. They went into the show no pretensions or
Speaker 4: errors or intentions. But then later on, as they realized
Speaker 4: all these people became famous. When you began to cast people,
Speaker 4: they would pretend to have more outrageous personalities. So these
Speaker 4: shows became more exaggerated in terms of, you know, the
Speaker 4: norm of human behavior, but the audience ate that up
Speaker 4: as well, and then they were as different category as
Speaker 4: a reality show, celebrity reality shows. We kind of kicked
Speaker 4: that off with the Osbournes following Ozzy around with Sharon,
Speaker 4: his wife and the kids, and then you know, they
Speaker 4: came along and Dey's contests like Mark Burnett did with
Speaker 4: The Survivor, and these things are still on the air.
Speaker 2: I'm curious.
Speaker 3: You've done so many things that have influenced so many
Speaker 3: people and created something brands from like Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy
Speaker 3: Central and then Vice and television stations in Afghanistan, and
Speaker 3: you've been involved in all sorts of incredible charities as well.
Speaker 3: What do you think is closest to your heart in
Speaker 3: terms of all the stuff, like what is the show
Speaker 3: or the production or the thing you made that feels
Speaker 3: most special to you.
Speaker 4: Well, there were a lot of successes in my media career,
Speaker 4: and I was most proud of the management team I assembled,
Speaker 4: people like Judy McGrath, Thug HERZG, Bill flannag and Van Toffler,
Speaker 4: Jerry Labor and Herb Scannal. I mean, we had like
Speaker 4: the best management team in the business, unbelievably talented in
Speaker 4: terms of creativity. They also had business acumen and we
Speaker 4: were able to for year after year after year after
Speaker 4: year create and put out groundbreaking, genre breaking shows. And
Speaker 4: just being around those people was a thrill. I mean,
Speaker 4: they really deserved the bulk of the credit of the
Speaker 4: stuff be invented. My job was sort of protect them
Speaker 4: from corporate overseers outside world old and to give them
Speaker 4: the ability to be able to execute on what they thought,
Speaker 4: and of course I'd be part of the process. So
Speaker 4: that was highly enjoyable to me. You know, starting out
Speaker 4: in the animation business is a great example that was
Speaker 4: a thrill. These days, you know, I'm really involved with
Speaker 4: work I've done in the sort of do gooder category.
Speaker 4: My long relationship in Afghanistan ended up with me going
Speaker 4: back there after I was fired and helping launch the
Speaker 4: first television stations, which were really a civilizing force and
Speaker 4: what they now called the American occupation of twenty years,
Speaker 4: which we really badly bungled, But that's a whole o
Speaker 4: their story. But what wasn't bungled was the civilizing effect
Speaker 4: of the medium on the Afghan population and making them
Speaker 4: more tolerant and more connected to the outside world, more nuanced,
Speaker 4: more aspirational, and things they wanted to do in their
Speaker 4: personal life. And then in Africa, I work with this
Speaker 4: thing called a One campaign that's about justice and where
Speaker 4: you live shouldn't decide whether you live or die. And
Speaker 4: we have fought on the global health front for preventable diseases,
Speaker 4: influencing politicians to swing billions of dollars into programs that
Speaker 4: have saved millions of lives. And I love going to
Speaker 4: Africa and seeing the impact of that. And I love
Speaker 4: going to Africa just to go to Africa and hear
Speaker 4: the music and you know, partaking the culture there. And
Speaker 4: by twenty fifty, one out of four people on the
Speaker 4: face of the Earth is going to be African. It's
Speaker 4: it's really a place with a totally exploding population and dynamism,
Speaker 4: and it's going to be the continent to watch.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you so much for this time. I really
Speaker 3: appreciate it. Such fun talking to you.
Speaker 4: Great to talk to you, magneshow was really nice. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Well. That does it for today. Big thank you to
Speaker 1: Tom Preston for speaking with us. His book Unplugged Eventures
Speaker 1: from MTV to Timbuktoo is out now and you can
Speaker 1: get it wherever you get your books. We'll put a
Speaker 1: link to in the show as well, just to make
Speaker 1: that process faster for you. It really is a terrific read. Also,
Speaker 1: if you like the show, be sure to follow us
Speaker 1: on Instagram or Blue Sky.
Speaker 2: We're at Part Time Genius.
Speaker 1: We will be back next week with another brand new episode,
Speaker 1: but in the meantime, from Will Dylan, Mary, Gabe, and myself,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is
Speaker 1: a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. It is hosted by
Speaker 1: my good pal Will Pearson, who I've known for almost
Speaker 1: three decades now. That is insane to me. I'm the
Speaker 1: utter COO host Mangeshatikular aka Mango. Our producer is Mary
Speaker 1: Phillips Sandy. She's actually a super producer. I'm gonna fix
Speaker 1: that in post. Our writer is Gabe Lucier who I've
Speaker 1: also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more.
Speaker 1: Dylan Fagan is in the booth. He is always dressed up,
Speaker 1: always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record
Speaker 1: and then mix the show after he does a great job.
Speaker 1: I also want to shout out the executive producers from
Speaker 1: iHeart my good pals Katrina and Norvel and Ali Perry.
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Speaker 1: That's it from us here at Part Time Genius.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening.