Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is Tom Freston, who has a new autobiography,
Speaker 1: Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim Buck to Tom. Why
Speaker 1: this book? Why Now?
Speaker 2: Well, we had this thing called the pandemic a while back,
Speaker 2: and I had some time on my hands, and I
Speaker 2: thought maybe it was time to try and I like writing,
Speaker 2: trying to link together some of the things in my
Speaker 2: life and see what kind of sense it might make.
Speaker 2: So I started churning it out, and next thing, you know,
Speaker 2: I thought, I thought, rather than do a business book,
Speaker 2: which everybody's doing, I'd do something more along the line
Speaker 2: of an adventure story and try and cast it as that.
Speaker 2: And I try and put in, you know, a series
Speaker 2: of favorite stories, whether they be physical adventures or adventures
Speaker 2: like in the workplace, and kind of go from there,
Speaker 2: and also try and give it a light, kind of
Speaker 2: humorous tone, so it wasn't too serious and it was
Speaker 2: fun fun to do.
Speaker 1: Okay, obviously you're well known for your tenure at MTV.
Speaker 1: How did you decide how much MTV to include and
Speaker 1: not include?
Speaker 2: Well, I didn't want to go into every little detail.
Speaker 2: A lot of it's all been There's been a bunch
Speaker 2: of books out on MTV documentaries. I think people kind
Speaker 2: of know the story. I was always more and more
Speaker 2: interested in my sort of my first chapter in life,
Speaker 2: which was, you know, the years I spent in Afghanistan
Speaker 2: in India, which sort of set the template for me.
Speaker 2: They were like my most adventurous years I was younger,
Speaker 2: but also those are the years where I learned various
Speaker 2: traits that would turn out to serve me well as
Speaker 2: someone who was running an eccentric media organization that was
Speaker 2: unlike most others, which was the MTV network, a MTV nick, E,
Speaker 2: VH one, Comedy Central, and I had I actually had
Speaker 2: journals Bob from those years when I would I was
Speaker 2: either bartending my way around North America or I was
Speaker 2: traveling all over the world by myself mostly, And then
Speaker 2: spent eight years running a business that was pretty successful
Speaker 2: and then got, you know, got a series of unfortunate
Speaker 2: events happened, and I came back to New York, you know,
Speaker 2: bankrupt and broke in. Then I started at MTV and
Speaker 2: the MTV story inventsment. I was like every MTV network's
Speaker 2: running that for all those years and being there. That
Speaker 2: was you know, all the things in my life that
Speaker 2: I loved outside of traveling and living abroad was sort
Speaker 2: of in one place. So it was in a sense
Speaker 2: for me, it was a perfect job. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: not saying that no one else couldn't could have done it,
Speaker 2: but yeah, I wasn't. I didn't have a career path
Speaker 2: of a traditional media executive, let's put it that way.
Speaker 1: So what lessons did you learn in your adventures in
Speaker 1: the so called rag trade in Asia that translated to
Speaker 1: your tenure at MTV.
Speaker 2: Well, when I lived there in Asia in the seventies,
Speaker 2: it was a very tumultuous time in India. India was really,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of still a brand new nation. It
Speaker 2: was bureaucratics. Sixty percent of people were below the poverty line.
Speaker 2: Today that number was like two or three percent. So
Speaker 2: it was very poor, very ragged, and they were a
Speaker 2: socialist government. They didn't allow any imports. There was no
Speaker 2: foreigners really living there. I mean you couldn't go there.
Speaker 2: And you know, there was no call centers in Bangalore.
Speaker 2: So I learned humility first and foremost. You realize how
Speaker 2: small and insignificant you are when you're living in a
Speaker 2: place like that that seemed to be just made of chaos,
Speaker 2: and I would find that the determination and you know,
Speaker 2: flexibility I would need to wind my way through there
Speaker 2: and be successful was very satisfying. So the improvisation and
Speaker 2: tolerance of traveling low to the ground, and tolerance of
Speaker 2: sort of eccentric individuals and so forth, and believing in
Speaker 2: risk taking, we're all. You know, there was this part
Speaker 2: of the things that I picked up there. That and
Speaker 2: feeling confidence, feeling confidence in an international marketplace, which which
Speaker 2: really led me to put the internationalization of MTV networks
Speaker 2: on the front burners. And you know when they when
Speaker 2: governments started to finally liberalize their media and allow satellite
Speaker 2: and cable to come in the late eighties early nineties,
Speaker 2: that was a big, big change. Yeah, you know, like
Speaker 2: in the UK, I mean you could never really there
Speaker 2: was and there was no radio stations even that played
Speaker 2: music in the early days. So we kind of came
Speaker 2: up when that was all happening. I said, well, I
Speaker 2: want to get first in line for doing that. How
Speaker 2: can we make say, let's start with MTV and can
Speaker 2: we make it a real international network? Now CNN would
Speaker 2: always say they were an international network, but they were
Speaker 2: mostly in hotels. We were really in local language in
Speaker 2: most places, in people's homes, and we had local versions
Speaker 2: and it was greatly satisfying. But to answer your question,
Speaker 2: you know, I learned it was the hardest work I
Speaker 2: ever did in my life running that business. Existing there
Speaker 2: so endurance and fortitude and humility and you know, an
Speaker 2: appreciation of creativity and risk taking. We're all things that
Speaker 2: came in handy later on in all parts of my life.
Speaker 2: It was like a good school.
Speaker 1: Okay, were you always a confident guy or did you
Speaker 1: learn to be confident?
Speaker 2: I learned to be confident, and you know, I would
Speaker 2: say even today, I still have a bit of that
Speaker 2: imposter syndrome that a lot of people have, you know,
Speaker 2: which came really evident to me. Like, you know, when
Speaker 2: I finally got fired by son to Redstone, I said,
Speaker 2: oh man, it's like the mask isn't ripped off. I
Speaker 2: had for a second of flash there that you know,
Speaker 2: they finally figured out I wasn't the right guy for
Speaker 2: the job. I really was not incompetent, but I wasn't
Speaker 2: everything I needed to be. But I dispelled that. But
Speaker 2: confidence bills, you know, you start out in school and
Speaker 2: you get from one grade to another, you get a
Speaker 2: little more confident about your abilities. But my confidence skyrocketed
Speaker 2: in my date, in my traveling days because I wasn't
Speaker 2: traveling around going to golf courses. That kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, is confidence faked till you make it? How much
Speaker 1: is that apart? Do we say, well, let me get
Speaker 1: myself in the situation and figure it out, as opposed saying, oh,
Speaker 1: this is my wheelhouse, I can do this.
Speaker 2: A combination, but a lot of the former. I think
Speaker 2: a lot of the former. You know, you kind of
Speaker 2: learn as you go. You build up confidence by doing things,
Speaker 2: and you go in and you know, at MTV the
Speaker 2: first time you have to interact with like major artists,
Speaker 2: and am I really right for this? I mean, then
Speaker 2: you find out, you know, you talk to people person
Speaker 2: to person, You're like, I can do this too. These
Speaker 2: are like regular people. There's ways to relate to those people,
Speaker 2: to all kinds of people. So confidence bills as your
Speaker 2: experience kind of magnifies.
Speaker 1: So what's the trick to connecting with artists?
Speaker 2: Well? I always found trying, don't look nervous, be yourself
Speaker 2: what they really want to hear In many ways is
Speaker 2: a connection to their music and their artistry. And if
Speaker 2: you can come off as a genuine not so much
Speaker 2: a fan, but an appreciator of what they do, and
Speaker 2: be respectful of their time and what they've done, and
Speaker 2: talk to them as regular people, it would be like
Speaker 2: a conversation with anybody after a while. I mean I
Speaker 2: was never really starstruck, except maybe by a couple of artists.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it was always I always loved
Speaker 2: what artists did, and I realized early on that I wasn't.
Speaker 2: You know, I couldn't paint, I couldn't play the guitar.
Speaker 2: I couldn't do a lot of artistic endeavors, but I could.
Speaker 2: I wanted to work near create. I wanted to work
Speaker 2: with creative people and be close to some kind of
Speaker 2: artistic endeavor, and that I would be able to do that.
Speaker 2: That that that came to me like when I was
Speaker 2: in school, I felt that would be that would be
Speaker 2: the lane I wanted to ultimately be in. That would
Speaker 2: be satisfying for me. I couldn't make it, but I
Speaker 2: could help other people do it.
Speaker 1: What is the trick to talking to business titans who
Speaker 1: were sprinkled throughout your book.
Speaker 2: Well, you got to show them that you know how
Speaker 2: business works. You know how what a P and L is, uh,
Speaker 2: what ebata is. What they want to see. For example,
Speaker 2: in a business plan, you can't come off as NAI.
Speaker 2: If you can't, you want to come off with some confidence.
Speaker 2: You've got to be able to defend numbers and if
Speaker 2: you have a great ability to kind of process numbers
Speaker 2: in your head about percentages and things like that. That
Speaker 2: I found that always works. They want to you know,
Speaker 2: in my line of work, it was always I would
Speaker 2: always try and impress them first without creative output. I
Speaker 2: always found at the beginning of a meeting if I
Speaker 2: was going to see somebody, if I was trying to
Speaker 2: help sell something, butether that be one of our networks
Speaker 2: to an outside person and they kind of brought me
Speaker 2: in to do it, or even to my own corporate
Speaker 2: people that I work with. As you know, a great
Speaker 2: it's hard to beat a great videotape, and you know
Speaker 2: that people would stand up and salute at at the
Speaker 2: end of it because that says, Okay, I'm really going
Speaker 2: to listen carefully now to what this guy is going
Speaker 2: to say, because he obviously they got something going on here.
Speaker 2: And in many cases the videotape was better than in
Speaker 2: what we were actually making, you know, because it's easy
Speaker 2: to do a three minute piece of something that seems
Speaker 2: really you know.
Speaker 1: Okay, But that's in the selling process when you're talking
Speaker 1: about you in the book, it's about going to Cuba, Okay,
Speaker 1: you go with Graydon Carter from Vanity Fair, you go
Speaker 1: with less Moon Verters from CBS, you go with Rona
Speaker 1: Howard's partner from Imagine. What's the key to connecting with
Speaker 1: those people?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, let me say I wanted to
Speaker 2: go to Cuba by myself. I mean it started off.
Speaker 2: I wanted to you know, Cuba was going through this
Speaker 2: horrible period when the Soviet when the Berlin Wall came down,
Speaker 2: in communism kind of vaporize, except for Castro. He's like
Speaker 2: the last communist going just about. There's certainly the last
Speaker 2: one in the Western hemisphere. But the music scene, despite
Speaker 2: all the increasing poverty in Cuba was really vibrant, and
Speaker 2: they had fantastic music there, and I wanted to go
Speaker 2: in there and sort of get in on it and
Speaker 2: make some connections. So I happened to to Brian Grazer
Speaker 2: one day, who I hadn't known since the eighties. You know,
Speaker 2: he was an early guy who I knew around MTV.
Speaker 2: We would promote some of his films. We had a friendship.
Speaker 2: I said, Hey, I'm going to Cuba. You know, I
Speaker 2: want to check out the music scene there and get
Speaker 2: a sense of it, because I know we can't start
Speaker 2: MTV there. But if we could get some relationships with
Speaker 2: some of these musicians and you know, find out what's
Speaker 2: going on it could you know, we have a ravenous
Speaker 2: network we could use this stuff. He says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'd like to go, so you know, you know, I said, okay,
Speaker 2: you want to go. So then he tells somebody else,
Speaker 2: who tells somebody else. Next thing, you know, I got
Speaker 2: a whole bolo to moguls. They all want to go
Speaker 2: to Cuba. And I found this guy, this great guy
Speaker 2: lives in La Jonathan Branstein. He was like my man
Speaker 2: in Havana. He'd had been there many times, and he
Speaker 2: got us the proper visas. Allegedly they were the proper
Speaker 2: visas that you would need to go to Cuba. And
Speaker 2: we all went. But I knew all these people, Bob
Speaker 2: and as I kind of came up in the business,
Speaker 2: you just run into a certain level of people. And
Speaker 2: as you know, I knew Graydon from Vanity Fair, I
Speaker 2: knew Brad gray tangentially less Moonvez and I worked in
Speaker 2: like sister companies who also Jim Wyatt then was running
Speaker 2: William Morris, I Ken I'm trying to remember now who
Speaker 2: was house on the trip. But anyway, next thing, I'm
Speaker 2: bringing now a group of fussy people to a communist
Speaker 2: country I've never been to, and they and they want
Speaker 2: a certain level of service which I'm not even sure exists.
Speaker 2: So all of a sudden, now I'm like a tour
Speaker 2: guide rather than someone who's sort of freelancing down there
Speaker 2: trying to you know, meet as many people as I can.
Speaker 2: And I'm with a lot of people who kind of
Speaker 2: view this as some kind of holiday.
Speaker 1: But it was.
Speaker 2: It was fun. You know, we all got you know,
Speaker 2: you rent the old cars from your youth and drive
Speaker 2: around Havana, which is like it was exotic. It was
Speaker 2: like I think two thousand and one and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: Havana is a beautiful city. And we ended up having
Speaker 2: a series of meetings. It was productive and it didn't
Speaker 2: end well. Didn't end well, but we did have dinner.
Speaker 2: We had lunch with the Fidel Castro, which was unexpected.
Speaker 2: He thought, you know, we're a group of people in
Speaker 2: town he wanted to meet, so he entertained us for
Speaker 2: like five and a half hours out of lunch, which
Speaker 2: was you know, just one funny story about that. So
Speaker 2: we're told by this minder from the Ministry of Culture,
Speaker 2: Jorge Gonzalez, who was a cool kind of dude, little
Speaker 2: rotn guy. We were around and we met some of
Speaker 2: the Cuban All the music seemed to go up through
Speaker 2: people in the government, the Ministry of Culture. We had
Speaker 2: a meeting there and as we're leaving that want to
Speaker 2: hit Jorge's bosses and says, hey, do you guys want
Speaker 2: to meet Fidel. We want to meet the big man,
Speaker 2: you know, the big man. We want to meet Fidel.
Speaker 2: He'd like to meet you. Well, yeah, we'd like to
Speaker 2: meet Fidel. So they said, well, we got a he's
Speaker 2: speaking tomorrow night to a group of school teachers outside
Speaker 2: of Havana, and you know it's going to go late,
Speaker 2: So would you guys be up to meetingum like one
Speaker 2: or two in the morning. Oh yeah, whatever, it's Foridel Castro,
Speaker 2: for God's sake. He's a man from history. So it
Speaker 2: turns out that he doesn't use a cell phone. All
Speaker 2: these cats use burner phones, and what they don't know,
Speaker 2: they don't even use burner phones. They use payphones. So
Speaker 2: they take us to this kind of club that's sort
Speaker 2: of like a brothel. You know. People are dry humping
Speaker 2: against the wall. It's the communist upper class. They're letting
Speaker 2: off steam on a Friday. And we're waiting for the
Speaker 2: call to come in. And the call comes in to
Speaker 2: a payphone outside. We all go outside and it's like,
Speaker 2: he can't meet you tonight, He's got to meet you tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Why don't you come for lunch? I said, okay, So
Speaker 2: we get ready, we go for lunch. We pull in
Speaker 2: like two when was a fifty seven Cadillac invertible and
Speaker 2: was a fifty four to Ford convertible, like a bunch
Speaker 2: of yahoo. Gring goes and there he is on the
Speaker 2: palace steps and I'm thinking, Wow, that's Fidel Castro. He's
Speaker 2: a man from history. We tried to kill him like
Speaker 2: eight or nine times with a CEO. What's he going
Speaker 2: to say to us? What's his first words? And he
Speaker 2: says he comes out and you look up at him.
Speaker 2: He's on top of a flight of stairs and he says,
Speaker 2: what do you guys produces the Sopranos? This is like
Speaker 2: Cuba is only HBO subscriber. He's really a jump thinking god.
Speaker 2: Gangsters tried to kill him, you know, and we had this,
Speaker 2: We hired gangsters to take him out with exploding cigars
Speaker 2: and wet suits filled with poison. And now he wants
Speaker 2: to know who produced the Sopranos about the gangster so
Speaker 2: is Brad Gray? Brad Gray then ran Brillstein Gray, He
Speaker 2: said it was me, and so he works his way
Speaker 2: forward and Fidel goes, that's my favorite show. That's my
Speaker 2: favorite show. That was sort of his icebreaker, and then uh,
Speaker 2: you know, we're let into the Palace of Ferns where
Speaker 2: he would entertain foreign dignitaries, and we're all doing cocktails
Speaker 2: and ganging around and talking about this and that, and
Speaker 2: it was just bizarre. And then we would go in
Speaker 2: to sit for this luncheon and I'm sitting at his
Speaker 2: right and I always remember we all had place settings,
Speaker 2: and his his el Comandante al hefe Fidel Castro was
Speaker 2: his place card, which I of course stole when the
Speaker 2: meal was over. But he sat us all down and
Speaker 2: gone on and on, and he started, you guys, want
Speaker 2: to drink any wine? You know? He wheels out this
Speaker 2: this like all this wine from Chile and Algeria, and
Speaker 2: we start drinking wine. Everybody's getting a little buzz. And
Speaker 2: he just went on and on and on. He would
Speaker 2: have this translator. He spoke perfect English, but he had
Speaker 2: this translator who was always like a half a sentence
Speaker 2: behind him. And then this guy could talk. So if
Speaker 2: we were there for five and a half hours, he
Speaker 2: talked for five of it. And at one point I
Speaker 2: would a couple of points. I got up and I said,
Speaker 2: oh that this is what am I doing here? I
Speaker 2: came down here to listen to some music, make some connections.
Speaker 2: Now I'm listening to the what's the price of kilo
Speaker 2: aut of electricity? And uh, you know in one of
Speaker 2: the one of the Cuban taps, which he knew by
Speaker 2: wrote he he knew all these facts and figures. I
Speaker 2: would go into the restroom and gonaix hail. But at
Speaker 2: the end he he wheeled in. He said it's over.
Speaker 2: They wheeled in this trolley with all these boxes of
Speaker 2: cigars that he signed them all. And then he had
Speaker 2: this American photographer who was a communist who left the
Speaker 2: who had Steve still spoke with a bronx accent. He
Speaker 2: came out and he autographed all these photos that he
Speaker 2: Jonathan knew this guy, and it was like it was
Speaker 2: like you know when you're at when the artists come
Speaker 2: out at the end of a show to sign CDs
Speaker 2: and everything that was were all these guys who were
Speaker 2: sort of paid to not lose their cool, were like fanboys.
Speaker 2: And then Grazer does and buy a photo, but he
Speaker 2: says to Fidel, you know who running to know really
Speaker 2: all about how he made his hair stand up straight.
Speaker 2: He wanted to know about hair gel and Brian Grazer.
Speaker 2: He says, well, sign sign my chest. When you just
Speaker 2: sign my chest and he goes, no, I'm not gonna say,
Speaker 2: well sign my shirt. Sure enough he Fidel Castro sign
Speaker 2: says shirt. It was a it was a crazy uh
Speaker 2: end to a memorable lunch.
Speaker 1: So you walk out of the building. At first there's silence,
Speaker 1: Then you look at each other, what do you say?
Speaker 1: What did everybody say? At that point?
Speaker 2: Well, we all get in the car and it's like
Speaker 2: teeming rain, and just as soon as we're about to
Speaker 2: pull out, the sky's open, you know, and it's all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, it's like a tropical paradise again. So
Speaker 2: we put the tops down and we're all kind of
Speaker 2: stunned and people going, wow, that was something you believe
Speaker 2: that you were heading to the airport because he had to.
Speaker 2: We tipped in and charted a plane to cant Coon
Speaker 2: because he couldn't really go on a commercial flight in
Speaker 2: those days. So we took this little plane, we filled
Speaker 2: it up and we get in a plane. I remember
Speaker 2: Brad Gray says, no one had said anything really yet,
Speaker 2: and he says, so where are we going next? You know,
Speaker 2: let's just skip over the whole experience and go into
Speaker 2: the next chapter. So it was a that was a a.
Speaker 2: And then we all got fined fifty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: That was bad news. That was bad news, and we
Speaker 2: had to get out of it. We hired reich Hooter's
Speaker 2: lawyer because he had had the same problem when he
Speaker 2: made Buinnivist the social club, and the lawyer turned out
Speaker 2: to be a guy who worked in the Treasury department.
Speaker 2: He used to find people like us for doing it.
Speaker 2: And then what the worst one worst thing happened to
Speaker 2: less Moonviz. Because he was in the middle of negotiations
Speaker 2: with David Letterman, and Letterman couldn't get over the less Moon.
Speaker 2: He's having a link a fight negotiating with David Letterman,
Speaker 2: and he did a skit called Lunch with Fidel and
Speaker 2: Less and they would whe let these comedians. This guy
Speaker 2: was dressed up as Fidel Castro and a guy was
Speaker 2: dressed up at with the less Moonvez and Less would
Speaker 2: say to these ina things like I have the biggest
Speaker 2: office in Hollywood, or I went to Fiddel's Grammy party
Speaker 2: and he let me whip some artists and you know,
Speaker 2: things like that. And uh, I think Less took the
Speaker 2: brunt of the joke, that's for sure, but it was
Speaker 2: it was you know, we ended up getting I ended
Speaker 2: up getting relationships in Cuba, which was my original intent,
Speaker 2: and we were able to get some music out of
Speaker 2: there and so forth.
Speaker 1: Okay, you were told that it was okay to do
Speaker 1: it and then ultimately find you know, the Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: mantra is you know, ask for permission after the fact.
Speaker 1: Is that the kind of guy you are we're gonna
Speaker 1: do it. It's gonna work out in the long run.
Speaker 1: Are you fearful?
Speaker 2: Wait?
Speaker 1: Wait this is illegal or I heard this?
Speaker 2: Well in some cases yeah, but in this case, I
Speaker 2: was told we had this what they call a cultural
Speaker 2: exchange visa and Jonathan arranging, So man, it'd be a
Speaker 2: lay up to get those I mean, you guys, you're
Speaker 2: going down there looking for music. It's okay, and you know,
Speaker 2: we all thought we were golden. Then when I get
Speaker 2: this note in the mails, like an inch thick a
Speaker 2: thing from a Treasury department, I called Jonathan and he goes, yeah,
Speaker 2: we had it. I have it too. I got the
Speaker 2: same package. But I think we jumped the shark when
Speaker 2: we had lunch with Fidel Castro. That wasn't sort of
Speaker 2: included as cultural exchange. But in general, I'd be more
Speaker 2: inclined to if someone said, well, we could have a
Speaker 2: problem doing that. I mean, you assess the risks, and
Speaker 2: sometimes you just go ahead and everything works out. You're
Speaker 2: not if you just play by the rules or listen
Speaker 2: to lawyers all your life. You know, you're kind of
Speaker 2: handicapped in a way, particularly if you want to move
Speaker 2: with any speed.
Speaker 1: Okay, ultimately, Fidel bored you. But you know, we all
Speaker 1: had these experiences with famous people and a lot of
Speaker 1: times you say, I can't believe that's the guy. Other
Speaker 1: times you go, wow, that guy lives up to the
Speaker 1: rep So with all this history, the Cuban missile crisis,
Speaker 1: et cetera, you're there with Fidel. You're saying, you know,
Speaker 1: he may be boring me, but he knows what he's doing.
Speaker 1: Or you're saying, I can't believe this guy's running the country.
Speaker 2: Well, no, you have to respect for him. I mean,
Speaker 2: he would tell me he was still he told me
Speaker 2: he still earns, he still earned sneakers, he works out
Speaker 2: an hour a day. I mean, he had controlled this
Speaker 2: whole country in every way, shape or form, like no
Speaker 2: autocrat really gets a chance to do. Because it was
Speaker 2: a small island, not that small. But you know, I
Speaker 2: mean he was a man of consequence. He had withstood
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff, and he was just dabbling around
Speaker 2: with us. But I mean he was I don't know
Speaker 2: what he was expecting from us, but he when he
Speaker 2: starts talking, he kind of goes into a routine, and
Speaker 2: you know, we're hearing all the facts about the triumphs
Speaker 2: of the revolution and the superior medical system they have
Speaker 2: and the work they do in Angola and this and that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's interesting. But if you're with somebody and they
Speaker 2: talked for almost five hours straight, you know, you don't
Speaker 2: see a lot of that. And at one point he
Speaker 2: wanted to say, Less, I want you to bring back
Speaker 2: a message to President Clinton. You know about these planes
Speaker 2: that keep coming over from Florida dropping leaflets on Havana,
Speaker 2: because then he shot two of these planes down. I want,
Speaker 2: I want want, I want build and know, I want
Speaker 2: Clinton to know that I don't mean problems. I have
Speaker 2: good intentions. And Less goes, Yeah, I'll get the message
Speaker 2: to him. But I'm thinking, but now George Bush is
Speaker 2: the president. He's been the president for two months or
Speaker 2: three months, and I'm thinking he, you know, he was
Speaker 2: really really felt bad that uh, these Cuban exiles or
Speaker 2: whatever you want to call him, or flying over and
Speaker 2: doing these things. But and he had to defend his country.
Speaker 2: I mean, I could put myself in his shoes. I'm thinking,
Speaker 2: you just can't have somebody coming over in a piper
Speaker 2: plane dumping stuff out and violating your airspace and you
Speaker 2: warn them a few times and then you have to,
Speaker 2: you know, shoot him down. I get it. But he
Speaker 2: was concerned, and yeah, maybe that's one of the reasons
Speaker 2: he wanted to meet us, was to have an opportunity
Speaker 2: to send some you know, sort of under the table
Speaker 2: or you know, messages back to the American government. Two
Speaker 2: unusual connections.
Speaker 1: What other heads of stints have you met.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm trying to think in my life and when
Speaker 2: I was at MTV and Viacom, you know, I met
Speaker 2: or I met I met Justin Trudeau a few times
Speaker 2: when we were working my work with Bread, I met him.
Speaker 2: I'm going through the list now in my head. Once
Speaker 2: I was in Mexico at a U two show years ago,
Speaker 2: and I believe a president of Mexico showed up. But
Speaker 2: you know, these were like not in depth meetings or anything.
Speaker 2: This is sort of a meet and greet. I haven't
Speaker 2: really had any exchanges with any you know, American presidents. Yes,
Speaker 2: but I don't think as I think now, Bob, nothing
Speaker 2: really jumps out of me that I was hanging out
Speaker 2: with the heads of state in any consequential way.
Speaker 1: Okay, you go on about Bono reaches out after your
Speaker 1: tenure at Via Commons, you work with him on Red.
Speaker 1: Bono has a The public perception is shall I say,
Speaker 1: Kira Sciro. Some people positive, some people negative. What do
Speaker 1: people not get about Bono?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm a fan, you know. I know a lot
Speaker 2: of people think he's a wind bag and why is
Speaker 2: he doing all this stuff? But I've seen this guy
Speaker 2: who has a very busy life, and all the amount
Speaker 2: of time and effort he would spend on this when
Speaker 2: he could be doing something you know that other people
Speaker 2: might find more personally gratifying, vacationing or spending more time,
Speaker 2: you know, around the house or listen to music. He would,
Speaker 2: you know, go to Africa for a couple of weeks
Speaker 2: and he'd work. He'd be working eighteen hours a day.
Speaker 2: I mean, he really really wanted to make a difference.
Speaker 2: He really cared about injustice. He really believed that activists
Speaker 2: could be lifted up because change in governments. He really
Speaker 2: believed this. He was a good man, he was a
Speaker 2: great speaker. So I've seen him wear himself down. I
Speaker 2: mean at some point that's how I kind of came
Speaker 2: into the picture. Because McGuinness, Paul McGinnis, who you know,
Speaker 2: he called me because I turned down Bono's overtures and
Speaker 2: he called me. He said, you know, why don't you
Speaker 2: come over. You know, Bono's got these do gooder things going.
Speaker 2: It's kind of upsetting the band in a bunch of ways,
Speaker 2: and he could use some help. These things are running
Speaker 2: off the rails a bit. He could use a little
Speaker 2: help and bring a little organization to bear. And so
Speaker 2: I went over and be pitched me, and Bono pitched me,
Speaker 2: and I think guy had been so good to me,
Speaker 2: and I believed in what he was doing, and I
Speaker 2: saw his sincerity, and I'm a fan. So I signed
Speaker 2: up and said I would do three months. I'd give
Speaker 2: you a report back. I go around and talk to
Speaker 2: people and I'll tell you how many want to reorganize
Speaker 2: these things in a way that might work more efficiently
Speaker 2: and effectively and take up less of your time, which
Speaker 2: I did. And it was interesting because in it it
Speaker 2: was like, well, you're going to fire some people, you know,
Speaker 2: he got some people here are either too political or extraneous,
Speaker 2: and he was really reluctant on that score. And I saw,
Speaker 2: like the loyalty the man feels, he's a loyal guy.
Speaker 2: I could see why the band's been together for all
Speaker 2: these years, something we don't really see in any bands
Speaker 2: that have been around for that many decades. But you know,
Speaker 2: finally I had my way and I said I'll see you.
Speaker 2: And he said, well, why don't you just stay on
Speaker 2: the board, Why don't you be the board chair. I
Speaker 2: had had no real experience on being a board chair
Speaker 2: or anything, but I said, sure, I'll do it. I'm
Speaker 2: still the board chair. The work has been very gratifying
Speaker 2: for me. And he's kind of peeled off the bed.
Speaker 2: He's dropped off the board. He's a founder now he
Speaker 2: still does stuff. But your question was is he basically
Speaker 2: is he bullshitter or not. He's a hard working guy.
Speaker 2: He spent so much of his personal time, Bob, I
Speaker 2: mean so much on this work. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: for no money and doing it sincerely and being brought
Speaker 2: to tears in places. So I have great respect for that.
Speaker 2: And he could you know, he stands up a guy,
Speaker 2: gives a good speech, and he you know, he's got
Speaker 2: the ability to talk and relate to lots of people,
Speaker 2: sort of almost a Clinton esque, you know, sincerity. He
Speaker 2: listens to people. Yes, he talks a lot.
Speaker 1: Does he have a sense of humor about himself. Is
Speaker 1: he aware of public perception or is he living in
Speaker 1: a bubble?
Speaker 2: Oh no, he knows, you know. I mean I remember
Speaker 2: one time I was down in as you know, he's
Speaker 2: got a place down there, and we were driving around
Speaker 2: in his car. It's got like I'm a modest car.
Speaker 2: And you know, most artists they don't like to listen
Speaker 2: to their own music. You know, they go into a
Speaker 2: club and someone playing their music and it's like, I
Speaker 2: don't want to hear. He can't get enough of his
Speaker 2: own music. So I remember he's, Uh, we're in some
Speaker 2: car and he's got it turned up to like eleven,
Speaker 2: and there's some Someboddy like in the next car rolling
Speaker 2: down in the windows, telling them basically to turn it down,
Speaker 2: even though it's coming kind of coming through windows. He
Speaker 2: he just thinks, it's how it's fucking bono, man, it's
Speaker 2: fucking fuck bono. He goes, yeah, fuck bono. He likes,
Speaker 2: he enjoys the people who take him down. I mean,
Speaker 2: he's fully aware of it, and it just rolls off
Speaker 2: him and he finds some humor in it. He knows,
Speaker 2: he knows what people don't like about him. And you know,
Speaker 2: he can roll with the punches.
Speaker 1: So what's the status of the organization today.
Speaker 2: Well, we have two organizations that basically are sort of
Speaker 2: like a little conglomerate. There's one the One Campaign, which
Speaker 2: is the activist organization that you know, it does two
Speaker 2: things that sort of lobbies governments to line up and
Speaker 2: do the right things on police and financial commitments they
Speaker 2: make to the South to Africa and to and help
Speaker 2: people in the South like be better to stand on
Speaker 2: their own feet and you know, and help policies be
Speaker 2: you know, how would I say this? You know, they
Speaker 2: just be smart. AID if we're going to do aid
Speaker 2: A doesn't work in a lot of ways, and we
Speaker 2: recognize that and really the key to development in Africa
Speaker 2: is going to be from the private sector. But one
Speaker 2: place it does work is in the health sector. And
Speaker 2: there's been twenty five million people now walking around in
Speaker 2: Africa who would have been dead because they're on any
Speaker 2: retroviral drugs which are financed thirty percent by the United States.
Speaker 2: But and we were the leaders and the rest by
Speaker 2: you know, other countries, and it's made a huge difference.
Speaker 2: You know, towns where coffin making was the chief business
Speaker 2: and the whole city was falling under and a state
Speaker 2: was on its way to becoming a failed state. Kind
Speaker 2: of revived and it's been great what we do now.
Speaker 2: And now we're trying to switch to making it a
Speaker 2: real African based organization helping African leaders, you know, kind
Speaker 2: of finance their you know, end ofate, finance their own
Speaker 2: health systems and so forth. That's a challenge for us.
Speaker 2: The biggest challenge now, for one, is that Trump blew
Speaker 2: a hole. You know, he closed down USAID and a
Speaker 2: lot of foreign aids. So it's just crippling, and it's
Speaker 2: such a hole it's impossible to fill with Bill Gates
Speaker 2: or any of these foundations. It's and and it means
Speaker 2: that you know, tens of millions of people aren't going
Speaker 2: to get the drugs they need. We actually had stores
Speaker 2: of these drugs for you know, stocked up in the UAE,
Speaker 2: and rather than give them out, the Trump administration had
Speaker 2: them burned. We had stores of these high protein bars
Speaker 2: for children in Sudan. Rather than give them out or
Speaker 2: give them to save the children or some other NGO,
Speaker 2: we had them burned and destroyed. It's like cruelty is
Speaker 2: sort of in the DNA of the administration and the
Speaker 2: richest man in the world would would would say that
Speaker 2: us AID, which spends one third of one percent of
Speaker 2: the national budget, say twenty million dollars, is a criminal
Speaker 2: organization that does that. He put in the wood chipper,
Speaker 2: and it's and people who work there at criminals. I know,
Speaker 2: these people they're like do gooders. I mean, they could
Speaker 2: have made a lot of money and done things, you know,
Speaker 2: made a lot more money. And if they were in
Speaker 2: the private sector, and I'm sure there was a lot
Speaker 2: of things going on there that could have been done
Speaker 2: better or maybe you shouldn't have been done at all. But
Speaker 2: that's like a footnote in the sense of the good
Speaker 2: things that they did in the lives that they saved.
Speaker 2: I mean, we give twenty forty billion dollars to Argentina.
Speaker 2: You know. Meanwhile, the twenty billion that we were spending,
Speaker 2: the part of what we spent in Africa was keeping
Speaker 2: people alive, and it was burnishing America's image in a
Speaker 2: good way, which we certainly need. And secondly, it was
Speaker 2: good for American security because you don't want migration to
Speaker 2: be you know, increased in flooding. And you know, it
Speaker 2: was a small when the richest country in the histy
Speaker 2: the world can't do that, and yet we have twice
Speaker 2: that amount of money to the government of Argentina for
Speaker 2: no apparent good reason. And you make people in the
Speaker 2: civil service feel so diminished and disregarded. And these are
Speaker 2: one these are these are people who are some of
Speaker 2: our best citizens. It's just just sad. So we're dealing
Speaker 2: with that. How do we plug the hole here? How
Speaker 2: do we help get Africa on the road to being
Speaker 2: self sufficient more quickly? Uh So we're doing that and Read,
Speaker 2: which is sort of the sister organization, you know, they
Speaker 2: do these phones and the you know, we've raised about
Speaker 2: eight hundred million dollars and all the money goes to
Speaker 2: the Global Fund, which is for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Speaker 2: We want it. We want to get that to a
Speaker 2: billion dollars. There's now, believe it or not, an AIDS
Speaker 2: vaccine finally available, going to be available in the near term,
Speaker 2: which is this huge thing with people have been talking
Speaker 2: about for years. Uh So we're trying to figure out
Speaker 2: how we couple that and the getting the distribution of
Speaker 2: that done and paid for in a way that could
Speaker 2: be efficient. So we've got a handful of challenges. We've
Speaker 2: got an African CEO now, which is part of the
Speaker 2: move to kind of I want to really move this
Speaker 2: into being an African led organization, not Southern with a
Speaker 2: bunch of white Northerners and eventually just have it sort
Speaker 2: of sit there. So we're in transition trying to deal
Speaker 2: with the discombobulation of this whole ecosystem that has been
Speaker 2: created by the Trump administration and Doze and Musk and
Speaker 2: all of that frustrating.
Speaker 1: So what is the overall budget of these organizations and
Speaker 1: how many people are on the payroll?
Speaker 2: Well, if I look at Red and One together, it's
Speaker 2: probably twenty five to thirty million a year. That includes
Speaker 2: mostly employees, do gooders, activists. It's funded entirely from private
Speaker 2: sector funds. You know, we have money, you know, John Dorr,
Speaker 2: George Sorows, Mike Bloomberg, Build Gates Foundation, other people, And
Speaker 2: that's what we do. And it's less money than we
Speaker 2: used to spend. We've been hit like a lot of
Speaker 2: organizations have with these cutbacks in general. So what we
Speaker 2: can do a lot of good work with that amount
Speaker 2: of funding. It's not all the money in the world,
Speaker 2: and I would say, none of it's really wasted. It
Speaker 2: goes to good effort. It goes for good But in
Speaker 2: the case of Red, every cent that read raises, one
Speaker 2: percent of it goes to buying largely these antiretroviral drugs.
Speaker 2: So it's not like one of these things where people
Speaker 2: give money and it's always going to some bloated overhead.
Speaker 2: The overhead itself is covered by a couple of donors
Speaker 2: and it's really small.
Speaker 1: In the book, you talk about as part of this effort,
Speaker 1: you deal with politicos and you say they don't always
Speaker 1: these elected officials don't always square with your perception, and
Speaker 1: you can have a meeting of the minds. Can you
Speaker 1: tell me more about that.
Speaker 2: Well, all my life I had avoided politic politicians. It's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons I never met a lot of them.
Speaker 2: When I was in working at MTV Networks, at Viacom,
Speaker 2: I had avoided a lot of them. One they tried
Speaker 2: to draft me and send me to Vietnam when I
Speaker 2: was younger, just like they did to you two. Jimmy
Speaker 2: Carter kind of ended my business like on the drop
Speaker 2: of a nickel in the late seventies. The business I
Speaker 2: worked so hard for for eight years. I announced one day,
Speaker 2: we're going to do an embargo on clothes from India.
Speaker 2: You know, there was no warning. It's just the same
Speaker 2: thing that's happened now with Trump and his tariffs. I mean,
Speaker 2: you're a small businessman and you just can't afford to
Speaker 2: pay this kind of money. There's so many companies now,
Speaker 2: like small companies that are going through exactly this. You're
Speaker 2: a furniture importer from China or Indonesia. You've got to
Speaker 2: pay fifty percent more for this stuff, and you know,
Speaker 2: you don't your employees or you know, the parts that
Speaker 2: you need that you're bringing in from out of the
Speaker 2: country or heavily tarraft and you just can't handle it.
Speaker 2: You're going to go under. So we're going to see
Speaker 2: a wave and we're seeing it already of bankruptcies in
Speaker 2: that small business sector. So I was, you know, and
Speaker 2: you know, it always offended me that there was never
Speaker 2: a warning, like, don't these politicians know that these businesses
Speaker 2: could like give them a little time to adjust, don't
Speaker 2: just kill everything day one. I mean, give them some warning.
Speaker 2: There's like it's like they never had the stand put there,
Speaker 2: you know, standing the feet stand in the shoes of
Speaker 2: a small businessman. They don't know what it's like to
Speaker 2: be living from nickel to dive and have a cash
Speaker 2: flow crunch. I mean, they just decrease something and assume
Speaker 2: everything's going to fall into place, but the pain is extensive.
Speaker 2: So I was never a f of politicians. When I
Speaker 2: started working with Red and One, I began to meet
Speaker 2: a lot of them, and I was impressed by their sincerity.
Speaker 2: I mean, these weren't the guys who were enforcing the
Speaker 2: things that had pained me. But you know, even somebody
Speaker 2: like Mike Huckabee, who I know now is sort of
Speaker 2: the ambassador to Israel at all. I spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time with him. We'd drive around. I was John Kasik,
Speaker 2: John Podesta. We used to take these bipartisan groups on
Speaker 2: these tours to see things. I found that the best
Speaker 2: way to get someone as a being advocate about Africa
Speaker 2: and extreme poverty was to take them there, because once
Speaker 2: they got there, their hearts would open and they could
Speaker 2: see that good things were being done, particularly in the
Speaker 2: health area. And these were nice people. I remember a
Speaker 2: time once we were in Liberia, which was really a
Speaker 2: war torn country, and you know, had had this really
Speaker 2: ugly civil war, and we were going to meet the president.
Speaker 2: It was Bono myself. There was a group of us,
Speaker 2: and then into town pulls up Lindsey Graham, John Thune,
Speaker 2: and John the senator from Arizona who passed McKenney McCain
Speaker 2: Sidney McCain. So all these people had spent ten days
Speaker 2: of what was basically their recess ended the summer recess,
Speaker 2: going around from Sudan to Rwanda, to Congo to Liberia,
Speaker 2: going around on this congressional delegation when they you know,
Speaker 2: they could have been home doing barbecues or listening to
Speaker 2: their constituents. And I was so impressed. These were Republicans,
Speaker 2: they cared about this issue. I mean, it's funny to
Speaker 2: see where they are now, but I mean I would say, well,
Speaker 2: they really in their heart, their hearts are okay. This
Speaker 2: is an issue that you know, left and right could
Speaker 2: agree on, and they have for a long time. So
Speaker 2: I would as I spend time with these people, as
Speaker 2: often happens, when you meet people with whom you might
Speaker 2: have some prejudice against, they turn out to be human
Speaker 2: and you have some common ground and you end up
Speaker 2: having a good feeling about them.
Speaker 1: So talking about Africa, when I was growing up, there
Speaker 1: was the Congo. Then I was in college at a
Speaker 1: friend of mine set his brother had hitchhiked through Africa. Certainly,
Speaker 1: in the seventies, a lot of young Americans went to Europe.
Speaker 1: Now they go to Asia. On some level, Africa's still
Speaker 1: a black hole. People are afraid to go there. What
Speaker 1: is really going on in Africa now.
Speaker 2: Well, it's hard to speak of it as a single
Speaker 2: continent because it's fifty four countries and some of them
Speaker 2: are really conflict zones, like the dr he liked, the Congo,
Speaker 2: like the Sudan. I mean, you know, you look at
Speaker 2: the eastern Congo. The six million people have been killed
Speaker 2: there in the last ten twenty years in the wake
Speaker 2: of the Rwandan comeback from their genocide, or the Sudan.
Speaker 2: It's just, you know, we've seen this stuff on the
Speaker 2: news recently, and now you've got al Qaeda about to
Speaker 2: take over Congo and Urkina Faso, and South Africa, which
Speaker 2: had been Africa's economy, has you know, has sort of
Speaker 2: plagued with all kinds of political issues and shortages of
Speaker 2: this and that. So but there are places that are
Speaker 2: doing well you can Rwanda, Ghana, the hand Senegal, Kenya.
Speaker 2: These are countries that are kind of emerging to be
Speaker 2: middle class countries. So it's a mix. Some are war zones,
Speaker 2: some are about to become true middle class countries. Others
Speaker 2: are sort of on the middle. They're trying to fight off,
Speaker 2: you know, to hottest organizations across the Sahel. You know,
Speaker 2: look at Somalia. They've been lingering on the edge for
Speaker 2: a long time, but there is a population explosion going
Speaker 2: on there. There is, on average, an increase in disposable income.
Speaker 2: A middle class is emerging in a lot of these countries.
Speaker 2: Their primary problem is governance. You know, there's there's still corruption,
Speaker 2: which is you know, the level of corruption is almost
Speaker 2: equal to the amount of is greater than the amount
Speaker 2: of foreign aid that pours in there in various places.
Speaker 2: Some people think it's an unstoppable whole. I don't believe that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've seen progress in places when they get
Speaker 2: governance in shape. Look at Rwanda, it's like you've never
Speaker 2: been to a cleaner country, Bob. The whole population has
Speaker 2: to go out on one Saturday a month and pick
Speaker 2: up garbage and do things. I mean, the place and
Speaker 2: you consider they had this awful eight hundred thousand people
Speaker 2: killed in a genocide in nineteen ninety four. Now it's like, man,
Speaker 2: it's like a paradise there, really clean and clear. I mean,
Speaker 2: an exception to the rule, I'll say. But you know,
Speaker 2: the problems are endemic in some of these other ones,
Speaker 2: and they appear to be unsolvable. But I have a
Speaker 2: connection when I go there, I feel somehow, I feel
Speaker 2: this wonderful sense of purpose, I guess, and when you
Speaker 2: see that, things can improve. I also love the arts.
Speaker 2: The arts are booming and quite often as the arts
Speaker 2: that can help bring up a country. You look at
Speaker 2: a country like Nigeria Afro Beat, the music, the music
Speaker 2: everywhere in Africa is sensational. I've been able to travel
Speaker 2: independently to like so many of these musical meccas in
Speaker 2: Africa and really dig down to the history there and
Speaker 2: where there's me all our music kind of came from there.
Speaker 2: So as a music fan first, I find traveling in
Speaker 2: Africa fascinating. I made a lot of separate trips on
Speaker 2: my own just sort of, you know, to take in
Speaker 2: as much African music as I can.
Speaker 1: So to what degree on your travels have you been
Speaker 1: afraid or unafraid for your personal safety?
Speaker 2: Oh, you know, I've been afraid in places when I traveled.
Speaker 2: When I lived in Asia in the eighties or the seventies,
Speaker 2: I should say, in Afghanistan, which people now say, you know,
Speaker 2: the tourists, there was hardly any tourists. It was an
Speaker 2: exotic play. It was open that people really friendly and hospitable.
Speaker 2: People think of it as a place of continuous war.
Speaker 2: They had had fifty years of peace. It was the
Speaker 2: tourist posters. Weren't many tourists who said, visit Afghanistan and
Speaker 2: see the world's friendliest people. That's not the last thing
Speaker 2: most people would think these days. But if you were there,
Speaker 2: it was like that all kinds of young Westerners would
Speaker 2: pass through there. In those days. That was who the
Speaker 2: primary tourists were, and it was everyone whoever went through there,
Speaker 2: you know, basically had a good experience. When I went back.
Speaker 2: I went back for twelve years in and out to
Speaker 2: work for this TV station there, which I really did enjoy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was dangerous because there would be the Taliban. There
Speaker 2: was an insurgency fighting, so you would feel, you know,
Speaker 2: you would have to drive fast at nights, so you
Speaker 2: wouldn't get stopped by some kidnapping group, or there would
Speaker 2: be a bomb suicide bombers here or there, and you know,
Speaker 2: you're always sort of filled with adrenaline. But I didn't
Speaker 2: really feel for my personal safety much in the seventies,
Speaker 2: more later on in Africa, not really. You know, things
Speaker 2: are a lot safer than people think. They may look
Speaker 2: dangerous if you drop somebody into a place and it
Speaker 2: looks like a little shady and dangerous, but you know,
Speaker 2: and in the seventies, the most dangerous place in the
Speaker 2: world's New York City. I mean my friends in Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: I say, well, come on, New York, it's great, and
Speaker 2: you go, no, that's crazy. I've seen what's going on
Speaker 2: over there. I'm you're not going to get me near
Speaker 2: New York. Too dangerous for me. The tables have turned now,
Speaker 2: but I haven't been plagued with fears for my own
Speaker 2: safety too much.
Speaker 1: Where have you not been that you would like to go?
Speaker 2: I was talking about that last I'd like to go
Speaker 2: to Tasmania. Have you ever been there? You've been to Australia, right.
Speaker 1: I've been in Australia a couple of times, have not
Speaker 1: been to Tasmania.
Speaker 2: I'd like to go there. I've only been in Australia once.
Speaker 2: I'd like to go to New Zealand. I've never been there.
Speaker 2: I'd like to go. I haven't really dug a deep pole,
Speaker 2: and I'd like to really slower Argentina. Now that they
Speaker 2: got all this American money, you must have been out
Speaker 2: and bathe and some of that. I've never been really
Speaker 2: down to Patagonia. I've never been to southern Chile. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of spots, haven't There's a plus spots
Speaker 2: I want to kind of feel. And I just went
Speaker 2: to Taiwan with some I have this group of people
Speaker 2: I kind of travel with, you know, we kind of
Speaker 2: took go to places. We went to Taiwan in the fall,
Speaker 2: I mean in the spring, and it was fantastic. I
Speaker 2: had no idea it was such a beautiful island. We
Speaker 2: wanted to get over there before the Chinese took it over.
Speaker 2: And you go there and you come back with a
Speaker 2: whole different impression. Number One, the natural beauty is just
Speaker 2: you know, on the in the eastern part of Taiwan,
Speaker 2: it's like it's like you can drive four or five
Speaker 2: hours and almost not see another house. It's kind of
Speaker 2: subtropical jungle, just fantastic. And the food's really good because
Speaker 2: when Shanghai Check came over at the end of the
Speaker 2: Chinese Civil War, all the rich people came to Taiwan
Speaker 2: and they brought all their chefs with them. So the
Speaker 2: level of food excellence in Taiwan is not to be
Speaker 2: surpassed mainland. Maybe these days, I don't know, but that
Speaker 2: was an interesting tripper. We go to Georgia, you know,
Speaker 2: down there, not the one in America, but the one
Speaker 2: down there on the southern belt of Russia where Stalin
Speaker 2: was from. And so I try and keep an arm
Speaker 2: in the fire and that keeps me excited. And every
Speaker 2: time I go to Africa, I try to go to
Speaker 2: a couple of new places.
Speaker 1: So when you have this group, how many people go.
Speaker 2: There's like four or five of us. There's this guy,
Speaker 2: Sad Mussin, who's an incredible guy. You would love him.
Speaker 2: He's the guy who convinced me to come back to Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: He's the most optimistic man I ever met. He's probably
Speaker 2: in his mid fifties now. He's the guy who started
Speaker 2: the first private TV and radio stations in Afghanistan after
Speaker 2: the fall of the Taliban, and he's living in London
Speaker 2: now London in Dubai, and we'd like to go. We
Speaker 2: went to Yemen, we traveled so much. So he's a
Speaker 2: great travel partner, as is this guy Jonathan Branstein, who
Speaker 2: turned out the guy who got me into Qbe but
Speaker 2: had also been to Malley Molly got me into the
Speaker 2: festival in the desert. You know, he's an eccentric traveler.
Speaker 2: And then I have this friend from Yemen whose father
Speaker 2: used to be president of Yemen. He now lives in
Speaker 2: the UAE. He's in the group. And then there's these
Speaker 2: two American guys who have a company called Zeba who
Speaker 2: who that make really good fruits and nuts from Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: They're still doing business there and they live in Lake Como,
Speaker 2: which is always nice to visit, and they have this
Speaker 2: kind of thriving business even now. In the age of
Speaker 2: the Taliban, Afghanistan was famous for nuts and pomegranates and grapes,
Speaker 2: so they put them in really kind of sexy looking,
Speaker 2: great packaging sell them. It's a whole soul in the
Speaker 2: Arawan and whole foods and those kind of grocers. But
Speaker 2: these guys like to travel and they're really good at it.
Speaker 2: So these are and we like to hike. So hiking
Speaker 2: becomes like, you know, we go to a place where
Speaker 2: you can, you know, hike up in the mountains and
Speaker 2: have some nice, nice traveling around, seeing the nightclubs.
Speaker 1: Everybody's got a different traveling style. Some people their ideas
Speaker 1: get a great hotel room, have service. Other people want
Speaker 1: to go see the historical sites, the museums. You mentioned
Speaker 1: the nightclubs. What kind of traveler are you?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't mind a good hotel, you know, if
Speaker 2: I was, it depends if I'm taking a trip somewhere.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's nothing like a nice hotel. I don't
Speaker 2: want to stay. I mean I've stayed believe me, Bob,
Speaker 2: I have stayed in my share fleabag hotels. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't. I don't even go into it.
Speaker 2: But you know, we go out now. I mean, we're
Speaker 2: all kind of grown up, so we can afford a
Speaker 2: decent hotel. And if there's a great hotel nearby and
Speaker 2: it's not an armen leg, I would like to stay
Speaker 2: there too. But a lot of it isn't you know,
Speaker 2: if there's a national museum that sounds really cool, unique,
Speaker 2: like there wasn't Taiwan, you'd go there. But I much
Speaker 2: prefer being outside looking at scene, re hiking and trying
Speaker 2: to get a sense of the vibe at the place.
Speaker 2: And you know, I'd like to always investigate them. Whatever
Speaker 2: the music scene is. That for me is a thrill.
Speaker 2: But it isn't like I mean, I'm fully capable of
Speaker 2: packing up and trying to someone says, come to the
Speaker 2: Caribbean for a week, I have a house stay with us.
Speaker 2: I say, that sounds good. I can do that.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I like going to California in the winter. You know,
Speaker 2: to me, that's traveling. I love. I love the Santa
Speaker 2: Barbara area. I just I've had a home up there
Speaker 2: for twenty years, and you know it's beautiful. Of course,
Speaker 2: now i just got eight or nine inches of rain,
Speaker 2: so I'm just wondering if my house has kind of
Speaker 2: washed away again. It's I don't know what happened to California, Bob.
Speaker 2: It used to be beautiful every day, and now if
Speaker 2: it isn't a wildfire, it's a flood, it's a debris flow,
Speaker 2: it's a mud slide, it's like you're on the edge
Speaker 2: of your seat. It's like it cats your adjuta.
Speaker 1: You know, you know it's harder when you're not here.
Speaker 1: It's certainly rained these past few days in terms of
Speaker 1: deleterious effects, fewer than I've ever seen. In terms of
Speaker 1: major rain. I didn't go to visit your house. I
Speaker 1: don't know what it's like there.
Speaker 2: Mine. Mine's turned out okay, and I couldn't believe it. Again,
Speaker 2: over two inches of rain a day, and I thought
Speaker 2: it'd be and I had this guy go check it out.
Speaker 2: He says, you know, everything's okay, no leaks and no mudslives,
Speaker 2: and I almost couldn't believe it. So I'm yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2: I'm back here thinking the worst. And I don't know why.
Speaker 2: It seems like there was good every No one really
Speaker 2: had any major damage.
Speaker 1: No, we traditionally have this mud problem from the hill
Speaker 1: behind our house. We put up, you know, a very
Speaker 1: small fence, but nothing came through. I mean this, this
Speaker 1: speaks to a completely different issue, which is perception. I mean,
Speaker 1: when you ran MTV, it was a monoculture. If you
Speaker 1: put an act on, they were known all over the world.
Speaker 1: Now you know California's pejorative. You know, I saw this
Speaker 1: great video where someone went to a business conference in
Speaker 1: you know, North Carolina, and the legitimate people they are saying,
Speaker 1: what about the twenty five dollars Hamburgers? You know, what
Speaker 1: about everybody? Can your kid go to school without a gun?
Speaker 1: You know, everybody thinks it's a hell hole, where as
Speaker 1: we're living here. It's kind of a joke. Listen. It's
Speaker 1: just like you're saying, there were all these places that
Speaker 1: were off the grid. Is there any place that's off
Speaker 1: the grid anymore?
Speaker 2: No? I mean, yeah, if there is one, someone's gonna
Speaker 2: go there and put on Instagram and it'll be on
Speaker 2: the grid in a bad way before you know it.
Speaker 2: You know, but what you're saying is right. Like when
Speaker 2: I lived in Afghanistan, people say, oh man, you must
Speaker 2: be on the edge of your seat all the time.
Speaker 2: Like people are living like normal lives pretty most of
Speaker 2: the time. You know, it's not like that. I mean,
Speaker 2: there may be a bomb on the other side of
Speaker 2: the toath I can bear route, but you know, two
Speaker 2: blocks away, everything's kind of normal. It's really kind of bizarre.
Speaker 2: And California is that way everybody think is gonna be
Speaker 2: just filled with homeless people. And but when you're even me,
Speaker 2: who's experienced and spent a lot of time in California,
Speaker 2: now I'm thinking, oh man, it's like I'm going to
Speaker 2: wash into the sea, because you know, the media blows
Speaker 2: it up and I have all these websites. I go
Speaker 2: to the show rain gages and so forth.
Speaker 1: But yeah, well I remember in the nineties, couple times
Speaker 1: we're rain this hard for a week straight. You could bear,
Speaker 1: you know, you left your house, you would drive through
Speaker 1: big puddles. You worry about your engine getting wet. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that there's not global warming. That there is,
Speaker 1: but I mean it's kind of funny again, way a
Speaker 1: point here, but I had to go out a number
Speaker 1: of times during the rain. Nobody's out. It's like on
Speaker 1: the East Coast, you tell people I didn't leave the
Speaker 1: house because it was raining. They would have no idea
Speaker 1: if it was snowing maybe, but here it's raining. People
Speaker 1: are staying home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and fantasy they don't know how to drive in
Speaker 2: the rain. Yeah, lots as durable as the East Coast
Speaker 2: people with this stuff.
Speaker 1: So you were in business school, you get a gig
Speaker 1: at an advertising agency, you speak with this woman you
Speaker 1: know who's in Europe and you drop out? How hard?
Speaker 1: You know, Listen, the nature of being good in school
Speaker 1: is perseverance, staying the course. You go to college, you
Speaker 1: go to graduate school, and all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: jump the track. I mean, how hard a decision was that?
Speaker 1: What'd your parents say?
Speaker 2: It was so easy? You know, you got to remember,
Speaker 2: you may remember of the era was like this is
Speaker 2: now nineteen seventy one, seventy two. Freedom was in the air.
Speaker 2: Every time you listen to a song is about going
Speaker 2: down a highway or hitting the road. I remember always
Speaker 2: just listening all that time to Joni Mitchell's International Adventures
Speaker 2: in Blue, and I'm thinking I get part of that.
Speaker 2: I mean, every time I go to the movies, it's
Speaker 2: like I'm seeing walk about or and I'm alienated in
Speaker 2: my work. And the idea that I'm going to spend
Speaker 2: my precious time selling fucking toilet paper. That was like
Speaker 2: a line too far. You know, I was already annoyed
Speaker 2: when they had me on Gi Joe, But now toilet paper.
Speaker 2: I just and then this woman made me this ears proposition.
Speaker 2: Quit your job, fuck it, you know you'll do something.
Speaker 2: Come with me, Let's go on an adventure. Let's go
Speaker 2: on an adventure. Let's hitchhike down to all the way
Speaker 2: down to Morocco across the Sahara Desert. And I said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that sounds fantastic. I was on a plane like a
Speaker 2: week later, and I was gone for a year, and
Speaker 2: it was like the defining year of my life, essentially,
Speaker 2: and I really wasn't worried like you would be today.
Speaker 2: Like someone was asking me that I got to go
Speaker 2: to the book party tomorrow night and it's going to
Speaker 2: be a lot of young people, and said, you know,
Speaker 2: your book could be inspiring to young people, because today
Speaker 2: young people they all have these panic attacks and they
Speaker 2: have depression, and they're afraid to take moves, and they're
Speaker 2: stuck in their ways and they think if they do
Speaker 2: this or do that, they're never going to get hired again.
Speaker 2: And tell them it ain't true. And it's hard to
Speaker 2: tell them because the situations are different and everyone's different.
Speaker 2: But for me, I never I mean I was never
Speaker 2: chasing Big Bucks and I wanted to. I was very
Speaker 2: much under the influence of the beats. I was in
Speaker 2: the countercultural flow. The idea that I was even in
Speaker 2: an ad agency. Kind of irritated me a bit, but
Speaker 2: I had saved some money. I figured I'd do it
Speaker 2: for a year. I had a plane ticket that was
Speaker 2: good for exactly a year. I came back in exactly
Speaker 2: the last day, and I would see what I found
Speaker 2: and maybe, oh, new doors would open. And it was
Speaker 2: the most valuable year to do it. And admittedly it
Speaker 2: was a good time to do it. In that time.
Speaker 2: You know, you can go anywhere. Iran and Lebanon, those
Speaker 2: were like party places. I mean, the world is a lot,
Speaker 2: you know, more fucked up now. So I never didn't
Speaker 2: cross my mind not to do it. It did I
Speaker 2: told my parents because they I had already spent a
Speaker 2: year off before I took this job. I got out
Speaker 2: of graduate school and I was a bartender or everywhere,
Speaker 2: and I learned that trade and moving around. I had.
Speaker 2: I had it in my bone somehow, and it was
Speaker 2: about I'd rather trade experience for money, and I figured
Speaker 2: I could always come back. I'm like, I'm thinking myself
Speaker 2: as like a jazz sportet. I could improvise my way
Speaker 2: into something or other. I'm not going to starve to death,
Speaker 2: and I'm not going to think I'm like in a
Speaker 2: formal orchestra and I have to go on some straight
Speaker 2: line that some conveyor belt that other people were doing.
Speaker 2: And it was in the air. I mean, I wasn't
Speaker 2: the only guy. I mean America, people would quit and
Speaker 2: go to somewhere in Vermont and northern California to communes
Speaker 2: and like make furniture whatever they're doing. But in Europe
Speaker 2: people would like to hit the road, like they had
Speaker 2: this thing, the hippie trail, you know, all through all
Speaker 2: these lower cost countries in Africa and in Asia. It
Speaker 2: was exhilarating. That was fantastic, you know, And I wanted
Speaker 2: to stay. That's why I started this business. I wanted
Speaker 2: to stay and live out there. I'd stay there for
Speaker 2: eight years. I said, this is like I lived so
Speaker 2: vividly and I feel so alive here. Why would I
Speaker 2: want to, you know, go back. I almost love being
Speaker 2: in a place where I felt no one would ever
Speaker 2: find me. Here. I'm going to, like, you know, kind
Speaker 2: of figure my way out. I'm learning a little language,
Speaker 2: make some friends, and it's a good challenge. I don't know,
Speaker 2: Wanderluss whatever it is it was, but it was exhilarating.
Speaker 1: This clothing company. Was it a light bulb that went
Speaker 1: off in your head when you were there seeing things
Speaker 1: or was it more of the reverse. This is the
Speaker 1: lifestyle I want. How can I support it?
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you. I am. After I was traveling
Speaker 2: with this woman for a couple months, she had to
Speaker 2: go back for a job, so I kept going. I
Speaker 2: hitchhiked all over Africa and I at one point I
Speaker 2: landed in Greece and I go to This is like
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two. So the night they broke into the watergate,
Speaker 2: I landed in Michinos. And then it wasn't like some
Speaker 2: you know, overly tourists at Greek Island. I was beautiful.
Speaker 2: I thought I was stepping into a postcard. And they
Speaker 2: had this beach there, this naked beach called Paradise Beach,
Speaker 2: which now is a big nightclub. But then it was
Speaker 2: like these two guys had at taverna and I was
Speaker 2: in there one day and I see this little girl,
Speaker 2: not a little girl, she's a woman, young woman, and
Speaker 2: she was selling all these kind of beachy clothes to
Speaker 2: German and tourists and so forth, and I got to
Speaker 2: see her. Everone was like a frenzy. She had them
Speaker 2: in these trunks and I had Indian deities painted on them,
Speaker 2: and she was making them fortune. And I went up
Speaker 2: to her afterwards. I said, that was really something. What's
Speaker 2: the story. Where do you get all this stuff? She say, well,
Speaker 2: I've been living in Katmandu for four years and I
Speaker 2: design and make my own clothes. I do all this
Speaker 2: stuff and then I pack it up in these trunks
Speaker 2: and I take it overland from the Pole through India, Pakistan,
Speaker 2: I ran Turkey, and I end up in Italy and
Speaker 2: Greece and sell it right to the customers, her own
Speaker 2: little vertical, integrated like enterprise. And I live in katman
Speaker 2: Do I have a fantastic house. I have servants, I
Speaker 2: throw parties. I go surfing in Sri Lanka. I ride
Speaker 2: horses in Afghanistan. India is the greatest show on earth, Tom,
Speaker 2: you really should go. So I said, Wow, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2: So that kind of set set me to go to India.
Speaker 2: I wanted. It was a very spiritual center in those days,
Speaker 2: and I started thinking, if she's doing that, and I've
Speaker 2: seen all this crappy clothing that was being made in
Speaker 2: Morocco and cheap stuff from India. What if I toned
Speaker 2: it up a bit. I knew nothing about this business,
Speaker 2: mind you, But if I, let say, I got a
Speaker 2: designer and we could make stuff that was of higher
Speaker 2: quality because the cost differences were great, air freight was
Speaker 2: just beginning. I could sell it to coholesale stores and
Speaker 2: boutiques which were now beginning to be this new thing.
Speaker 2: Everyone's opening these boutiques, and I could give it a shot.
Speaker 2: And you know, and I would always think, well, that
Speaker 2: way I could live in I'll get a house in India.
Speaker 2: I'll live in house in India, and I'll find some
Speaker 2: partners who I could trust and be good, and we
Speaker 2: could make something for five dollars in New Delhi and
Speaker 2: put it on a plane in twenty four hours later,
Speaker 2: I could sell it for twenty five dollars in Manhattan.
Speaker 2: And I basically did that. It ended up being the
Speaker 2: hardest job I ever had in my life, and it
Speaker 2: was very satisfied. I was a millionaire. I mean it is,
Speaker 2: I had a partner, and next thing I know, I'm
Speaker 2: a fucking My parents thought I was crazy, but it was.
Speaker 2: We really did really well. We'd be in vogue in
Speaker 2: women's Wear Daily and Mademoiselle magazine, and it was a
Speaker 2: lot of work. We had cash flow problems. You know,
Speaker 2: it got more difficult, but we grew every year. And
Speaker 2: I imagine, Bob, I imagine this is the life for me.
Speaker 2: I didn't want to be a big garmento, but I
Speaker 2: would always be available to take these side trips, like
Speaker 2: I would round up people in Afghanistan. I'd rent a bus,
Speaker 2: we'd all go on some kind of adventure. I would think,
Speaker 2: this is what I'm going to do. This is so
Speaker 2: it's so exotic and so real, and I'm living a
Speaker 2: life that no one at home could imagine. And then
Speaker 2: it all came crashing down. So I had to reinvent
Speaker 2: myself again, and I ended up like in a really
Speaker 2: safe heart. We're at a lucky time, and you know,
Speaker 2: timing is everything. The job I got at the company
Speaker 2: that would become MTV, if I had been there a
Speaker 2: month later or a month earlier, I wouldn't have gotten it. Now.
Speaker 2: I just happened to show up when they said we
Speaker 2: got to hire a lot of people who don't have
Speaker 2: any experience in television, for which I was a primer,
Speaker 2: a perfect candidate.
Speaker 1: You mentioned this Afghanistan renting a bus And there are
Speaker 1: a couple of other times with the same behavior in
Speaker 1: the book. Are you like the ring leader type? Are
Speaker 1: you say, Okay, this is what we're doing. We're getting
Speaker 1: everybody together and you're the cheerleader and you take them.
Speaker 1: Were those anomalous?
Speaker 2: I wouldn't do that a few times? You know? I
Speaker 2: mean there was a really I had a really great
Speaker 2: group of friends there, and I just thought that it
Speaker 2: was a big thing in the north of the country
Speaker 2: every New Year's which for them is like the Spring
Speaker 2: Equinox March twenty one. So I rented a bus and
Speaker 2: I loaded up with people and you know, we kind
Speaker 2: of split some expenses and I took out, rented this hotel,
Speaker 2: we all pay for our rooms, and we took off
Speaker 2: on this big road trip just like you know, eighteen
Speaker 2: hour journey up through the Hindukush Mountains and back down
Speaker 2: and Steven's Piscashi game. I meet the governor of the
Speaker 2: province and vices to the palace and shows. You know,
Speaker 2: they had a whole thing there for their New year celebration,
Speaker 2: and we looked like we looked like we were off
Speaker 2: of Jimi Hendrix's album cup. You know, everybody is dressed
Speaker 2: up in shawls and all this habitdash Ree and these
Speaker 2: girls who were designers. It was a great gang. And
Speaker 2: people who kind of had been bidden by the same
Speaker 2: bug as myself, who couldn't be They thought living in
Speaker 2: Kabble was like fantastic. It was like this fantasy we
Speaker 2: were living that nobody else knew anything about. It was
Speaker 2: it was a magic time.
Speaker 1: To what degree have you run into those people, the
Speaker 1: pre MTV, the wanderlust people. Have you run into them
Speaker 1: or kept up with them later in life?
Speaker 2: Yeah? My designer Jill Lumpkin, who you wrote about in
Speaker 2: Your Peace, she still lives in Bangalore. It's not called Belarub.
Speaker 2: I mean, they've changed the name, but she's still living
Speaker 2: in India. Fifty years later. The guy who was my
Speaker 2: partner's nephew, We were his mentor. He became a real
Speaker 2: estate maven, building big apartment buildings and hotels at a
Speaker 2: private jet. He was doing better than anybody. He gave
Speaker 2: Jill an apartment in Bangalore, like a three bedroom apartment
Speaker 2: in a modern complex with a pool and a gym.
Speaker 2: It's like living somewhere in you know, somewhere in the States.
Speaker 2: She still lives there, has her social Security check wire
Speaker 2: to India every month, and she couldn't be happier to
Speaker 2: still be there.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 2: I usually worried about it if she would adjust to
Speaker 2: life there, But she's out on me. And there would
Speaker 2: be other people like even now, some of my closest
Speaker 2: friends are from my second round in Afghanistan. These people
Speaker 2: that I would meet, like who were in Cobbled during
Speaker 2: the who were war journalists, you know, Richard Engel or
Speaker 2: Dexter Filkins, these guys who were kind of stars to me.
Speaker 2: They were like the rock stars to me in a way,
Speaker 2: who were out there and I admired what they did.
Speaker 2: We still kind of hang out and we're all still
Speaker 2: in touch, and there's like someone gets married from this
Speaker 2: group and everybody goes, and it's like a reunion. I
Speaker 2: just just this fellow I knew, Oza Mahmed, who was
Speaker 2: this American guy of Pakistani descent. He got a he
Speaker 2: won a Pulitzer Prize New York Time bureau chief in
Speaker 2: Afghanistan and then bureau chief in Mexico City, and he
Speaker 2: got married and Lisbon and everybody went. It was like
Speaker 2: a reunion of the good old the good old days
Speaker 2: in the war zone of you know, twenty ten to fifteen. Yeah,
Speaker 2: those were heady times too.
Speaker 1: Okay. Tom Rush is a friend of mine and he
Speaker 1: mentions this old girlfriend. And the funny thing about it is,
Speaker 1: anybody else would say, oh, I had this old girlfriend whatever.
Speaker 1: Not only is it Jill, It's always Jill Lumpkin of course,
Speaker 1: which is a unique name. And I've heard all the
Speaker 1: stories her flying back to New York and no regrets
Speaker 1: on the album. Well, all of a sudden she shows
Speaker 1: up in your book. What is so special about this woman?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, you got to realize because I
Speaker 2: was reading, I get online this paper from a Monacito,
Speaker 2: Montecito journal, whatever it is. I see that Tom Rush
Speaker 2: and Judy Collins are playing tonight right at the Libero
Speaker 2: Theater in Santa Barbara. I'm saying, wow. And I've heard
Speaker 2: him on your podcast, and I was always an admirer room.
Speaker 2: He was the first musician I ever really met. When
Speaker 2: I was in college. I did a show and I
Speaker 2: booked him. I was sort of an entrepreneur. And anyway,
Speaker 2: what's so special about Jill? Well, at the time, Jill
Speaker 2: was like this real beauty she was working at Maxis
Speaker 2: Kansas City in New York with this other woman who
Speaker 2: was a matress. They worked the back room. And the
Speaker 2: other one was Helen Martin, who that wasn't her name
Speaker 2: at the time. She married Bryce Martin, the artist, and
Speaker 2: she's now an artist herself. So that two of them
Speaker 2: were these high cheekbone thin waf looking model like really
Speaker 2: cool chicks, really right out of the boat. You know.
Speaker 2: You look up Bohemian in the dictionary and it's them.
Speaker 2: And she had this cool aura about her. I mean,
Speaker 2: as I said in the book, she was like the coolest,
Speaker 2: freest spirit I'd ever met in my life. I mean,
Speaker 2: she just didn't care. And through her I met all
Speaker 2: kinds of interesting characters. And in both Cobblin and Delhi,
Speaker 2: she had a tendency. You know, she was very social,
Speaker 2: she was very beautiful. Tom Russe really had a thing
Speaker 2: about her. Evidently they still communicate. She calls them Tommy,
Speaker 2: Tommy's in touch this and that, you know. Now she
Speaker 2: was going out with some guy from Pentangle, remember them.
Speaker 2: Pentager was one of those kind of gypsy bands in
Speaker 2: the Irritations liming with that dude Swasties.
Speaker 1: Brute Yane people.
Speaker 2: She had a thing for this guy, you know she
Speaker 2: But we were together for shit eight years seven and
Speaker 2: now six seven years, and you know we never were
Speaker 2: an item ourselves, but I always enjoyed her, and she
Speaker 2: was a magnet for interesting people. And yeah, her and
Speaker 2: Tom Rush were He was really taken with her. She was,
Speaker 2: I mean, she still is beautiful, but I mean now
Speaker 2: she's like my age. I mean, you know, she's getting
Speaker 2: herself a security check wired to India, and you know,
Speaker 2: I'd love to have been there and seen Tom Rush
Speaker 2: play tonight. I met He'd never remember. I think I
Speaker 2: met him in nineteen sixty four or five, but he
Speaker 2: was a striking character in those days.
Speaker 1: So in the book, you say, I have this idea,
Speaker 1: I'm going to sell slightly more upskilled than the usual
Speaker 1: item to boutiques. Then all of a sudden, you're selling
Speaker 1: to Bloomingdale's Involved. That doesn't happen by accident. How did
Speaker 1: all that happen?
Speaker 2: Well, we had good stuff, and I had contacts. I mean,
Speaker 2: I this girl Sidney Bachmann from Martha's Vineyard where I
Speaker 2: was a bartender and my partner had a house there.
Speaker 2: The guy who became my partner and Sydney was the
Speaker 2: head of the fashion office, which like a key position
Speaker 2: at the key retailer of the era, and she loved
Speaker 2: what we did to the point where she would give
Speaker 2: me stuff say, you know, basically, knock this off and
Speaker 2: I'll get a whole bunch of it. So we were
Speaker 2: always Bloomingdale's was always our biggest customer, but we also
Speaker 2: sold to Bendel's, which was another like powerhouse fashion forward operation,
Speaker 2: Macy's and you know, major stores, but a lot of
Speaker 2: it was in you know, there was a real boutique
Speaker 2: store kind of you know, there was a lot of them,
Speaker 2: and they We used to have a thing called the
Speaker 2: Boutique Show at the old McAlpin Hotel, which was like
Speaker 2: some kind of Renaissance fare that would happen twice a
Speaker 2: year and you would go and you would be able
Speaker 2: to Celtics. People had stores in Florida or California or
Speaker 2: what have you. So it was hard work. I set
Speaker 2: up a showroom in New York, hire someone to run it,
Speaker 2: and we have buyers come in and we were I
Speaker 2: knew women who worked at these as fashion editors, so
Speaker 2: I could get I had more than an average chance.
Speaker 2: It's like getting a record on the radio. I had
Speaker 2: more than an average chance of getting some editorial coverage
Speaker 2: in Vogue or Mademoiselle or Glamour or one of those.
Speaker 2: Essence and buyers would come in and everyone's always looking for, like,
Speaker 2: what's the cool new place that hasn't been ruined yet
Speaker 2: tourism wise, what's that place? Well, what's a cool new
Speaker 2: company that no one knows anything about. It's sort of
Speaker 2: under the radar, but they're doing something really good. And
Speaker 2: we were that for a while. So that's how, you know,
Speaker 2: we kind of boosted our sales. It was through connections
Speaker 2: I had and the product that was good, and the
Speaker 2: word of mouth, and you know, we went we went viral.
Speaker 1: Bob Okay, did you know how to run it and
Speaker 1: how to price it because you'd been to business school?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that helped a lot. I mean, my skills helped
Speaker 2: a lot there. You know, we used to have a
Speaker 2: thing of whatever our landed cost was. If you pay
Speaker 2: some for four dollars, by the time you pay the
Speaker 2: tariff in the air freight, it's like six dollars. Well,
Speaker 2: I'll sell it for twelve dollars, knowing that the retail
Speaker 2: will probably sell it for twenty four dollars. But you know,
Speaker 2: the business as we got bigger, got more complicated because
Speaker 2: when you sell to big stores, they take a discount.
Speaker 2: If you got an agent in la he wants a commission,
Speaker 2: and then people who are in the big stores they
Speaker 2: don't pay it for a long time. So you might
Speaker 2: be a millionaire on paper, which we were, but you
Speaker 2: don't have any money. It's all tied up in receivables.
Speaker 2: It's all tied up in inventory. Never you're always trying
Speaker 2: to get your head above water. You're sort of basically
Speaker 2: just hanging on. I know that's the thing that a
Speaker 2: lot of people are going through today with Trump's tariffs.
Speaker 2: I mean, things were already bad enough for these folks
Speaker 2: and they're getting squeezed on pricing by competitors now they
Speaker 2: got Yeah. But anyway, I'm having a business background and
Speaker 2: a business orientation was really important and it kind of
Speaker 2: set me apart. We were like the only kind of
Speaker 2: Western people who own companies like this who were doing it,
Speaker 2: which also brought me a bit of an advantage. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I was putting my uh my business degree to good use,
Speaker 2: which which which which was a big solace to my
Speaker 2: beleaguered parents who kept thinking, why are you gonna get
Speaker 2: a job and do something? Because when I came back
Speaker 2: from India after being gone a year and they said,
Speaker 2: what are you going to do? I said, I'm going
Speaker 2: to start a business. You know, I got a box
Speaker 2: of these shirts and I'm going to drive it around
Speaker 2: in a Volkswagen see if there's a market forum. And
Speaker 2: then when we became successful, they were like, wow, I
Speaker 2: had to give it to my parents. They were patient
Speaker 2: and supported me. I was on a mission.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what did you learn in business school?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, you take think first of all, I
Speaker 2: went there. This will sound really dumb. This sounds really dumb.
Speaker 2: So I'm in college. I'm a senior in college. I know.
Speaker 2: You know, the draft now was like forty fifty thousand
Speaker 2: people a month. My deferment's gonna route in June. That
Speaker 2: coming June, when I graduate, I'll be in Vietnam by
Speaker 2: the end of the year. I knew people in the service.
Speaker 2: You're probably in the same situation. So what are you
Speaker 2: gonna do. People gonna go to law school, going to
Speaker 2: go to be a doctor, a dentist. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to be a doctor or dentist or a lawyer. But
Speaker 2: someone says, go to business school. I'm so dumb. I
Speaker 2: didn't even know there was a thing as a business Wait.
Speaker 1: Wait, I graduated. I had no idea there was anything
Speaker 1: such as an NBA, and I didn't know for years.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm the same big thing. So thank god someone
Speaker 2: told me. I said, why don't you go to business school.
Speaker 2: I'm working in a school cafeteria. Go to business school.
Speaker 2: But there's business school, so you know. So I applied
Speaker 2: to NYU. I wanted to go to a city. I
Speaker 2: was in Vermont, and I want to buy to be
Speaker 2: U and NYU. That was it. And I got into NYU.
Speaker 2: You and that that was another thing that really changed
Speaker 2: my life. But what I'd learned there. I had this
Speaker 2: professor Peter Drucker, who was sort of the management guru
Speaker 2: of the era. Put out a lot of books The
Speaker 2: Age of cod Discontinent and everything. He was all about
Speaker 2: innovation and change, and his classes were just fantastic, and
Speaker 2: he real learned the key element of the business of
Speaker 2: the American economy is entrepreneurs creating, correcting with customers, creating
Speaker 2: new things. It isn't creating, it's innovating new things. He said,
Speaker 2: someone's an inventor. They make something out of nothing. An
Speaker 2: innovator is somebody who takes stuff that already exists and
Speaker 2: somehow puts it together in a new way for a
Speaker 2: new market or a new this and that. And I said,
Speaker 2: now that's interesting. You know, that's a place in business
Speaker 2: where it could be creative, It could be interesting, and
Speaker 2: I'm going to keep my eye on that sector. You know,
Speaker 2: it starts small. And the other thing was always always
Speaker 2: look for jobs and sectors that were ascendant. You know,
Speaker 2: you know, you don't want to be, you know, in
Speaker 2: the buggy business. You want to be in something that
Speaker 2: looks to be coming and being ascendant, which later on
Speaker 2: my life was certainly cable television, and at one point
Speaker 2: in my life it became importing. Importing was not a
Speaker 2: big thing in the seventies early seventies. That was, you
Speaker 2: know that the worldwide economic system was just sort of
Speaker 2: adjusting to all this international trade. So I was really
Speaker 2: uh intrigued with him, and I did really well in school,
Speaker 2: even though I had sometimes I had work into the bartender.
Speaker 2: I'd get out of work some nights at three am,
Speaker 2: but I worked my ass off. I didn't want to
Speaker 2: get thrown out of him. If I flunked out, I
Speaker 2: was going to end up in Vietnam, you know. So
Speaker 2: I worked hard at my you know, and I had
Speaker 2: to hustle money because my dad's got I ended up
Speaker 2: getting a scholarship, you know, when I was one semester in.
Speaker 2: But I didn't really have any money to go to school.
Speaker 2: But as you know, then school wasn't that expensive, not
Speaker 2: compared to today. It's unbelievable, you know, for a couple
Speaker 2: thousand dollars a semester. You know, now you know it's
Speaker 2: a whole other thing, which you know impacts everything else.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I liked business school. So I got an MBA,
Speaker 2: and then it was okay, I'm going to take I
Speaker 2: worked for sixteen years, eighteen years of school. I'm going
Speaker 2: to take a year off and drift around and try
Speaker 2: and keep up with some of these buddies I had
Speaker 2: met who had their career path was not to have
Speaker 2: one then their their career paths was never have a
Speaker 2: grown up job, you know, which fits in sync with,
Speaker 2: you know, some of the counterculture sensibility. I was that
Speaker 2: was one of those guys. But I was never like,
Speaker 2: I never got on the spiritual thing in any kind
Speaker 2: of large degree. You know, I wasn't going to India
Speaker 2: to sit in the cave or something with some sadus.
Speaker 2: I was sort of on a reconnaissance mission.
Speaker 1: Okay, this all blows up the answer and an ad.
Speaker 1: You go for a meeting at MTV. How exactly did
Speaker 1: you sell yourself? What was it about what you said
Speaker 1: that they said, okay, we want this guy.
Speaker 2: Well I got this meeting through my brother who worked
Speaker 2: at Columbia Records, and this guy Bob mcgrorty. And this
Speaker 2: is at this point in time that company had just
Speaker 2: started and they had Nickelodeon and the Movie Channel. The
Speaker 2: MTV was still an idea they talked about, but it
Speaker 2: hadn't been approved by the Warner Amex joint venture. They
Speaker 2: hadn't they So I'm just trying to get in anywhere.
Speaker 2: And when I went in to see him, I mean
Speaker 2: I got a hair cut, I got a suit. I
Speaker 2: remember buying a Georgia Armani's suit for like three hundred
Speaker 2: bucks down on Orchard Street. I looked really good. I
Speaker 2: went in and my sale line was, look, you need entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2: I'm an entrepreneur. I know it sounds weird. I lived
Speaker 2: in Asia for eight years, buy and large, but I
Speaker 2: started this company. We're a multimillion dollar company. It kind
Speaker 2: of went under because of a series of unfortunate events.
Speaker 2: But I know all about music. I'm a music fanatic,
Speaker 2: always have been, and I can bring a spirit to
Speaker 2: this place. And I have creative abilities. I worked in
Speaker 2: an ad agency and I had this whole portfolio of
Speaker 2: I really went all out. I said, this is going
Speaker 2: to be a protesy interview. I'm going to try and
Speaker 2: blow it. I want to work at this company. So
Speaker 2: I had this portfolio of all this stuff. We had
Speaker 2: made catalog shots with models and you know, tear sheets
Speaker 2: for magazines, and so I could look legitimate. I want
Speaker 2: to look at the I didn't appear to be legitimate,
Speaker 2: but I want to make myself look legitimately. So it
Speaker 2: goes right away. Oh, this is fantastic. I want you to
Speaker 2: go see my boss right away. And that's John Lack,
Speaker 2: who was the guy who was the originator of the
Speaker 2: idea of MTV. And he said to me, so, what
Speaker 2: were you doing in Afghanistan? You were smuggling drugs And
Speaker 2: he said it like it was a good thing, you know.
Speaker 2: I said, no, not really. I wanted smuggling drugs, but
Speaker 2: I did this and that and the other thing. And
Speaker 2: he says, well, we're looking for people with no experience
Speaker 2: in television. We need people who don't have can't we
Speaker 2: don't need money, so we can't afford someone from NBC
Speaker 2: who's just going to make stuff with some independent operations.
Speaker 2: It's going to be expensive. We need people who can
Speaker 2: think out of the box. I said, well I didn't.
Speaker 2: I haven't even lived in a country that had television.
Speaker 2: But I'm this, that and the other thing. I went
Speaker 2: to the whole dittany. So they offered me a job
Speaker 2: on the spot, and I said, this is going a
Speaker 2: lot better than I thought. You know, I just came
Speaker 2: in for an interview and thinking, well, well think about it.
Speaker 2: Maybe we'll have you back. No, take a job, and
Speaker 2: it's thirty five thousand dollars, take it or leave it.
Speaker 2: I said, come in, count me in. So that's how
Speaker 2: I got the job. And then like four months later
Speaker 2: they hire Bob Pittman.
Speaker 1: Wait wait before you get there, you said, but I
Speaker 1: got to go do something else for a month.
Speaker 2: Right, I did? I know? I know I skipped over
Speaker 2: that part. I said, this is like I'm sitting there
Speaker 2: and going, oh my god. I've been thinking, no one's
Speaker 2: going to hire me. I've been running around in pajamas
Speaker 2: for eight years, and they're going to think, who is
Speaker 2: this guy? He's some drug smuggler. So they hire me,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, I feel this wave of legitimacy.
Speaker 2: And I said, well, I'd like to start, but I
Speaker 2: can't really start for a month. He said, that's not
Speaker 2: going to work. We need you right away. We're hiring
Speaker 2: twenty people or something right away. I said, that's not
Speaker 2: going to work. I got a I'm thinking, okay, I
Speaker 2: got a job, and I'm thinking I'm going to go
Speaker 2: into some corporate life and while it may be fun,
Speaker 2: it's going to be nothing like what I left. So
Speaker 2: I want to take like another run on the Marrakesh Express.
Speaker 2: So I grabbed my then girlfriend and I told him
Speaker 2: I couldn't start for a year. For a month, I
Speaker 2: had to do some things. He said, well, I can't
Speaker 2: wait a month. Look, if you want to take off
Speaker 2: a month, do it, but the job may not be
Speaker 2: here if you come back. But if that job's not here,
Speaker 2: there'll probably be something else. So I split to Marrakesh
Speaker 2: with my girlfriend and we roamed around Morocco for a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks. And I came back and I remember
Speaker 2: I entered the building on I think it was no
Speaker 2: I went back. Yeah, I went back, and the job
Speaker 2: was available. It wasn't a job I wanted. They put
Speaker 2: me in a room where they stored soda and was
Speaker 2: It was Saint Patrick's Day in nineteen eighty, ten years
Speaker 2: to the day from when I went to the Fillmore
Speaker 2: West and saw the Jefferson airplane with the Joshua light show,
Speaker 2: and I saw music videos being I mean I saw
Speaker 2: a video being made the old fashioned way by those dudes,
Speaker 2: and I saw the power of music being linked up
Speaker 2: with video some kind. But anyway, I started off, and
Speaker 2: then they had me doing sales for a while, and
Speaker 2: then they hired a Bob Pittman, who was he's twenty
Speaker 2: one years old or twenty two years old. He's running
Speaker 2: the biggest radio station in New York, having run the
Speaker 2: biggest one in Chicago. He's like this long haired, one
Speaker 2: eyed hippie dude who a sweet talker. He was working
Speaker 2: with don Imus, and they hired him to kind of
Speaker 2: be the point person to develop the concept of MTV
Speaker 2: into a real channel, and he was looking to get six,
Speaker 2: seven eight people to be on the first team. So
Speaker 2: I went to see him saying, I'm your man, this
Speaker 2: is why i came to the company in the first place.
Speaker 2: I've seen music videos. I'm like nuts about this idea
Speaker 2: is the big best idea in the world. You got
Speaker 2: to hire me. I'll work my ass up for you. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: I'm like six or seven years older than him. I'm
Speaker 2: like the only old guy. I'm like thirty three. So
Speaker 2: he starts the same thing. He says, well, were you
Speaker 2: smuggling hashi Ish because that was a big thing of
Speaker 2: the day. I go, not really, I wasn't really smuggling
Speaker 2: hash He says not really. He says that means you were.
Speaker 2: That means you were right. He kind of trapped me,
Speaker 2: so he says, you're hired. So he hired me to
Speaker 2: be the head of marketing. So it was me and
Speaker 2: John Sykes and Piskuy, Fred Cyber, Carolyn Bigger. There was
Speaker 2: a handful of us. They were all shoved us into
Speaker 2: the Sheridan Hotel, into these hotel rooms where you know,
Speaker 2: We're just it's like a like like the kind of
Speaker 2: startup you'd see in the internet. One hero, everyone's eating
Speaker 2: pizza and you know, we had like eight people and
Speaker 2: four phones and they had call waiting and we had
Speaker 2: no money, but we were we were Everyone was like
Speaker 2: a music fanatic. A lot of them came out of
Speaker 2: either radio or record companies, and you know, we all
Speaker 2: thought this was the greatest idea in the world. And
Speaker 2: the people were I was like the highest paid guy
Speaker 2: other by no sychs is making thirty grand a year
Speaker 2: and they would have worked for less money. It's funny, Bob,
Speaker 2: but you know, everyone talks about money, money, money these days.
Speaker 2: None of these people were really concerned with money. We
Speaker 2: were on a you know, on a crusade to do
Speaker 2: something that sounded really exciting and if it worked out,
Speaker 2: maybe we'd make some money. No one was imagining it
Speaker 2: would be a multi billion dollar business one day.
Speaker 1: Okay, just to go back. You had nothing to do
Speaker 1: during that month. You just wanted another month live in
Speaker 1: the hippie lifestyle.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, I know, I'm athetic.
Speaker 1: Well wouldn't you normally say I can't believe I got
Speaker 1: this job? I mean, what was for you it.
Speaker 2: Turned out to be. It was a blessing in disguise
Speaker 2: because I when I came in, I'm now a level lower.
Speaker 2: So the frontline guys who were higher than me, they
Speaker 2: all ultimately got fired because they were out in front
Speaker 2: and they're making threshold mistakes in a new business, and
Speaker 2: you know, sooner or later, he's gone. He's gone, he's gone,
Speaker 2: and I'm down just below the swing of the and
Speaker 2: I'm seeing what's going on. I've seen, I'm learning stuff,
Speaker 2: and you know, I realized I'm learning from their mistakes,
Speaker 2: and I get elevated back to where I would have been,
Speaker 2: and then I ultimately go up to MTV. So if
Speaker 2: I had stayed and taken that higher job, maybe I
Speaker 2: would have made some dumb mistakes and they would have
Speaker 2: dusted me as well. So it all worked out. There's
Speaker 2: that improvised life thing, you know, you take a chance
Speaker 2: and you never know. But I followed my heart. I
Speaker 2: wanted to I wanted to go back to Morocco. That's
Speaker 2: where my you know, I was. It was like my
Speaker 2: old It's like going back to your old lover, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, it was still there, that that third world thing,
Speaker 2: and I wanted another. I wanted another run at it
Speaker 2: got the best of me.
Speaker 1: So what was Pittman's special sauce.
Speaker 2: He was a great bullshitter. He was smart as a whip.
Speaker 2: He had the Southern drawl. You know. I think he
Speaker 2: was the son of a minister or something. He came
Speaker 2: from Mississippi, and he would impress the hell out of
Speaker 2: older people because here he is, this young guy. He's
Speaker 2: wearing a suit, he's got long hair, he's got one eye.
Speaker 2: He's programmed all these big radio stations. He says, I
Speaker 2: got my finger on the pulse of the youth culture,
Speaker 2: and they believe them. And he could talk like no
Speaker 2: one could talk. I caught him the other day. I
Speaker 2: was I was going through Instagram reels or whatever the
Speaker 2: hell it is, and there's Bob Pittman. He's talking at
Speaker 2: some conference in San Francisco. The same you know, he could.
Speaker 2: He was like remind me of Shane Smith, same fucking lineus.
Speaker 2: You know. He was just a smooth talking dude, much
Speaker 2: different than Shane. But he making making something bad sound
Speaker 2: really good and people are eating it up because it
Speaker 2: comes out and sounds right. And he was a good manager.
Speaker 2: He was a good manager and he was cheap. He
Speaker 2: wouldn't give us any money to do anything because there
Speaker 2: wasn't really a lot of money to give. And he
Speaker 2: became a great friend of me, and he was my mentor.
Speaker 2: For God's sake. He's the young guy. I'm the old
Speaker 2: I'm the old man. And I never told anybody there
Speaker 2: like I had an MBA. That would be like, you know,
Speaker 2: like I had cancer or something, because all these people
Speaker 2: kind of come from the creative side pretty much. I
Speaker 2: was just like some dude from Afghanistan who was a
Speaker 2: rug smuggler.
Speaker 1: So why exactly did Pittman leave?
Speaker 2: Well, the bloom was off the roads, he thought, and
Speaker 2: others thought. We had a great run, and we went.
Speaker 2: When our revenue got to like seventy million dollars, Viacom
Speaker 2: Steve Warner Ames was having problems. There was the Atari
Speaker 2: thing if you can remember that right, you know.
Speaker 1: They were losing the crashed.
Speaker 2: We got to sell some stuff. We got to sell
Speaker 2: like some of these joint ventures. We got to get
Speaker 2: out of this. We got to raise some money. So
Speaker 2: we were put on the block and there was a
Speaker 2: company called via Com then that had just bought showtime.
Speaker 2: And then we went to Forestmen Little, that Bob new
Speaker 2: Teddy Forceman. There was a big lbo operation that was
Speaker 2: a big thing in the sixties or seventies or eighties
Speaker 2: if you remember. It leveraged buyouts. So we worked out
Speaker 2: a thing where we could buy the employees could buy
Speaker 2: the copy in conjunction with money from Forestman Little, and
Speaker 2: we put a bit on the table and then we
Speaker 2: were going to get it. We were going to be
Speaker 2: independent and free. And then Teddy forst. Then Steve Ross
Speaker 2: got on some helicopter he flew to East Hampton and
Speaker 2: when he got off he decided he was in sell
Speaker 2: to the other guy. So like an extra fifty million dollars.
Speaker 2: So we were a shit out of luck. And the
Speaker 2: new guys who came in weren't all that pleasant. They
Speaker 2: were like proper business people. And Bob, I think, felt deflated.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm out of here. The blooms off the rose,
Speaker 2: the party's over, so he les Garland Sykes. A lot
Speaker 2: of people left, and I'm thinking, where the hell they going? Man,
Speaker 2: this is still the greatest idea around. What else are
Speaker 2: you going to find us better than this? They went
Speaker 2: off to work at CIA or some promotion thing and
Speaker 2: I think Bob was running Morton Downey Show, some kind
Speaker 2: of stuff like that. He had a deal with MCA.
Speaker 2: Everybody was everyone was desired by Hollywood people because they thought,
Speaker 2: for some reason, the MTV executives had some kind of
Speaker 2: special sauce. So I stayed where I was and Bob
Speaker 2: made me president on the way out. So now I'm in.
Speaker 2: Now I'm on top of the pile. And I had
Speaker 2: to reconstitute everybody. And we were not impressed with the
Speaker 2: new people, the new people who took us over, and
Speaker 2: they came in to tell us, uh, you know what
Speaker 2: was what. I had a management retreat going on in
Speaker 2: Montalk at this place called Gurney's, and they came out
Speaker 2: with a helicopter. Now, the only silver lining of this deal,
Speaker 2: these guys getting a deal, was that the paltry amount
Speaker 2: of stock options that were distributed would vest and be
Speaker 2: paid out if someone bought the company. So we were
Speaker 2: looking around, you know, we had like ten thousands. You know,
Speaker 2: you're not going to make, you know, make forty fifty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars, but that was a lot of money to us.
Speaker 2: So they came in to talk to us. They set
Speaker 2: up a little microphone in the ballroom and they start
Speaker 2: off saying, well, we've talked to lawyers and we don't
Speaker 2: think we have to pay out your stock options. This
Speaker 2: is like the opener, you know. It was nothing like hey,
Speaker 2: you guys have done a great job, we see a
Speaker 2: great future ahead. We can't wait to work with you. No,
Speaker 2: and like fuck you. And then they you know, they
Speaker 2: talked a little bit about other stuff, and they left
Speaker 2: in their helicopters, and then we proceeded to trash the barroom,
Speaker 2: tip over fish tanks, tip over palm trees, bus glasses.
Speaker 2: It was like a gang of like like led Zeppelin.
Speaker 2: It infected us and anyway, then some of the Redstone
Speaker 2: took over the company and and displaced those guys, and
Speaker 2: I was off to work with him. He hired a
Speaker 2: guy named.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait before before you go there, Bob makes you president.
Speaker 1: Were you an impostor learning on the gig or did
Speaker 1: you know how to do it?
Speaker 2: Oh? I was an impostor. I mean I had been around.
Speaker 2: I think even it was still a small company, I
Speaker 2: could do it. But then the new guy said, hey,
Speaker 2: you're not a good enough president. We're going to give
Speaker 2: you a co president. Because I don't think that, you know,
Speaker 2: advertisers are going to like trust you, or you didn't
Speaker 2: have the credibility to deal with advertisers. You were not
Speaker 2: that school in that part of the business. So now
Speaker 2: I have a co president and you know, this is
Speaker 2: the guy I got along with him. Okay, but it
Speaker 2: was a bit deflating. But meanwhile I was learning the
Speaker 2: ropes on my half of the business. And then Sunder
Speaker 2: came along. He took it over in a big takeout battle, big, big,
Speaker 2: big battle. It was, you know, well chronicled on Wall Street.
Speaker 2: And he hired Frank Biondi, this great guy, who immediately
Speaker 2: made me the CEO and had me fire the other guy,
Speaker 2: which I did, and then I was off with those
Speaker 2: guys for you know, I was the CEO of MTV
Speaker 2: Networks for seventeen years, and you know, we blew it
Speaker 2: up into a multi billion dollar business. It was fantastic
Speaker 2: because it wasn't like I was doing the same boring thing.
Speaker 2: Things would come along and we'd be a whole different,
Speaker 2: new kind of company. We started going international. We started
Speaker 2: nick Toons Animation, finding these weird like animators and setting
Speaker 2: them up to do business and set up a little
Speaker 2: animation studio. Going international was a big We launched other networks,
Speaker 2: Comedy Central among them, so it was always new, it
Speaker 2: was always interesting, and I viewed my job as my
Speaker 2: job was to keep the entity, this creative nucleus protected
Speaker 2: because I had this management team that was amazingly talented,
Speaker 2: and we were just filled with people who didn't want
Speaker 2: to work in normal companies. We had the worst dress
Speaker 2: group of people in any Manhattan office building. And my
Speaker 2: job was basically to try and keep this as a
Speaker 2: creative first company and to develop a culture there that
Speaker 2: would be seen as a competitive advantage by others. And
Speaker 2: I made the heads of our networks creative people, not
Speaker 2: business people, which would have been the normal process in
Speaker 2: the business world. We gave up half our key jobs
Speaker 2: to women, but we had like Judy McGrath and John
Speaker 2: Sykes and Jerry Laiborne and Herb Scannal and others, you know.
Speaker 2: So I thought that if you had a creative person
Speaker 2: running a network, the people who worked there would see
Speaker 2: that we're a creative company at heart and create activity
Speaker 2: and taking risks is our key aptitude. And everyone was
Speaker 2: always encouraged to try and push the envelope, do stuff
Speaker 2: we didn't have a lot of money, so they had to
Speaker 2: kind of do it in an innovative way, and for
Speaker 2: a long time it worked. We cranked out, you know,
Speaker 2: we grew for seventeen years, four quarters each year. Every
Speaker 2: quarter we were up double digits on the top and
Speaker 2: bottom line. So it really went from seventy million dollars
Speaker 2: a year to a few billion dollars a year in revenue.
Speaker 2: And when really kicked in was Nickelodeon and when we
Speaker 2: made the move to invent our own cartoons, basically create
Speaker 2: our own cartoon characters rather than licensed looney tunes and
Speaker 2: stuff like that. And then we can had consumer products.
Speaker 2: And then Sumnder bought Paramount, so we were able to
Speaker 2: make movies and so again we're reincarnated into a whole
Speaker 2: other kind of business. So you learn a bit about
Speaker 2: the movie business. It was. It was a great ride.
Speaker 1: Just got to go back to the party out in
Speaker 1: mod talk. You're in charge and they're trashing the place.
Speaker 2: Well, I was second in charge. Pittman was still there.
Speaker 2: This was his swan soa and he actually started it.
Speaker 2: He started throwing the glass. He started throwing the glasses,
Speaker 2: and then everybody said, well, hey man, he's throwing the glasses.
Speaker 2: Let's throw the glasses. Then let's they had these palm
Speaker 2: trees like in these pots and they're being thrown over
Speaker 2: and fish tank and really, I mean it was quite
Speaker 2: a scene to see. But everyone was so pissed, like
Speaker 2: we had this little wonderland, we had a plan to
Speaker 2: be out on our own, and now it's not just
Speaker 2: not happening, but it seems like the new guys are like,
Speaker 2: you know, not exactly our kind of people.
Speaker 1: Okay, so tell me about Sumner. Was Sunder just a
Speaker 1: bull who took chances? Was he a brilliant businessman who
Speaker 1: built this empire? Who was Sumner Redstone?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. He was a complicated man. He
Speaker 2: inherited a driving theater business from his father and then
Speaker 2: built it up. He was really the kind of guy
Speaker 2: who started building the multiplexus. This is, you know, at
Speaker 2: the time when theater business was quite big, and he
Speaker 2: had dreams at sixty five or so, which was older
Speaker 2: in those days than it is nowadays, to build an internet,
Speaker 2: you know, to build a real company, big company. So
Speaker 2: he started taking pieces of eye. He used to. He
Speaker 2: built his fortune when he was an exhibitor by going
Speaker 2: to movie screenings, you know. So he'd like see a
Speaker 2: screening of Star Wars and he said, it's a good movie.
Speaker 2: So he called his broker and buy a lot of
Speaker 2: stock in Fox. And you know, I mean, he'd buy
Speaker 2: a lot of stock at a time and he would
Speaker 2: be he was able to parlor himself into being a millionaire.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like he had inside information, but he had
Speaker 2: sort of inside vibes as to what was happening, and
Speaker 2: he placed big bets in the stock market and made
Speaker 2: himself rich. And then he decided he wanted to build
Speaker 2: a he wanted to become a mogul and start, and
Speaker 2: he started with Us, and then he just kept doing
Speaker 2: more deals. I mean, as soon as he got us
Speaker 2: under control, that was taken over Paramount and then and
Speaker 2: each time with another heaping of debt and then taken
Speaker 2: over Paramount. Well, now I'm going to take over CBS.
Speaker 2: So he m l Karmezan work out a deal. So
Speaker 2: now it's CBS is in there, and they bring along
Speaker 2: some other you know, they had Simon and Schuster and
Speaker 2: you know, other businesses, and you know, then it was
Speaker 2: always a mess to try and integrate all of this.
Speaker 1: And all away.
Speaker 2: I mean, he was a litigious guy. He was a
Speaker 2: lawyer by training, and he was always had always had
Speaker 2: his ears up for anyone he thought might be unfairly
Speaker 2: treating us. Like. He was an anti trust lawyer. So
Speaker 2: he always thought like John Malone and TCI, they were
Speaker 2: the big, the big bohemoths of the day, and like
Speaker 2: normally you couldn't get distribution for your network unless you're
Speaker 2: willing to give, like Bob Johnson to give or discover give, give,
Speaker 2: give him. It's sort of like what Trump's doing. Now,
Speaker 2: give him a piece of the business and you get distribution.
Speaker 2: He never wanted to play that game, so he would sue,
Speaker 2: you know, he sued, Uh, he sued John Malone, He
Speaker 2: sewed TCI against my wishes. He made lawsuits like a
Speaker 2: profit center. He brought in Philippe Dumont, which is a
Speaker 2: state lawyer, to kind of aid in a bet the
Speaker 2: legal you know, our legal stance. So he was successful
Speaker 2: at doing. He didn't care. He to suit people and win.
Speaker 2: I mean, he was happy to be the thurd on
Speaker 2: the on the cable golf course. Club didn't bother him
Speaker 2: at all. So he was bold and brave and made
Speaker 2: big moves and he was brilliant, but he he kind
Speaker 2: of desired the limelight. So like Frank Biondi, who was
Speaker 2: a very very able manager who I loved. The guy
Speaker 2: was great. He he understood what we had at MTV
Speaker 2: Networks and he ran it with a really light touch.
Speaker 2: He understood that we were not a traditional, you know division,
Speaker 2: and we were allowed at certain kind of freedoms and
Speaker 2: they didn't really interferce so long as we delivered them mode.
Speaker 2: But when Frank started getting like nice articles in the
Speaker 2: New Yorker or whatever, you know, he was soon gone.
Speaker 2: One day he was gone. And then with Mel, it
Speaker 2: was the same thing. Mel was another really able guy.
Speaker 2: Mel Karminson was a legend in the music business, in
Speaker 2: the radio business. You know, he created Infinity Radio, sold
Speaker 2: at the CBS, somehow worked out to be on the
Speaker 2: top of CBS. You know, he kind of like worked
Speaker 2: his way up and then he took us over and
Speaker 2: he became my new boss. And again, you know, he
Speaker 2: he kind of left us alone as so long as
Speaker 2: we met our financial targets. I like Meil very much.
Speaker 2: He was a real character. But again he was getting
Speaker 2: credit for making move. You know, he was getting credit
Speaker 2: for making a lot of smart moves that he made,
Speaker 2: but Sumner didn't, you know, he was sort of stealing
Speaker 2: the limelight. I think that Sumner desired and Sumner at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, while he started really modestly
Speaker 2: when we started, he would sit back at staff meetings,
Speaker 2: let frank he was kind of like he was kind
Speaker 2: of like learning the business, you know, at these meetings
Speaker 2: and seeing how things really work. And when he got
Speaker 2: to the point where we thought, Okay, now I know
Speaker 2: what I'm doing. You know, I'm going to run the
Speaker 2: whole baby, and you know, he was he didn't have
Speaker 2: a lot of friends. I would notice that anybody who
Speaker 2: got kind of close to him was gone. And I
Speaker 2: kind of kept my distance, and he was always happy
Speaker 2: to see me. And I tried to get him engaged
Speaker 2: in a lot of things, and he would support us,
Speaker 2: you know, he was a supportive guy. But in the
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, he was he got
Speaker 2: upset with me. I I I began, I didn't want
Speaker 2: to be the CEO. I mean I didn't, but he
Speaker 2: I remember clearly one day we we had had a
Speaker 2: joint venture with HBO to run Comedy Central. After we
Speaker 2: had these so called comedy wars, and we had a
Speaker 2: board meeting one day. I remember walking down Broadway as
Speaker 2: a spring day, the sun was out, and I'm with
Speaker 2: Jeff Buchus, who became a good friend. He was running
Speaker 2: HBO at the time. He said, you know, you and me,
Speaker 2: we got the best jobs in town. This is these
Speaker 2: jobs are fantastic. We get to do all these things
Speaker 2: we love. We work with interesting people, businesses are vibrant.
Speaker 2: He says. The only problem is one day they're going
Speaker 2: to ask us to run these things and we're going
Speaker 2: to be in a whole different ballgame. And he was right.
Speaker 2: He ended up running Time Waterer. I ended up running Viacom.
Speaker 2: But you know I took it over at a point
Speaker 2: in time when the digital companies were really beginning to
Speaker 2: make inroads into the legacy media companies, and you know,
Speaker 2: we had this sort of how do we change direction?
Speaker 2: And stock prices were stalled and you can only jack
Speaker 2: up your price, which someonder was obsessed with stock price,
Speaker 2: whereas Rupert Murdoch his nemesis, would fly around the world
Speaker 2: and know how well his operations ran. Uh, some are
Speaker 2: really looked at the stock price like that would like
Speaker 2: the dog, the tail wagging the dog. So I fell
Speaker 2: in a bit of disfavor and he fired me. And
Speaker 2: that was it?
Speaker 1: Was it really that? You know, the company was split
Speaker 1: into and less had good numbers. The division that you
Speaker 1: ran the report wasn't as good, even though we both
Speaker 1: know those are manipulated numbers. Was it inevitable or an
Speaker 1: irrelevant of whether you wanted to keep the job? If
Speaker 1: you could repeat it, would you play it any differently?
Speaker 2: Now? I thought we were making the right moves. I mean,
Speaker 2: we had been thwarted into the real challenge for us,
Speaker 2: for all these kind of media companies is how do
Speaker 2: we how do we face the digital invasion that was
Speaker 2: coming our way? You know, increasingly we were being decimated
Speaker 2: by the yeah Who's and the Googles and the Facebook,
Speaker 2: well not so much Facebook, so I mean that was
Speaker 2: nothing at the time.
Speaker 1: How do we.
Speaker 2: Reinvent ourselves for the digital era? How do we make
Speaker 2: this transition? Because we all, we weren't stupid, we saw
Speaker 2: what was coming. We were coming to this on demand
Speaker 2: streaming sort of model and these it was going to
Speaker 2: be a more open world. And one of the we
Speaker 2: tried to buy. We bought some small websites. We hired
Speaker 2: a digital department trying to find our way around, but
Speaker 2: then decided, you know, we need to really acquire something.
Speaker 2: We're not going to really get there by any kind
Speaker 2: of organic thing, which is what we were used to.
Speaker 2: We weren't used to buying companies and integrating them. We
Speaker 2: did everything ourselves. We grew organically. But we started off.
Speaker 2: We had a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook when
Speaker 2: they were doing like nine million dollars a year in revenue.
Speaker 2: He was like twenty years old, and we made an
Speaker 2: offer to buy it, and he turned it down. And
Speaker 2: then we looked at YouTube, which launched in two thousand
Speaker 2: and five, and that was you know, we saw that
Speaker 2: these these digital networks were like this major paradigm shift.
Speaker 2: This was a whole new thing. This is going to
Speaker 2: become like this was going to really really decimate us
Speaker 2: because no longer were you going to be a gatekeeper
Speaker 2: on YouTube. Anybody could upload video, share it, comment on it,
Speaker 2: this or that they could be peer to peer and
Speaker 2: this is sort of going to unfold and evolve to
Speaker 2: be the future. And sure enough we were the short
Speaker 2: form Kings and along comes YouTube and we looked at YouTube,
Speaker 2: and it was fascinating to see what they were doing.
Speaker 2: But they were doing things that the traditional media people
Speaker 2: thought were illegal. You know, they were taking copyrighted material
Speaker 2: and uploading it for free. And while some companies like
Speaker 2: you know, SNL would use they would put up Lazy Sunday.
Speaker 2: That was an early thing that sort of went viral.
Speaker 2: It was viewed as a content infringement machine by the
Speaker 2: Viacom board. You know, if we buy it, hat, everybody's
Speaker 2: gonna sue us because they can't sue YouTube now because
Speaker 2: they don't have any money. They're not gonna Maybe they're
Speaker 2: going to get sued. But you know, this can't happen.
Speaker 2: This is not right. This is these digital guys are
Speaker 2: just taking away everything for free. We're seeing the same
Speaker 2: argument now with AI Bob. You know, it's the same thing.
Speaker 2: They can't do it. The laws will never stand for it.
Speaker 2: So what we had there, because I look now at
Speaker 2: you know, were we too have been able to buy
Speaker 2: YouTube Buyacom, would look a lot different today. But there
Speaker 2: was a couple of things preventing that from happening. Besides
Speaker 2: the disposition of the board, which you could say was
Speaker 2: you know, maybe it's going to work out the kind
Speaker 2: of why you could afford to buy it. You would
Speaker 2: have to show Wall Street sort of immediate results that
Speaker 2: it was going to show some profit, which wasn't going
Speaker 2: to happen, and you would have to fund the infrastructure
Speaker 2: that they've used to develop this amazing machine that we
Speaker 2: all see now and just you're in awe. It's worth
Speaker 2: almost six hundred billion dollars, So you know, in a
Speaker 2: wood of wood of would have should have there was
Speaker 2: a lot of wood. You could dream about it, but
Speaker 2: it was impossible. We couldn't own it and lose money
Speaker 2: for ten years like Google could. So and then I
Speaker 2: tried to buy We looked at MySpace, which was the
Speaker 2: pre eminent social network of the day, and we had
Speaker 2: conversations with them, and they had that was attracting a
Speaker 2: lot of independent bands, and they would get more traffic
Speaker 2: on their little you know, on their site for some
Speaker 2: of our shows, and we get for our own websites
Speaker 2: on the shows. So Rupert Murdoch came in and bought it,
Speaker 2: and that was a bad thing. I mean, it wasn't
Speaker 2: a bad thing because we hadn't really decided we wanted it,
Speaker 2: but for some there it was a bad thing because
Speaker 2: Rupert Murdoch bought it his uh, his chief rise, and
Speaker 2: Rupert started appearing on the covers of all these trade
Speaker 2: magazines as the digital genius, the new digital guy. And
Speaker 2: Sumner was like, you know, not that guy. And he
Speaker 2: thought I had blown that because I was when Rupert
Speaker 2: was buying it over a weekend with no due diligence.
Speaker 2: I was in Hawaii with my two kids and my
Speaker 2: wife for like a week vacation. And he told Charlie
Speaker 2: Rose after he fired me that. Charlie asked him directly,
Speaker 2: was yeah, was a YouTube factor? He goes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: we lost. I hate to lose, Sir Rupert Murdoch. So
Speaker 2: that was one reason. And then you know, we missed
Speaker 2: numbers for a quarter, but then the second quarter, our
Speaker 2: second quarter numbers were fine. We were back on track.
Speaker 2: You know. We were also precluded from the most obvious
Speaker 2: thing for us to turn digital would have been to
Speaker 2: have taken our library of twenty thousand videos and gotten
Speaker 2: the video rights for them, just be one big Vivo.
Speaker 2: You know. We could have set up the architecture to
Speaker 2: do that and video on demand, and we could have
Speaker 2: figured out innovative ways to put it out and program it.
Speaker 2: But the record companies really put their foot down, the
Speaker 2: legal side of the record companies. They felt that MTV
Speaker 2: Networks had built a business on their backs. Nothing was
Speaker 2: ever said about the money we paid them or the
Speaker 2: fact that we made so many of their acts so popular,
Speaker 2: but they didn't want another MTV on the Internet, so
Speaker 2: it was impossible for us to get a hold of
Speaker 2: the key programming form that had, you know, driven a
Speaker 2: large part of our success on the Internet, which was
Speaker 2: a big frustration and a big roadblock. Not to say
Speaker 2: it couldn't have been one day conquered. But then it
Speaker 2: didn't become my problem anymore because I got fired.
Speaker 1: Okay, before you get fired, you were also running Paramount.
Speaker 1: What did you learn about the movie business? And having
Speaker 1: been deep in the trenches, what is your perspective on
Speaker 1: the movie business today?
Speaker 2: Well, I learned that it's a very opaque business where
Speaker 2: it's kind of hard to keep track of who does what,
Speaker 2: and you know, it's even though I learned that the
Speaker 2: feature film is king always on the hierarchy in Hollywood,
Speaker 2: nothing's higher than the movie business. Then came, you know,
Speaker 2: the sort of television business, the premium cable business. Then
Speaker 2: we were sort of at the next level basic cable,
Speaker 2: and then the music business that was like a whole
Speaker 2: other thing. They didn't understand that at all. They didn't
Speaker 2: understand how these music companies were making all this money.
Speaker 2: These guys were the most untraditional businessmen of all were
Speaker 2: in the record business. I found it to be the
Speaker 2: most interesting people and the most fun to be with.
Speaker 2: You know, all these guys scoundrels and clever people and whatever,
Speaker 2: but they all love their they love what they did.
Speaker 2: But in the movie business, you learn that the movie
Speaker 2: studio they take the bulk of the money. They'll find
Speaker 2: out ways in terms of you know, we were we
Speaker 2: were going to try and turn our brands into movies,
Speaker 2: which we did do. Nickelodeon, MTV, VH one had like
Speaker 2: that Ben Stiller movie, zoolanderv VH one. Everyone we made
Speaker 2: like forty movies over course of time and sort of
Speaker 2: sat at the hand of Sherry Lansing who helped us,
Speaker 2: you know, become accomplished movie makers from just being little
Speaker 2: cable weasels. I learned that everybody in my company wanted
Speaker 2: to make movies. You know, all my top creative people
Speaker 2: wanted to go to the movie studios. They wanted them.
Speaker 2: Everyone wants to make a movie. I mean, come on,
Speaker 2: I don't want to work on some Buffkis television show.
Speaker 2: If I have a chance to work on a movie,
Speaker 2: that's great for me. So it was, you know, there
Speaker 2: was a pre we ate of exodus to want to
Speaker 2: do this. But at the end of the day, we
Speaker 2: didn't make much money on movies, even if it was
Speaker 2: on our own ip. You know, we get a fee.
Speaker 2: And then we found out one sunder bought Paramount that
Speaker 2: we were an exclusive producer. In other words, we couldn't
Speaker 2: take if we wanted to make a movie, and they
Speaker 2: said no, we couldn't take it to Sony or Fox.
Speaker 2: So we were sort of the prisoners of Melrose Avenue way.
Speaker 2: It was unusual in the television business, it wasn't unusual
Speaker 2: to have an exclusive deal, but he didn't see a
Speaker 2: lot of that going on in the movie business. So
Speaker 2: that was a big frustration. So always had a little
Speaker 2: friction back and forth. And I'll say, like on the
Speaker 2: Paramount side, they found a lot of our people to
Speaker 2: be kind of arrogant, which was true. It wasn't like
Speaker 2: a perfect match. But we came to a good equilibrium.
Speaker 2: I can't say enough about Sherry Lansing. You know, she
Speaker 2: was gracious and great despite the fact that we often
Speaker 2: did stupid things. But we never got you know, I
Speaker 2: could make more money in a couple hours on television
Speaker 2: I could make on a movie and after absorbing all
Speaker 2: that creative energy. But we had some hit movies and
Speaker 2: it was always exhilarating when it happened. You know. We
Speaker 2: did movies with the Jackass guys, with the South Park guys,
Speaker 2: with Beavis and butt Head. We had movies like Election,
Speaker 2: Napoleon Dynamite. You know, we had a flair for finding
Speaker 2: some good projects. The Twilight series is a good example.
Speaker 2: Some it came to us, or before it came to us.
Speaker 2: We developed it from a book. We developed a script
Speaker 2: for Twilight, and Paramount didn't want to make it. We
Speaker 2: couldn't take it anywhere. It went to Summit. The thing
Speaker 2: went on to make like three or four billion dollars
Speaker 2: in box office. You know what they used to say.
Speaker 2: John Dolson used to say, I don't want to see
Speaker 2: some movie we turned down. Then you guys take somewhere
Speaker 2: else and it's a hit. It'll be embarrassing, you know,
Speaker 2: that kind of that kind of thinking, I would permeate
Speaker 2: it permeate in Hollywood in those days, wasn't just John.
Speaker 2: John was a guy that I was a really tough guy,
Speaker 2: but I really came to respect him. He was He
Speaker 2: really knew his rock and roll, he knew his music.
Speaker 2: He was a funny man. Anyway, we made, like I guess,
Speaker 2: forty movies over the years. They were largely lower budget movies,
Speaker 2: and most of them were profitable. And it was an
Speaker 2: interesting experience, you know, that being you know, have a
Speaker 2: chair in Hollywood. But at one point, yes, when I
Speaker 2: became the CEO of Paramount, reported to me, so now
Speaker 2: I'm like the cable guy, like Dave's aslov I'm like
Speaker 2: the cable guy. I'm in charge of a movie studio,
Speaker 2: which I had never dreamed of.
Speaker 1: So what'd you learn?
Speaker 2: Well, I had learned a lot, you know what. One
Speaker 2: of the first things I did was I got in
Speaker 2: touch with Bob Daily, who, with Terry Simmel, had the
Speaker 2: best run of probably any studio heads in history. And
Speaker 2: I asked Bob Daily to be my mentor and teach
Speaker 2: me the ins and outs, really the ins and outs
Speaker 2: of the movie business that I might not have learned
Speaker 2: just being a producer on the lot for Paramount making
Speaker 2: movies and handing them over to him. So he had
Speaker 2: his own little film school he set up for me,
Speaker 2: and it was good to sort of learn from the
Speaker 2: master how P and L's work, all the financial mechanisms,
Speaker 2: and so I got myself equipped. And then Sherry decided
Speaker 2: that she was going to leave, so I had to
Speaker 2: find a new studio head, and Bob. I had Bob
Speaker 2: interview candidates. I mean, the problem is all the studio
Speaker 2: heads in those days, they used to kind of rotate
Speaker 2: from studio to studio, and it was very rare that
Speaker 2: someone from outside the system would actually take up and
Speaker 2: run a studio. Bob Evans back in the day, you know,
Speaker 2: he was an actor. He ended up running Paramount. I
Speaker 2: had a pretty successful run, I must say. I mean
Speaker 2: some of those movies at Paramount cranked out Love Story
Speaker 2: in the late eighties, late seventies, Love Story, Apocalypse now
Speaker 2: gon All came out under his reign for a guy
Speaker 2: who didn't know what he was doing, and I ended
Speaker 2: up hiring Brad Gray, who was the partner of Berlstein
Speaker 2: Gray to run the studio. And then you know, we
Speaker 2: acquired dream Works. Brad got caught up in this Anthony
Speaker 2: Pelicano scandal, which really sullied his reputation and was a
Speaker 2: big drama for him. And that's where I was when
Speaker 2: I got fired, you know, I mean, I never really
Speaker 2: got a chance to I installed Brad at the studio.
Speaker 2: He was there for a couple of years. He ended up.
Speaker 2: He died at a young age, at fifty nine, a
Speaker 2: couple of years after I left. And that's my story.
Speaker 1: Well, David Geffen implored you to hire Brad Gray. In retrospect,
Speaker 1: did you find that people were doing your a solid
Speaker 1: or everybody had an agenda? You're better off just listening
Speaker 1: to yourself.
Speaker 2: People had an agenda a lot of times. But in
Speaker 2: the case of David, David was someone I had developed
Speaker 2: a relationship. He was the first guy to give us
Speaker 2: videos for MTV. He was the first guy we made
Speaker 2: a movie with. He called me up one day in
Speaker 2: New York. I was it was a Saturday morning. He's
Speaker 2: in LA He calls me like ten o'clock in the
Speaker 2: morning in New York. He says, you know, I saw
Speaker 2: Beavis and butt Head last night. Our first episode ran
Speaker 2: you know whatever, It was at ten o'clock. And it
Speaker 2: wasn't like somebody on his staff handed him a video
Speaker 2: tape and said check this out. I mean, was David
Speaker 2: was on the case. He said, let's make a movie
Speaker 2: with those guys. So so, all right, we'll make a movie.
Speaker 2: He was in butt Head, so he was always a
Speaker 2: source of good advice. And when I was going through
Speaker 2: the exercise of looking for people, it wasn't like he
Speaker 2: implored me. He called me one day and he said,
Speaker 2: was in Bay Route. I remember this. He said, I
Speaker 2: found the guy I think could work, which is Brad Gray.
Speaker 2: Because we had already been through. I had already been
Speaker 2: through all the studio hads I might want to hire,
Speaker 2: like say Stacy Snyder. They all had contracts and other
Speaker 2: people who were sort of on the second rung, they
Speaker 2: weren't really there. And I started thinking, well, maybe we
Speaker 2: look on the outside. Someone who's got the ability to
Speaker 2: deal with talent, who's smart about the business, might not
Speaker 2: necessarily have a pedigree purely have been in a movie studio.
Speaker 2: And David said, you know, maybe Brad's your guy. Brad
Speaker 2: was at the peak of his powers then he had
Speaker 2: the sopranos and he had started turning Perlstein Gray in
Speaker 2: a bit of a studio. He did Bill Mahery had
Speaker 2: a relationship with Gary Shannling. He really had a lot
Speaker 2: of aspirations and energy. And I had a bunch of
Speaker 2: interviews with Bob with the Brad, I sent him to Bob.
Speaker 2: Bob gave me the thumbs up. He really put him
Speaker 2: through the trail. Seemed to be able and whatnot. And
Speaker 2: we started out and he ran into a buzzsaw with Pelicano.
Speaker 2: That was you know, there was two front page stories
Speaker 2: about him and that really knocked him off balance. I
Speaker 2: must say he recovered. But and when I left, he
Speaker 2: was in charge of Paramount, so I hired Brad.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have all this experience. What's your view of
Speaker 1: these businesses today? In your book you say somebody want
Speaker 1: to start a cable channel and you're laughing, And then
Speaker 1: I get emailed that Morgan Roland is starting a field
Speaker 1: and stream channel. The movie business with a twenty five
Speaker 1: straight drama failures. Where's it all going?
Speaker 2: Well, Morgan Wallin should save his money. I mean, he's
Speaker 2: pissing in the wind, wants to start a you know,
Speaker 2: in the cord cutting era where the TV revolution has ended,
Speaker 2: and it's winding down these linear networks. Unless you've got
Speaker 2: some exclusive product that's really unique, like news or sports,
Speaker 2: you know, it's most of this other stuff's all available
Speaker 2: on demand on streaming services. He'd be smart to start
Speaker 2: in a different way other than setting up a linear
Speaker 2: cable network. But now, I mean, it's no one likes
Speaker 2: to see these movie studios disappear. I mean, we saw
Speaker 2: a Fox get gobbled up by Disney. Disney had a
Speaker 2: real smart strategy about going digital, which was doubling down
Speaker 2: and getting more being a really invincible content supplier. And
Speaker 2: you know, now we're looking at the Ellison's coming in
Speaker 2: and buying Paramount. And when I looked at, for example,
Speaker 2: the alternatives for Paramount, it's like my old high school.
Speaker 2: You wanted to end up in good hands. You want
Speaker 2: it to be solved. And they were having tough time
Speaker 2: in the wake of a lot of the bad moves
Speaker 2: that had been made. And here you have David Ellison
Speaker 2: who actually likes movies. He makes movies, and he's good
Speaker 2: at it, and they've made some movies. Had a wayward talent,
Speaker 2: he understands the business. He's got a lot of money,
Speaker 2: and you know, he made a master movie, put Sherry
Speaker 2: Lansing on the board, you know, I mean, you get
Speaker 2: a sense that Paramount's not going to disappear, which is
Speaker 2: good news. I mean, the town doesn't want to see
Speaker 2: another studio disappear. I remember back when we started MTV,
Speaker 2: there was like forty record labels. You remember these days,
Speaker 2: a lot of them started by entrepreneurs and run by
Speaker 2: entrepreneurs who who basically had instincts and tastes, and they
Speaker 2: kind of modeled these labels after their own taste. It
Speaker 2: was a whole different game. Now there's like two and
Speaker 2: a half record companies and a lot of stuff in
Speaker 2: the outer rings, but it's a very different business. And
Speaker 2: now people all over the town are losing their jobs
Speaker 2: and they're thinking, is Ellison going to take over Paramount?
Speaker 2: I don't know, I mean, I know, I know they
Speaker 2: on paper it would make sense for them to do it.
Speaker 1: Which about Paramount buying Warner just to be clear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would make sense. I mean they could. They
Speaker 2: could fold up a lot of stuff, save more, you
Speaker 2: know the old arguments, you know, make efficiencies in the
Speaker 2: back office. They could keep the movie brands separate, and
Speaker 2: they'd have more clout and they could compete more avidly,
Speaker 2: but you know, it would mean another movie studio disappears.
Speaker 2: I love I love the area of the forty record companies.
Speaker 2: I thought that was really cool, more interesting. But someone's
Speaker 2: going to get someone's gonna you know. David Zaslov did
Speaker 2: the deal with Warner Brothers because he saw a discovery
Speaker 2: was going to be in sad shapes if they didn't
Speaker 2: latch onto somebody, and he was able to engineer a
Speaker 2: deal with John Malone, whereas they were able to actually
Speaker 2: buy Warner Brothers. It was sort of brilliant in a way.
Speaker 2: But in the meantime, while they're trying to save themselves,
Speaker 2: you know, we're seeing the exhibition business not being great.
Speaker 2: You know, there was I think some hope this summer
Speaker 2: that people would like to go to the theaters, but
Speaker 2: more and more people now have theaters in their homes
Speaker 2: of one form or another. And it's what it was
Speaker 2: the word they're using now, and not affordable. It's part
Speaker 2: of the unaffordability problem going to the movies. So a
Speaker 2: lot of the money has been sucked out of the
Speaker 2: movie business. I don't know what happens, Bob, but it
Speaker 2: seems like more consolidations probably in the wings. It seems
Speaker 2: like the theater exhibition business is going to diminish, and
Speaker 2: it seems like companies that are big are going to survive.
Speaker 2: At the same time, you look around the edges and
Speaker 2: you see, oh, there's creative companies like A twenty four
Speaker 2: and Nion who are like sort of in the moll
Speaker 2: of small movie companies of your where they have good
Speaker 2: tastes and they can find a good movie and market it.
Speaker 2: Within the big system, you still have like Fox search,
Speaker 2: like and create, buy and create a buzz around, you know,
Speaker 2: tasty movies. I've always been a guy who was happy
Speaker 2: to sort of move around the edges rather than be
Speaker 2: in the mainstream, you know, mainstream movie labels. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a high investment business. You got to pay a
Speaker 2: lot of money. With that movie that's out now with
Speaker 2: I'm forgetting the name, it's getting to be that time
Speaker 2: of night. But you know, with the Leonardo DiCaprio and
Speaker 2: Serian Penn, I don't have you seen that.
Speaker 1: No, I haven't. Paul Thomas Anderson movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good. I mean, it's phil You look at
Speaker 2: that and you go, that's good. It was fun, but
Speaker 2: you know, it's made the economy. It kind of even
Speaker 2: though it made a couple of hundred million dollars, it
Speaker 2: kind of fell short of what it needed to make.
Speaker 2: And I know Wonners Brothers has had some other successes,
Speaker 2: So it's hard to say what's going to happen is
Speaker 2: but it's clear that one something's going to happen in
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers. And that's maybe the most legendary of all
Speaker 2: the movie studios. You know, the one with the most
Speaker 2: cachet about it is an NBC universe A going to
Speaker 2: do something? Is Netflix going to do something? I don't know.
Speaker 2: You know, I never thought that the tech guys, which
Speaker 2: I always include Netflix sort of in that category. I
Speaker 2: never thought they were that hot on buying movie studios.
Speaker 2: I mean, they'd figure, why the hell do I need
Speaker 2: to do that? I can't just license them.
Speaker 1: I think they would only be buying it for the titles.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine I'm getting into production, et cetera. But okay,
Speaker 1: you're off the radar with your clothing business. Then you
Speaker 1: end up coming in the side door, going in mainstream
Speaker 1: corporate America. Sumner cuts you loose and you have enough cash,
Speaker 1: but you're offered some big jobs. Ultimately, you work with
Speaker 1: Shane Smith Advice, you work with Oprah, you work with Bono,
Speaker 1: and all those things are very fulfilling, but it's one
Speaker 1: step removed from the game without mentioning names. I know
Speaker 1: people who are contemporaries and you say how much longer
Speaker 1: are you going to do this? And they say, I
Speaker 1: don't want to lose access. So emotionally, you were offered
Speaker 1: other big jobs subsequent to some nerve firing you with
Speaker 1: hindsight to say I played it exactly the way I
Speaker 1: wanted or did you say I played it? But I'm
Speaker 1: not happy with the way some people treated me where
Speaker 1: I was. What are your feelings about your post paramount activities?
Speaker 2: Listen, I never fully identified with my job, like I
Speaker 2: know a lot of people do an entertainment business. I
Speaker 2: just thought, you know, there's a lot of different things
Speaker 2: you can do with your life. I had a great
Speaker 2: run there twenty six years. I kept my toe in
Speaker 2: a little bit on boards of some companies. I like
Speaker 2: working with Advice, I like working with Oprah, but there's
Speaker 2: no access I don't need. I don't need that kind
Speaker 2: of access just for the sake but I have a
Speaker 2: circle of friends. If someone doesn't want to be my
Speaker 2: friend because I don't have a position of power in
Speaker 2: the Hollywood structure, well you know, I couldn't care less.
Speaker 2: I don't really need them as friends. I got plenty
Speaker 2: of friends I've never been. I'm happy. In some ways.
Speaker 2: I felt relieved I didn't have to deal with a
Speaker 2: lot of this michigansh that's going on right now, you know,
Speaker 2: to be in the big game with the big companies.
Speaker 2: I know for some people that's their life and blood,
Speaker 2: but it never was for me. I never fully identified
Speaker 2: myself with my job, so it was easier for me
Speaker 2: to have this transition than maybe some other people. So
Speaker 2: I have no complaints. I also feel, at my age,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm sort of got to do good or
Speaker 2: thing going on. I went back to Afghanistan for twelve
Speaker 2: years to work with a company. I was making hardly
Speaker 2: any money at it. To me, it was so exhilarating.
Speaker 2: I thought we were really you know, this was a country,
Speaker 2: a company that had social purpose baked into its agenda,
Speaker 2: gender equality, civilizing Afghans, connecting them each other, connecting them
Speaker 2: to or I loved it. Trying to replicate a bit
Speaker 2: of what we had done I had done in the past.
Speaker 2: So again, that was a business on the margins if
Speaker 2: there ever was want in the frontier market, and it
Speaker 2: was a thrill to be there and do that. You know,
Speaker 2: it wasn't it wasn't paying me a lot of money.
Speaker 2: But how much money do you need? You know? I
Speaker 2: don't understand why a billionaire, for example, thinks he has
Speaker 2: to have two billion dollars, But the hell you can't.
Speaker 2: You couldn't spend a billion dollars. You know, you really
Speaker 2: have to put your mind to it. That's money has
Speaker 2: never been my motivation. I wanted to have experience. I
Speaker 2: want to have full experiences that I enjoyed with people
Speaker 2: I like. I want to be able to see parts
Speaker 2: of the world I used to dream about and continue
Speaker 2: to do that. Stay healthy and have fun. It wouldn't
Speaker 2: be fun running one of these companies right now. That's
Speaker 2: another thing. It doesn't look like these guys are having
Speaker 2: a ball right back. And you were there back in
Speaker 2: the eighties and the nineties, people were having a lot
Speaker 2: of fun running these companies. That ain't the case now.
Speaker 1: Okay, Finally, as someone who's been married a couple of
Speaker 1: times number of relationships. Can someone balance a high powered
Speaker 1: job like this with life, the life work balance or
Speaker 1: really the nature of these jobs they're going to consume
Speaker 1: so much of your time and mental energy.
Speaker 2: Well, a good question. You know, you really give up
Speaker 2: a lot to really throw yourself into one of these jobs,
Speaker 2: you know, because they're all consuming. But you know, I
Speaker 2: look around and I see, you know, there's people who
Speaker 2: I look at my friends in Ginianopolis. He ran Fox,
Speaker 2: he ran Paramount. He was doing as big as anyone
Speaker 2: could do in the movie business. And he and and
Speaker 2: are still happily married. You know, look at Jeffrey Katzenberg
Speaker 2: or Steven Spielberg. They been executives and producers and whatnot.
Speaker 2: They're still married. Everybody doesn't get divorced. Peter Turning, Peter
Speaker 2: Urnan is a great example of someone who was at
Speaker 2: the top and figure out a way to do it differently,
Speaker 2: you know, not on the sidelines, but in his own
Speaker 2: little field and space, by investing in companies and doing
Speaker 2: it really smartly. Well, you know, I don't see that
Speaker 2: divorce is necessarily a phata company if you have a
Speaker 2: high powered job.
Speaker 1: No, Okay, it's been great talking to you. Always great
Speaker 1: talking to you Tom. The book, you know you've heard,
Speaker 1: the surface of the story covers Tom's complete life from Connecticut,
Speaker 1: from the Liverpool Docks to the Hollywood Bull. As Matt
Speaker 1: the Hoople would say, the book is great. I couldn't
Speaker 1: put it down. Unplugged by Tom Freston. Tom, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for taking this time with my audience.
Speaker 2: Bob always good to talk to you and I appreciate
Speaker 2: this the poortant opportunity to talk about the book. So
Speaker 2: I'll see you soon out there.
Speaker 1: Absolutely to take care until next time. This is Bob left,
Speaker 1: SAIDs