Latest / Ridiculous History / Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, with Tom Freston

Transcript

Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, with Tom Freston · Ridiculous History

0:00
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
0:27
Speaker 1: the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
0:31
Speaker 1: much for tuning in. We want to give a big
0:34
Speaker 1: end of the year shout out to our super producer,
0:36
Speaker 1: mister Max Williams. We've got We've got Big Bullen, We've
0:44
Speaker 1: got Noel Brown. We also have a special guest today, Noel.
0:50
Speaker 1: We can't believe this is happening. This is a true story.
0:55
Speaker 1: We are speaking with the author, the world traveler, the
1:01
Speaker 1: man who started MTV, none other than Tom Freston, creator
1:07
Speaker 1: of the newest hip book Unplugged.
1:13
Speaker 2: Thanks for being here, Tom, How are you.
1:14
Speaker 3: I'm good, I'm very good.
1:17
Speaker 2: He's a busy man. Against the calls.
1:24
Speaker 3: I'm fine. I'm just trying to disconnect my phone here.
1:29
Speaker 2: You're trying to unplug. Huh.
1:30
Speaker 3: I need to be unplugged.
1:32
Speaker 2: It's tough. It's a very difficult thing to do in
1:35
Speaker 2: this day and age. Ben. I think he did a
1:43
Speaker 2: fine job of given the short version of an incredibly
1:48
Speaker 2: storied career and cv. Tom, you are the co founder
1:52
Speaker 2: of MTV, the former CEO of Viacom. You've had your
1:56
Speaker 2: hands in just about every aspect of the entertainment and
1:59
Speaker 2: media landscape that you know you could possibly imagine, but
2:03
Speaker 2: even more than that, And I'd love to start a
2:05
Speaker 2: little bit with some of your background. I saw an
2:08
Speaker 2: article this morning from Forbes, I think it just came
2:11
Speaker 2: out today describing you as a beat poet exec who
2:15
Speaker 2: made MTV cool for twenty years. Can you tell us
2:18
Speaker 2: a little bit about what that means. You talk a
2:20
Speaker 2: little bit about like getting into the game as it
2:23
Speaker 2: were in some of these more kind of wild West
2:26
Speaker 2: days of the sixties and not wanting to work for
2:30
Speaker 2: the man, and having that attitude kind of carry you
2:33
Speaker 2: into this sort of freewheeling, you know, life of adventure
2:38
Speaker 2: and entrepreneurship.
2:39
Speaker 3: Well, that headline, Kana threw me too, okay, I told
2:45
Speaker 3: the reporter. He said, you know, what were some of
2:47
Speaker 3: your seminal influences, And I said, well, in my life,
2:50
Speaker 3: I was influenced by two groups of people, primarily the Beats,
2:53
Speaker 3: you know, Perlengetti, Kerowhac Corso the rest of them, and
2:58
Speaker 3: the Libertarians, which was sort of an odd mix, but
3:02
Speaker 3: they both believed in individual freedom. They both believed in
3:05
Speaker 3: a way that a life should be full of experience,
3:10
Speaker 3: and the Beafs in particular, thought that you could go
3:14
Speaker 3: through life sort of improvising your life, not having a
3:18
Speaker 3: really set career path, but leaving yourself open to possibility, traveling,
3:23
Speaker 3: hungering for experience, being with people that you like. And
3:27
Speaker 3: that's sort of been a guiding maxim for me, along
3:30
Speaker 3: with the fact that I never really wanted to do
3:32
Speaker 3: any work in the mainstream. I thought life would be
3:36
Speaker 3: a little more interesting over on the side of the road,
3:39
Speaker 3: and by and large that's what I've been able to accomplish.
3:42
Speaker 3: And the places I've worked and the things I've done,
3:44
Speaker 3: none of them were really mainstream activities.
3:49
Speaker 1: And this is strange because, to be quite honest with you, Todd,
3:54
Speaker 1: MTV is a formative experience for us on this show,
4:00
Speaker 1: and I'm sure you hear that all the time. If
4:04
Speaker 1: we could, could you share a little bit of the
4:07
Speaker 1: providence or the origin story of how you and your
4:11
Speaker 1: pals came up with this idea of music television.
4:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, and let me just qualify one thing at the outset,
4:17
Speaker 3: which is the MTV you've seen for the last say,
4:20
Speaker 3: fifteen years or so, is not the MTV that I'm
4:24
Speaker 3: really talking about.
4:26
Speaker 2: We started out, for sure.
4:27
Speaker 3: We started out as a music service for young adults.
4:32
Speaker 3: The idea was, if you drive back to nineteen eighty,
4:35
Speaker 3: cable was just beginning. Most cities did not have cable TV.
4:40
Speaker 3: It existed in some rural areas because people just wanted
4:43
Speaker 3: distance signals and better reception. And in nineteen seventy nine
4:47
Speaker 3: and eighty, various companies were cooking up things like CNN
4:51
Speaker 3: or U, ESPN or USA Network, and we were going
4:56
Speaker 3: to bounce our signals off of satellite, and we were
4:59
Speaker 3: going to make cable TV kind of sweeped through the
5:01
Speaker 3: hinter lands in the cities and become a universal utility. Essentially,
5:06
Speaker 3: MTV and Nickelodeon was the other company under my sort
5:10
Speaker 3: of umbrella. We were really the tip of the sphere.
5:13
Speaker 3: Prior to that, you had free broadcast networks ABC, NBCCBS,
5:17
Speaker 3: that's pretty much all it was there. Cable was going
5:20
Speaker 3: to do to television what FM radio sort of did
5:24
Speaker 3: to AM radio. They were going to have more slender services.
5:27
Speaker 3: They called it narrow casting at the time, doing one
5:31
Speaker 3: thing all the time, appealing to a certain audience, so
5:34
Speaker 3: you really didn't care that everyone wasn't watching you. ABC
5:37
Speaker 3: was just a bunch of disconnected shows, whereas everything we
5:41
Speaker 3: did on MTV would be cohesive. They would all be
5:44
Speaker 3: directed at younger music lovers. And the form that we
5:49
Speaker 3: were going to build us around was the music video,
5:53
Speaker 3: which was unknown to most Americans but had existed in Europe,
5:57
Speaker 3: where I had seen it years ago, because in Europe
6:00
Speaker 3: it was very difficult for record companies to get their
6:03
Speaker 3: acts on the radio because there wasn't a lot of
6:05
Speaker 3: radio stations they didn't play music, so they would make
6:08
Speaker 3: these music videos and put them on shows like Top
6:11
Speaker 3: of the Pops in the UK. On television, we thought
6:14
Speaker 3: that this would be a great vehicle. Music's a big category.
6:18
Speaker 3: We could have a music channel on television. We thought
6:21
Speaker 3: we'd take the two things that the baby boomers who
6:24
Speaker 3: we were targeting at that time, the two things they
6:27
Speaker 3: really loved, music and television, and put it together in
6:29
Speaker 3: a new way, and we call it MTV. And I
6:32
Speaker 3: was on the team that developed that concept, and we
6:35
Speaker 3: launched in nineteen eighty one, and at the bulk of
6:40
Speaker 3: the programming, we tried to give it an underground sort
6:43
Speaker 3: of cool sensibility, like this was something like you don't
6:47
Speaker 3: know where it came from. And it really became a thing.
6:51
Speaker 3: I mean, it really became a force in the cultures.
6:54
Speaker 3: Easy to remember, easy to forget how revolutionary it seemed
6:58
Speaker 3: at the time, given all that's happened, But back then
7:01
Speaker 3: it really looked like something brand new, a sign of
7:05
Speaker 3: the future that was coming and so forth.
7:07
Speaker 2: It had a certain quality of pirate radio, had a
7:10
Speaker 2: certain quality of punk rock kind of aesthetic. Even with
7:13
Speaker 2: all those I mean, I think of the bumpers so often,
7:16
Speaker 2: some of those early MTV animated bumpers with the clamation
7:19
Speaker 2: using weirdo artists. Some of the animation that came later,
7:22
Speaker 2: stuff like Beavis and butt Head, but in the earliest days.
7:25
Speaker 2: I think the video that a lot of people associate
7:27
Speaker 2: with the very very first days of MTVS video Killed
7:31
Speaker 2: the Radio Star by the Buggles, which a lot of
7:34
Speaker 2: people don't know this, but there is a tiny little
7:36
Speaker 2: cameo in that video from Hans Zimmer, I think he
7:39
Speaker 2: was in the band at the times, and he's got
7:41
Speaker 2: this rack of crazy modular sins behind him, and you
7:44
Speaker 2: can see a young Hans bopping with the Buggles. But
7:47
Speaker 2: it's like you almost think of it as such a
7:50
Speaker 2: connected piece, this idea of this mission statement or this
7:54
Speaker 2: thesis video killed the radio star. But that wasn't exactly
7:57
Speaker 2: on purpose. It just happened to be the one that
7:59
Speaker 2: took off and sort of led this new style of
8:03
Speaker 2: broadcast and the way of experiencing music. Can you kind
8:06
Speaker 2: of talk about those early days and how quickly it
8:09
Speaker 2: picked up or like, did it take a minute or
8:11
Speaker 2: was it a kind of instant that people just saw
8:13
Speaker 2: the potential and got on board with MTV?
8:16
Speaker 1: And what was the climate like? Was this a very
8:19
Speaker 1: startup environment where you.
8:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was like a bunch of us in a
8:23
Speaker 3: hotel room with coal waiting. We didn't even have a
8:26
Speaker 3: lot of phones, eating pizza and working day and night.
8:29
Speaker 3: There was a handful of us and we were all
8:32
Speaker 3: No one was making more than thirty thousand dollars a year,
8:35
Speaker 3: and we probably would have worked for less because we
8:37
Speaker 3: were all on a mission. We were like crusaders. Everyone was.
8:41
Speaker 3: No one was from the world of television. I came
8:44
Speaker 3: from eight years in Afghanistan and India. A lot of people
8:46
Speaker 3: came out of record companies or radio stations. But we
8:49
Speaker 3: were all passionate and you were right about the bumpers
8:54
Speaker 3: and all that. We really tried to create an image
8:56
Speaker 3: that would be coh. We didn't want We want an
8:58
Speaker 3: MTV to be a place. It wasn't a show. I
9:01
Speaker 3: wasn't going to go watch a show on MTV. I
9:03
Speaker 3: was going to go watch MTV. We thought that's the
9:05
Speaker 3: only way we really could survive, would be just a
9:09
Speaker 3: because we didn't have a lot of shows for starters,
9:11
Speaker 3: but we wanted people just to come there anytime. In
9:15
Speaker 3: the early days we had we went on the air,
9:17
Speaker 3: we only had one hundred and sixty eight videos. That's
9:20
Speaker 3: like one video for every hour of the week if
9:22
Speaker 3: you didn't repeat them, and it didn't take off immediately,
9:28
Speaker 3: it took a while. We were everyone we dealt with
9:31
Speaker 3: thought thought it was a bad idea. The cable operators
9:34
Speaker 3: didn't want to pay us any money because they don't
9:36
Speaker 3: like paying money to anybody, and they were all monopolists
9:39
Speaker 3: in a particular geography. The advertiser said, no one's going
9:43
Speaker 3: to watch music on television, will never get an audience,
9:46
Speaker 3: and the record company said, we're not going to give
9:48
Speaker 3: you these videos. You know, we want you to pay
9:52
Speaker 3: for them, and we really couldn't afford to do that.
9:54
Speaker 3: We said, well, they're going to sell records for you.
9:56
Speaker 3: They're like three minute commercials. So for a long time
10:00
Speaker 3: it was like for two years, it was just trying
10:02
Speaker 3: to overcome a series of no no, no, no, no no.
10:06
Speaker 3: But what we did know was that people who got
10:09
Speaker 3: it once we went on the air in August of
10:11
Speaker 3: eighty one, they loved it like the consumer had been
10:16
Speaker 3: left out of the equation. I would go out, because
10:18
Speaker 3: I was the marketing guy at the time, with this
10:21
Speaker 3: other fellow, John Stikes, who was a promotion guy. We
10:23
Speaker 3: would go to cities like Tulsa, Current then the biggest
10:27
Speaker 3: cable system in America. And just even when I arrived
10:31
Speaker 3: at the airport to rent a car, they saw MTV
10:33
Speaker 3: button on my jacket. It was like, where did you
10:35
Speaker 3: get that? Cool? I said, you know, you've heard of MTV?
10:40
Speaker 3: They go, are you kidding me? Everybody here knows about MTV.
10:44
Speaker 3: It's wild. It had just come on unannounced in the
10:47
Speaker 3: middle of the night, like six weeks earlier, and the
10:51
Speaker 3: town was going nuts for it. They went to a
10:54
Speaker 3: radio station they were like, wow, all these people are
10:56
Speaker 3: requesting songs from the Buggles in Duran. Duran grew we
11:00
Speaker 3: never play on the radio. People are getting haircuts based
11:03
Speaker 3: on various artists that they see. I went to a
11:07
Speaker 3: bar and everybody was standing around like they were watching
11:09
Speaker 3: an NFL game, but they were watching MTV. So we
11:13
Speaker 3: had the first sign of life. No one who worked
11:15
Speaker 3: at MTV got it at home. It was all an
11:18
Speaker 3: abstraction to us. We were making it putting up on
11:21
Speaker 3: our satellite. We only had two million subscribers, which was
11:26
Speaker 3: not enough to do anything. So we decided, as we
11:29
Speaker 3: were running out of money, to do sort of a
11:31
Speaker 3: hail Mary pass, and we came up with it. I
11:34
Speaker 3: won my MTV campaign, which would go right over the
11:37
Speaker 3: cable operator's head and get these young Then it was
11:42
Speaker 3: like rock and roll fans to torment their cable operator
11:45
Speaker 3: to make sure they carry it, and it worked like
11:48
Speaker 3: a charm. We would enlist major rock stars Mick Jagger,
11:52
Speaker 3: David Bowie, p Townsend Hall and Oates, have them hold
11:55
Speaker 3: our logo and validate it. Call your cable company and
11:59
Speaker 3: say I want my MTV.
12:01
Speaker 2: And you approached them in kind of a punk rock
12:03
Speaker 2: sort of culture jammy way, like didn't you like find
12:06
Speaker 2: Bowie on the slopes or something and like walk up
12:08
Speaker 2: to him and try to get into record like his
12:10
Speaker 2: little version of that.
12:11
Speaker 3: Well, I had drawn to David Bowie cart I had
12:15
Speaker 3: to find him. And you know, the first time I
12:19
Speaker 3: met him, I saw him, I was just trying to
12:22
Speaker 3: ask him to get permission to use some photos of him,
12:25
Speaker 3: Like we couldn't even get those from the record companies.
12:27
Speaker 3: They thought we were like a fan club or something.
12:30
Speaker 3: And David Bowie just said, you want my picture. The
12:32
Speaker 3: best way to get to an artist is to go
12:34
Speaker 3: directly to them, don't go through the record company, don't
12:37
Speaker 3: go through the manager. And he just said it is
12:40
Speaker 3: it good for music? And I said yeah, we're going
12:42
Speaker 3: to play music twenty four hours a day. Said sure,
12:45
Speaker 3: So that was over. So then I called his manager
12:47
Speaker 3: when we wanted to do this campaign. I said, you know,
12:50
Speaker 3: we have this campaign. It's blah blah blah. We'd love
12:54
Speaker 3: to have David in it. Well, David's skiing in Switzerland,
12:57
Speaker 3: he's in stop, but he'll do it. So I got
13:02
Speaker 3: the crew. We got on a plane to Zurich right away,
13:05
Speaker 3: where like it's like mission impossible. And then we got
13:08
Speaker 3: on a train to stod and we went out to
13:12
Speaker 3: like this little hill that was off in the mainstream
13:14
Speaker 3: and Bowie looked great. He was in you know, he
13:17
Speaker 3: was in his legs dance phase, you know, blonde hair,
13:19
Speaker 3: looking healthy. He's a good skier. Comes down and he
13:23
Speaker 3: knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to come
13:25
Speaker 3: down a hill and then stop with a squish, and
13:27
Speaker 3: he was going to go hold his hands like this
13:30
Speaker 3: and say I want my MTV. And uh so we did.
13:36
Speaker 3: We did that a few times and then he he's
13:41
Speaker 3: a really nice guy. He won't know if any of
13:44
Speaker 3: us wanted to ski with him. And at the end
13:47
Speaker 3: of the day he said, you know, Tom, what are
13:49
Speaker 3: you doing later? You want to take a sauna at
13:53
Speaker 3: the Grand Hotel, which was like the main hotel in
13:56
Speaker 3: the shad. So I like, can't believe this is happening.
14:01
Speaker 3: I go, yeah, I got nothing to do. So I
14:03
Speaker 3: go back to like our place, which is like sort
14:05
Speaker 3: of a youth host, the Loemost where the crew was.
14:09
Speaker 3: I said, I'll see you losers later. I'm gonna go
14:12
Speaker 3: take a sauna with David Bowie. So when I went
14:16
Speaker 3: there into the spa, you know, got put a towel
14:19
Speaker 3: on to go into the sauna room. We went in there.
14:24
Speaker 3: He said, you know, he's a very pleasant guy. He
14:27
Speaker 3: talked you about what books you're reading and all that
14:29
Speaker 3: kind of thing. There's one other person in the sauna.
14:33
Speaker 3: I look up in it's Squint and it's Paul McCartney.
14:36
Speaker 3: Can you believe so that maybe you know, I was
14:41
Speaker 3: there twenty six years that was maybe one of my
14:43
Speaker 3: peak moments, you know, early on in my career.
14:46
Speaker 1: That's a weird place to meet Paul McCartney too, because
14:50
Speaker 1: you're walking in, You've got the towel lawn. It's definitely
14:54
Speaker 1: a sauna. It's not a pr thing, right, what was
14:59
Speaker 1: did you have like an icebreaker?
15:01
Speaker 3: Or yeah? Well he is in what you know? They
15:04
Speaker 3: didn't know what was up. They said, what is MTV?
15:06
Speaker 3: We start west where we started? What is MTV? That's
15:10
Speaker 3: how little they knew about it. So I described it
15:12
Speaker 3: to them and I'd be throwing water on the rocks.
15:16
Speaker 3: They were both really, really nice, and I was very
15:20
Speaker 3: self effacing and saying, you know, we're trying to get
15:22
Speaker 3: this thing going. It's going to be really good for
15:24
Speaker 3: music and going to be good for the category. It's
15:26
Speaker 3: a new way for artists to express themselves. And we
15:29
Speaker 3: would one day end up being in Europe, which we
15:31
Speaker 3: did some years later, so that was a that was
15:35
Speaker 3: a highlight for me. But with that, this campaign allowed
15:38
Speaker 3: us to ramp up our subscribers to like seventy eighty
15:42
Speaker 3: ninety million homes as cable built out and as more,
15:46
Speaker 3: because we'd go into a market and run this advertising
15:50
Speaker 3: on the broadcast networks at really high levels, so you know,
15:54
Speaker 3: you'd have to be dead if you didn't know about it.
15:56
Speaker 3: So people would call their company cable company and use
15:59
Speaker 3: that language and put us on.
16:08
Speaker 1: And one thing that's amazing here right that I'm sure
16:12
Speaker 1: you get questions about MTV all the time, obviously. One
16:18
Speaker 1: thing that's amazing about your book Unplugged. I didn't give
16:22
Speaker 1: the full title, it's Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim bucktoo.
16:28
Speaker 1: And Tom, we can't let it go here because you
16:32
Speaker 1: mentioned something that I wish more interviews examined from your
16:38
Speaker 1: book before we have this moment with David Bowie and
16:43
Speaker 1: with Paul McCartney, before we have MTV and Nickelodeon and
16:48
Speaker 1: so on. You have traveled the world, you said, eight years,
16:55
Speaker 1: eight years abroad in places that honestly a lot of
17:00
Speaker 1: Americans had not visited at the time. Could you tell
17:04
Speaker 1: us a little bit kind of speaking to that mention
17:08
Speaker 1: of improvisation and just hopping on the road. Could you
17:12
Speaker 1: could you tell us what inspired your travels, what you
17:16
Speaker 1: were doing. We have we have so many questions, but
17:18
Speaker 1: maybe paint the stage. Okay, I'm a kid in the US.
17:23
Speaker 3: I'm a kid in the US and less. Remember it's
17:25
Speaker 3: the sixties, so and there was alienation in the air,
17:29
Speaker 3: there was freedom in the air. The counterculture was in
17:32
Speaker 3: full force. There was the war in Vietnam. I had
17:37
Speaker 3: gone to a graduate school to avoid getting drafted. Somehow
17:43
Speaker 3: that I pulled that off, and then I took a
17:45
Speaker 3: year off and I sort of improvised even with I
17:48
Speaker 3: had an MBA that kept me out of the army,
17:52
Speaker 3: and then I bartended my way out and asked spen
17:56
Speaker 3: a Virgin Islands Martha's Vin. You know, I did a
17:58
Speaker 3: lot of that. That was sort of improvising that I
18:00
Speaker 3: wouldn't got a job at an ad.
18:01
Speaker 1: Agency, Benton and Bulls.
18:03
Speaker 3: Benton and Bulls is one of the big agencies at
18:05
Speaker 3: the time, so I try that out. I got on
18:08
Speaker 3: what they called the fast track for Procter and Gamble products.
18:12
Speaker 3: So I did like I did a Gi Joe thing,
18:14
Speaker 3: which I hated, scope mouthwis. The whole thing was a
18:17
Speaker 3: learning experience, but it was enough for me to know
18:20
Speaker 3: this wasn't for me. Then they wanted to assign me
18:22
Speaker 3: a Sharman toilet paper, one of their big accounts, and
18:26
Speaker 3: that was hard to digest. And I had a woman,
18:28
Speaker 3: a girlfriend. She was living in Paris. She called me
18:31
Speaker 3: up and see, well, how you doing. I said, man,
18:35
Speaker 3: they wanted me to sell toilet paper. And she says, oh,
18:38
Speaker 3: you can't do that. Come with me across. I'm going
18:41
Speaker 3: to go across the Tahara Desert. You're going to hitchhike
18:44
Speaker 3: down through Spain and Morocco. Go across the Tahara Desert.
18:48
Speaker 3: I was on a plane ten weeks later. Ten days later,
18:51
Speaker 3: excuse me, I got a passport and I was off
18:54
Speaker 3: and I didn't come back for a year. We left.
18:57
Speaker 3: We split up after two months, but I kept going.
18:59
Speaker 3: And I had met another woman in Greece who told me,
19:04
Speaker 3: you know, you got to go to India. That's like
19:06
Speaker 3: the Holy Grail, that's the greatest show on Earth. And
19:09
Speaker 3: I set out overland through Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan
19:14
Speaker 3: and India, and I just fell in love with that area.
19:17
Speaker 3: I was fascinated. I had done a lot of homework.
19:20
Speaker 3: I decided I wanted to live there, but I had
19:22
Speaker 3: to create a job, and you couldn't really get a
19:24
Speaker 3: job there in those days. And in those days, this
19:27
Speaker 3: was the seventies. Now in India, the place was like
19:32
Speaker 3: a shock to the system. Sixty percent of the population
19:35
Speaker 3: was under the poverty line and it was a massive
19:38
Speaker 3: humanity and it took a lot of energy just to
19:41
Speaker 3: get through one day. But I said, this is so,
19:44
Speaker 3: I feel so alive here. So I set up a
19:47
Speaker 3: business to design it and make and then import into
19:51
Speaker 3: the United States clothing, higher end clothing, more designer like
19:55
Speaker 3: than the cheap sort of ethnic stuff. And I said
19:59
Speaker 3: that would allow me to make enough money to live here.
20:02
Speaker 3: It would be sort of a creative endeavor. Lord knows
20:06
Speaker 3: what's going to happen. Once I start, other things will
20:08
Speaker 3: happen to me. So I did that for eight years,
20:11
Speaker 3: made a lot of money. I was a millionaire in
20:13
Speaker 3: my twenties. Back then, I had a partner and we
20:17
Speaker 3: were in you know, I knew people in New York,
20:20
Speaker 3: so we would be in vogue and Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines.
20:23
Speaker 3: We got a lot of coverage, we sold. We became
20:27
Speaker 3: an unexpected hit. But at the end a lot of
20:31
Speaker 3: bat I had a house, I had servants, I was
20:34
Speaker 3: living like a pasha. Couldn't believe it. It was fantastic and
20:38
Speaker 3: a very exciting place to be. But then the Russians
20:41
Speaker 3: invaded Afghanistan, which kind of took that market away, that operation.
20:47
Speaker 3: And then Jimmy Carter, of all people, after all we
20:52
Speaker 3: had endured in India, you know, blackouts, strikes, cobra's dysentery,
21:00
Speaker 3: you name it, he.
21:01
Speaker 2: Discovered the actual cobras.
21:02
Speaker 3: By the way, those are real cobra.
21:04
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, oh yeah, thank you.
21:05
Speaker 3: It's in our backyard and they were in our backyard
21:08
Speaker 3: eating the rats.
21:09
Speaker 2: That's right. But it was the cobra problem because they
21:11
Speaker 2: released cobras to kill the rats. And then I believe
21:14
Speaker 2: you would get some sort of bounty if you showed
21:17
Speaker 2: that your cobra had killed rats. So people just released
21:19
Speaker 2: more and more cobras, and it became this like self
21:22
Speaker 2: like this rabuus kind of snake eating its own tail.
21:24
Speaker 2: Thing would be created. Went from a rat problem to
21:27
Speaker 2: a cobra problem.
21:27
Speaker 3: Right, I go on YouTube. They have all these snake videos.
21:32
Speaker 3: There's a rabbit hole on YouTube where you can see
21:34
Speaker 3: all these cobras eating things. But then they declared an
21:39
Speaker 3: embargo on clothing from India because the president put in
21:43
Speaker 3: place tariffs kind of like today, because it was hurting
21:48
Speaker 3: domestic manufacturing. So they outlawed it for a while, and
21:53
Speaker 3: I basically went bankrupt. I did smuggle some some some
21:59
Speaker 3: of the clothing I shipped to Canada and kind of
22:01
Speaker 3: smuggled it into the US over the Saint Lawrence Seaway,
22:04
Speaker 3: which was crazy.
22:07
Speaker 1: Just so you know, folks, we are at Audio Podcast
22:11
Speaker 1: and Ed Tubb, you had the most poetic look out
22:14
Speaker 1: the window and I could see you traveling back to
22:18
Speaker 1: the Saint Lawrence River.
22:19
Speaker 3: That situation, Yeah, that was a that was not going
22:23
Speaker 3: to be a good way to make a living. So
22:25
Speaker 3: I was out of work. I was out of luck.
22:28
Speaker 3: I was broke. I was. I spent eight years doing that.
22:31
Speaker 3: I'm thirty three years old. And I then saw this
22:34
Speaker 3: article about the guy wanted to start a music channel,
22:38
Speaker 3: and my brother, who worked at Columbia Records, recommended me
22:42
Speaker 3: for an interview. And I realized that after traveling My
22:45
Speaker 3: other main passion was music, and I was a music nut.
22:48
Speaker 3: I knew I could tell you when I was growing up,
22:51
Speaker 3: who sang what song? What was on the other side
22:53
Speaker 3: of the record, all that, And I said, well, this
22:56
Speaker 3: looks like fun, this looks like something I could do.
22:58
Speaker 3: So I went in for an interview and they said,
23:00
Speaker 3: we're looking for people with no experience in television because
23:03
Speaker 3: we don't have any money and we can't afford to
23:05
Speaker 3: hire people who have bad habits they've acquired working for
23:08
Speaker 3: the broadcasters. So they hired me on the spot.
23:11
Speaker 1: Wow, did I have to ask? Did your escape from
23:17
Speaker 1: Kabul come up in the interview at all? When they
23:20
Speaker 1: said what's your previous work?
23:21
Speaker 3: Well? Yeah, both two people thought I was a hash
23:25
Speaker 3: he smugging as I asked about and they said it
23:29
Speaker 3: in a way like it was a positive.
23:32
Speaker 2: That's one of these fellows. Is our CEO here at iHeart?
23:35
Speaker 3: Were you smuggling the guy Bob Pittman, who now is
23:38
Speaker 3: the CEO of iHeart? Bob Bob, I hope you're listening,
23:43
Speaker 3: he said to me when he was twenty six. He
23:46
Speaker 3: was younger than me. He was the head guy. He said,
23:49
Speaker 3: what were you doing in Afghanistan smuggling drugs and I said,
23:53
Speaker 3: not really, he goes, not really, that means you were.
23:57
Speaker 2: But I was a feature, not a bug. Right, You're hired.
24:00
Speaker 3: So I got hired by Bob.
24:03
Speaker 1: And this, this journey continues because, as you said, we're
24:08
Speaker 1: doing something revolutionary. At this point, you know, I was
24:12
Speaker 1: also in full disclosure. I was one of those kids
24:17
Speaker 1: that got hacked by Uh, I want my MTV and
24:20
Speaker 1: I was. I was bugging my parents that I remember vividly.
24:25
Speaker 3: Uh.
24:25
Speaker 1: There was one Christmas where, uh, you know, my my
24:29
Speaker 1: parents asked me what I wanted, right, And instead of
24:33
Speaker 1: picking you know, a toy or a trip or something,
24:37
Speaker 1: I said, it'd be cool if we had MTV because
24:40
Speaker 1: the kids up the street have it.
24:42
Speaker 2: Oh, it's something you'd go to the kids up the
24:44
Speaker 2: street's house. I watched a million.
24:47
Speaker 3: I like those sort of origin of my MTV viewing stories.
24:51
Speaker 3: I hear them a lot. People were young and going
24:54
Speaker 3: over to friends' houses because pumpy my mother wouldn't let
24:57
Speaker 3: us get cable. My mother would let me watch EMTV
25:00
Speaker 3: well or whatever, but there was always someone in the
25:02
Speaker 3: neighborhood who had it with lenient parents.
25:05
Speaker 2: That's right, yep, and then that would be the rallying spot.
25:08
Speaker 2: I don't want to maybe now, I mean, let's just
25:10
Speaker 2: go ahead and do it. You mentioned the idea of cable,
25:13
Speaker 2: and I think there might be some bocks growing up
25:15
Speaker 2: now that don't even really remember what cable was all about.
25:18
Speaker 2: And you mentioned the idea of subscribers, and I think
25:21
Speaker 2: we can certainly correlate that to the model that we
25:23
Speaker 2: all now participate in against our will most of the time,
25:26
Speaker 2: which is this sort of I don't know, the fatigue
25:30
Speaker 2: of infinite subscriptions, all of these different things, which more
25:34
Speaker 2: or less the way things are now. It's kind of
25:36
Speaker 2: become what cable packages used to be. Where it was like,
25:39
Speaker 2: you know, it was this illusion of choice. You know,
25:41
Speaker 2: you could get all the different whatever channels, you get
25:44
Speaker 2: the package you want, not have the ones that you
25:46
Speaker 2: don't want. But now it's like there's so much crossover
25:49
Speaker 2: and so much weird kind of I don't know, overkill.
25:53
Speaker 2: If everyone's got their own thing, you can no longer
25:55
Speaker 2: get everything in one place, so you have to have
25:57
Speaker 2: all of them. Can you speak a little bit abou
25:58
Speaker 2: how the landscapes changed from what cable was to where
26:03
Speaker 2: we are now with the streaming thing, that to my
26:05
Speaker 2: mind kind of resembles almost a more monstrous version of cable.
26:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good question. Well, you know, we used
26:12
Speaker 3: to call it, but there's a TV revolution, which meant
26:14
Speaker 3: you're going to get more choices. So we started out
26:17
Speaker 3: cable systems were twelve channels, and twenty four, then thirty
26:21
Speaker 3: five and fifty four, and then it just kept going.
26:23
Speaker 3: But they were all like you say, they were all
26:26
Speaker 3: you're getting them all for one price, so you didn't
26:28
Speaker 3: have to keep tracking, even though you maybe only watch
26:30
Speaker 3: eight or nine of them, but you pay the same
26:32
Speaker 3: price that was the cable package. And then they kept
26:35
Speaker 3: raising the prices of the cable package. Then satellite came on,
26:39
Speaker 3: and you know, there was a little bit of a
26:41
Speaker 3: battle price. This went down a bit, but the TV
26:43
Speaker 3: revolution kind of came to an end. It was replaced
26:45
Speaker 3: by the digital revolution. And in this revolution, we have
26:49
Speaker 3: the Internet, we've got social media, we've got all these
26:52
Speaker 3: streaming services, we've got substacks, we've got podcasts, and we're
26:57
Speaker 3: just we used to say you're gonna be able to
27:01
Speaker 3: watch or listen to whatever you want, whenever you want,
27:04
Speaker 3: And now they get out on whatever device, So there's
27:06
Speaker 3: an infinite amount of choice. It's not thirty five channels,
27:10
Speaker 3: and it's a hard thing. Do I have Hulu?
27:12
Speaker 2: I don't know.
27:13
Speaker 3: I don't remember. Am I on his substack? I can't remember.
27:16
Speaker 3: Someone's got to come up with a new kind of
27:19
Speaker 3: aggregated package or at least show me on a screen
27:24
Speaker 3: all the things I subscribe to so I can unsubscribe
27:27
Speaker 3: to some of them.
27:28
Speaker 1: Agreed, Do you, given your experience right and your deep
27:35
Speaker 1: knowledge base with Asdall said, the changing landscape, we have
27:40
Speaker 1: to ask you a little bit about the future. I mean,
27:43
Speaker 1: do you see a course correction coming for streaming services?
27:47
Speaker 1: Do we see a world where someone says, hey, I'll
27:52
Speaker 1: just watch these three things? Are were returning back to ABC, CBC,
27:57
Speaker 1: the TV with three channels.
27:59
Speaker 2: And to piggyback US, especially now with what we're seeing
28:01
Speaker 2: as more of this corporate consolidation, these efforts to kind
28:04
Speaker 2: of be the one company that has all the things.
28:07
Speaker 2: Of course, there's a lot of talk about this merger
28:10
Speaker 2: with Paramounts and Warner Brothers, after Warner Brothers already was
28:13
Speaker 2: acquired by a company that we actually used to be
28:14
Speaker 2: a part of Discovery in our early days of podcasting,
28:18
Speaker 2: it just seems like it's getting deluded more and more
28:20
Speaker 2: and more, and I'm just curious if that's a good thing.
28:22
Speaker 2: Is this for the consumer? Is this anti consumer?
28:25
Speaker 3: Like?
28:25
Speaker 2: What is the future of anti consumer?
28:29
Speaker 3: Okay, make no mistake about it. Whatever happens with Warner Brothers,
28:34
Speaker 3: who's like the crown jewel studio of hollywoods.
28:37
Speaker 2: They have all the all of it, all the legacy stuff.
28:40
Speaker 3: Yes, whatever happens, if it goes when Netflix, or if
28:43
Speaker 3: it goes with the Paramount and the Lessons, there's nothing
28:47
Speaker 3: in it for the consumer. It means prices are going
28:50
Speaker 3: to go up because if Netflix gets it, you know,
28:54
Speaker 3: it's going to fold into Netflix and they're going to
28:56
Speaker 3: have they'll be able to raise their prices because they'll
28:58
Speaker 3: be one less competitor, which was a big competitor. They'll
29:02
Speaker 3: have more content that they can talk about, so they
29:04
Speaker 3: can raise their prices. As a consumer, you're not getting
29:07
Speaker 3: anything really extra. You know, you could have got them
29:11
Speaker 3: from the two of them. And then you know, if
29:14
Speaker 3: you're a let's say you're a producer. You guys produce
29:16
Speaker 3: a show, so you got a new like Sopranos in
29:20
Speaker 3: your mind, you used to be able to go to
29:23
Speaker 3: Warners and you used to be able to go to Netflix,
29:26
Speaker 3: two potential buyers. Now there's only one buyer of those,
29:30
Speaker 3: So you've lost a buyer and you've given this company
29:34
Speaker 3: more leverage to raise prices. So it's really a question
29:39
Speaker 3: of consolidation, and it's trying. It's like, it seems like
29:43
Speaker 3: it's this inexorable force. You know, why can't Warner Brothers
29:46
Speaker 3: just stay where they were? And you know, the last
29:49
Speaker 3: time we had a studio in Hollywood eaten up by somebody,
29:52
Speaker 3: it was when Disney bought Fox. And if you look
29:56
Speaker 3: at the amount of movies that the combined Disney Fox
30:00
Speaker 3: puts out now, it's less than what they put used
30:03
Speaker 3: to put out individually.
30:05
Speaker 2: Arguably less good ones.
30:07
Speaker 1: Well, they can't compete against themselves, right, They've essentially consolidated
30:11
Speaker 1: a schedule to attempt to maximize their return.
30:15
Speaker 3: They stuck out a lot of costs, they unemploy a
30:18
Speaker 3: lot of people, and you know, it's an I don't
30:22
Speaker 3: know what happens at the end of this. I don't
30:25
Speaker 3: know what happens. Yeah, this is is more and more consolidation,
30:30
Speaker 3: and maybe some of these smaller streaming services go out
30:33
Speaker 3: of business unless you're like you got a niche, like
30:35
Speaker 3: you're the Criterion Channel or something, and you can can
30:38
Speaker 3: live over on the sidelines and no one's really going
30:40
Speaker 3: to mess with you.
30:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, you point out, you point out that the indie spirit,
30:46
Speaker 1: the art first still remains in some ways with outfits
30:51
Speaker 1: like eight twenty four. I think we're big fans of
30:54
Speaker 1: their work. But it does seem like what you're saying here, Tom,
30:59
Speaker 1: is there be a big crunch of consolidation that takes
31:04
Speaker 1: us back to the days of essentially three channels, even
31:08
Speaker 1: if they pretend to be thousands, And it doesn't sound
31:12
Speaker 1: like it's the best thing.
31:15
Speaker 3: No, you're gonna have in the old days, you've got
31:18
Speaker 3: three channels for free. Now you're gonna have three packages,
31:22
Speaker 3: each of which costs money and cost more money going forward.
31:33
Speaker 1: It's very strange because I keep thinking back through through Unplugged.
31:39
Speaker 1: When we were reading it, it was a journey I
31:43
Speaker 1: was not expecting to be quite honest, and it's a
31:47
Speaker 1: hell of a story, and there there are a lot
31:50
Speaker 1: of deep philosophical gems in this, and I love that
31:56
Speaker 1: you mentioned Joseph Campbell. It seems almost as if mass
32:01
Speaker 1: media is on a hero's journey of its own, would
32:05
Speaker 1: you agree with that? And what do you like about
32:08
Speaker 1: Joseph Capbell And please tell me if that analogies BS.
32:14
Speaker 3: No, I mean he was about the hero's journey. I
32:16
Speaker 3: mean his his sort of philosophy underwride, you know so
32:21
Speaker 3: much of life. I always found him as a source
32:24
Speaker 3: of good advice. What would he be thinking of today's
32:27
Speaker 3: media world. That's a good question. He'd probably be as
32:31
Speaker 3: confused as we are. He's going to watch a lot
32:33
Speaker 3: of shows, but he hasn't signed up for that network
32:36
Speaker 3: yet streaming service.
32:38
Speaker 2: And we'd have to get out his sub sect. Yeah,
32:41
Speaker 2: I'd love to add one more. Go back to music
32:43
Speaker 2: briefly with this discussion of kind of the Future, because
32:46
Speaker 2: as you mentioned, MTV isn't the MTV it used to be.
32:49
Speaker 2: It's much more of a reality driven network, or at
32:52
Speaker 2: least it has been for a long time with like
32:54
Speaker 2: reality shows. And obviously they've made a lot of waves
32:56
Speaker 2: in that medium, for better or worse, whatever your opinion
32:58
Speaker 2: is on that kind of content. But they're certainly not
33:02
Speaker 2: breaking artists anymore. There used to be MTV two, which
33:05
Speaker 2: I thought was great. That was more like the old MTV,
33:08
Speaker 2: but that's not really around anymore. And now it seems
33:10
Speaker 2: to me that music has been removed entirely from what
33:12
Speaker 2: MTV is or has been. I'm wondering if with things
33:16
Speaker 2: like AI music generation and you know, AI video generation
33:23
Speaker 2: and this question around the philosophical nature of art and
33:27
Speaker 2: the artist and giving the people what they want, how
33:31
Speaker 2: does that all fit in to your journey and how
33:35
Speaker 2: does that all fit into kind of the trajectory of
33:37
Speaker 2: media and culture, Because I mean, we literally have songs
33:40
Speaker 2: charting now that were entirely generated by artificial intelligence mean
33:44
Speaker 2: or machine learning, whatever the term might be.
33:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, as I said before, we had the cable revolution
33:49
Speaker 3: and you had sort of the digital revolution. You could
33:51
Speaker 3: argue that the digital revolution is about the annibisa planted
33:54
Speaker 3: by the AI revolution. And it's maybe too early to
33:58
Speaker 3: know where the AI is going. I mean, it's going
34:01
Speaker 3: to be the end of civilization or it's going to
34:02
Speaker 3: make our lives a lot better. It's probably somewhere in between. Well,
34:07
Speaker 3: so I'm glad in my career I don't have to
34:10
Speaker 3: deal with a lot of the issues, the macro issues.
34:14
Speaker 3: Is it going to put twenty percent of our people
34:15
Speaker 3: out on the street. Is it going to eliminate so
34:18
Speaker 3: many things, so many jobs, The fact that you can
34:23
Speaker 3: make songs or TV shows with AI not using real people.
34:30
Speaker 3: You know, I don't know. I'm alone. I shake my head.
34:37
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm all fashioned, but I like authenticity and I
34:41
Speaker 3: can't see myself getting emotionally entangled in a song that
34:47
Speaker 3: I don't think any human being had a role in making.
34:51
Speaker 3: That it's some kind of consolid dated ay, you know,
34:55
Speaker 3: something out of chat GPT. It's just I don't know, maybe,
35:00
Speaker 3: but maybe for other for younger people, they might not
35:04
Speaker 3: find this so bad if the beat's good that they
35:06
Speaker 3: don't really care about that.
35:07
Speaker 2: Haven't we lost something at that point? Though? Kind of?
35:10
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know it not to be like
35:11
Speaker 2: the old man screaming at clouds myself, but it does
35:14
Speaker 2: feel like if it becomes so good that you quote
35:16
Speaker 2: unquote can't tell the difference, or you just don't really
35:19
Speaker 2: care that much, it haven't we lost something in that
35:22
Speaker 2: connection to what it means to be a human and
35:25
Speaker 2: to make art and to make something that is the
35:27
Speaker 2: product of experience, Because isn't at the end of the day,
35:30
Speaker 2: this AI stuff is kind of regurgitating the wealth of
35:32
Speaker 2: human art, creativity, knowledge and sort of remixing it in
35:35
Speaker 2: a way that's as hopefully as trans or as hard
35:37
Speaker 2: to tell that it was done that way as possible.
35:40
Speaker 2: Is it kind of like a way of like tricking us?
35:42
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's like a it is like a remix,
35:45
Speaker 3: but like the remixes, we know at least we're mixed
35:47
Speaker 3: together by humans, right, Yeah, these are going to be
35:52
Speaker 3: much more deeper remixes.
35:55
Speaker 1: It's it's also a new normal. We have to consider that, right,
35:58
Speaker 1: because if you are privileged enough to have been in
36:03
Speaker 1: an environment where you see you see live musicians, right,
36:09
Speaker 1: you have that destination moment. Oh the new music video
36:13
Speaker 1: it's coming out tonight at nine pm. Everybody get to
36:16
Speaker 1: Timmy's house because his mom lets us watch HIMTV. You
36:21
Speaker 1: have those moments of connection of authenticity. But then let's
36:25
Speaker 1: say you're growing up. Now it's the end of twenty
36:29
Speaker 1: twenty five as we record this, you're six years old, right,
36:33
Speaker 1: you grow up in a place where live music exists.
36:39
Speaker 1: But now it's normalized to have that AI experience. I'm
36:43
Speaker 1: just wondering here, Tom, does the pendulum swing back? Do
36:47
Speaker 1: we see a return to authenticity after a certain point
36:51
Speaker 1: with Ai rolling out.
36:53
Speaker 3: I think so, okay, I think so. I mean, I
36:58
Speaker 3: think people will have to be more hungry for that
37:00
Speaker 3: real experience. I mean, if you're six years old, let's
37:03
Speaker 3: say you grow up and you can be by the
37:05
Speaker 3: time you're twenty, maybe you haven't been to a live concert,
37:08
Speaker 3: and a live concert is something where, you know, music's
37:12
Speaker 3: a lot deeper of an entertainment form than than film
37:15
Speaker 3: or TV. I mean, there's a it's bigger than language.
37:19
Speaker 3: You're in a you're in a crowd, there's not a
37:21
Speaker 3: collective vibe, and everybody's in it together and it's really magical,
37:28
Speaker 3: and you know, to not have it, I don't see
37:30
Speaker 3: how you duplicate that with things all being artificial. You know,
37:37
Speaker 3: maybe I'm just another old man screaming at the future.
37:41
Speaker 1: Well, we're with you here, a fellow abbateur meteorologist, right,
37:48
Speaker 1: We're also we're also getting a lot of folks in
37:53
Speaker 1: the audience and friends of ours candidly when we said
37:58
Speaker 1: we're going to have a moment to explore life and
38:02
Speaker 1: history in the future with this guy. One thing a
38:05
Speaker 1: lot of people are asking us about is the life
38:10
Speaker 1: lessons or advice you would give not now for a
38:13
Speaker 1: six year old, but let's fast forward for a twenty
38:16
Speaker 1: year old right now growing.
38:17
Speaker 2: Up in the world.
38:18
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe hopscotching around, doing some bartending at the vineyard
38:23
Speaker 1: and so on. What would you want a young like,
38:30
Speaker 1: let's say early twenties Tom Freston to know about the future.
38:35
Speaker 1: What advice would you give yourself if you could travel
38:37
Speaker 1: in time.
38:38
Speaker 3: Well, let's say you just got out of school and
38:41
Speaker 3: you're really young. And if you're really young, you're at
38:44
Speaker 3: a point in your life where you can make some mistakes,
38:47
Speaker 3: you can take some shots. There's no risk. Really, It
38:50
Speaker 3: isn't like if you disappear for a while, people are
38:53
Speaker 3: really going to know you're gone and disqualify you off
38:55
Speaker 3: some kind of list. So get off the conveyor belt.
39:00
Speaker 3: The world is the best classroom. I'm now speaking from
39:03
Speaker 3: my own experience. What others would say this too? And
39:06
Speaker 3: go places? Now, Maybe you can't go everywhere like I did,
39:10
Speaker 3: but you can go places. You can have menial jobs,
39:13
Speaker 3: you can work around, you can be a king of
39:15
Speaker 3: the road for a while and see the world, see
39:17
Speaker 3: the world outside this country, see the world from other
39:20
Speaker 3: people's shoes, see what they think about our country. Get
39:23
Speaker 3: some of the nuances involved in the global you know
39:28
Speaker 3: sort of setup that we have today, Make some friends
39:31
Speaker 3: in other places that you can continue to have through
39:33
Speaker 3: the rest of your life, and don't feel guilty. Don't
39:37
Speaker 3: feel like you have to go to work for Goldman
39:39
Speaker 3: Sachs like a week after you get out of college.
39:42
Speaker 3: That just baffles me. But you see these kids today,
39:45
Speaker 3: they really have high anxiety, and they have they're more
39:48
Speaker 3: prone to depression, and they have panic attacks. And I'm thinking, God,
39:54
Speaker 3: you're in your young twenties. You should feel great. You
39:57
Speaker 3: did the school thing. Of course, you you don't know
40:00
Speaker 3: exactly what you're going to be. If you do know,
40:02
Speaker 3: you're you're you know, you're really naive. So doors will
40:06
Speaker 3: open to you that you would not even have imagined
40:10
Speaker 3: if you take a break, take a few beats, and
40:14
Speaker 3: get out there and get some experience, and because when
40:16
Speaker 3: you come back, you're going to be a lot more
40:19
Speaker 3: desirable of a job candidate and a lot more interesting
40:23
Speaker 3: with a more interesting story as a job candidate than
40:26
Speaker 3: if you've just been you know, going along drone like
40:30
Speaker 3: in you know, thinking that you don't have a lot
40:34
Speaker 3: of agency in what you're going to do with your life.
40:39
Speaker 3: You know, a little improvisation could be good for sure.
40:42
Speaker 2: I mean, I think especially as like the traditional models
40:44
Speaker 2: even of like college and career paths and stuff, they're
40:47
Speaker 2: starting to, I don't know, fall apart a little bit.
40:50
Speaker 2: It makes a whole lot of sense to just try
40:52
Speaker 2: to collect experiences, collect various pieces of wisdom and knowledge,
40:57
Speaker 2: various skill sets, and then be able to to kind
41:00
Speaker 2: of improvise your way into finding the right path as
41:03
Speaker 2: it presents itself. But you can't really see that path
41:06
Speaker 2: if you don't go places in order to look for
41:08
Speaker 2: those doors, right, because you know it's not if you're
41:10
Speaker 2: looking for like the setout path that's going to be
41:13
Speaker 2: what it is. But if you go abroad or go
41:16
Speaker 2: elsewhere or just try different things, then you're gonna kind.
41:19
Speaker 3: Of a good place. I'm an optimist. I know. Whenever
41:22
Speaker 3: I go looking for an apartment, you see an apartment
41:24
Speaker 3: you think you like, and then you don't get it,
41:27
Speaker 3: and then you see something else you think you like,
41:29
Speaker 3: and then you don't get it someone else rented it.
41:31
Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, you find something
41:33
Speaker 3: and you go, thank God, I didn't get those other two,
41:36
Speaker 3: because this is a better one. And you know, I
41:40
Speaker 3: think you can apply some of that optimism to like,
41:45
Speaker 3: you know, career choice. Career is almost a different word
41:48
Speaker 3: these days because you're in the world. We're in the
41:50
Speaker 3: gig economy time, which I know it presents a whole
41:54
Speaker 3: bunch of other issues and problems, and you know.
41:58
Speaker 1: I do, I do. Like I love the point about
42:03
Speaker 1: about traveling, about taking a beat away from the conveyor
42:06
Speaker 1: belts or the so called rat race, because often we
42:11
Speaker 1: forget there's a whole other world out there. And Tom,
42:14
Speaker 1: this reminds me of that that beautiful verse from T. S.
42:19
Speaker 1: Eliot from Little gettings, we shall not cease from exploration,
42:23
Speaker 1: and the end of all our exploring will be to
42:26
Speaker 1: arrive where we started and know the place for the
42:28
Speaker 1: first time. I feel like that that's kind of nailing.
42:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's beautiful, that's really true. You do kind of
42:36
Speaker 3: know it for the first time. You can say I
42:38
Speaker 3: know myself and I know America. I really know America
42:43
Speaker 3: for the first time, because you know, Americas are famous
42:46
Speaker 3: for not traveling, right, Yeah, I think it used to
42:50
Speaker 3: be twenty five percent of Americans had passports. Well, you know,
42:53
Speaker 3: you go to the Netherlands like ninety nine percent of
42:56
Speaker 3: people that passports. Of course it's a smaller country and
42:58
Speaker 3: all that.
43:00
Speaker 1: It also, uh. The story that's going to stick with
43:04
Speaker 1: my pal Nola and I is definitely going to be
43:07
Speaker 1: the fact that man Bob never asked us if we
43:12
Speaker 1: smuggled Hashish out of Kabul.
43:15
Speaker 3: You know what you should do. You should send him
43:17
Speaker 3: an email say you're just speaking to Tom and wondering
43:22
Speaker 3: if the fact that we've been smuggling Hashi shot us
43:25
Speaker 3: somewhere that does that mean we could get out some
43:28
Speaker 3: kind of promotion or a raise, or maybe you can
43:31
Speaker 3: direct us into another side hustle.
43:33
Speaker 2: Hell, I've never even seen Hashish until I went to
43:36
Speaker 2: UH to Copenhagen, where it's Yeah.
43:39
Speaker 3: I think they smoke it all before it gets across there.
43:43
Speaker 2: It is there, it is Tom, this is the best.
43:46
Speaker 2: I don't know. Do you have any any closing thoughts
43:48
Speaker 2: to leave us when we could go so deep with this?
43:50
Speaker 2: But I do first of all recommend everybody pick up
43:53
Speaker 2: this book Unplugged. It is not entirely about the history
43:56
Speaker 2: of MTV unplugged, which could be a topic of discussion
44:00
Speaker 2: all its own. I think We're gonna leave that one
44:02
Speaker 2: for another time. But yeah, I don't know, is there anything.
44:04
Speaker 3: I'm just please you guys have me on. I just
44:06
Speaker 3: say the book is not a business book.
44:09
Speaker 2: No, no, no, It's.
44:11
Speaker 3: An adventure story and it's wrapped around us some business
44:15
Speaker 3: things and in my life. But yeah, it's about history
44:19
Speaker 3: going through you know, going from the sixties onward. You know,
44:23
Speaker 3: the path that I took, which started out in a
44:26
Speaker 3: relatively more free, optimistic environment, and what we find ourselves
44:32
Speaker 3: in today. Things were ascendant and anything. You thought you
44:37
Speaker 3: could do anything. But I say that a lot of
44:40
Speaker 3: the rules then still apply now. And my book ends
44:43
Speaker 3: up with reinventing yourself. I reinvented myself a third time
44:48
Speaker 3: doing a lot of pro social work work, going back
44:50
Speaker 3: to Afghanistan and helping a TV network there or working
44:54
Speaker 3: in Africa for the extreme poor. I know, there's a
44:58
Speaker 3: lot of lessons in there. It's funny when you write
45:00
Speaker 3: a book like that, you don't think of what you're
45:01
Speaker 3: writing your lessons. But people would say to me, that's
45:04
Speaker 3: why I really learned a lot reading that. But people
45:07
Speaker 3: like the book. It's it's kind of fun, it's good ride.
45:11
Speaker 2: Well, but it doesn't come off as teaching lessons. You're not.
45:13
Speaker 2: You're not preaching to people, You're just experiencing. You're expressing
45:16
Speaker 2: these lessons you yourself have learned that are very universally applicable.
45:20
Speaker 3: I would argue, I never thought i'd write a memoir,
45:22
Speaker 3: you know, it never occurred to me till the pandemic
45:25
Speaker 3: came along and I kind of started and I'm thinking,
45:27
Speaker 3: how do I connect all of the sparate parts of
45:29
Speaker 3: my life? Is there is there some overarching narrative? And I,
45:32
Speaker 3: you know, you do a book like that. Of course
45:35
Speaker 3: I'm older, you know, and sort of like you could
45:38
Speaker 3: see it come into focus. So it was a satisfying experience.
45:42
Speaker 2: As fine reading.
45:43
Speaker 1: And you have genuinely made the world a better place
45:49
Speaker 1: with your work, which I know sounds hyperbolic, right, but
45:53
Speaker 1: we're I love that you're mentioning the fact of the
45:57
Speaker 1: existence of things like one. I love that you're mentioning
46:01
Speaker 1: the volunteering that you've done and returning to Afghanistan. And
46:06
Speaker 1: if you want to learn more about this, folks, please
46:09
Speaker 1: do check out Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim Buck
46:13
Speaker 1: to We're not blowing rainbows here. This is a page
46:16
Speaker 1: turner again, Tom, it was not what I was expecting
46:20
Speaker 1: and I was riveted and we can't thank you enough
46:24
Speaker 1: for your time man.
46:26
Speaker 3: Thanks Ben, thanks Aul, really nice to speak to both
46:28
Speaker 3: of you guys. Good luck, happy holidays, and thanks so
46:32
Speaker 3: much for giving me the time.
46:34
Speaker 1: And there you have it, folks, Tom Preston the one
46:38
Speaker 1: and only. I can't believe that we got to hang
46:41
Speaker 1: out with a living legend like that. And super big
46:44
Speaker 1: thanks to everybody for tuning in. Big thanks to our
46:47
Speaker 1: super producer mister Max Williams and Alex Williams who composed
46:52
Speaker 1: our track and did some yoga with Noel.
46:54
Speaker 2: That's right, we did a hot yoga session. It was
46:56
Speaker 2: at delay. Huge thanks to Chris Frostiotis and Eves cheff
46:59
Speaker 2: Coat here in Sparait the Strickland, the quizzer A and
47:01
Speaker 2: j Bahamas Jacob's.
47:03
Speaker 1: The Buzzler and big big thanks to doctor Rachel Big
47:06
Speaker 1: Spinach Lands, Big thanks to our rude dudes of ridiculous crime.
47:11
Speaker 1: If you dig us you'll love them and Noel thanks
47:15
Speaker 1: to you and thanks to Max. This is the last
47:18
Speaker 1: episode we're going to record in twenty twenty five.
47:20
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, have a great holiday you guys. We'll
47:24
Speaker 2: see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
47:33
Speaker 2: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
47:36
Speaker 2: to your favorite shows.