Latest / The Bob Lefsetz Podcast / Tom Freston

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Tom Freston · The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
0:13
Speaker 1: My guest today is Tom Freston, who has a new autobiography,
0:17
Speaker 1: Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim Buck to Tom. Why
0:22
Speaker 1: this book? Why Now?
0:26
Speaker 2: Well, we had this thing called the pandemic a while back,
0:31
Speaker 2: and I had some time on my hands, and I
0:33
Speaker 2: thought maybe it was time to try and I like writing,
0:37
Speaker 2: trying to link together some of the things in my
0:39
Speaker 2: life and see what kind of sense it might make.
0:41
Speaker 2: So I started churning it out, and next thing, you know,
0:45
Speaker 2: I thought, I thought, rather than do a business book,
0:50
Speaker 2: which everybody's doing, I'd do something more along the line
0:53
Speaker 2: of an adventure story and try and cast it as that.
0:55
Speaker 2: And I try and put in, you know, a series
0:58
Speaker 2: of favorite stories, whether they be physical adventures or adventures
1:01
Speaker 2: like in the workplace, and kind of go from there,
1:04
Speaker 2: and also try and give it a light, kind of
1:06
Speaker 2: humorous tone, so it wasn't too serious and it was
1:10
Speaker 2: fun fun to do.
1:12
Speaker 1: Okay, obviously you're well known for your tenure at MTV.
1:17
Speaker 1: How did you decide how much MTV to include and
1:20
Speaker 1: not include?
1:23
Speaker 2: Well, I didn't want to go into every little detail.
1:26
Speaker 2: A lot of it's all been There's been a bunch
1:28
Speaker 2: of books out on MTV documentaries. I think people kind
1:32
Speaker 2: of know the story. I was always more and more
1:35
Speaker 2: interested in my sort of my first chapter in life,
1:38
Speaker 2: which was, you know, the years I spent in Afghanistan
1:40
Speaker 2: in India, which sort of set the template for me.
1:45
Speaker 2: They were like my most adventurous years I was younger,
1:48
Speaker 2: but also those are the years where I learned various
1:51
Speaker 2: traits that would turn out to serve me well as
1:54
Speaker 2: someone who was running an eccentric media organization that was
1:57
Speaker 2: unlike most others, which was the MTV network, a MTV nick, E,
2:01
Speaker 2: VH one, Comedy Central, and I had I actually had
2:05
Speaker 2: journals Bob from those years when I would I was
2:09
Speaker 2: either bartending my way around North America or I was
2:14
Speaker 2: traveling all over the world by myself mostly, And then
2:18
Speaker 2: spent eight years running a business that was pretty successful
2:22
Speaker 2: and then got, you know, got a series of unfortunate
2:25
Speaker 2: events happened, and I came back to New York, you know,
2:29
Speaker 2: bankrupt and broke in. Then I started at MTV and
2:33
Speaker 2: the MTV story inventsment. I was like every MTV network's
2:38
Speaker 2: running that for all those years and being there. That
2:42
Speaker 2: was you know, all the things in my life that
2:45
Speaker 2: I loved outside of traveling and living abroad was sort
2:48
Speaker 2: of in one place. So it was in a sense
2:51
Speaker 2: for me, it was a perfect job. You know, I'm
2:53
Speaker 2: not saying that no one else couldn't could have done it,
2:55
Speaker 2: but yeah, I wasn't. I didn't have a career path
2:59
Speaker 2: of a traditional media executive, let's put it that way.
3:03
Speaker 1: So what lessons did you learn in your adventures in
3:05
Speaker 1: the so called rag trade in Asia that translated to
3:11
Speaker 1: your tenure at MTV.
3:14
Speaker 2: Well, when I lived there in Asia in the seventies,
3:16
Speaker 2: it was a very tumultuous time in India. India was really,
3:19
Speaker 2: you know, sort of still a brand new nation. It
3:22
Speaker 2: was bureaucratics. Sixty percent of people were below the poverty line.
3:28
Speaker 2: Today that number was like two or three percent. So
3:31
Speaker 2: it was very poor, very ragged, and they were a
3:34
Speaker 2: socialist government. They didn't allow any imports. There was no
3:37
Speaker 2: foreigners really living there. I mean you couldn't go there.
3:40
Speaker 2: And you know, there was no call centers in Bangalore.
3:44
Speaker 2: So I learned humility first and foremost. You realize how
3:49
Speaker 2: small and insignificant you are when you're living in a
3:52
Speaker 2: place like that that seemed to be just made of chaos,
3:56
Speaker 2: and I would find that the determination and you know,
4:01
Speaker 2: flexibility I would need to wind my way through there
4:03
Speaker 2: and be successful was very satisfying. So the improvisation and
4:10
Speaker 2: tolerance of traveling low to the ground, and tolerance of
4:14
Speaker 2: sort of eccentric individuals and so forth, and believing in
4:18
Speaker 2: risk taking, we're all. You know, there was this part
4:21
Speaker 2: of the things that I picked up there. That and
4:25
Speaker 2: feeling confidence, feeling confidence in an international marketplace, which which
4:30
Speaker 2: really led me to put the internationalization of MTV networks
4:36
Speaker 2: on the front burners. And you know when they when
4:39
Speaker 2: governments started to finally liberalize their media and allow satellite
4:44
Speaker 2: and cable to come in the late eighties early nineties,
4:48
Speaker 2: that was a big, big change. Yeah, you know, like
4:51
Speaker 2: in the UK, I mean you could never really there
4:53
Speaker 2: was and there was no radio stations even that played
4:56
Speaker 2: music in the early days. So we kind of came
5:02
Speaker 2: up when that was all happening. I said, well, I
5:04
Speaker 2: want to get first in line for doing that. How
5:06
Speaker 2: can we make say, let's start with MTV and can
5:08
Speaker 2: we make it a real international network? Now CNN would
5:11
Speaker 2: always say they were an international network, but they were
5:13
Speaker 2: mostly in hotels. We were really in local language in
5:16
Speaker 2: most places, in people's homes, and we had local versions
5:21
Speaker 2: and it was greatly satisfying. But to answer your question,
5:26
Speaker 2: you know, I learned it was the hardest work I
5:29
Speaker 2: ever did in my life running that business. Existing there
5:34
Speaker 2: so endurance and fortitude and humility and you know, an
5:40
Speaker 2: appreciation of creativity and risk taking. We're all things that
5:43
Speaker 2: came in handy later on in all parts of my life.
5:47
Speaker 2: It was like a good school.
5:49
Speaker 1: Okay, were you always a confident guy or did you
5:52
Speaker 1: learn to be confident?
5:55
Speaker 2: I learned to be confident, and you know, I would
5:57
Speaker 2: say even today, I still have a bit of that
6:00
Speaker 2: imposter syndrome that a lot of people have, you know,
6:04
Speaker 2: which came really evident to me. Like, you know, when
6:08
Speaker 2: I finally got fired by son to Redstone, I said,
6:11
Speaker 2: oh man, it's like the mask isn't ripped off. I
6:13
Speaker 2: had for a second of flash there that you know,
6:17
Speaker 2: they finally figured out I wasn't the right guy for
6:20
Speaker 2: the job. I really was not incompetent, but I wasn't
6:23
Speaker 2: everything I needed to be. But I dispelled that. But
6:27
Speaker 2: confidence bills, you know, you start out in school and
6:30
Speaker 2: you get from one grade to another, you get a
6:31
Speaker 2: little more confident about your abilities. But my confidence skyrocketed
6:35
Speaker 2: in my date, in my traveling days because I wasn't
6:39
Speaker 2: traveling around going to golf courses. That kind of thing.
6:42
Speaker 1: Okay, is confidence faked till you make it? How much
6:46
Speaker 1: is that apart? Do we say, well, let me get
6:49
Speaker 1: myself in the situation and figure it out, as opposed saying, oh,
6:53
Speaker 1: this is my wheelhouse, I can do this.
6:56
Speaker 2: A combination, but a lot of the former. I think
6:59
Speaker 2: a lot of the former. You know, you kind of
7:01
Speaker 2: learn as you go. You build up confidence by doing things,
7:03
Speaker 2: and you go in and you know, at MTV the
7:06
Speaker 2: first time you have to interact with like major artists,
7:08
Speaker 2: and am I really right for this? I mean, then
7:10
Speaker 2: you find out, you know, you talk to people person
7:12
Speaker 2: to person, You're like, I can do this too. These
7:15
Speaker 2: are like regular people. There's ways to relate to those people,
7:18
Speaker 2: to all kinds of people. So confidence bills as your
7:21
Speaker 2: experience kind of magnifies.
7:23
Speaker 1: So what's the trick to connecting with artists?
7:29
Speaker 2: Well? I always found trying, don't look nervous, be yourself
7:34
Speaker 2: what they really want to hear In many ways is
7:36
Speaker 2: a connection to their music and their artistry. And if
7:39
Speaker 2: you can come off as a genuine not so much
7:43
Speaker 2: a fan, but an appreciator of what they do, and
7:46
Speaker 2: be respectful of their time and what they've done, and
7:49
Speaker 2: talk to them as regular people, it would be like
7:53
Speaker 2: a conversation with anybody after a while. I mean I
7:56
Speaker 2: was never really starstruck, except maybe by a couple of artists.
8:01
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it was always I always loved
8:05
Speaker 2: what artists did, and I realized early on that I wasn't.
8:09
Speaker 2: You know, I couldn't paint, I couldn't play the guitar.
8:12
Speaker 2: I couldn't do a lot of artistic endeavors, but I could.
8:16
Speaker 2: I wanted to work near create. I wanted to work
8:18
Speaker 2: with creative people and be close to some kind of
8:22
Speaker 2: artistic endeavor, and that I would be able to do that.
8:26
Speaker 2: That that that came to me like when I was
8:28
Speaker 2: in school, I felt that would be that would be
8:32
Speaker 2: the lane I wanted to ultimately be in. That would
8:34
Speaker 2: be satisfying for me. I couldn't make it, but I
8:37
Speaker 2: could help other people do it.
8:39
Speaker 1: What is the trick to talking to business titans who
8:42
Speaker 1: were sprinkled throughout your book.
8:46
Speaker 2: Well, you got to show them that you know how
8:49
Speaker 2: business works. You know how what a P and L is, uh,
8:53
Speaker 2: what ebata is. What they want to see. For example,
8:57
Speaker 2: in a business plan, you can't come off as NAI.
9:00
Speaker 2: If you can't, you want to come off with some confidence.
9:03
Speaker 2: You've got to be able to defend numbers and if
9:06
Speaker 2: you have a great ability to kind of process numbers
9:09
Speaker 2: in your head about percentages and things like that. That
9:12
Speaker 2: I found that always works. They want to you know,
9:17
Speaker 2: in my line of work, it was always I would
9:19
Speaker 2: always try and impress them first without creative output. I
9:22
Speaker 2: always found at the beginning of a meeting if I
9:25
Speaker 2: was going to see somebody, if I was trying to
9:27
Speaker 2: help sell something, butether that be one of our networks
9:31
Speaker 2: to an outside person and they kind of brought me
9:33
Speaker 2: in to do it, or even to my own corporate
9:38
Speaker 2: people that I work with. As you know, a great
9:40
Speaker 2: it's hard to beat a great videotape, and you know
9:44
Speaker 2: that people would stand up and salute at at the
9:46
Speaker 2: end of it because that says, Okay, I'm really going
9:49
Speaker 2: to listen carefully now to what this guy is going
9:51
Speaker 2: to say, because he obviously they got something going on here.
9:55
Speaker 2: And in many cases the videotape was better than in
9:58
Speaker 2: what we were actually making, you know, because it's easy
10:02
Speaker 2: to do a three minute piece of something that seems
10:04
Speaker 2: really you know.
10:05
Speaker 1: Okay, But that's in the selling process when you're talking
10:10
Speaker 1: about you in the book, it's about going to Cuba, Okay,
10:13
Speaker 1: you go with Graydon Carter from Vanity Fair, you go
10:16
Speaker 1: with less Moon Verters from CBS, you go with Rona
10:20
Speaker 1: Howard's partner from Imagine. What's the key to connecting with
10:25
Speaker 1: those people?
10:27
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, let me say I wanted to
10:29
Speaker 2: go to Cuba by myself. I mean it started off.
10:33
Speaker 2: I wanted to you know, Cuba was going through this
10:35
Speaker 2: horrible period when the Soviet when the Berlin Wall came down,
10:39
Speaker 2: in communism kind of vaporize, except for Castro. He's like
10:42
Speaker 2: the last communist going just about. There's certainly the last
10:45
Speaker 2: one in the Western hemisphere. But the music scene, despite
10:48
Speaker 2: all the increasing poverty in Cuba was really vibrant, and
10:53
Speaker 2: they had fantastic music there, and I wanted to go
10:55
Speaker 2: in there and sort of get in on it and
10:57
Speaker 2: make some connections. So I happened to to Brian Grazer
11:01
Speaker 2: one day, who I hadn't known since the eighties. You know,
11:03
Speaker 2: he was an early guy who I knew around MTV.
11:06
Speaker 2: We would promote some of his films. We had a friendship.
11:09
Speaker 2: I said, Hey, I'm going to Cuba. You know, I
11:12
Speaker 2: want to check out the music scene there and get
11:14
Speaker 2: a sense of it, because I know we can't start
11:17
Speaker 2: MTV there. But if we could get some relationships with
11:20
Speaker 2: some of these musicians and you know, find out what's
11:23
Speaker 2: going on it could you know, we have a ravenous
11:25
Speaker 2: network we could use this stuff. He says, oh, yeah,
11:28
Speaker 2: I'd like to go, so you know, you know, I said, okay,
11:32
Speaker 2: you want to go. So then he tells somebody else,
11:34
Speaker 2: who tells somebody else. Next thing, you know, I got
11:36
Speaker 2: a whole bolo to moguls. They all want to go
11:39
Speaker 2: to Cuba. And I found this guy, this great guy
11:42
Speaker 2: lives in La Jonathan Branstein. He was like my man
11:45
Speaker 2: in Havana. He'd had been there many times, and he
11:48
Speaker 2: got us the proper visas. Allegedly they were the proper
11:52
Speaker 2: visas that you would need to go to Cuba. And
11:54
Speaker 2: we all went. But I knew all these people, Bob
11:58
Speaker 2: and as I kind of came up in the business,
12:00
Speaker 2: you just run into a certain level of people. And
12:03
Speaker 2: as you know, I knew Graydon from Vanity Fair, I
12:07
Speaker 2: knew Brad gray tangentially less Moonvez and I worked in
12:12
Speaker 2: like sister companies who also Jim Wyatt then was running
12:18
Speaker 2: William Morris, I Ken I'm trying to remember now who
12:22
Speaker 2: was house on the trip. But anyway, next thing, I'm
12:25
Speaker 2: bringing now a group of fussy people to a communist
12:30
Speaker 2: country I've never been to, and they and they want
12:35
Speaker 2: a certain level of service which I'm not even sure exists.
12:37
Speaker 2: So all of a sudden, now I'm like a tour
12:39
Speaker 2: guide rather than someone who's sort of freelancing down there
12:44
Speaker 2: trying to you know, meet as many people as I can.
12:47
Speaker 2: And I'm with a lot of people who kind of
12:49
Speaker 2: view this as some kind of holiday.
12:51
Speaker 1: But it was.
12:52
Speaker 2: It was fun. You know, we all got you know,
12:54
Speaker 2: you rent the old cars from your youth and drive
12:57
Speaker 2: around Havana, which is like it was exotic. It was
13:01
Speaker 2: like I think two thousand and one and uh, you know,
13:04
Speaker 2: Havana is a beautiful city. And we ended up having
13:08
Speaker 2: a series of meetings. It was productive and it didn't
13:11
Speaker 2: end well. Didn't end well, but we did have dinner.
13:15
Speaker 2: We had lunch with the Fidel Castro, which was unexpected.
13:19
Speaker 2: He thought, you know, we're a group of people in
13:22
Speaker 2: town he wanted to meet, so he entertained us for
13:25
Speaker 2: like five and a half hours out of lunch, which
13:27
Speaker 2: was you know, just one funny story about that. So
13:32
Speaker 2: we're told by this minder from the Ministry of Culture,
13:36
Speaker 2: Jorge Gonzalez, who was a cool kind of dude, little
13:39
Speaker 2: rotn guy. We were around and we met some of
13:43
Speaker 2: the Cuban All the music seemed to go up through
13:46
Speaker 2: people in the government, the Ministry of Culture. We had
13:48
Speaker 2: a meeting there and as we're leaving that want to
13:51
Speaker 2: hit Jorge's bosses and says, hey, do you guys want
13:54
Speaker 2: to meet Fidel. We want to meet the big man,
13:57
Speaker 2: you know, the big man. We want to meet Fidel.
14:00
Speaker 2: He'd like to meet you. Well, yeah, we'd like to
14:03
Speaker 2: meet Fidel. So they said, well, we got a he's
14:07
Speaker 2: speaking tomorrow night to a group of school teachers outside
14:11
Speaker 2: of Havana, and you know it's going to go late,
14:13
Speaker 2: So would you guys be up to meetingum like one
14:15
Speaker 2: or two in the morning. Oh yeah, whatever, it's Foridel Castro,
14:18
Speaker 2: for God's sake. He's a man from history. So it
14:21
Speaker 2: turns out that he doesn't use a cell phone. All
14:25
Speaker 2: these cats use burner phones, and what they don't know,
14:30
Speaker 2: they don't even use burner phones. They use payphones. So
14:33
Speaker 2: they take us to this kind of club that's sort
14:35
Speaker 2: of like a brothel. You know. People are dry humping
14:37
Speaker 2: against the wall. It's the communist upper class. They're letting
14:40
Speaker 2: off steam on a Friday. And we're waiting for the
14:43
Speaker 2: call to come in. And the call comes in to
14:46
Speaker 2: a payphone outside. We all go outside and it's like,
14:49
Speaker 2: he can't meet you tonight, He's got to meet you tomorrow.
14:51
Speaker 2: Why don't you come for lunch? I said, okay, So
14:54
Speaker 2: we get ready, we go for lunch. We pull in
14:56
Speaker 2: like two when was a fifty seven Cadillac invertible and
15:00
Speaker 2: was a fifty four to Ford convertible, like a bunch
15:03
Speaker 2: of yahoo. Gring goes and there he is on the
15:06
Speaker 2: palace steps and I'm thinking, Wow, that's Fidel Castro. He's
15:10
Speaker 2: a man from history. We tried to kill him like
15:12
Speaker 2: eight or nine times with a CEO. What's he going
15:15
Speaker 2: to say to us? What's his first words? And he
15:19
Speaker 2: says he comes out and you look up at him.
15:21
Speaker 2: He's on top of a flight of stairs and he says,
15:24
Speaker 2: what do you guys produces the Sopranos? This is like
15:32
Speaker 2: Cuba is only HBO subscriber. He's really a jump thinking god.
15:36
Speaker 2: Gangsters tried to kill him, you know, and we had this,
15:40
Speaker 2: We hired gangsters to take him out with exploding cigars
15:43
Speaker 2: and wet suits filled with poison. And now he wants
15:46
Speaker 2: to know who produced the Sopranos about the gangster so
15:49
Speaker 2: is Brad Gray? Brad Gray then ran Brillstein Gray, He
15:51
Speaker 2: said it was me, and so he works his way
15:54
Speaker 2: forward and Fidel goes, that's my favorite show. That's my
15:57
Speaker 2: favorite show. That was sort of his icebreaker, and then uh,
16:02
Speaker 2: you know, we're let into the Palace of Ferns where
16:04
Speaker 2: he would entertain foreign dignitaries, and we're all doing cocktails
16:09
Speaker 2: and ganging around and talking about this and that, and
16:14
Speaker 2: it was just bizarre. And then we would go in
16:16
Speaker 2: to sit for this luncheon and I'm sitting at his
16:19
Speaker 2: right and I always remember we all had place settings,
16:22
Speaker 2: and his his el Comandante al hefe Fidel Castro was
16:27
Speaker 2: his place card, which I of course stole when the
16:29
Speaker 2: meal was over. But he sat us all down and
16:32
Speaker 2: gone on and on, and he started, you guys, want
16:34
Speaker 2: to drink any wine? You know? He wheels out this
16:37
Speaker 2: this like all this wine from Chile and Algeria, and
16:41
Speaker 2: we start drinking wine. Everybody's getting a little buzz. And
16:44
Speaker 2: he just went on and on and on. He would
16:46
Speaker 2: have this translator. He spoke perfect English, but he had
16:49
Speaker 2: this translator who was always like a half a sentence
16:51
Speaker 2: behind him. And then this guy could talk. So if
16:54
Speaker 2: we were there for five and a half hours, he
16:56
Speaker 2: talked for five of it. And at one point I
16:59
Speaker 2: would a couple of points. I got up and I said,
17:01
Speaker 2: oh that this is what am I doing here? I
17:04
Speaker 2: came down here to listen to some music, make some connections.
17:08
Speaker 2: Now I'm listening to the what's the price of kilo
17:11
Speaker 2: aut of electricity? And uh, you know in one of
17:14
Speaker 2: the one of the Cuban taps, which he knew by
17:17
Speaker 2: wrote he he knew all these facts and figures. I
17:20
Speaker 2: would go into the restroom and gonaix hail. But at
17:24
Speaker 2: the end he he wheeled in. He said it's over.
17:27
Speaker 2: They wheeled in this trolley with all these boxes of
17:29
Speaker 2: cigars that he signed them all. And then he had
17:32
Speaker 2: this American photographer who was a communist who left the
17:36
Speaker 2: who had Steve still spoke with a bronx accent. He
17:39
Speaker 2: came out and he autographed all these photos that he
17:42
Speaker 2: Jonathan knew this guy, and it was like it was
17:45
Speaker 2: like you know when you're at when the artists come
17:48
Speaker 2: out at the end of a show to sign CDs
17:51
Speaker 2: and everything that was were all these guys who were
17:55
Speaker 2: sort of paid to not lose their cool, were like fanboys.
17:58
Speaker 2: And then Grazer does and buy a photo, but he
18:02
Speaker 2: says to Fidel, you know who running to know really
18:04
Speaker 2: all about how he made his hair stand up straight.
18:07
Speaker 2: He wanted to know about hair gel and Brian Grazer.
18:09
Speaker 2: He says, well, sign sign my chest. When you just
18:11
Speaker 2: sign my chest and he goes, no, I'm not gonna say,
18:15
Speaker 2: well sign my shirt. Sure enough he Fidel Castro sign
18:18
Speaker 2: says shirt. It was a it was a crazy uh
18:21
Speaker 2: end to a memorable lunch.
18:31
Speaker 1: So you walk out of the building. At first there's silence,
18:35
Speaker 1: Then you look at each other, what do you say?
18:38
Speaker 1: What did everybody say? At that point?
18:39
Speaker 2: Well, we all get in the car and it's like
18:41
Speaker 2: teeming rain, and just as soon as we're about to
18:43
Speaker 2: pull out, the sky's open, you know, and it's all
18:45
Speaker 2: of a sudden, it's like a tropical paradise again. So
18:48
Speaker 2: we put the tops down and we're all kind of
18:50
Speaker 2: stunned and people going, wow, that was something you believe
18:53
Speaker 2: that you were heading to the airport because he had to.
18:56
Speaker 2: We tipped in and charted a plane to cant Coon
18:58
Speaker 2: because he couldn't really go on a commercial flight in
19:01
Speaker 2: those days. So we took this little plane, we filled
19:03
Speaker 2: it up and we get in a plane. I remember
19:05
Speaker 2: Brad Gray says, no one had said anything really yet,
19:08
Speaker 2: and he says, so where are we going next? You know,
19:13
Speaker 2: let's just skip over the whole experience and go into
19:15
Speaker 2: the next chapter. So it was a that was a a.
19:19
Speaker 2: And then we all got fined fifty five thousand dollars.
19:22
Speaker 2: That was bad news. That was bad news, and we
19:26
Speaker 2: had to get out of it. We hired reich Hooter's
19:28
Speaker 2: lawyer because he had had the same problem when he
19:30
Speaker 2: made Buinnivist the social club, and the lawyer turned out
19:33
Speaker 2: to be a guy who worked in the Treasury department.
19:35
Speaker 2: He used to find people like us for doing it.
19:38
Speaker 2: And then what the worst one worst thing happened to
19:40
Speaker 2: less Moonviz. Because he was in the middle of negotiations
19:43
Speaker 2: with David Letterman, and Letterman couldn't get over the less Moon.
19:47
Speaker 2: He's having a link a fight negotiating with David Letterman,
19:51
Speaker 2: and he did a skit called Lunch with Fidel and
19:53
Speaker 2: Less and they would whe let these comedians. This guy
19:57
Speaker 2: was dressed up as Fidel Castro and a guy was
19:59
Speaker 2: dressed up at with the less Moonvez and Less would
20:03
Speaker 2: say to these ina things like I have the biggest
20:05
Speaker 2: office in Hollywood, or I went to Fiddel's Grammy party
20:10
Speaker 2: and he let me whip some artists and you know,
20:13
Speaker 2: things like that. And uh, I think Less took the
20:16
Speaker 2: brunt of the joke, that's for sure, but it was
20:19
Speaker 2: it was you know, we ended up getting I ended
20:22
Speaker 2: up getting relationships in Cuba, which was my original intent,
20:26
Speaker 2: and we were able to get some music out of
20:28
Speaker 2: there and so forth.
20:29
Speaker 1: Okay, you were told that it was okay to do
20:34
Speaker 1: it and then ultimately find you know, the Silicon Valley
20:39
Speaker 1: mantra is you know, ask for permission after the fact.
20:44
Speaker 1: Is that the kind of guy you are we're gonna
20:46
Speaker 1: do it. It's gonna work out in the long run.
20:47
Speaker 1: Are you fearful?
20:48
Speaker 2: Wait?
20:48
Speaker 1: Wait this is illegal or I heard this?
20:52
Speaker 2: Well in some cases yeah, but in this case, I
20:54
Speaker 2: was told we had this what they call a cultural
20:56
Speaker 2: exchange visa and Jonathan arranging, So man, it'd be a
21:00
Speaker 2: lay up to get those I mean, you guys, you're
21:02
Speaker 2: going down there looking for music. It's okay, and you know,
21:05
Speaker 2: we all thought we were golden. Then when I get
21:07
Speaker 2: this note in the mails, like an inch thick a
21:09
Speaker 2: thing from a Treasury department, I called Jonathan and he goes, yeah,
21:13
Speaker 2: we had it. I have it too. I got the
21:15
Speaker 2: same package. But I think we jumped the shark when
21:17
Speaker 2: we had lunch with Fidel Castro. That wasn't sort of
21:20
Speaker 2: included as cultural exchange. But in general, I'd be more
21:27
Speaker 2: inclined to if someone said, well, we could have a
21:31
Speaker 2: problem doing that. I mean, you assess the risks, and
21:33
Speaker 2: sometimes you just go ahead and everything works out. You're
21:35
Speaker 2: not if you just play by the rules or listen
21:38
Speaker 2: to lawyers all your life. You know, you're kind of
21:41
Speaker 2: handicapped in a way, particularly if you want to move
21:44
Speaker 2: with any speed.
21:46
Speaker 1: Okay, ultimately, Fidel bored you. But you know, we all
21:50
Speaker 1: had these experiences with famous people and a lot of
21:53
Speaker 1: times you say, I can't believe that's the guy. Other
21:56
Speaker 1: times you go, wow, that guy lives up to the
22:00
Speaker 1: rep So with all this history, the Cuban missile crisis,
22:04
Speaker 1: et cetera, you're there with Fidel. You're saying, you know,
22:07
Speaker 1: he may be boring me, but he knows what he's doing.
22:09
Speaker 1: Or you're saying, I can't believe this guy's running the country.
22:13
Speaker 2: Well, no, you have to respect for him. I mean,
22:15
Speaker 2: he would tell me he was still he told me
22:17
Speaker 2: he still earns, he still earned sneakers, he works out
22:19
Speaker 2: an hour a day. I mean, he had controlled this
22:21
Speaker 2: whole country in every way, shape or form, like no
22:24
Speaker 2: autocrat really gets a chance to do. Because it was
22:26
Speaker 2: a small island, not that small. But you know, I
22:30
Speaker 2: mean he was a man of consequence. He had withstood
22:32
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff, and he was just dabbling around
22:34
Speaker 2: with us. But I mean he was I don't know
22:36
Speaker 2: what he was expecting from us, but he when he
22:38
Speaker 2: starts talking, he kind of goes into a routine, and
22:41
Speaker 2: you know, we're hearing all the facts about the triumphs
22:44
Speaker 2: of the revolution and the superior medical system they have
22:49
Speaker 2: and the work they do in Angola and this and that. Yeah,
22:51
Speaker 2: and it's interesting. But if you're with somebody and they
22:55
Speaker 2: talked for almost five hours straight, you know, you don't
22:59
Speaker 2: see a lot of that. And at one point he
23:04
Speaker 2: wanted to say, Less, I want you to bring back
23:07
Speaker 2: a message to President Clinton. You know about these planes
23:11
Speaker 2: that keep coming over from Florida dropping leaflets on Havana,
23:16
Speaker 2: because then he shot two of these planes down. I want,
23:18
Speaker 2: I want want, I want build and know, I want
23:21
Speaker 2: Clinton to know that I don't mean problems. I have
23:23
Speaker 2: good intentions. And Less goes, Yeah, I'll get the message
23:27
Speaker 2: to him. But I'm thinking, but now George Bush is
23:29
Speaker 2: the president. He's been the president for two months or
23:31
Speaker 2: three months, and I'm thinking he, you know, he was
23:36
Speaker 2: really really felt bad that uh, these Cuban exiles or
23:42
Speaker 2: whatever you want to call him, or flying over and
23:45
Speaker 2: doing these things. But and he had to defend his country.
23:49
Speaker 2: I mean, I could put myself in his shoes. I'm thinking,
23:51
Speaker 2: you just can't have somebody coming over in a piper
23:54
Speaker 2: plane dumping stuff out and violating your airspace and you
23:58
Speaker 2: warn them a few times and then you have to,
24:00
Speaker 2: you know, shoot him down. I get it. But he
24:03
Speaker 2: was concerned, and yeah, maybe that's one of the reasons
24:05
Speaker 2: he wanted to meet us, was to have an opportunity
24:07
Speaker 2: to send some you know, sort of under the table
24:10
Speaker 2: or you know, messages back to the American government. Two
24:14
Speaker 2: unusual connections.
24:17
Speaker 1: What other heads of stints have you met.
24:20
Speaker 2: Well, I'm trying to think in my life and when
24:23
Speaker 2: I was at MTV and Viacom, you know, I met
24:28
Speaker 2: or I met I met Justin Trudeau a few times
24:32
Speaker 2: when we were working my work with Bread, I met him.
24:37
Speaker 2: I'm going through the list now in my head. Once
24:40
Speaker 2: I was in Mexico at a U two show years ago,
24:43
Speaker 2: and I believe a president of Mexico showed up. But
24:46
Speaker 2: you know, these were like not in depth meetings or anything.
24:51
Speaker 2: This is sort of a meet and greet. I haven't
24:54
Speaker 2: really had any exchanges with any you know, American presidents. Yes,
24:59
Speaker 2: but I don't think as I think now, Bob, nothing
25:02
Speaker 2: really jumps out of me that I was hanging out
25:04
Speaker 2: with the heads of state in any consequential way.
25:08
Speaker 1: Okay, you go on about Bono reaches out after your
25:11
Speaker 1: tenure at Via Commons, you work with him on Red.
25:16
Speaker 1: Bono has a The public perception is shall I say,
25:20
Speaker 1: Kira Sciro. Some people positive, some people negative. What do
25:24
Speaker 1: people not get about Bono?
25:28
Speaker 2: Well, I'm a fan, you know. I know a lot
25:30
Speaker 2: of people think he's a wind bag and why is
25:33
Speaker 2: he doing all this stuff? But I've seen this guy
25:35
Speaker 2: who has a very busy life, and all the amount
25:38
Speaker 2: of time and effort he would spend on this when
25:40
Speaker 2: he could be doing something you know that other people
25:44
Speaker 2: might find more personally gratifying, vacationing or spending more time,
25:49
Speaker 2: you know, around the house or listen to music. He would,
25:53
Speaker 2: you know, go to Africa for a couple of weeks
25:55
Speaker 2: and he'd work. He'd be working eighteen hours a day.
25:58
Speaker 2: I mean, he really really wanted to make a difference.
26:03
Speaker 2: He really cared about injustice. He really believed that activists
26:08
Speaker 2: could be lifted up because change in governments. He really
26:11
Speaker 2: believed this. He was a good man, he was a
26:13
Speaker 2: great speaker. So I've seen him wear himself down. I
26:17
Speaker 2: mean at some point that's how I kind of came
26:19
Speaker 2: into the picture. Because McGuinness, Paul McGinnis, who you know,
26:24
Speaker 2: he called me because I turned down Bono's overtures and
26:27
Speaker 2: he called me. He said, you know, why don't you
26:29
Speaker 2: come over. You know, Bono's got these do gooder things going.
26:33
Speaker 2: It's kind of upsetting the band in a bunch of ways,
26:37
Speaker 2: and he could use some help. These things are running
26:40
Speaker 2: off the rails a bit. He could use a little
26:42
Speaker 2: help and bring a little organization to bear. And so
26:46
Speaker 2: I went over and be pitched me, and Bono pitched me,
26:50
Speaker 2: and I think guy had been so good to me,
26:53
Speaker 2: and I believed in what he was doing, and I
26:54
Speaker 2: saw his sincerity, and I'm a fan. So I signed
26:58
Speaker 2: up and said I would do three months. I'd give
27:01
Speaker 2: you a report back. I go around and talk to
27:03
Speaker 2: people and I'll tell you how many want to reorganize
27:05
Speaker 2: these things in a way that might work more efficiently
27:07
Speaker 2: and effectively and take up less of your time, which
27:09
Speaker 2: I did. And it was interesting because in it it
27:13
Speaker 2: was like, well, you're going to fire some people, you know,
27:15
Speaker 2: he got some people here are either too political or extraneous,
27:18
Speaker 2: and he was really reluctant on that score. And I saw,
27:22
Speaker 2: like the loyalty the man feels, he's a loyal guy.
27:26
Speaker 2: I could see why the band's been together for all
27:28
Speaker 2: these years, something we don't really see in any bands
27:30
Speaker 2: that have been around for that many decades. But you know,
27:33
Speaker 2: finally I had my way and I said I'll see you.
27:36
Speaker 2: And he said, well, why don't you just stay on
27:38
Speaker 2: the board, Why don't you be the board chair. I
27:41
Speaker 2: had had no real experience on being a board chair
27:44
Speaker 2: or anything, but I said, sure, I'll do it. I'm
27:45
Speaker 2: still the board chair. The work has been very gratifying
27:48
Speaker 2: for me. And he's kind of peeled off the bed.
27:51
Speaker 2: He's dropped off the board. He's a founder now he
27:53
Speaker 2: still does stuff. But your question was is he basically
27:59
Speaker 2: is he bullshitter or not. He's a hard working guy.
28:03
Speaker 2: He spent so much of his personal time, Bob, I
28:05
Speaker 2: mean so much on this work. I mean, you know,
28:11
Speaker 2: for no money and doing it sincerely and being brought
28:15
Speaker 2: to tears in places. So I have great respect for that.
28:18
Speaker 2: And he could you know, he stands up a guy,
28:20
Speaker 2: gives a good speech, and he you know, he's got
28:24
Speaker 2: the ability to talk and relate to lots of people,
28:27
Speaker 2: sort of almost a Clinton esque, you know, sincerity. He
28:33
Speaker 2: listens to people. Yes, he talks a lot.
28:37
Speaker 1: Does he have a sense of humor about himself. Is
28:41
Speaker 1: he aware of public perception or is he living in
28:43
Speaker 1: a bubble?
28:45
Speaker 2: Oh no, he knows, you know. I mean I remember
28:47
Speaker 2: one time I was down in as you know, he's
28:49
Speaker 2: got a place down there, and we were driving around
28:52
Speaker 2: in his car. It's got like I'm a modest car.
28:54
Speaker 2: And you know, most artists they don't like to listen
28:57
Speaker 2: to their own music. You know, they go into a
28:59
Speaker 2: club and someone playing their music and it's like, I
29:01
Speaker 2: don't want to hear. He can't get enough of his
29:03
Speaker 2: own music. So I remember he's, Uh, we're in some
29:07
Speaker 2: car and he's got it turned up to like eleven,
29:09
Speaker 2: and there's some Someboddy like in the next car rolling
29:13
Speaker 2: down in the windows, telling them basically to turn it down,
29:15
Speaker 2: even though it's coming kind of coming through windows. He
29:17
Speaker 2: he just thinks, it's how it's fucking bono, man, it's
29:20
Speaker 2: fucking fuck bono. He goes, yeah, fuck bono. He likes,
29:24
Speaker 2: he enjoys the people who take him down. I mean,
29:27
Speaker 2: he's fully aware of it, and it just rolls off
29:30
Speaker 2: him and he finds some humor in it. He knows,
29:33
Speaker 2: he knows what people don't like about him. And you know,
29:37
Speaker 2: he can roll with the punches.
29:40
Speaker 1: So what's the status of the organization today.
29:44
Speaker 2: Well, we have two organizations that basically are sort of
29:48
Speaker 2: like a little conglomerate. There's one the One Campaign, which
29:51
Speaker 2: is the activist organization that you know, it does two
29:54
Speaker 2: things that sort of lobbies governments to line up and
29:57
Speaker 2: do the right things on police and financial commitments they
30:01
Speaker 2: make to the South to Africa and to and help
30:04
Speaker 2: people in the South like be better to stand on
30:08
Speaker 2: their own feet and you know, and help policies be
30:14
Speaker 2: you know, how would I say this? You know, they
30:17
Speaker 2: just be smart. AID if we're going to do aid
30:19
Speaker 2: A doesn't work in a lot of ways, and we
30:21
Speaker 2: recognize that and really the key to development in Africa
30:24
Speaker 2: is going to be from the private sector. But one
30:26
Speaker 2: place it does work is in the health sector. And
30:28
Speaker 2: there's been twenty five million people now walking around in
30:31
Speaker 2: Africa who would have been dead because they're on any
30:34
Speaker 2: retroviral drugs which are financed thirty percent by the United States.
30:38
Speaker 2: But and we were the leaders and the rest by
30:41
Speaker 2: you know, other countries, and it's made a huge difference.
30:44
Speaker 2: You know, towns where coffin making was the chief business
30:47
Speaker 2: and the whole city was falling under and a state
30:50
Speaker 2: was on its way to becoming a failed state. Kind
30:52
Speaker 2: of revived and it's been great what we do now.
30:55
Speaker 2: And now we're trying to switch to making it a
30:57
Speaker 2: real African based organization helping African leaders, you know, kind
31:01
Speaker 2: of finance their you know, end ofate, finance their own
31:04
Speaker 2: health systems and so forth. That's a challenge for us.
31:06
Speaker 2: The biggest challenge now, for one, is that Trump blew
31:10
Speaker 2: a hole. You know, he closed down USAID and a
31:14
Speaker 2: lot of foreign aids. So it's just crippling, and it's
31:19
Speaker 2: such a hole it's impossible to fill with Bill Gates
31:22
Speaker 2: or any of these foundations. It's and and it means
31:25
Speaker 2: that you know, tens of millions of people aren't going
31:28
Speaker 2: to get the drugs they need. We actually had stores
31:31
Speaker 2: of these drugs for you know, stocked up in the UAE,
31:35
Speaker 2: and rather than give them out, the Trump administration had
31:38
Speaker 2: them burned. We had stores of these high protein bars
31:42
Speaker 2: for children in Sudan. Rather than give them out or
31:45
Speaker 2: give them to save the children or some other NGO,
31:48
Speaker 2: we had them burned and destroyed. It's like cruelty is
31:51
Speaker 2: sort of in the DNA of the administration and the
31:54
Speaker 2: richest man in the world would would would say that
31:59
Speaker 2: us AID, which spends one third of one percent of
32:04
Speaker 2: the national budget, say twenty million dollars, is a criminal
32:09
Speaker 2: organization that does that. He put in the wood chipper,
32:12
Speaker 2: and it's and people who work there at criminals. I know,
32:14
Speaker 2: these people they're like do gooders. I mean, they could
32:17
Speaker 2: have made a lot of money and done things, you know,
32:21
Speaker 2: made a lot more money. And if they were in
32:23
Speaker 2: the private sector, and I'm sure there was a lot
32:25
Speaker 2: of things going on there that could have been done
32:27
Speaker 2: better or maybe you shouldn't have been done at all. But
32:29
Speaker 2: that's like a footnote in the sense of the good
32:32
Speaker 2: things that they did in the lives that they saved.
32:35
Speaker 2: I mean, we give twenty forty billion dollars to Argentina.
32:39
Speaker 2: You know. Meanwhile, the twenty billion that we were spending,
32:43
Speaker 2: the part of what we spent in Africa was keeping
32:45
Speaker 2: people alive, and it was burnishing America's image in a
32:48
Speaker 2: good way, which we certainly need. And secondly, it was
32:51
Speaker 2: good for American security because you don't want migration to
32:54
Speaker 2: be you know, increased in flooding. And you know, it
32:57
Speaker 2: was a small when the richest country in the histy
33:00
Speaker 2: the world can't do that, and yet we have twice
33:04
Speaker 2: that amount of money to the government of Argentina for
33:06
Speaker 2: no apparent good reason. And you make people in the
33:09
Speaker 2: civil service feel so diminished and disregarded. And these are
33:15
Speaker 2: one these are these are people who are some of
33:17
Speaker 2: our best citizens. It's just just sad. So we're dealing
33:20
Speaker 2: with that. How do we plug the hole here? How
33:22
Speaker 2: do we help get Africa on the road to being
33:24
Speaker 2: self sufficient more quickly? Uh So we're doing that and Read,
33:29
Speaker 2: which is sort of the sister organization, you know, they
33:32
Speaker 2: do these phones and the you know, we've raised about
33:35
Speaker 2: eight hundred million dollars and all the money goes to
33:38
Speaker 2: the Global Fund, which is for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
33:43
Speaker 2: We want it. We want to get that to a
33:45
Speaker 2: billion dollars. There's now, believe it or not, an AIDS
33:50
Speaker 2: vaccine finally available, going to be available in the near term,
33:54
Speaker 2: which is this huge thing with people have been talking
33:56
Speaker 2: about for years. Uh So we're trying to figure out
34:00
Speaker 2: how we couple that and the getting the distribution of
34:04
Speaker 2: that done and paid for in a way that could
34:07
Speaker 2: be efficient. So we've got a handful of challenges. We've
34:10
Speaker 2: got an African CEO now, which is part of the
34:12
Speaker 2: move to kind of I want to really move this
34:15
Speaker 2: into being an African led organization, not Southern with a
34:18
Speaker 2: bunch of white Northerners and eventually just have it sort
34:22
Speaker 2: of sit there. So we're in transition trying to deal
34:27
Speaker 2: with the discombobulation of this whole ecosystem that has been
34:34
Speaker 2: created by the Trump administration and Doze and Musk and
34:38
Speaker 2: all of that frustrating.
34:40
Speaker 1: So what is the overall budget of these organizations and
34:43
Speaker 1: how many people are on the payroll?
34:47
Speaker 2: Well, if I look at Red and One together, it's
34:49
Speaker 2: probably twenty five to thirty million a year. That includes
34:53
Speaker 2: mostly employees, do gooders, activists. It's funded entirely from private
35:02
Speaker 2: sector funds. You know, we have money, you know, John Dorr,
35:07
Speaker 2: George Sorows, Mike Bloomberg, Build Gates Foundation, other people, And
35:19
Speaker 2: that's what we do. And it's less money than we
35:22
Speaker 2: used to spend. We've been hit like a lot of
35:24
Speaker 2: organizations have with these cutbacks in general. So what we
35:28
Speaker 2: can do a lot of good work with that amount
35:31
Speaker 2: of funding. It's not all the money in the world,
35:34
Speaker 2: and I would say, none of it's really wasted. It
35:36
Speaker 2: goes to good effort. It goes for good But in
35:38
Speaker 2: the case of Red, every cent that read raises, one
35:43
Speaker 2: percent of it goes to buying largely these antiretroviral drugs.
35:49
Speaker 2: So it's not like one of these things where people
35:51
Speaker 2: give money and it's always going to some bloated overhead.
35:54
Speaker 2: The overhead itself is covered by a couple of donors
35:57
Speaker 2: and it's really small.
36:06
Speaker 1: In the book, you talk about as part of this effort,
36:10
Speaker 1: you deal with politicos and you say they don't always
36:13
Speaker 1: these elected officials don't always square with your perception, and
36:17
Speaker 1: you can have a meeting of the minds. Can you
36:19
Speaker 1: tell me more about that.
36:21
Speaker 2: Well, all my life I had avoided politic politicians. It's
36:25
Speaker 2: one of the reasons I never met a lot of them.
36:26
Speaker 2: When I was in working at MTV Networks, at Viacom,
36:31
Speaker 2: I had avoided a lot of them. One they tried
36:34
Speaker 2: to draft me and send me to Vietnam when I
36:36
Speaker 2: was younger, just like they did to you two. Jimmy
36:42
Speaker 2: Carter kind of ended my business like on the drop
36:45
Speaker 2: of a nickel in the late seventies. The business I
36:48
Speaker 2: worked so hard for for eight years. I announced one day,
36:50
Speaker 2: we're going to do an embargo on clothes from India.
36:54
Speaker 2: You know, there was no warning. It's just the same
36:56
Speaker 2: thing that's happened now with Trump and his tariffs. I mean,
36:59
Speaker 2: you're a small businessman and you just can't afford to
37:02
Speaker 2: pay this kind of money. There's so many companies now,
37:06
Speaker 2: like small companies that are going through exactly this. You're
37:08
Speaker 2: a furniture importer from China or Indonesia. You've got to
37:11
Speaker 2: pay fifty percent more for this stuff, and you know,
37:14
Speaker 2: you don't your employees or you know, the parts that
37:17
Speaker 2: you need that you're bringing in from out of the
37:19
Speaker 2: country or heavily tarraft and you just can't handle it.
37:21
Speaker 2: You're going to go under. So we're going to see
37:23
Speaker 2: a wave and we're seeing it already of bankruptcies in
37:26
Speaker 2: that small business sector. So I was, you know, and
37:29
Speaker 2: you know, it always offended me that there was never
37:31
Speaker 2: a warning, like, don't these politicians know that these businesses
37:35
Speaker 2: could like give them a little time to adjust, don't
37:37
Speaker 2: just kill everything day one. I mean, give them some warning.
37:41
Speaker 2: There's like it's like they never had the stand put there,
37:46
Speaker 2: you know, standing the feet stand in the shoes of
37:48
Speaker 2: a small businessman. They don't know what it's like to
37:51
Speaker 2: be living from nickel to dive and have a cash
37:53
Speaker 2: flow crunch. I mean, they just decrease something and assume
37:56
Speaker 2: everything's going to fall into place, but the pain is extensive.
37:58
Speaker 2: So I was never a f of politicians. When I
38:02
Speaker 2: started working with Red and One, I began to meet
38:04
Speaker 2: a lot of them, and I was impressed by their sincerity.
38:07
Speaker 2: I mean, these weren't the guys who were enforcing the
38:10
Speaker 2: things that had pained me. But you know, even somebody
38:13
Speaker 2: like Mike Huckabee, who I know now is sort of
38:15
Speaker 2: the ambassador to Israel at all. I spent a lot
38:17
Speaker 2: of time with him. We'd drive around. I was John Kasik,
38:20
Speaker 2: John Podesta. We used to take these bipartisan groups on
38:23
Speaker 2: these tours to see things. I found that the best
38:26
Speaker 2: way to get someone as a being advocate about Africa
38:29
Speaker 2: and extreme poverty was to take them there, because once
38:31
Speaker 2: they got there, their hearts would open and they could
38:33
Speaker 2: see that good things were being done, particularly in the
38:36
Speaker 2: health area. And these were nice people. I remember a
38:39
Speaker 2: time once we were in Liberia, which was really a
38:42
Speaker 2: war torn country, and you know, had had this really
38:45
Speaker 2: ugly civil war, and we were going to meet the president.
38:49
Speaker 2: It was Bono myself. There was a group of us,
38:52
Speaker 2: and then into town pulls up Lindsey Graham, John Thune,
38:55
Speaker 2: and John the senator from Arizona who passed McKenney McCain
39:05
Speaker 2: Sidney McCain. So all these people had spent ten days
39:08
Speaker 2: of what was basically their recess ended the summer recess,
39:14
Speaker 2: going around from Sudan to Rwanda, to Congo to Liberia,
39:20
Speaker 2: going around on this congressional delegation when they you know,
39:23
Speaker 2: they could have been home doing barbecues or listening to
39:25
Speaker 2: their constituents. And I was so impressed. These were Republicans,
39:29
Speaker 2: they cared about this issue. I mean, it's funny to
39:31
Speaker 2: see where they are now, but I mean I would say, well,
39:33
Speaker 2: they really in their heart, their hearts are okay. This
39:36
Speaker 2: is an issue that you know, left and right could
39:38
Speaker 2: agree on, and they have for a long time. So
39:43
Speaker 2: I would as I spend time with these people, as
39:45
Speaker 2: often happens, when you meet people with whom you might
39:48
Speaker 2: have some prejudice against, they turn out to be human
39:51
Speaker 2: and you have some common ground and you end up
39:54
Speaker 2: having a good feeling about them.
39:56
Speaker 1: So talking about Africa, when I was growing up, there
39:59
Speaker 1: was the Congo. Then I was in college at a
40:02
Speaker 1: friend of mine set his brother had hitchhiked through Africa. Certainly,
40:07
Speaker 1: in the seventies, a lot of young Americans went to Europe.
40:11
Speaker 1: Now they go to Asia. On some level, Africa's still
40:16
Speaker 1: a black hole. People are afraid to go there. What
40:19
Speaker 1: is really going on in Africa now.
40:24
Speaker 2: Well, it's hard to speak of it as a single
40:26
Speaker 2: continent because it's fifty four countries and some of them
40:30
Speaker 2: are really conflict zones, like the dr he liked, the Congo,
40:33
Speaker 2: like the Sudan. I mean, you know, you look at
40:35
Speaker 2: the eastern Congo. The six million people have been killed
40:38
Speaker 2: there in the last ten twenty years in the wake
40:40
Speaker 2: of the Rwandan comeback from their genocide, or the Sudan.
40:44
Speaker 2: It's just, you know, we've seen this stuff on the
40:46
Speaker 2: news recently, and now you've got al Qaeda about to
40:50
Speaker 2: take over Congo and Urkina Faso, and South Africa, which
40:57
Speaker 2: had been Africa's economy, has you know, has sort of
41:02
Speaker 2: plagued with all kinds of political issues and shortages of
41:06
Speaker 2: this and that. So but there are places that are
41:08
Speaker 2: doing well you can Rwanda, Ghana, the hand Senegal, Kenya.
41:17
Speaker 2: These are countries that are kind of emerging to be
41:19
Speaker 2: middle class countries. So it's a mix. Some are war zones,
41:24
Speaker 2: some are about to become true middle class countries. Others
41:27
Speaker 2: are sort of on the middle. They're trying to fight off,
41:29
Speaker 2: you know, to hottest organizations across the Sahel. You know,
41:34
Speaker 2: look at Somalia. They've been lingering on the edge for
41:38
Speaker 2: a long time, but there is a population explosion going
41:44
Speaker 2: on there. There is, on average, an increase in disposable income.
41:49
Speaker 2: A middle class is emerging in a lot of these countries.
41:52
Speaker 2: Their primary problem is governance. You know, there's there's still corruption,
41:58
Speaker 2: which is you know, the level of corruption is almost
42:01
Speaker 2: equal to the amount of is greater than the amount
42:05
Speaker 2: of foreign aid that pours in there in various places.
42:08
Speaker 2: Some people think it's an unstoppable whole. I don't believe that.
42:11
Speaker 2: I mean, I've seen progress in places when they get
42:13
Speaker 2: governance in shape. Look at Rwanda, it's like you've never
42:18
Speaker 2: been to a cleaner country, Bob. The whole population has
42:21
Speaker 2: to go out on one Saturday a month and pick
42:23
Speaker 2: up garbage and do things. I mean, the place and
42:25
Speaker 2: you consider they had this awful eight hundred thousand people
42:29
Speaker 2: killed in a genocide in nineteen ninety four. Now it's like, man,
42:33
Speaker 2: it's like a paradise there, really clean and clear. I mean,
42:36
Speaker 2: an exception to the rule, I'll say. But you know,
42:40
Speaker 2: the problems are endemic in some of these other ones,
42:43
Speaker 2: and they appear to be unsolvable. But I have a
42:48
Speaker 2: connection when I go there, I feel somehow, I feel
42:51
Speaker 2: this wonderful sense of purpose, I guess, and when you
42:57
Speaker 2: see that, things can improve. I also love the arts.
43:00
Speaker 2: The arts are booming and quite often as the arts
43:03
Speaker 2: that can help bring up a country. You look at
43:04
Speaker 2: a country like Nigeria Afro Beat, the music, the music
43:08
Speaker 2: everywhere in Africa is sensational. I've been able to travel
43:11
Speaker 2: independently to like so many of these musical meccas in
43:13
Speaker 2: Africa and really dig down to the history there and
43:16
Speaker 2: where there's me all our music kind of came from there.
43:19
Speaker 2: So as a music fan first, I find traveling in
43:23
Speaker 2: Africa fascinating. I made a lot of separate trips on
43:25
Speaker 2: my own just sort of, you know, to take in
43:28
Speaker 2: as much African music as I can.
43:31
Speaker 1: So to what degree on your travels have you been
43:33
Speaker 1: afraid or unafraid for your personal safety?
43:41
Speaker 2: Oh, you know, I've been afraid in places when I traveled.
43:48
Speaker 2: When I lived in Asia in the eighties or the seventies,
43:52
Speaker 2: I should say, in Afghanistan, which people now say, you know,
43:55
Speaker 2: the tourists, there was hardly any tourists. It was an
43:59
Speaker 2: exotic play. It was open that people really friendly and hospitable.
44:03
Speaker 2: People think of it as a place of continuous war.
44:06
Speaker 2: They had had fifty years of peace. It was the
44:09
Speaker 2: tourist posters. Weren't many tourists who said, visit Afghanistan and
44:12
Speaker 2: see the world's friendliest people. That's not the last thing
44:15
Speaker 2: most people would think these days. But if you were there,
44:18
Speaker 2: it was like that all kinds of young Westerners would
44:21
Speaker 2: pass through there. In those days. That was who the
44:23
Speaker 2: primary tourists were, and it was everyone whoever went through there,
44:27
Speaker 2: you know, basically had a good experience. When I went back.
44:30
Speaker 2: I went back for twelve years in and out to
44:32
Speaker 2: work for this TV station there, which I really did enjoy. Yeah,
44:35
Speaker 2: it was dangerous because there would be the Taliban. There
44:38
Speaker 2: was an insurgency fighting, so you would feel, you know,
44:41
Speaker 2: you would have to drive fast at nights, so you
44:43
Speaker 2: wouldn't get stopped by some kidnapping group, or there would
44:46
Speaker 2: be a bomb suicide bombers here or there, and you know,
44:52
Speaker 2: you're always sort of filled with adrenaline. But I didn't
44:56
Speaker 2: really feel for my personal safety much in the seventies,
45:01
Speaker 2: more later on in Africa, not really. You know, things
45:05
Speaker 2: are a lot safer than people think. They may look
45:08
Speaker 2: dangerous if you drop somebody into a place and it
45:11
Speaker 2: looks like a little shady and dangerous, but you know,
45:13
Speaker 2: and in the seventies, the most dangerous place in the
45:15
Speaker 2: world's New York City. I mean my friends in Afghanistan.
45:20
Speaker 2: I say, well, come on, New York, it's great, and
45:21
Speaker 2: you go, no, that's crazy. I've seen what's going on
45:24
Speaker 2: over there. I'm you're not going to get me near
45:26
Speaker 2: New York. Too dangerous for me. The tables have turned now,
45:31
Speaker 2: but I haven't been plagued with fears for my own
45:36
Speaker 2: safety too much.
45:38
Speaker 1: Where have you not been that you would like to go?
45:42
Speaker 2: I was talking about that last I'd like to go
45:43
Speaker 2: to Tasmania. Have you ever been there? You've been to Australia, right.
45:47
Speaker 1: I've been in Australia a couple of times, have not
45:48
Speaker 1: been to Tasmania.
45:50
Speaker 2: I'd like to go there. I've only been in Australia once.
45:52
Speaker 2: I'd like to go to New Zealand. I've never been there.
45:56
Speaker 2: I'd like to go. I haven't really dug a deep pole,
45:58
Speaker 2: and I'd like to really slower Argentina. Now that they
46:01
Speaker 2: got all this American money, you must have been out
46:03
Speaker 2: and bathe and some of that. I've never been really
46:05
Speaker 2: down to Patagonia. I've never been to southern Chile. You know,
46:10
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of spots, haven't There's a plus spots
46:12
Speaker 2: I want to kind of feel. And I just went
46:14
Speaker 2: to Taiwan with some I have this group of people
46:16
Speaker 2: I kind of travel with, you know, we kind of
46:18
Speaker 2: took go to places. We went to Taiwan in the fall,
46:21
Speaker 2: I mean in the spring, and it was fantastic. I
46:23
Speaker 2: had no idea it was such a beautiful island. We
46:25
Speaker 2: wanted to get over there before the Chinese took it over.
46:28
Speaker 2: And you go there and you come back with a
46:30
Speaker 2: whole different impression. Number One, the natural beauty is just
46:34
Speaker 2: you know, on the in the eastern part of Taiwan,
46:36
Speaker 2: it's like it's like you can drive four or five
46:38
Speaker 2: hours and almost not see another house. It's kind of
46:40
Speaker 2: subtropical jungle, just fantastic. And the food's really good because
46:45
Speaker 2: when Shanghai Check came over at the end of the
46:47
Speaker 2: Chinese Civil War, all the rich people came to Taiwan
46:52
Speaker 2: and they brought all their chefs with them. So the
46:55
Speaker 2: level of food excellence in Taiwan is not to be
46:58
Speaker 2: surpassed mainland. Maybe these days, I don't know, but that
47:04
Speaker 2: was an interesting tripper. We go to Georgia, you know,
47:06
Speaker 2: down there, not the one in America, but the one
47:09
Speaker 2: down there on the southern belt of Russia where Stalin
47:12
Speaker 2: was from. And so I try and keep an arm
47:14
Speaker 2: in the fire and that keeps me excited. And every
47:18
Speaker 2: time I go to Africa, I try to go to
47:19
Speaker 2: a couple of new places.
47:21
Speaker 1: So when you have this group, how many people go.
47:25
Speaker 2: There's like four or five of us. There's this guy,
47:27
Speaker 2: Sad Mussin, who's an incredible guy. You would love him.
47:30
Speaker 2: He's the guy who convinced me to come back to Afghanistan.
47:33
Speaker 2: He's the most optimistic man I ever met. He's probably
47:36
Speaker 2: in his mid fifties now. He's the guy who started
47:39
Speaker 2: the first private TV and radio stations in Afghanistan after
47:42
Speaker 2: the fall of the Taliban, and he's living in London
47:47
Speaker 2: now London in Dubai, and we'd like to go. We
47:50
Speaker 2: went to Yemen, we traveled so much. So he's a
47:53
Speaker 2: great travel partner, as is this guy Jonathan Branstein, who
47:57
Speaker 2: turned out the guy who got me into Qbe but
47:58
Speaker 2: had also been to Malley Molly got me into the
48:01
Speaker 2: festival in the desert. You know, he's an eccentric traveler.
48:05
Speaker 2: And then I have this friend from Yemen whose father
48:07
Speaker 2: used to be president of Yemen. He now lives in
48:09
Speaker 2: the UAE. He's in the group. And then there's these
48:12
Speaker 2: two American guys who have a company called Zeba who
48:15
Speaker 2: who that make really good fruits and nuts from Afghanistan.
48:19
Speaker 2: They're still doing business there and they live in Lake Como,
48:22
Speaker 2: which is always nice to visit, and they have this
48:24
Speaker 2: kind of thriving business even now. In the age of
48:27
Speaker 2: the Taliban, Afghanistan was famous for nuts and pomegranates and grapes,
48:32
Speaker 2: so they put them in really kind of sexy looking,
48:35
Speaker 2: great packaging sell them. It's a whole soul in the
48:38
Speaker 2: Arawan and whole foods and those kind of grocers. But
48:40
Speaker 2: these guys like to travel and they're really good at it.
48:43
Speaker 2: So these are and we like to hike. So hiking
48:45
Speaker 2: becomes like, you know, we go to a place where
48:47
Speaker 2: you can, you know, hike up in the mountains and
48:51
Speaker 2: have some nice, nice traveling around, seeing the nightclubs.
48:55
Speaker 1: Everybody's got a different traveling style. Some people their ideas
48:59
Speaker 1: get a great hotel room, have service. Other people want
49:03
Speaker 1: to go see the historical sites, the museums. You mentioned
49:07
Speaker 1: the nightclubs. What kind of traveler are you?
49:12
Speaker 2: Well, I don't mind a good hotel, you know, if
49:14
Speaker 2: I was, it depends if I'm taking a trip somewhere.
49:17
Speaker 2: I mean, it's nothing like a nice hotel. I don't
49:19
Speaker 2: want to stay. I mean I've stayed believe me, Bob,
49:22
Speaker 2: I have stayed in my share fleabag hotels. I mean,
49:24
Speaker 2: you know, I don't. I don't even go into it.
49:28
Speaker 2: But you know, we go out now. I mean, we're
49:31
Speaker 2: all kind of grown up, so we can afford a
49:34
Speaker 2: decent hotel. And if there's a great hotel nearby and
49:36
Speaker 2: it's not an armen leg, I would like to stay
49:38
Speaker 2: there too. But a lot of it isn't you know,
49:40
Speaker 2: if there's a national museum that sounds really cool, unique,
49:43
Speaker 2: like there wasn't Taiwan, you'd go there. But I much
49:46
Speaker 2: prefer being outside looking at scene, re hiking and trying
49:49
Speaker 2: to get a sense of the vibe at the place.
49:51
Speaker 2: And you know, I'd like to always investigate them. Whatever
49:54
Speaker 2: the music scene is. That for me is a thrill.
49:59
Speaker 2: But it isn't like I mean, I'm fully capable of
50:03
Speaker 2: packing up and trying to someone says, come to the
50:05
Speaker 2: Caribbean for a week, I have a house stay with us.
50:08
Speaker 2: I say, that sounds good. I can do that.
50:10
Speaker 1: You know.
50:11
Speaker 2: I like going to California in the winter. You know,
50:14
Speaker 2: to me, that's traveling. I love. I love the Santa
50:17
Speaker 2: Barbara area. I just I've had a home up there
50:19
Speaker 2: for twenty years, and you know it's beautiful. Of course,
50:24
Speaker 2: now i just got eight or nine inches of rain,
50:26
Speaker 2: so I'm just wondering if my house has kind of
50:28
Speaker 2: washed away again. It's I don't know what happened to California, Bob.
50:32
Speaker 2: It used to be beautiful every day, and now if
50:35
Speaker 2: it isn't a wildfire, it's a flood, it's a debris flow,
50:39
Speaker 2: it's a mud slide, it's like you're on the edge
50:42
Speaker 2: of your seat. It's like it cats your adjuta.
50:45
Speaker 1: You know, you know it's harder when you're not here.
50:49
Speaker 1: It's certainly rained these past few days in terms of
50:53
Speaker 1: deleterious effects, fewer than I've ever seen. In terms of
50:57
Speaker 1: major rain. I didn't go to visit your house. I
51:00
Speaker 1: don't know what it's like there.
51:01
Speaker 2: Mine. Mine's turned out okay, and I couldn't believe it. Again,
51:04
Speaker 2: over two inches of rain a day, and I thought
51:06
Speaker 2: it'd be and I had this guy go check it out.
51:08
Speaker 2: He says, you know, everything's okay, no leaks and no mudslives,
51:11
Speaker 2: and I almost couldn't believe it. So I'm yeah, you're right.
51:14
Speaker 2: I'm back here thinking the worst. And I don't know why.
51:17
Speaker 2: It seems like there was good every No one really
51:19
Speaker 2: had any major damage.
51:21
Speaker 1: No, we traditionally have this mud problem from the hill
51:24
Speaker 1: behind our house. We put up, you know, a very
51:27
Speaker 1: small fence, but nothing came through. I mean this, this
51:31
Speaker 1: speaks to a completely different issue, which is perception. I mean,
51:36
Speaker 1: when you ran MTV, it was a monoculture. If you
51:40
Speaker 1: put an act on, they were known all over the world.
51:44
Speaker 1: Now you know California's pejorative. You know, I saw this
51:49
Speaker 1: great video where someone went to a business conference in
51:51
Speaker 1: you know, North Carolina, and the legitimate people they are saying,
51:55
Speaker 1: what about the twenty five dollars Hamburgers? You know, what
51:58
Speaker 1: about everybody? Can your kid go to school without a gun?
52:01
Speaker 1: You know, everybody thinks it's a hell hole, where as
52:04
Speaker 1: we're living here. It's kind of a joke. Listen. It's
52:08
Speaker 1: just like you're saying, there were all these places that
52:11
Speaker 1: were off the grid. Is there any place that's off
52:13
Speaker 1: the grid anymore?
52:16
Speaker 2: No? I mean, yeah, if there is one, someone's gonna
52:20
Speaker 2: go there and put on Instagram and it'll be on
52:21
Speaker 2: the grid in a bad way before you know it.
52:23
Speaker 2: You know, but what you're saying is right. Like when
52:25
Speaker 2: I lived in Afghanistan, people say, oh man, you must
52:27
Speaker 2: be on the edge of your seat all the time.
52:29
Speaker 2: Like people are living like normal lives pretty most of
52:31
Speaker 2: the time. You know, it's not like that. I mean,
52:34
Speaker 2: there may be a bomb on the other side of
52:35
Speaker 2: the toath I can bear route, but you know, two
52:37
Speaker 2: blocks away, everything's kind of normal. It's really kind of bizarre.
52:40
Speaker 2: And California is that way everybody think is gonna be
52:43
Speaker 2: just filled with homeless people. And but when you're even me,
52:46
Speaker 2: who's experienced and spent a lot of time in California,
52:48
Speaker 2: now I'm thinking, oh man, it's like I'm going to
52:50
Speaker 2: wash into the sea, because you know, the media blows
52:54
Speaker 2: it up and I have all these websites. I go
52:56
Speaker 2: to the show rain gages and so forth.
52:58
Speaker 1: But yeah, well I remember in the nineties, couple times
53:05
Speaker 1: we're rain this hard for a week straight. You could bear,
53:08
Speaker 1: you know, you left your house, you would drive through
53:10
Speaker 1: big puddles. You worry about your engine getting wet. I'm
53:14
Speaker 1: not saying that there's not global warming. That there is,
53:17
Speaker 1: but I mean it's kind of funny again, way a
53:19
Speaker 1: point here, but I had to go out a number
53:22
Speaker 1: of times during the rain. Nobody's out. It's like on
53:25
Speaker 1: the East Coast, you tell people I didn't leave the
53:28
Speaker 1: house because it was raining. They would have no idea
53:31
Speaker 1: if it was snowing maybe, but here it's raining. People
53:34
Speaker 1: are staying home.
53:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, and fantasy they don't know how to drive in
53:38
Speaker 2: the rain. Yeah, lots as durable as the East Coast
53:41
Speaker 2: people with this stuff.
53:50
Speaker 1: So you were in business school, you get a gig
53:54
Speaker 1: at an advertising agency, you speak with this woman you
53:58
Speaker 1: know who's in Europe and you drop out? How hard?
54:03
Speaker 1: You know, Listen, the nature of being good in school
54:05
Speaker 1: is perseverance, staying the course. You go to college, you
54:09
Speaker 1: go to graduate school, and all of a sudden you
54:11
Speaker 1: jump the track. I mean, how hard a decision was that?
54:14
Speaker 1: What'd your parents say?
54:16
Speaker 2: It was so easy? You know, you got to remember,
54:18
Speaker 2: you may remember of the era was like this is
54:20
Speaker 2: now nineteen seventy one, seventy two. Freedom was in the air.
54:27
Speaker 2: Every time you listen to a song is about going
54:29
Speaker 2: down a highway or hitting the road. I remember always
54:32
Speaker 2: just listening all that time to Joni Mitchell's International Adventures
54:35
Speaker 2: in Blue, and I'm thinking I get part of that.
54:37
Speaker 2: I mean, every time I go to the movies, it's
54:38
Speaker 2: like I'm seeing walk about or and I'm alienated in
54:42
Speaker 2: my work. And the idea that I'm going to spend
54:46
Speaker 2: my precious time selling fucking toilet paper. That was like
54:50
Speaker 2: a line too far. You know, I was already annoyed
54:53
Speaker 2: when they had me on Gi Joe, But now toilet paper.
54:57
Speaker 2: I just and then this woman made me this ears proposition.
55:01
Speaker 2: Quit your job, fuck it, you know you'll do something.
55:05
Speaker 2: Come with me, Let's go on an adventure. Let's go
55:08
Speaker 2: on an adventure. Let's hitchhike down to all the way
55:11
Speaker 2: down to Morocco across the Sahara Desert. And I said, oh, yeah,
55:15
Speaker 2: that sounds fantastic. I was on a plane like a
55:18
Speaker 2: week later, and I was gone for a year, and
55:22
Speaker 2: it was like the defining year of my life, essentially,
55:25
Speaker 2: and I really wasn't worried like you would be today.
55:29
Speaker 2: Like someone was asking me that I got to go
55:30
Speaker 2: to the book party tomorrow night and it's going to
55:33
Speaker 2: be a lot of young people, and said, you know,
55:34
Speaker 2: your book could be inspiring to young people, because today
55:37
Speaker 2: young people they all have these panic attacks and they
55:40
Speaker 2: have depression, and they're afraid to take moves, and they're
55:42
Speaker 2: stuck in their ways and they think if they do
55:44
Speaker 2: this or do that, they're never going to get hired again.
55:47
Speaker 2: And tell them it ain't true. And it's hard to
55:49
Speaker 2: tell them because the situations are different and everyone's different.
55:52
Speaker 2: But for me, I never I mean I was never
55:56
Speaker 2: chasing Big Bucks and I wanted to. I was very
55:59
Speaker 2: much under the influence of the beats. I was in
56:02
Speaker 2: the countercultural flow. The idea that I was even in
56:05
Speaker 2: an ad agency. Kind of irritated me a bit, but
56:10
Speaker 2: I had saved some money. I figured I'd do it
56:12
Speaker 2: for a year. I had a plane ticket that was
56:15
Speaker 2: good for exactly a year. I came back in exactly
56:17
Speaker 2: the last day, and I would see what I found
56:20
Speaker 2: and maybe, oh, new doors would open. And it was
56:23
Speaker 2: the most valuable year to do it. And admittedly it
56:26
Speaker 2: was a good time to do it. In that time.
56:29
Speaker 2: You know, you can go anywhere. Iran and Lebanon, those
56:34
Speaker 2: were like party places. I mean, the world is a lot,
56:38
Speaker 2: you know, more fucked up now. So I never didn't
56:41
Speaker 2: cross my mind not to do it. It did I
56:43
Speaker 2: told my parents because they I had already spent a
56:45
Speaker 2: year off before I took this job. I got out
56:47
Speaker 2: of graduate school and I was a bartender or everywhere,
56:51
Speaker 2: and I learned that trade and moving around. I had.
56:54
Speaker 2: I had it in my bone somehow, and it was
56:57
Speaker 2: about I'd rather trade experience for money, and I figured
57:03
Speaker 2: I could always come back. I'm like, I'm thinking myself
57:05
Speaker 2: as like a jazz sportet. I could improvise my way
57:08
Speaker 2: into something or other. I'm not going to starve to death,
57:11
Speaker 2: and I'm not going to think I'm like in a
57:13
Speaker 2: formal orchestra and I have to go on some straight
57:18
Speaker 2: line that some conveyor belt that other people were doing.
57:22
Speaker 2: And it was in the air. I mean, I wasn't
57:24
Speaker 2: the only guy. I mean America, people would quit and
57:27
Speaker 2: go to somewhere in Vermont and northern California to communes
57:32
Speaker 2: and like make furniture whatever they're doing. But in Europe
57:36
Speaker 2: people would like to hit the road, like they had
57:38
Speaker 2: this thing, the hippie trail, you know, all through all
57:40
Speaker 2: these lower cost countries in Africa and in Asia. It
57:45
Speaker 2: was exhilarating. That was fantastic, you know, And I wanted
57:50
Speaker 2: to stay. That's why I started this business. I wanted
57:52
Speaker 2: to stay and live out there. I'd stay there for
57:54
Speaker 2: eight years. I said, this is like I lived so
57:57
Speaker 2: vividly and I feel so alive here. Why would I
58:01
Speaker 2: want to, you know, go back. I almost love being
58:04
Speaker 2: in a place where I felt no one would ever
58:05
Speaker 2: find me. Here. I'm going to, like, you know, kind
58:08
Speaker 2: of figure my way out. I'm learning a little language,
58:11
Speaker 2: make some friends, and it's a good challenge. I don't know,
58:16
Speaker 2: Wanderluss whatever it is it was, but it was exhilarating.
58:20
Speaker 1: This clothing company. Was it a light bulb that went
58:24
Speaker 1: off in your head when you were there seeing things
58:26
Speaker 1: or was it more of the reverse. This is the
58:29
Speaker 1: lifestyle I want. How can I support it?
58:32
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you. I am. After I was traveling
58:35
Speaker 2: with this woman for a couple months, she had to
58:37
Speaker 2: go back for a job, so I kept going. I
58:39
Speaker 2: hitchhiked all over Africa and I at one point I
58:42
Speaker 2: landed in Greece and I go to This is like
58:44
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two. So the night they broke into the watergate,
58:48
Speaker 2: I landed in Michinos. And then it wasn't like some
58:51
Speaker 2: you know, overly tourists at Greek Island. I was beautiful.
58:55
Speaker 2: I thought I was stepping into a postcard. And they
58:57
Speaker 2: had this beach there, this naked beach called Paradise Beach,
59:02
Speaker 2: which now is a big nightclub. But then it was
59:05
Speaker 2: like these two guys had at taverna and I was
59:07
Speaker 2: in there one day and I see this little girl,
59:11
Speaker 2: not a little girl, she's a woman, young woman, and
59:13
Speaker 2: she was selling all these kind of beachy clothes to
59:17
Speaker 2: German and tourists and so forth, and I got to
59:20
Speaker 2: see her. Everone was like a frenzy. She had them
59:23
Speaker 2: in these trunks and I had Indian deities painted on them,
59:26
Speaker 2: and she was making them fortune. And I went up
59:29
Speaker 2: to her afterwards. I said, that was really something. What's
59:32
Speaker 2: the story. Where do you get all this stuff? She say, well,
59:33
Speaker 2: I've been living in Katmandu for four years and I
59:36
Speaker 2: design and make my own clothes. I do all this
59:38
Speaker 2: stuff and then I pack it up in these trunks
59:41
Speaker 2: and I take it overland from the Pole through India, Pakistan,
59:44
Speaker 2: I ran Turkey, and I end up in Italy and
59:47
Speaker 2: Greece and sell it right to the customers, her own
59:50
Speaker 2: little vertical, integrated like enterprise. And I live in katman
59:54
Speaker 2: Do I have a fantastic house. I have servants, I
59:57
Speaker 2: throw parties. I go surfing in Sri Lanka. I ride
1:00:01
Speaker 2: horses in Afghanistan. India is the greatest show on earth, Tom,
1:00:04
Speaker 2: you really should go. So I said, Wow, that's fantastic.
1:00:08
Speaker 2: So that kind of set set me to go to India.
1:00:11
Speaker 2: I wanted. It was a very spiritual center in those days,
1:00:14
Speaker 2: and I started thinking, if she's doing that, and I've
1:00:17
Speaker 2: seen all this crappy clothing that was being made in
1:00:20
Speaker 2: Morocco and cheap stuff from India. What if I toned
1:00:24
Speaker 2: it up a bit. I knew nothing about this business,
1:00:26
Speaker 2: mind you, But if I, let say, I got a
1:00:28
Speaker 2: designer and we could make stuff that was of higher
1:00:30
Speaker 2: quality because the cost differences were great, air freight was
1:00:33
Speaker 2: just beginning. I could sell it to coholesale stores and
1:00:37
Speaker 2: boutiques which were now beginning to be this new thing.
1:00:40
Speaker 2: Everyone's opening these boutiques, and I could give it a shot.
1:00:43
Speaker 2: And you know, and I would always think, well, that
1:00:46
Speaker 2: way I could live in I'll get a house in India.
1:00:48
Speaker 2: I'll live in house in India, and I'll find some
1:00:51
Speaker 2: partners who I could trust and be good, and we
1:00:54
Speaker 2: could make something for five dollars in New Delhi and
1:00:58
Speaker 2: put it on a plane in twenty four hours later,
1:01:00
Speaker 2: I could sell it for twenty five dollars in Manhattan.
1:01:03
Speaker 2: And I basically did that. It ended up being the
1:01:05
Speaker 2: hardest job I ever had in my life, and it
1:01:08
Speaker 2: was very satisfied. I was a millionaire. I mean it is,
1:01:10
Speaker 2: I had a partner, and next thing I know, I'm
1:01:13
Speaker 2: a fucking My parents thought I was crazy, but it was.
1:01:17
Speaker 2: We really did really well. We'd be in vogue in
1:01:19
Speaker 2: women's Wear Daily and Mademoiselle magazine, and it was a
1:01:24
Speaker 2: lot of work. We had cash flow problems. You know,
1:01:28
Speaker 2: it got more difficult, but we grew every year. And
1:01:32
Speaker 2: I imagine, Bob, I imagine this is the life for me.
1:01:35
Speaker 2: I didn't want to be a big garmento, but I
1:01:37
Speaker 2: would always be available to take these side trips, like
1:01:40
Speaker 2: I would round up people in Afghanistan. I'd rent a bus,
1:01:42
Speaker 2: we'd all go on some kind of adventure. I would think,
1:01:45
Speaker 2: this is what I'm going to do. This is so
1:01:48
Speaker 2: it's so exotic and so real, and I'm living a
1:01:51
Speaker 2: life that no one at home could imagine. And then
1:01:54
Speaker 2: it all came crashing down. So I had to reinvent
1:01:57
Speaker 2: myself again, and I ended up like in a really
1:01:59
Speaker 2: safe heart. We're at a lucky time, and you know,
1:02:02
Speaker 2: timing is everything. The job I got at the company
1:02:04
Speaker 2: that would become MTV, if I had been there a
1:02:06
Speaker 2: month later or a month earlier, I wouldn't have gotten it. Now.
1:02:09
Speaker 2: I just happened to show up when they said we
1:02:11
Speaker 2: got to hire a lot of people who don't have
1:02:12
Speaker 2: any experience in television, for which I was a primer,
1:02:16
Speaker 2: a perfect candidate.
1:02:18
Speaker 1: You mentioned this Afghanistan renting a bus And there are
1:02:22
Speaker 1: a couple of other times with the same behavior in
1:02:26
Speaker 1: the book. Are you like the ring leader type? Are
1:02:30
Speaker 1: you say, Okay, this is what we're doing. We're getting
1:02:33
Speaker 1: everybody together and you're the cheerleader and you take them.
1:02:35
Speaker 1: Were those anomalous?
1:02:38
Speaker 2: I wouldn't do that a few times? You know? I
1:02:40
Speaker 2: mean there was a really I had a really great
1:02:42
Speaker 2: group of friends there, and I just thought that it
1:02:45
Speaker 2: was a big thing in the north of the country
1:02:46
Speaker 2: every New Year's which for them is like the Spring
1:02:49
Speaker 2: Equinox March twenty one. So I rented a bus and
1:02:53
Speaker 2: I loaded up with people and you know, we kind
1:02:55
Speaker 2: of split some expenses and I took out, rented this hotel,
1:02:58
Speaker 2: we all pay for our rooms, and we took off
1:03:00
Speaker 2: on this big road trip just like you know, eighteen
1:03:02
Speaker 2: hour journey up through the Hindukush Mountains and back down
1:03:05
Speaker 2: and Steven's Piscashi game. I meet the governor of the
1:03:09
Speaker 2: province and vices to the palace and shows. You know,
1:03:13
Speaker 2: they had a whole thing there for their New year celebration,
1:03:16
Speaker 2: and we looked like we looked like we were off
1:03:18
Speaker 2: of Jimi Hendrix's album cup. You know, everybody is dressed
1:03:21
Speaker 2: up in shawls and all this habitdash Ree and these
1:03:24
Speaker 2: girls who were designers. It was a great gang. And
1:03:29
Speaker 2: people who kind of had been bidden by the same
1:03:32
Speaker 2: bug as myself, who couldn't be They thought living in
1:03:34
Speaker 2: Kabble was like fantastic. It was like this fantasy we
1:03:37
Speaker 2: were living that nobody else knew anything about. It was
1:03:41
Speaker 2: it was a magic time.
1:03:43
Speaker 1: To what degree have you run into those people, the
1:03:46
Speaker 1: pre MTV, the wanderlust people. Have you run into them
1:03:50
Speaker 1: or kept up with them later in life?
1:03:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? My designer Jill Lumpkin, who you wrote about in
1:03:59
Speaker 2: Your Peace, she still lives in Bangalore. It's not called Belarub.
1:04:03
Speaker 2: I mean, they've changed the name, but she's still living
1:04:05
Speaker 2: in India. Fifty years later. The guy who was my
1:04:10
Speaker 2: partner's nephew, We were his mentor. He became a real
1:04:15
Speaker 2: estate maven, building big apartment buildings and hotels at a
1:04:18
Speaker 2: private jet. He was doing better than anybody. He gave
1:04:21
Speaker 2: Jill an apartment in Bangalore, like a three bedroom apartment
1:04:23
Speaker 2: in a modern complex with a pool and a gym.
1:04:26
Speaker 2: It's like living somewhere in you know, somewhere in the States.
1:04:30
Speaker 2: She still lives there, has her social Security check wire
1:04:33
Speaker 2: to India every month, and she couldn't be happier to
1:04:36
Speaker 2: still be there.
1:04:37
Speaker 1: I was.
1:04:37
Speaker 2: I usually worried about it if she would adjust to
1:04:39
Speaker 2: life there, But she's out on me. And there would
1:04:42
Speaker 2: be other people like even now, some of my closest
1:04:46
Speaker 2: friends are from my second round in Afghanistan. These people
1:04:49
Speaker 2: that I would meet, like who were in Cobbled during
1:04:52
Speaker 2: the who were war journalists, you know, Richard Engel or
1:04:58
Speaker 2: Dexter Filkins, these guys who were kind of stars to me.
1:05:01
Speaker 2: They were like the rock stars to me in a way,
1:05:04
Speaker 2: who were out there and I admired what they did.
1:05:07
Speaker 2: We still kind of hang out and we're all still
1:05:09
Speaker 2: in touch, and there's like someone gets married from this
1:05:12
Speaker 2: group and everybody goes, and it's like a reunion. I
1:05:15
Speaker 2: just just this fellow I knew, Oza Mahmed, who was
1:05:18
Speaker 2: this American guy of Pakistani descent. He got a he
1:05:22
Speaker 2: won a Pulitzer Prize New York Time bureau chief in
1:05:26
Speaker 2: Afghanistan and then bureau chief in Mexico City, and he
1:05:30
Speaker 2: got married and Lisbon and everybody went. It was like
1:05:32
Speaker 2: a reunion of the good old the good old days
1:05:34
Speaker 2: in the war zone of you know, twenty ten to fifteen. Yeah,
1:05:39
Speaker 2: those were heady times too.
1:05:41
Speaker 1: Okay. Tom Rush is a friend of mine and he
1:05:44
Speaker 1: mentions this old girlfriend. And the funny thing about it is,
1:05:48
Speaker 1: anybody else would say, oh, I had this old girlfriend whatever.
1:05:52
Speaker 1: Not only is it Jill, It's always Jill Lumpkin of course,
1:05:55
Speaker 1: which is a unique name. And I've heard all the
1:05:59
Speaker 1: stories her flying back to New York and no regrets
1:06:02
Speaker 1: on the album. Well, all of a sudden she shows
1:06:04
Speaker 1: up in your book. What is so special about this woman?
1:06:09
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, you got to realize because I
1:06:11
Speaker 2: was reading, I get online this paper from a Monacito,
1:06:15
Speaker 2: Montecito journal, whatever it is. I see that Tom Rush
1:06:18
Speaker 2: and Judy Collins are playing tonight right at the Libero
1:06:23
Speaker 2: Theater in Santa Barbara. I'm saying, wow. And I've heard
1:06:27
Speaker 2: him on your podcast, and I was always an admirer room.
1:06:30
Speaker 2: He was the first musician I ever really met. When
1:06:32
Speaker 2: I was in college. I did a show and I
1:06:34
Speaker 2: booked him. I was sort of an entrepreneur. And anyway,
1:06:39
Speaker 2: what's so special about Jill? Well, at the time, Jill
1:06:42
Speaker 2: was like this real beauty she was working at Maxis
1:06:46
Speaker 2: Kansas City in New York with this other woman who
1:06:49
Speaker 2: was a matress. They worked the back room. And the
1:06:51
Speaker 2: other one was Helen Martin, who that wasn't her name
1:06:55
Speaker 2: at the time. She married Bryce Martin, the artist, and
1:06:58
Speaker 2: she's now an artist herself. So that two of them
1:07:00
Speaker 2: were these high cheekbone thin waf looking model like really
1:07:06
Speaker 2: cool chicks, really right out of the boat. You know.
1:07:08
Speaker 2: You look up Bohemian in the dictionary and it's them.
1:07:11
Speaker 2: And she had this cool aura about her. I mean,
1:07:15
Speaker 2: as I said in the book, she was like the coolest,
1:07:20
Speaker 2: freest spirit I'd ever met in my life. I mean,
1:07:22
Speaker 2: she just didn't care. And through her I met all
1:07:25
Speaker 2: kinds of interesting characters. And in both Cobblin and Delhi,
1:07:30
Speaker 2: she had a tendency. You know, she was very social,
1:07:33
Speaker 2: she was very beautiful. Tom Russe really had a thing
1:07:36
Speaker 2: about her. Evidently they still communicate. She calls them Tommy,
1:07:39
Speaker 2: Tommy's in touch this and that, you know. Now she
1:07:43
Speaker 2: was going out with some guy from Pentangle, remember them.
1:07:46
Speaker 2: Pentager was one of those kind of gypsy bands in
1:07:49
Speaker 2: the Irritations liming with that dude Swasties.
1:07:52
Speaker 1: Brute Yane people.
1:07:55
Speaker 2: She had a thing for this guy, you know she
1:07:58
Speaker 2: But we were together for shit eight years seven and
1:08:02
Speaker 2: now six seven years, and you know we never were
1:08:04
Speaker 2: an item ourselves, but I always enjoyed her, and she
1:08:08
Speaker 2: was a magnet for interesting people. And yeah, her and
1:08:12
Speaker 2: Tom Rush were He was really taken with her. She was,
1:08:16
Speaker 2: I mean, she still is beautiful, but I mean now
1:08:18
Speaker 2: she's like my age. I mean, you know, she's getting
1:08:21
Speaker 2: herself a security check wired to India, and you know,
1:08:27
Speaker 2: I'd love to have been there and seen Tom Rush
1:08:29
Speaker 2: play tonight. I met He'd never remember. I think I
1:08:32
Speaker 2: met him in nineteen sixty four or five, but he
1:08:36
Speaker 2: was a striking character in those days.
1:08:38
Speaker 1: So in the book, you say, I have this idea,
1:08:42
Speaker 1: I'm going to sell slightly more upskilled than the usual
1:08:46
Speaker 1: item to boutiques. Then all of a sudden, you're selling
1:08:50
Speaker 1: to Bloomingdale's Involved. That doesn't happen by accident. How did
1:08:55
Speaker 1: all that happen?
1:08:56
Speaker 2: Well, we had good stuff, and I had contacts. I mean,
1:08:59
Speaker 2: I this girl Sidney Bachmann from Martha's Vineyard where I
1:09:03
Speaker 2: was a bartender and my partner had a house there.
1:09:06
Speaker 2: The guy who became my partner and Sydney was the
1:09:09
Speaker 2: head of the fashion office, which like a key position
1:09:12
Speaker 2: at the key retailer of the era, and she loved
1:09:15
Speaker 2: what we did to the point where she would give
1:09:17
Speaker 2: me stuff say, you know, basically, knock this off and
1:09:19
Speaker 2: I'll get a whole bunch of it. So we were
1:09:21
Speaker 2: always Bloomingdale's was always our biggest customer, but we also
1:09:24
Speaker 2: sold to Bendel's, which was another like powerhouse fashion forward operation,
1:09:29
Speaker 2: Macy's and you know, major stores, but a lot of
1:09:31
Speaker 2: it was in you know, there was a real boutique
1:09:35
Speaker 2: store kind of you know, there was a lot of them,
1:09:39
Speaker 2: and they We used to have a thing called the
1:09:41
Speaker 2: Boutique Show at the old McAlpin Hotel, which was like
1:09:45
Speaker 2: some kind of Renaissance fare that would happen twice a
1:09:47
Speaker 2: year and you would go and you would be able
1:09:49
Speaker 2: to Celtics. People had stores in Florida or California or
1:09:52
Speaker 2: what have you. So it was hard work. I set
1:09:55
Speaker 2: up a showroom in New York, hire someone to run it,
1:09:58
Speaker 2: and we have buyers come in and we were I
1:10:00
Speaker 2: knew women who worked at these as fashion editors, so
1:10:04
Speaker 2: I could get I had more than an average chance.
1:10:08
Speaker 2: It's like getting a record on the radio. I had
1:10:11
Speaker 2: more than an average chance of getting some editorial coverage
1:10:13
Speaker 2: in Vogue or Mademoiselle or Glamour or one of those.
1:10:16
Speaker 2: Essence and buyers would come in and everyone's always looking for, like,
1:10:21
Speaker 2: what's the cool new place that hasn't been ruined yet
1:10:24
Speaker 2: tourism wise, what's that place? Well, what's a cool new
1:10:27
Speaker 2: company that no one knows anything about. It's sort of
1:10:29
Speaker 2: under the radar, but they're doing something really good. And
1:10:32
Speaker 2: we were that for a while. So that's how, you know,
1:10:37
Speaker 2: we kind of boosted our sales. It was through connections
1:10:39
Speaker 2: I had and the product that was good, and the
1:10:41
Speaker 2: word of mouth, and you know, we went we went viral.
1:10:46
Speaker 1: Bob Okay, did you know how to run it and
1:10:57
Speaker 1: how to price it because you'd been to business school?
1:11:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, that helped a lot. I mean, my skills helped
1:11:03
Speaker 2: a lot there. You know, we used to have a
1:11:05
Speaker 2: thing of whatever our landed cost was. If you pay
1:11:09
Speaker 2: some for four dollars, by the time you pay the
1:11:11
Speaker 2: tariff in the air freight, it's like six dollars. Well,
1:11:14
Speaker 2: I'll sell it for twelve dollars, knowing that the retail
1:11:17
Speaker 2: will probably sell it for twenty four dollars. But you know,
1:11:20
Speaker 2: the business as we got bigger, got more complicated because
1:11:23
Speaker 2: when you sell to big stores, they take a discount.
1:11:25
Speaker 2: If you got an agent in la he wants a commission,
1:11:29
Speaker 2: and then people who are in the big stores they
1:11:31
Speaker 2: don't pay it for a long time. So you might
1:11:34
Speaker 2: be a millionaire on paper, which we were, but you
1:11:37
Speaker 2: don't have any money. It's all tied up in receivables.
1:11:41
Speaker 2: It's all tied up in inventory. Never you're always trying
1:11:45
Speaker 2: to get your head above water. You're sort of basically
1:11:47
Speaker 2: just hanging on. I know that's the thing that a
1:11:49
Speaker 2: lot of people are going through today with Trump's tariffs.
1:11:51
Speaker 2: I mean, things were already bad enough for these folks
1:11:54
Speaker 2: and they're getting squeezed on pricing by competitors now they
1:11:57
Speaker 2: got Yeah. But anyway, I'm having a business background and
1:12:02
Speaker 2: a business orientation was really important and it kind of
1:12:05
Speaker 2: set me apart. We were like the only kind of
1:12:07
Speaker 2: Western people who own companies like this who were doing it,
1:12:11
Speaker 2: which also brought me a bit of an advantage. So yeah,
1:12:16
Speaker 2: I was putting my uh my business degree to good use,
1:12:20
Speaker 2: which which which which was a big solace to my
1:12:25
Speaker 2: beleaguered parents who kept thinking, why are you gonna get
1:12:30
Speaker 2: a job and do something? Because when I came back
1:12:32
Speaker 2: from India after being gone a year and they said,
1:12:34
Speaker 2: what are you going to do? I said, I'm going
1:12:35
Speaker 2: to start a business. You know, I got a box
1:12:37
Speaker 2: of these shirts and I'm going to drive it around
1:12:39
Speaker 2: in a Volkswagen see if there's a market forum. And
1:12:42
Speaker 2: then when we became successful, they were like, wow, I
1:12:45
Speaker 2: had to give it to my parents. They were patient
1:12:47
Speaker 2: and supported me. I was on a mission.
1:12:52
Speaker 1: Okay, So what did you learn in business school?
1:12:59
Speaker 2: Well, you know, you take think first of all, I
1:13:01
Speaker 2: went there. This will sound really dumb. This sounds really dumb.
1:13:06
Speaker 2: So I'm in college. I'm a senior in college. I know.
1:13:09
Speaker 2: You know, the draft now was like forty fifty thousand
1:13:12
Speaker 2: people a month. My deferment's gonna route in June. That
1:13:15
Speaker 2: coming June, when I graduate, I'll be in Vietnam by
1:13:17
Speaker 2: the end of the year. I knew people in the service.
1:13:19
Speaker 2: You're probably in the same situation. So what are you
1:13:23
Speaker 2: gonna do. People gonna go to law school, going to
1:13:25
Speaker 2: go to be a doctor, a dentist. I'm not going
1:13:27
Speaker 2: to be a doctor or dentist or a lawyer. But
1:13:29
Speaker 2: someone says, go to business school. I'm so dumb. I
1:13:32
Speaker 2: didn't even know there was a thing as a business Wait.
1:13:34
Speaker 1: Wait, I graduated. I had no idea there was anything
1:13:38
Speaker 1: such as an NBA, and I didn't know for years.
1:13:42
Speaker 2: Well, I'm the same big thing. So thank god someone
1:13:45
Speaker 2: told me. I said, why don't you go to business school.
1:13:47
Speaker 2: I'm working in a school cafeteria. Go to business school.
1:13:50
Speaker 2: But there's business school, so you know. So I applied
1:13:53
Speaker 2: to NYU. I wanted to go to a city. I
1:13:55
Speaker 2: was in Vermont, and I want to buy to be
1:13:57
Speaker 2: U and NYU. That was it. And I got into NYU.
1:14:00
Speaker 2: You and that that was another thing that really changed
1:14:02
Speaker 2: my life. But what I'd learned there. I had this
1:14:05
Speaker 2: professor Peter Drucker, who was sort of the management guru
1:14:09
Speaker 2: of the era. Put out a lot of books The
1:14:11
Speaker 2: Age of cod Discontinent and everything. He was all about
1:14:13
Speaker 2: innovation and change, and his classes were just fantastic, and
1:14:18
Speaker 2: he real learned the key element of the business of
1:14:20
Speaker 2: the American economy is entrepreneurs creating, correcting with customers, creating
1:14:24
Speaker 2: new things. It isn't creating, it's innovating new things. He said,
1:14:27
Speaker 2: someone's an inventor. They make something out of nothing. An
1:14:30
Speaker 2: innovator is somebody who takes stuff that already exists and
1:14:33
Speaker 2: somehow puts it together in a new way for a
1:14:35
Speaker 2: new market or a new this and that. And I said,
1:14:38
Speaker 2: now that's interesting. You know, that's a place in business
1:14:41
Speaker 2: where it could be creative, It could be interesting, and
1:14:45
Speaker 2: I'm going to keep my eye on that sector. You know,
1:14:47
Speaker 2: it starts small. And the other thing was always always
1:14:49
Speaker 2: look for jobs and sectors that were ascendant. You know,
1:14:53
Speaker 2: you know, you don't want to be, you know, in
1:14:54
Speaker 2: the buggy business. You want to be in something that
1:14:57
Speaker 2: looks to be coming and being ascendant, which later on
1:15:00
Speaker 2: my life was certainly cable television, and at one point
1:15:03
Speaker 2: in my life it became importing. Importing was not a
1:15:07
Speaker 2: big thing in the seventies early seventies. That was, you
1:15:09
Speaker 2: know that the worldwide economic system was just sort of
1:15:12
Speaker 2: adjusting to all this international trade. So I was really
1:15:17
Speaker 2: uh intrigued with him, and I did really well in school,
1:15:21
Speaker 2: even though I had sometimes I had work into the bartender.
1:15:24
Speaker 2: I'd get out of work some nights at three am,
1:15:26
Speaker 2: but I worked my ass off. I didn't want to
1:15:28
Speaker 2: get thrown out of him. If I flunked out, I
1:15:31
Speaker 2: was going to end up in Vietnam, you know. So
1:15:35
Speaker 2: I worked hard at my you know, and I had
1:15:38
Speaker 2: to hustle money because my dad's got I ended up
1:15:41
Speaker 2: getting a scholarship, you know, when I was one semester in.
1:15:44
Speaker 2: But I didn't really have any money to go to school.
1:15:46
Speaker 2: But as you know, then school wasn't that expensive, not
1:15:50
Speaker 2: compared to today. It's unbelievable, you know, for a couple
1:15:53
Speaker 2: thousand dollars a semester. You know, now you know it's
1:15:58
Speaker 2: a whole other thing, which you know impacts everything else.
1:16:01
Speaker 2: But yeah, I liked business school. So I got an MBA,
1:16:07
Speaker 2: and then it was okay, I'm going to take I
1:16:10
Speaker 2: worked for sixteen years, eighteen years of school. I'm going
1:16:13
Speaker 2: to take a year off and drift around and try
1:16:15
Speaker 2: and keep up with some of these buddies I had
1:16:16
Speaker 2: met who had their career path was not to have
1:16:19
Speaker 2: one then their their career paths was never have a
1:16:22
Speaker 2: grown up job, you know, which fits in sync with,
1:16:25
Speaker 2: you know, some of the counterculture sensibility. I was that
1:16:28
Speaker 2: was one of those guys. But I was never like,
1:16:31
Speaker 2: I never got on the spiritual thing in any kind
1:16:34
Speaker 2: of large degree. You know, I wasn't going to India
1:16:36
Speaker 2: to sit in the cave or something with some sadus.
1:16:39
Speaker 2: I was sort of on a reconnaissance mission.
1:16:42
Speaker 1: Okay, this all blows up the answer and an ad.
1:16:47
Speaker 1: You go for a meeting at MTV. How exactly did
1:16:52
Speaker 1: you sell yourself? What was it about what you said
1:16:56
Speaker 1: that they said, okay, we want this guy.
1:16:59
Speaker 2: Well I got this meeting through my brother who worked
1:17:02
Speaker 2: at Columbia Records, and this guy Bob mcgrorty. And this
1:17:05
Speaker 2: is at this point in time that company had just
1:17:08
Speaker 2: started and they had Nickelodeon and the Movie Channel. The
1:17:12
Speaker 2: MTV was still an idea they talked about, but it
1:17:14
Speaker 2: hadn't been approved by the Warner Amex joint venture. They
1:17:17
Speaker 2: hadn't they So I'm just trying to get in anywhere.
1:17:21
Speaker 2: And when I went in to see him, I mean
1:17:22
Speaker 2: I got a hair cut, I got a suit. I
1:17:24
Speaker 2: remember buying a Georgia Armani's suit for like three hundred
1:17:28
Speaker 2: bucks down on Orchard Street. I looked really good. I
1:17:31
Speaker 2: went in and my sale line was, look, you need entrepreneurs.
1:17:34
Speaker 2: I'm an entrepreneur. I know it sounds weird. I lived
1:17:37
Speaker 2: in Asia for eight years, buy and large, but I
1:17:39
Speaker 2: started this company. We're a multimillion dollar company. It kind
1:17:43
Speaker 2: of went under because of a series of unfortunate events.
1:17:47
Speaker 2: But I know all about music. I'm a music fanatic,
1:17:50
Speaker 2: always have been, and I can bring a spirit to
1:17:53
Speaker 2: this place. And I have creative abilities. I worked in
1:17:56
Speaker 2: an ad agency and I had this whole portfolio of
1:18:00
Speaker 2: I really went all out. I said, this is going
1:18:02
Speaker 2: to be a protesy interview. I'm going to try and
1:18:04
Speaker 2: blow it. I want to work at this company. So
1:18:06
Speaker 2: I had this portfolio of all this stuff. We had
1:18:08
Speaker 2: made catalog shots with models and you know, tear sheets
1:18:12
Speaker 2: for magazines, and so I could look legitimate. I want
1:18:15
Speaker 2: to look at the I didn't appear to be legitimate,
1:18:18
Speaker 2: but I want to make myself look legitimately. So it
1:18:19
Speaker 2: goes right away. Oh, this is fantastic. I want you to
1:18:22
Speaker 2: go see my boss right away. And that's John Lack,
1:18:27
Speaker 2: who was the guy who was the originator of the
1:18:29
Speaker 2: idea of MTV. And he said to me, so, what
1:18:33
Speaker 2: were you doing in Afghanistan? You were smuggling drugs And
1:18:38
Speaker 2: he said it like it was a good thing, you know.
1:18:41
Speaker 2: I said, no, not really. I wanted smuggling drugs, but
1:18:43
Speaker 2: I did this and that and the other thing. And
1:18:44
Speaker 2: he says, well, we're looking for people with no experience
1:18:47
Speaker 2: in television. We need people who don't have can't we
1:18:50
Speaker 2: don't need money, so we can't afford someone from NBC
1:18:53
Speaker 2: who's just going to make stuff with some independent operations.
1:18:55
Speaker 2: It's going to be expensive. We need people who can
1:18:57
Speaker 2: think out of the box. I said, well I didn't.
1:19:00
Speaker 2: I haven't even lived in a country that had television.
1:19:03
Speaker 2: But I'm this, that and the other thing. I went
1:19:04
Speaker 2: to the whole dittany. So they offered me a job
1:19:07
Speaker 2: on the spot, and I said, this is going a
1:19:09
Speaker 2: lot better than I thought. You know, I just came
1:19:11
Speaker 2: in for an interview and thinking, well, well think about it.
1:19:14
Speaker 2: Maybe we'll have you back. No, take a job, and
1:19:17
Speaker 2: it's thirty five thousand dollars, take it or leave it.
1:19:20
Speaker 2: I said, come in, count me in. So that's how
1:19:24
Speaker 2: I got the job. And then like four months later
1:19:27
Speaker 2: they hire Bob Pittman.
1:19:28
Speaker 1: Wait wait before you get there, you said, but I
1:19:31
Speaker 1: got to go do something else for a month.
1:19:33
Speaker 2: Right, I did? I know? I know I skipped over
1:19:36
Speaker 2: that part. I said, this is like I'm sitting there
1:19:39
Speaker 2: and going, oh my god. I've been thinking, no one's
1:19:41
Speaker 2: going to hire me. I've been running around in pajamas
1:19:43
Speaker 2: for eight years, and they're going to think, who is
1:19:46
Speaker 2: this guy? He's some drug smuggler. So they hire me,
1:19:50
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, I feel this wave of legitimacy.
1:19:52
Speaker 2: And I said, well, I'd like to start, but I
1:19:54
Speaker 2: can't really start for a month. He said, that's not
1:19:56
Speaker 2: going to work. We need you right away. We're hiring
1:19:57
Speaker 2: twenty people or something right away. I said, that's not
1:20:00
Speaker 2: going to work. I got a I'm thinking, okay, I
1:20:03
Speaker 2: got a job, and I'm thinking I'm going to go
1:20:06
Speaker 2: into some corporate life and while it may be fun,
1:20:08
Speaker 2: it's going to be nothing like what I left. So
1:20:11
Speaker 2: I want to take like another run on the Marrakesh Express.
1:20:13
Speaker 2: So I grabbed my then girlfriend and I told him
1:20:16
Speaker 2: I couldn't start for a year. For a month, I
1:20:18
Speaker 2: had to do some things. He said, well, I can't
1:20:21
Speaker 2: wait a month. Look, if you want to take off
1:20:23
Speaker 2: a month, do it, but the job may not be
1:20:26
Speaker 2: here if you come back. But if that job's not here,
1:20:28
Speaker 2: there'll probably be something else. So I split to Marrakesh
1:20:32
Speaker 2: with my girlfriend and we roamed around Morocco for a
1:20:35
Speaker 2: couple of weeks. And I came back and I remember
1:20:37
Speaker 2: I entered the building on I think it was no
1:20:42
Speaker 2: I went back. Yeah, I went back, and the job
1:20:44
Speaker 2: was available. It wasn't a job I wanted. They put
1:20:46
Speaker 2: me in a room where they stored soda and was
1:20:49
Speaker 2: It was Saint Patrick's Day in nineteen eighty, ten years
1:20:54
Speaker 2: to the day from when I went to the Fillmore
1:20:56
Speaker 2: West and saw the Jefferson airplane with the Joshua light show,
1:21:00
Speaker 2: and I saw music videos being I mean I saw
1:21:04
Speaker 2: a video being made the old fashioned way by those dudes,
1:21:07
Speaker 2: and I saw the power of music being linked up
1:21:10
Speaker 2: with video some kind. But anyway, I started off, and
1:21:13
Speaker 2: then they had me doing sales for a while, and
1:21:17
Speaker 2: then they hired a Bob Pittman, who was he's twenty
1:21:20
Speaker 2: one years old or twenty two years old. He's running
1:21:22
Speaker 2: the biggest radio station in New York, having run the
1:21:25
Speaker 2: biggest one in Chicago. He's like this long haired, one
1:21:28
Speaker 2: eyed hippie dude who a sweet talker. He was working
1:21:32
Speaker 2: with don Imus, and they hired him to kind of
1:21:35
Speaker 2: be the point person to develop the concept of MTV
1:21:38
Speaker 2: into a real channel, and he was looking to get six,
1:21:41
Speaker 2: seven eight people to be on the first team. So
1:21:44
Speaker 2: I went to see him saying, I'm your man, this
1:21:46
Speaker 2: is why i came to the company in the first place.
1:21:48
Speaker 2: I've seen music videos. I'm like nuts about this idea
1:21:52
Speaker 2: is the big best idea in the world. You got
1:21:54
Speaker 2: to hire me. I'll work my ass up for you. Meanwhile,
1:21:57
Speaker 2: I'm like six or seven years older than him. I'm
1:22:00
Speaker 2: like the only old guy. I'm like thirty three. So
1:22:04
Speaker 2: he starts the same thing. He says, well, were you
1:22:09
Speaker 2: smuggling hashi Ish because that was a big thing of
1:22:11
Speaker 2: the day. I go, not really, I wasn't really smuggling
1:22:14
Speaker 2: hash He says not really. He says that means you were.
1:22:17
Speaker 2: That means you were right. He kind of trapped me,
1:22:20
Speaker 2: so he says, you're hired. So he hired me to
1:22:22
Speaker 2: be the head of marketing. So it was me and
1:22:24
Speaker 2: John Sykes and Piskuy, Fred Cyber, Carolyn Bigger. There was
1:22:29
Speaker 2: a handful of us. They were all shoved us into
1:22:30
Speaker 2: the Sheridan Hotel, into these hotel rooms where you know,
1:22:34
Speaker 2: We're just it's like a like like the kind of
1:22:37
Speaker 2: startup you'd see in the internet. One hero, everyone's eating
1:22:39
Speaker 2: pizza and you know, we had like eight people and
1:22:43
Speaker 2: four phones and they had call waiting and we had
1:22:46
Speaker 2: no money, but we were we were Everyone was like
1:22:49
Speaker 2: a music fanatic. A lot of them came out of
1:22:51
Speaker 2: either radio or record companies, and you know, we all
1:22:56
Speaker 2: thought this was the greatest idea in the world. And
1:22:59
Speaker 2: the people were I was like the highest paid guy
1:23:01
Speaker 2: other by no sychs is making thirty grand a year
1:23:04
Speaker 2: and they would have worked for less money. It's funny, Bob,
1:23:07
Speaker 2: but you know, everyone talks about money, money, money these days.
1:23:10
Speaker 2: None of these people were really concerned with money. We
1:23:13
Speaker 2: were on a you know, on a crusade to do
1:23:15
Speaker 2: something that sounded really exciting and if it worked out,
1:23:18
Speaker 2: maybe we'd make some money. No one was imagining it
1:23:20
Speaker 2: would be a multi billion dollar business one day.
1:23:23
Speaker 1: Okay, just to go back. You had nothing to do
1:23:26
Speaker 1: during that month. You just wanted another month live in
1:23:30
Speaker 1: the hippie lifestyle.
1:23:33
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, I know, I'm athetic.
1:23:35
Speaker 1: Well wouldn't you normally say I can't believe I got
1:23:38
Speaker 1: this job? I mean, what was for you it.
1:23:40
Speaker 2: Turned out to be. It was a blessing in disguise
1:23:43
Speaker 2: because I when I came in, I'm now a level lower.
1:23:46
Speaker 2: So the frontline guys who were higher than me, they
1:23:50
Speaker 2: all ultimately got fired because they were out in front
1:23:53
Speaker 2: and they're making threshold mistakes in a new business, and
1:23:55
Speaker 2: you know, sooner or later, he's gone. He's gone, he's gone,
1:23:58
Speaker 2: and I'm down just below the swing of the and
1:24:00
Speaker 2: I'm seeing what's going on. I've seen, I'm learning stuff,
1:24:03
Speaker 2: and you know, I realized I'm learning from their mistakes,
1:24:06
Speaker 2: and I get elevated back to where I would have been,
1:24:09
Speaker 2: and then I ultimately go up to MTV. So if
1:24:11
Speaker 2: I had stayed and taken that higher job, maybe I
1:24:14
Speaker 2: would have made some dumb mistakes and they would have
1:24:15
Speaker 2: dusted me as well. So it all worked out. There's
1:24:18
Speaker 2: that improvised life thing, you know, you take a chance
1:24:21
Speaker 2: and you never know. But I followed my heart. I
1:24:23
Speaker 2: wanted to I wanted to go back to Morocco. That's
1:24:26
Speaker 2: where my you know, I was. It was like my
1:24:28
Speaker 2: old It's like going back to your old lover, you know,
1:24:31
Speaker 2: I mean, it was still there, that that third world thing,
1:24:34
Speaker 2: and I wanted another. I wanted another run at it
1:24:37
Speaker 2: got the best of me.
1:24:38
Speaker 1: So what was Pittman's special sauce.
1:24:42
Speaker 2: He was a great bullshitter. He was smart as a whip.
1:24:47
Speaker 2: He had the Southern drawl. You know. I think he
1:24:50
Speaker 2: was the son of a minister or something. He came
1:24:52
Speaker 2: from Mississippi, and he would impress the hell out of
1:24:56
Speaker 2: older people because here he is, this young guy. He's
1:24:58
Speaker 2: wearing a suit, he's got long hair, he's got one eye.
1:25:02
Speaker 2: He's programmed all these big radio stations. He says, I
1:25:04
Speaker 2: got my finger on the pulse of the youth culture,
1:25:06
Speaker 2: and they believe them. And he could talk like no
1:25:09
Speaker 2: one could talk. I caught him the other day. I
1:25:11
Speaker 2: was I was going through Instagram reels or whatever the
1:25:14
Speaker 2: hell it is, and there's Bob Pittman. He's talking at
1:25:16
Speaker 2: some conference in San Francisco. The same you know, he could.
1:25:19
Speaker 2: He was like remind me of Shane Smith, same fucking lineus.
1:25:23
Speaker 2: You know. He was just a smooth talking dude, much
1:25:26
Speaker 2: different than Shane. But he making making something bad sound
1:25:29
Speaker 2: really good and people are eating it up because it
1:25:32
Speaker 2: comes out and sounds right. And he was a good manager.
1:25:36
Speaker 2: He was a good manager and he was cheap. He
1:25:38
Speaker 2: wouldn't give us any money to do anything because there
1:25:40
Speaker 2: wasn't really a lot of money to give. And he
1:25:42
Speaker 2: became a great friend of me, and he was my mentor.
1:25:45
Speaker 2: For God's sake. He's the young guy. I'm the old
1:25:48
Speaker 2: I'm the old man. And I never told anybody there
1:25:51
Speaker 2: like I had an MBA. That would be like, you know,
1:25:53
Speaker 2: like I had cancer or something, because all these people
1:25:56
Speaker 2: kind of come from the creative side pretty much. I
1:25:59
Speaker 2: was just like some dude from Afghanistan who was a
1:26:02
Speaker 2: rug smuggler.
1:26:12
Speaker 1: So why exactly did Pittman leave?
1:26:15
Speaker 2: Well, the bloom was off the roads, he thought, and
1:26:17
Speaker 2: others thought. We had a great run, and we went.
1:26:21
Speaker 2: When our revenue got to like seventy million dollars, Viacom
1:26:28
Speaker 2: Steve Warner Ames was having problems. There was the Atari
1:26:31
Speaker 2: thing if you can remember that right, you know.
1:26:33
Speaker 1: They were losing the crashed.
1:26:35
Speaker 2: We got to sell some stuff. We got to sell
1:26:37
Speaker 2: like some of these joint ventures. We got to get
1:26:38
Speaker 2: out of this. We got to raise some money. So
1:26:40
Speaker 2: we were put on the block and there was a
1:26:42
Speaker 2: company called via Com then that had just bought showtime.
1:26:46
Speaker 2: And then we went to Forestmen Little, that Bob new
1:26:49
Speaker 2: Teddy Forceman. There was a big lbo operation that was
1:26:51
Speaker 2: a big thing in the sixties or seventies or eighties
1:26:54
Speaker 2: if you remember. It leveraged buyouts. So we worked out
1:26:57
Speaker 2: a thing where we could buy the employees could buy
1:26:59
Speaker 2: the copy in conjunction with money from Forestman Little, and
1:27:03
Speaker 2: we put a bit on the table and then we
1:27:05
Speaker 2: were going to get it. We were going to be
1:27:07
Speaker 2: independent and free. And then Teddy forst. Then Steve Ross
1:27:11
Speaker 2: got on some helicopter he flew to East Hampton and
1:27:16
Speaker 2: when he got off he decided he was in sell
1:27:18
Speaker 2: to the other guy. So like an extra fifty million dollars.
1:27:20
Speaker 2: So we were a shit out of luck. And the
1:27:22
Speaker 2: new guys who came in weren't all that pleasant. They
1:27:25
Speaker 2: were like proper business people. And Bob, I think, felt deflated.
1:27:28
Speaker 2: You know, I'm out of here. The blooms off the rose,
1:27:30
Speaker 2: the party's over, so he les Garland Sykes. A lot
1:27:34
Speaker 2: of people left, and I'm thinking, where the hell they going? Man,
1:27:37
Speaker 2: this is still the greatest idea around. What else are
1:27:40
Speaker 2: you going to find us better than this? They went
1:27:42
Speaker 2: off to work at CIA or some promotion thing and
1:27:46
Speaker 2: I think Bob was running Morton Downey Show, some kind
1:27:49
Speaker 2: of stuff like that. He had a deal with MCA.
1:27:52
Speaker 2: Everybody was everyone was desired by Hollywood people because they thought,
1:27:55
Speaker 2: for some reason, the MTV executives had some kind of
1:27:58
Speaker 2: special sauce. So I stayed where I was and Bob
1:28:00
Speaker 2: made me president on the way out. So now I'm in.
1:28:05
Speaker 2: Now I'm on top of the pile. And I had
1:28:06
Speaker 2: to reconstitute everybody. And we were not impressed with the
1:28:11
Speaker 2: new people, the new people who took us over, and
1:28:14
Speaker 2: they came in to tell us, uh, you know what
1:28:18
Speaker 2: was what. I had a management retreat going on in
1:28:20
Speaker 2: Montalk at this place called Gurney's, and they came out
1:28:23
Speaker 2: with a helicopter. Now, the only silver lining of this deal,
1:28:27
Speaker 2: these guys getting a deal, was that the paltry amount
1:28:31
Speaker 2: of stock options that were distributed would vest and be
1:28:33
Speaker 2: paid out if someone bought the company. So we were
1:28:36
Speaker 2: looking around, you know, we had like ten thousands. You know,
1:28:38
Speaker 2: you're not going to make, you know, make forty fifty
1:28:40
Speaker 2: thousand dollars, but that was a lot of money to us.
1:28:42
Speaker 2: So they came in to talk to us. They set
1:28:44
Speaker 2: up a little microphone in the ballroom and they start
1:28:47
Speaker 2: off saying, well, we've talked to lawyers and we don't
1:28:50
Speaker 2: think we have to pay out your stock options. This
1:28:52
Speaker 2: is like the opener, you know. It was nothing like hey,
1:28:55
Speaker 2: you guys have done a great job, we see a
1:28:58
Speaker 2: great future ahead. We can't wait to work with you. No,
1:29:00
Speaker 2: and like fuck you. And then they you know, they
1:29:03
Speaker 2: talked a little bit about other stuff, and they left
1:29:05
Speaker 2: in their helicopters, and then we proceeded to trash the barroom,
1:29:10
Speaker 2: tip over fish tanks, tip over palm trees, bus glasses.
1:29:13
Speaker 2: It was like a gang of like like led Zeppelin.
1:29:16
Speaker 2: It infected us and anyway, then some of the Redstone
1:29:20
Speaker 2: took over the company and and displaced those guys, and
1:29:26
Speaker 2: I was off to work with him. He hired a
1:29:29
Speaker 2: guy named.
1:29:29
Speaker 1: Okay, wait before before you go there, Bob makes you president.
1:29:34
Speaker 1: Were you an impostor learning on the gig or did
1:29:36
Speaker 1: you know how to do it?
1:29:38
Speaker 2: Oh? I was an impostor. I mean I had been around.
1:29:40
Speaker 2: I think even it was still a small company, I
1:29:42
Speaker 2: could do it. But then the new guy said, hey,
1:29:44
Speaker 2: you're not a good enough president. We're going to give
1:29:46
Speaker 2: you a co president. Because I don't think that, you know,
1:29:49
Speaker 2: advertisers are going to like trust you, or you didn't
1:29:52
Speaker 2: have the credibility to deal with advertisers. You were not
1:29:54
Speaker 2: that school in that part of the business. So now
1:29:57
Speaker 2: I have a co president and you know, this is
1:30:00
Speaker 2: the guy I got along with him. Okay, but it
1:30:02
Speaker 2: was a bit deflating. But meanwhile I was learning the
1:30:05
Speaker 2: ropes on my half of the business. And then Sunder
1:30:09
Speaker 2: came along. He took it over in a big takeout battle, big, big,
1:30:14
Speaker 2: big battle. It was, you know, well chronicled on Wall Street.
1:30:18
Speaker 2: And he hired Frank Biondi, this great guy, who immediately
1:30:22
Speaker 2: made me the CEO and had me fire the other guy,
1:30:25
Speaker 2: which I did, and then I was off with those
1:30:28
Speaker 2: guys for you know, I was the CEO of MTV
1:30:31
Speaker 2: Networks for seventeen years, and you know, we blew it
1:30:34
Speaker 2: up into a multi billion dollar business. It was fantastic
1:30:37
Speaker 2: because it wasn't like I was doing the same boring thing.
1:30:41
Speaker 2: Things would come along and we'd be a whole different,
1:30:43
Speaker 2: new kind of company. We started going international. We started
1:30:46
Speaker 2: nick Toons Animation, finding these weird like animators and setting
1:30:50
Speaker 2: them up to do business and set up a little
1:30:52
Speaker 2: animation studio. Going international was a big We launched other networks,
1:30:56
Speaker 2: Comedy Central among them, so it was always new, it
1:31:00
Speaker 2: was always interesting, and I viewed my job as my
1:31:04
Speaker 2: job was to keep the entity, this creative nucleus protected
1:31:10
Speaker 2: because I had this management team that was amazingly talented,
1:31:14
Speaker 2: and we were just filled with people who didn't want
1:31:16
Speaker 2: to work in normal companies. We had the worst dress
1:31:19
Speaker 2: group of people in any Manhattan office building. And my
1:31:25
Speaker 2: job was basically to try and keep this as a
1:31:27
Speaker 2: creative first company and to develop a culture there that
1:31:31
Speaker 2: would be seen as a competitive advantage by others. And
1:31:34
Speaker 2: I made the heads of our networks creative people, not
1:31:38
Speaker 2: business people, which would have been the normal process in
1:31:40
Speaker 2: the business world. We gave up half our key jobs
1:31:43
Speaker 2: to women, but we had like Judy McGrath and John
1:31:46
Speaker 2: Sykes and Jerry Laiborne and Herb Scannal and others, you know.
1:31:51
Speaker 2: So I thought that if you had a creative person
1:31:54
Speaker 2: running a network, the people who worked there would see
1:31:57
Speaker 2: that we're a creative company at heart and create activity
1:32:00
Speaker 2: and taking risks is our key aptitude. And everyone was
1:32:03
Speaker 2: always encouraged to try and push the envelope, do stuff
1:32:06
Speaker 2: we didn't have a lot of money, so they had to
1:32:07
Speaker 2: kind of do it in an innovative way, and for
1:32:09
Speaker 2: a long time it worked. We cranked out, you know,
1:32:12
Speaker 2: we grew for seventeen years, four quarters each year. Every
1:32:18
Speaker 2: quarter we were up double digits on the top and
1:32:20
Speaker 2: bottom line. So it really went from seventy million dollars
1:32:23
Speaker 2: a year to a few billion dollars a year in revenue.
1:32:28
Speaker 2: And when really kicked in was Nickelodeon and when we
1:32:31
Speaker 2: made the move to invent our own cartoons, basically create
1:32:34
Speaker 2: our own cartoon characters rather than licensed looney tunes and
1:32:37
Speaker 2: stuff like that. And then we can had consumer products.
1:32:40
Speaker 2: And then Sumnder bought Paramount, so we were able to
1:32:44
Speaker 2: make movies and so again we're reincarnated into a whole
1:32:48
Speaker 2: other kind of business. So you learn a bit about
1:32:49
Speaker 2: the movie business. It was. It was a great ride.
1:32:55
Speaker 1: Just got to go back to the party out in
1:32:57
Speaker 1: mod talk. You're in charge and they're trashing the place.
1:33:02
Speaker 2: Well, I was second in charge. Pittman was still there.
1:33:04
Speaker 2: This was his swan soa and he actually started it.
1:33:07
Speaker 2: He started throwing the glass. He started throwing the glasses,
1:33:10
Speaker 2: and then everybody said, well, hey man, he's throwing the glasses.
1:33:13
Speaker 2: Let's throw the glasses. Then let's they had these palm
1:33:15
Speaker 2: trees like in these pots and they're being thrown over
1:33:18
Speaker 2: and fish tank and really, I mean it was quite
1:33:22
Speaker 2: a scene to see. But everyone was so pissed, like
1:33:24
Speaker 2: we had this little wonderland, we had a plan to
1:33:27
Speaker 2: be out on our own, and now it's not just
1:33:29
Speaker 2: not happening, but it seems like the new guys are like,
1:33:33
Speaker 2: you know, not exactly our kind of people.
1:33:36
Speaker 1: Okay, so tell me about Sumner. Was Sunder just a
1:33:43
Speaker 1: bull who took chances? Was he a brilliant businessman who
1:33:47
Speaker 1: built this empire? Who was Sumner Redstone?
1:33:53
Speaker 2: That's a good question. He was a complicated man. He
1:33:57
Speaker 2: inherited a driving theater business from his father and then
1:34:01
Speaker 2: built it up. He was really the kind of guy
1:34:03
Speaker 2: who started building the multiplexus. This is, you know, at
1:34:06
Speaker 2: the time when theater business was quite big, and he
1:34:10
Speaker 2: had dreams at sixty five or so, which was older
1:34:13
Speaker 2: in those days than it is nowadays, to build an internet,
1:34:16
Speaker 2: you know, to build a real company, big company. So
1:34:19
Speaker 2: he started taking pieces of eye. He used to. He
1:34:23
Speaker 2: built his fortune when he was an exhibitor by going
1:34:27
Speaker 2: to movie screenings, you know. So he'd like see a
1:34:29
Speaker 2: screening of Star Wars and he said, it's a good movie.
1:34:34
Speaker 2: So he called his broker and buy a lot of
1:34:36
Speaker 2: stock in Fox. And you know, I mean, he'd buy
1:34:40
Speaker 2: a lot of stock at a time and he would
1:34:41
Speaker 2: be he was able to parlor himself into being a millionaire.
1:34:45
Speaker 2: It wasn't like he had inside information, but he had
1:34:48
Speaker 2: sort of inside vibes as to what was happening, and
1:34:51
Speaker 2: he placed big bets in the stock market and made
1:34:53
Speaker 2: himself rich. And then he decided he wanted to build
1:34:56
Speaker 2: a he wanted to become a mogul and start, and
1:35:00
Speaker 2: he started with Us, and then he just kept doing
1:35:03
Speaker 2: more deals. I mean, as soon as he got us
1:35:05
Speaker 2: under control, that was taken over Paramount and then and
1:35:09
Speaker 2: each time with another heaping of debt and then taken
1:35:12
Speaker 2: over Paramount. Well, now I'm going to take over CBS.
1:35:14
Speaker 2: So he m l Karmezan work out a deal. So
1:35:17
Speaker 2: now it's CBS is in there, and they bring along
1:35:20
Speaker 2: some other you know, they had Simon and Schuster and
1:35:23
Speaker 2: you know, other businesses, and you know, then it was
1:35:26
Speaker 2: always a mess to try and integrate all of this.
1:35:30
Speaker 1: And all away.
1:35:33
Speaker 2: I mean, he was a litigious guy. He was a
1:35:35
Speaker 2: lawyer by training, and he was always had always had
1:35:41
Speaker 2: his ears up for anyone he thought might be unfairly
1:35:44
Speaker 2: treating us. Like. He was an anti trust lawyer. So
1:35:47
Speaker 2: he always thought like John Malone and TCI, they were
1:35:51
Speaker 2: the big, the big bohemoths of the day, and like
1:35:53
Speaker 2: normally you couldn't get distribution for your network unless you're
1:35:56
Speaker 2: willing to give, like Bob Johnson to give or discover give, give,
1:36:01
Speaker 2: give him. It's sort of like what Trump's doing. Now,
1:36:03
Speaker 2: give him a piece of the business and you get distribution.
1:36:06
Speaker 2: He never wanted to play that game, so he would sue,
1:36:10
Speaker 2: you know, he sued, Uh, he sued John Malone, He
1:36:13
Speaker 2: sewed TCI against my wishes. He made lawsuits like a
1:36:17
Speaker 2: profit center. He brought in Philippe Dumont, which is a
1:36:20
Speaker 2: state lawyer, to kind of aid in a bet the
1:36:23
Speaker 2: legal you know, our legal stance. So he was successful
1:36:28
Speaker 2: at doing. He didn't care. He to suit people and win.
1:36:31
Speaker 2: I mean, he was happy to be the thurd on
1:36:32
Speaker 2: the on the cable golf course. Club didn't bother him
1:36:36
Speaker 2: at all. So he was bold and brave and made
1:36:39
Speaker 2: big moves and he was brilliant, but he he kind
1:36:46
Speaker 2: of desired the limelight. So like Frank Biondi, who was
1:36:51
Speaker 2: a very very able manager who I loved. The guy
1:36:55
Speaker 2: was great. He he understood what we had at MTV
1:36:58
Speaker 2: Networks and he ran it with a really light touch.
1:37:00
Speaker 2: He understood that we were not a traditional, you know division,
1:37:04
Speaker 2: and we were allowed at certain kind of freedoms and
1:37:06
Speaker 2: they didn't really interferce so long as we delivered them mode.
1:37:08
Speaker 2: But when Frank started getting like nice articles in the
1:37:12
Speaker 2: New Yorker or whatever, you know, he was soon gone.
1:37:14
Speaker 2: One day he was gone. And then with Mel, it
1:37:17
Speaker 2: was the same thing. Mel was another really able guy.
1:37:19
Speaker 2: Mel Karminson was a legend in the music business, in
1:37:21
Speaker 2: the radio business. You know, he created Infinity Radio, sold
1:37:24
Speaker 2: at the CBS, somehow worked out to be on the
1:37:27
Speaker 2: top of CBS. You know, he kind of like worked
1:37:30
Speaker 2: his way up and then he took us over and
1:37:33
Speaker 2: he became my new boss. And again, you know, he
1:37:37
Speaker 2: he kind of left us alone as so long as
1:37:39
Speaker 2: we met our financial targets. I like Meil very much.
1:37:43
Speaker 2: He was a real character. But again he was getting
1:37:45
Speaker 2: credit for making move. You know, he was getting credit
1:37:47
Speaker 2: for making a lot of smart moves that he made,
1:37:50
Speaker 2: but Sumner didn't, you know, he was sort of stealing
1:37:53
Speaker 2: the limelight. I think that Sumner desired and Sumner at
1:37:57
Speaker 2: the end of the day, while he started really modestly
1:37:59
Speaker 2: when we started, he would sit back at staff meetings,
1:38:02
Speaker 2: let frank he was kind of like he was kind
1:38:04
Speaker 2: of like learning the business, you know, at these meetings
1:38:07
Speaker 2: and seeing how things really work. And when he got
1:38:09
Speaker 2: to the point where we thought, Okay, now I know
1:38:11
Speaker 2: what I'm doing. You know, I'm going to run the
1:38:13
Speaker 2: whole baby, and you know, he was he didn't have
1:38:21
Speaker 2: a lot of friends. I would notice that anybody who
1:38:24
Speaker 2: got kind of close to him was gone. And I
1:38:27
Speaker 2: kind of kept my distance, and he was always happy
1:38:30
Speaker 2: to see me. And I tried to get him engaged
1:38:33
Speaker 2: in a lot of things, and he would support us,
1:38:38
Speaker 2: you know, he was a supportive guy. But in the
1:38:40
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, he was he got
1:38:44
Speaker 2: upset with me. I I I began, I didn't want
1:38:48
Speaker 2: to be the CEO. I mean I didn't, but he
1:38:52
Speaker 2: I remember clearly one day we we had had a
1:38:55
Speaker 2: joint venture with HBO to run Comedy Central. After we
1:38:58
Speaker 2: had these so called comedy wars, and we had a
1:39:01
Speaker 2: board meeting one day. I remember walking down Broadway as
1:39:03
Speaker 2: a spring day, the sun was out, and I'm with
1:39:05
Speaker 2: Jeff Buchus, who became a good friend. He was running
1:39:07
Speaker 2: HBO at the time. He said, you know, you and me,
1:39:10
Speaker 2: we got the best jobs in town. This is these
1:39:12
Speaker 2: jobs are fantastic. We get to do all these things
1:39:15
Speaker 2: we love. We work with interesting people, businesses are vibrant.
1:39:19
Speaker 2: He says. The only problem is one day they're going
1:39:22
Speaker 2: to ask us to run these things and we're going
1:39:24
Speaker 2: to be in a whole different ballgame. And he was right.
1:39:27
Speaker 2: He ended up running Time Waterer. I ended up running Viacom.
1:39:30
Speaker 2: But you know I took it over at a point
1:39:34
Speaker 2: in time when the digital companies were really beginning to
1:39:38
Speaker 2: make inroads into the legacy media companies, and you know,
1:39:43
Speaker 2: we had this sort of how do we change direction?
1:39:46
Speaker 2: And stock prices were stalled and you can only jack
1:39:49
Speaker 2: up your price, which someonder was obsessed with stock price,
1:39:52
Speaker 2: whereas Rupert Murdoch his nemesis, would fly around the world
1:39:56
Speaker 2: and know how well his operations ran. Uh, some are
1:40:04
Speaker 2: really looked at the stock price like that would like
1:40:06
Speaker 2: the dog, the tail wagging the dog. So I fell
1:40:10
Speaker 2: in a bit of disfavor and he fired me. And
1:40:15
Speaker 2: that was it?
1:40:18
Speaker 1: Was it really that? You know, the company was split
1:40:21
Speaker 1: into and less had good numbers. The division that you
1:40:27
Speaker 1: ran the report wasn't as good, even though we both
1:40:31
Speaker 1: know those are manipulated numbers. Was it inevitable or an
1:40:37
Speaker 1: irrelevant of whether you wanted to keep the job? If
1:40:39
Speaker 1: you could repeat it, would you play it any differently?
1:40:44
Speaker 2: Now? I thought we were making the right moves. I mean,
1:40:47
Speaker 2: we had been thwarted into the real challenge for us,
1:40:50
Speaker 2: for all these kind of media companies is how do
1:40:52
Speaker 2: we how do we face the digital invasion that was
1:40:55
Speaker 2: coming our way? You know, increasingly we were being decimated
1:40:59
Speaker 2: by the yeah Who's and the Googles and the Facebook,
1:41:02
Speaker 2: well not so much Facebook, so I mean that was
1:41:05
Speaker 2: nothing at the time.
1:41:07
Speaker 1: How do we.
1:41:07
Speaker 2: Reinvent ourselves for the digital era? How do we make
1:41:09
Speaker 2: this transition? Because we all, we weren't stupid, we saw
1:41:12
Speaker 2: what was coming. We were coming to this on demand
1:41:14
Speaker 2: streaming sort of model and these it was going to
1:41:17
Speaker 2: be a more open world. And one of the we
1:41:23
Speaker 2: tried to buy. We bought some small websites. We hired
1:41:27
Speaker 2: a digital department trying to find our way around, but
1:41:29
Speaker 2: then decided, you know, we need to really acquire something.
1:41:31
Speaker 2: We're not going to really get there by any kind
1:41:35
Speaker 2: of organic thing, which is what we were used to.
1:41:37
Speaker 2: We weren't used to buying companies and integrating them. We
1:41:40
Speaker 2: did everything ourselves. We grew organically. But we started off.
1:41:44
Speaker 2: We had a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook when
1:41:48
Speaker 2: they were doing like nine million dollars a year in revenue.
1:41:50
Speaker 2: He was like twenty years old, and we made an
1:41:53
Speaker 2: offer to buy it, and he turned it down. And
1:41:56
Speaker 2: then we looked at YouTube, which launched in two thousand
1:42:01
Speaker 2: and five, and that was you know, we saw that
1:42:08
Speaker 2: these these digital networks were like this major paradigm shift.
1:42:14
Speaker 2: This was a whole new thing. This is going to
1:42:16
Speaker 2: become like this was going to really really decimate us
1:42:20
Speaker 2: because no longer were you going to be a gatekeeper
1:42:24
Speaker 2: on YouTube. Anybody could upload video, share it, comment on it,
1:42:28
Speaker 2: this or that they could be peer to peer and
1:42:31
Speaker 2: this is sort of going to unfold and evolve to
1:42:33
Speaker 2: be the future. And sure enough we were the short
1:42:38
Speaker 2: form Kings and along comes YouTube and we looked at YouTube,
1:42:43
Speaker 2: and it was fascinating to see what they were doing.
1:42:46
Speaker 2: But they were doing things that the traditional media people
1:42:49
Speaker 2: thought were illegal. You know, they were taking copyrighted material
1:42:53
Speaker 2: and uploading it for free. And while some companies like
1:42:57
Speaker 2: you know, SNL would use they would put up Lazy Sunday.
1:43:00
Speaker 2: That was an early thing that sort of went viral.
1:43:04
Speaker 2: It was viewed as a content infringement machine by the
1:43:07
Speaker 2: Viacom board. You know, if we buy it, hat, everybody's
1:43:10
Speaker 2: gonna sue us because they can't sue YouTube now because
1:43:13
Speaker 2: they don't have any money. They're not gonna Maybe they're
1:43:15
Speaker 2: going to get sued. But you know, this can't happen.
1:43:18
Speaker 2: This is not right. This is these digital guys are
1:43:20
Speaker 2: just taking away everything for free. We're seeing the same
1:43:23
Speaker 2: argument now with AI Bob. You know, it's the same thing.
1:43:27
Speaker 2: They can't do it. The laws will never stand for it.
1:43:30
Speaker 2: So what we had there, because I look now at
1:43:34
Speaker 2: you know, were we too have been able to buy
1:43:37
Speaker 2: YouTube Buyacom, would look a lot different today. But there
1:43:42
Speaker 2: was a couple of things preventing that from happening. Besides
1:43:44
Speaker 2: the disposition of the board, which you could say was
1:43:48
Speaker 2: you know, maybe it's going to work out the kind
1:43:50
Speaker 2: of why you could afford to buy it. You would
1:43:53
Speaker 2: have to show Wall Street sort of immediate results that
1:43:56
Speaker 2: it was going to show some profit, which wasn't going
1:43:59
Speaker 2: to happen, and you would have to fund the infrastructure
1:44:01
Speaker 2: that they've used to develop this amazing machine that we
1:44:05
Speaker 2: all see now and just you're in awe. It's worth
1:44:07
Speaker 2: almost six hundred billion dollars, So you know, in a
1:44:13
Speaker 2: wood of wood of would have should have there was
1:44:15
Speaker 2: a lot of wood. You could dream about it, but
1:44:17
Speaker 2: it was impossible. We couldn't own it and lose money
1:44:20
Speaker 2: for ten years like Google could. So and then I
1:44:23
Speaker 2: tried to buy We looked at MySpace, which was the
1:44:26
Speaker 2: pre eminent social network of the day, and we had
1:44:30
Speaker 2: conversations with them, and they had that was attracting a
1:44:33
Speaker 2: lot of independent bands, and they would get more traffic
1:44:36
Speaker 2: on their little you know, on their site for some
1:44:40
Speaker 2: of our shows, and we get for our own websites
1:44:42
Speaker 2: on the shows. So Rupert Murdoch came in and bought it,
1:44:47
Speaker 2: and that was a bad thing. I mean, it wasn't
1:44:48
Speaker 2: a bad thing because we hadn't really decided we wanted it,
1:44:52
Speaker 2: but for some there it was a bad thing because
1:44:54
Speaker 2: Rupert Murdoch bought it his uh, his chief rise, and
1:45:00
Speaker 2: Rupert started appearing on the covers of all these trade
1:45:03
Speaker 2: magazines as the digital genius, the new digital guy. And
1:45:07
Speaker 2: Sumner was like, you know, not that guy. And he
1:45:11
Speaker 2: thought I had blown that because I was when Rupert
1:45:15
Speaker 2: was buying it over a weekend with no due diligence.
1:45:17
Speaker 2: I was in Hawaii with my two kids and my
1:45:19
Speaker 2: wife for like a week vacation. And he told Charlie
1:45:22
Speaker 2: Rose after he fired me that. Charlie asked him directly,
1:45:27
Speaker 2: was yeah, was a YouTube factor? He goes, yeah, yeah,
1:45:31
Speaker 2: we lost. I hate to lose, Sir Rupert Murdoch. So
1:45:34
Speaker 2: that was one reason. And then you know, we missed
1:45:40
Speaker 2: numbers for a quarter, but then the second quarter, our
1:45:44
Speaker 2: second quarter numbers were fine. We were back on track.
1:45:49
Speaker 2: You know. We were also precluded from the most obvious
1:45:51
Speaker 2: thing for us to turn digital would have been to
1:45:54
Speaker 2: have taken our library of twenty thousand videos and gotten
1:45:58
Speaker 2: the video rights for them, just be one big Vivo.
1:46:03
Speaker 2: You know. We could have set up the architecture to
1:46:05
Speaker 2: do that and video on demand, and we could have
1:46:07
Speaker 2: figured out innovative ways to put it out and program it.
1:46:10
Speaker 2: But the record companies really put their foot down, the
1:46:15
Speaker 2: legal side of the record companies. They felt that MTV
1:46:19
Speaker 2: Networks had built a business on their backs. Nothing was
1:46:23
Speaker 2: ever said about the money we paid them or the
1:46:26
Speaker 2: fact that we made so many of their acts so popular,
1:46:28
Speaker 2: but they didn't want another MTV on the Internet, so
1:46:31
Speaker 2: it was impossible for us to get a hold of
1:46:33
Speaker 2: the key programming form that had, you know, driven a
1:46:36
Speaker 2: large part of our success on the Internet, which was
1:46:40
Speaker 2: a big frustration and a big roadblock. Not to say
1:46:43
Speaker 2: it couldn't have been one day conquered. But then it
1:46:48
Speaker 2: didn't become my problem anymore because I got fired.
1:46:59
Speaker 1: Okay, before you get fired, you were also running Paramount.
1:47:05
Speaker 1: What did you learn about the movie business? And having
1:47:08
Speaker 1: been deep in the trenches, what is your perspective on
1:47:11
Speaker 1: the movie business today?
1:47:15
Speaker 2: Well, I learned that it's a very opaque business where
1:47:17
Speaker 2: it's kind of hard to keep track of who does what,
1:47:20
Speaker 2: and you know, it's even though I learned that the
1:47:24
Speaker 2: feature film is king always on the hierarchy in Hollywood,
1:47:30
Speaker 2: nothing's higher than the movie business. Then came, you know,
1:47:33
Speaker 2: the sort of television business, the premium cable business. Then
1:47:37
Speaker 2: we were sort of at the next level basic cable,
1:47:41
Speaker 2: and then the music business that was like a whole
1:47:43
Speaker 2: other thing. They didn't understand that at all. They didn't
1:47:46
Speaker 2: understand how these music companies were making all this money.
1:47:50
Speaker 2: These guys were the most untraditional businessmen of all were
1:47:53
Speaker 2: in the record business. I found it to be the
1:47:55
Speaker 2: most interesting people and the most fun to be with.
1:47:58
Speaker 2: You know, all these guys scoundrels and clever people and whatever,
1:48:04
Speaker 2: but they all love their they love what they did.
1:48:06
Speaker 2: But in the movie business, you learn that the movie
1:48:08
Speaker 2: studio they take the bulk of the money. They'll find
1:48:12
Speaker 2: out ways in terms of you know, we were we
1:48:18
Speaker 2: were going to try and turn our brands into movies,
1:48:21
Speaker 2: which we did do. Nickelodeon, MTV, VH one had like
1:48:25
Speaker 2: that Ben Stiller movie, zoolanderv VH one. Everyone we made
1:48:30
Speaker 2: like forty movies over course of time and sort of
1:48:33
Speaker 2: sat at the hand of Sherry Lansing who helped us,
1:48:36
Speaker 2: you know, become accomplished movie makers from just being little
1:48:40
Speaker 2: cable weasels. I learned that everybody in my company wanted
1:48:43
Speaker 2: to make movies. You know, all my top creative people
1:48:46
Speaker 2: wanted to go to the movie studios. They wanted them.
1:48:50
Speaker 2: Everyone wants to make a movie. I mean, come on,
1:48:52
Speaker 2: I don't want to work on some Buffkis television show.
1:48:54
Speaker 2: If I have a chance to work on a movie,
1:48:56
Speaker 2: that's great for me. So it was, you know, there
1:48:58
Speaker 2: was a pre we ate of exodus to want to
1:49:01
Speaker 2: do this. But at the end of the day, we
1:49:03
Speaker 2: didn't make much money on movies, even if it was
1:49:06
Speaker 2: on our own ip. You know, we get a fee.
1:49:08
Speaker 2: And then we found out one sunder bought Paramount that
1:49:12
Speaker 2: we were an exclusive producer. In other words, we couldn't
1:49:19
Speaker 2: take if we wanted to make a movie, and they
1:49:21
Speaker 2: said no, we couldn't take it to Sony or Fox.
1:49:25
Speaker 2: So we were sort of the prisoners of Melrose Avenue way.
1:49:28
Speaker 2: It was unusual in the television business, it wasn't unusual
1:49:30
Speaker 2: to have an exclusive deal, but he didn't see a
1:49:33
Speaker 2: lot of that going on in the movie business. So
1:49:34
Speaker 2: that was a big frustration. So always had a little
1:49:38
Speaker 2: friction back and forth. And I'll say, like on the
1:49:43
Speaker 2: Paramount side, they found a lot of our people to
1:49:45
Speaker 2: be kind of arrogant, which was true. It wasn't like
1:49:48
Speaker 2: a perfect match. But we came to a good equilibrium.
1:49:52
Speaker 2: I can't say enough about Sherry Lansing. You know, she
1:49:55
Speaker 2: was gracious and great despite the fact that we often
1:49:59
Speaker 2: did stupid things. But we never got you know, I
1:50:02
Speaker 2: could make more money in a couple hours on television
1:50:04
Speaker 2: I could make on a movie and after absorbing all
1:50:07
Speaker 2: that creative energy. But we had some hit movies and
1:50:10
Speaker 2: it was always exhilarating when it happened. You know. We
1:50:12
Speaker 2: did movies with the Jackass guys, with the South Park guys,
1:50:15
Speaker 2: with Beavis and butt Head. We had movies like Election,
1:50:19
Speaker 2: Napoleon Dynamite. You know, we had a flair for finding
1:50:22
Speaker 2: some good projects. The Twilight series is a good example.
1:50:25
Speaker 2: Some it came to us, or before it came to us.
1:50:29
Speaker 2: We developed it from a book. We developed a script
1:50:32
Speaker 2: for Twilight, and Paramount didn't want to make it. We
1:50:35
Speaker 2: couldn't take it anywhere. It went to Summit. The thing
1:50:38
Speaker 2: went on to make like three or four billion dollars
1:50:40
Speaker 2: in box office. You know what they used to say.
1:50:42
Speaker 2: John Dolson used to say, I don't want to see
1:50:45
Speaker 2: some movie we turned down. Then you guys take somewhere
1:50:49
Speaker 2: else and it's a hit. It'll be embarrassing, you know,
1:50:51
Speaker 2: that kind of that kind of thinking, I would permeate
1:50:54
Speaker 2: it permeate in Hollywood in those days, wasn't just John.
1:50:58
Speaker 2: John was a guy that I was a really tough guy,
1:51:00
Speaker 2: but I really came to respect him. He was He
1:51:04
Speaker 2: really knew his rock and roll, he knew his music.
1:51:06
Speaker 2: He was a funny man. Anyway, we made, like I guess,
1:51:12
Speaker 2: forty movies over the years. They were largely lower budget movies,
1:51:17
Speaker 2: and most of them were profitable. And it was an
1:51:21
Speaker 2: interesting experience, you know, that being you know, have a
1:51:24
Speaker 2: chair in Hollywood. But at one point, yes, when I
1:51:28
Speaker 2: became the CEO of Paramount, reported to me, so now
1:51:32
Speaker 2: I'm like the cable guy, like Dave's aslov I'm like
1:51:35
Speaker 2: the cable guy. I'm in charge of a movie studio,
1:51:39
Speaker 2: which I had never dreamed of.
1:51:41
Speaker 1: So what'd you learn?
1:51:43
Speaker 2: Well, I had learned a lot, you know what. One
1:51:45
Speaker 2: of the first things I did was I got in
1:51:48
Speaker 2: touch with Bob Daily, who, with Terry Simmel, had the
1:51:52
Speaker 2: best run of probably any studio heads in history. And
1:51:57
Speaker 2: I asked Bob Daily to be my mentor and teach
1:52:00
Speaker 2: me the ins and outs, really the ins and outs
1:52:02
Speaker 2: of the movie business that I might not have learned
1:52:05
Speaker 2: just being a producer on the lot for Paramount making
1:52:08
Speaker 2: movies and handing them over to him. So he had
1:52:10
Speaker 2: his own little film school he set up for me,
1:52:13
Speaker 2: and it was good to sort of learn from the
1:52:17
Speaker 2: master how P and L's work, all the financial mechanisms,
1:52:23
Speaker 2: and so I got myself equipped. And then Sherry decided
1:52:26
Speaker 2: that she was going to leave, so I had to
1:52:29
Speaker 2: find a new studio head, and Bob. I had Bob
1:52:35
Speaker 2: interview candidates. I mean, the problem is all the studio
1:52:38
Speaker 2: heads in those days, they used to kind of rotate
1:52:39
Speaker 2: from studio to studio, and it was very rare that
1:52:43
Speaker 2: someone from outside the system would actually take up and
1:52:46
Speaker 2: run a studio. Bob Evans back in the day, you know,
1:52:49
Speaker 2: he was an actor. He ended up running Paramount. I
1:52:51
Speaker 2: had a pretty successful run, I must say. I mean
1:52:54
Speaker 2: some of those movies at Paramount cranked out Love Story
1:52:56
Speaker 2: in the late eighties, late seventies, Love Story, Apocalypse now
1:53:00
Speaker 2: gon All came out under his reign for a guy
1:53:02
Speaker 2: who didn't know what he was doing, and I ended
1:53:04
Speaker 2: up hiring Brad Gray, who was the partner of Berlstein
1:53:09
Speaker 2: Gray to run the studio. And then you know, we
1:53:16
Speaker 2: acquired dream Works. Brad got caught up in this Anthony
1:53:21
Speaker 2: Pelicano scandal, which really sullied his reputation and was a
1:53:26
Speaker 2: big drama for him. And that's where I was when
1:53:33
Speaker 2: I got fired, you know, I mean, I never really
1:53:36
Speaker 2: got a chance to I installed Brad at the studio.
1:53:40
Speaker 2: He was there for a couple of years. He ended up.
1:53:44
Speaker 2: He died at a young age, at fifty nine, a
1:53:48
Speaker 2: couple of years after I left. And that's my story.
1:53:52
Speaker 1: Well, David Geffen implored you to hire Brad Gray. In retrospect,
1:54:01
Speaker 1: did you find that people were doing your a solid
1:54:04
Speaker 1: or everybody had an agenda? You're better off just listening
1:54:07
Speaker 1: to yourself.
1:54:09
Speaker 2: People had an agenda a lot of times. But in
1:54:12
Speaker 2: the case of David, David was someone I had developed
1:54:16
Speaker 2: a relationship. He was the first guy to give us
1:54:18
Speaker 2: videos for MTV. He was the first guy we made
1:54:23
Speaker 2: a movie with. He called me up one day in
1:54:24
Speaker 2: New York. I was it was a Saturday morning. He's
1:54:27
Speaker 2: in LA He calls me like ten o'clock in the
1:54:28
Speaker 2: morning in New York. He says, you know, I saw
1:54:30
Speaker 2: Beavis and butt Head last night. Our first episode ran
1:54:34
Speaker 2: you know whatever, It was at ten o'clock. And it
1:54:36
Speaker 2: wasn't like somebody on his staff handed him a video
1:54:39
Speaker 2: tape and said check this out. I mean, was David
1:54:42
Speaker 2: was on the case. He said, let's make a movie
1:54:44
Speaker 2: with those guys. So so, all right, we'll make a movie.
1:54:47
Speaker 2: He was in butt Head, so he was always a
1:54:50
Speaker 2: source of good advice. And when I was going through
1:54:54
Speaker 2: the exercise of looking for people, it wasn't like he
1:54:57
Speaker 2: implored me. He called me one day and he said,
1:55:00
Speaker 2: was in Bay Route. I remember this. He said, I
1:55:02
Speaker 2: found the guy I think could work, which is Brad Gray.
1:55:04
Speaker 2: Because we had already been through. I had already been
1:55:07
Speaker 2: through all the studio hads I might want to hire,
1:55:11
Speaker 2: like say Stacy Snyder. They all had contracts and other
1:55:15
Speaker 2: people who were sort of on the second rung, they
1:55:17
Speaker 2: weren't really there. And I started thinking, well, maybe we
1:55:19
Speaker 2: look on the outside. Someone who's got the ability to
1:55:22
Speaker 2: deal with talent, who's smart about the business, might not
1:55:25
Speaker 2: necessarily have a pedigree purely have been in a movie studio.
1:55:29
Speaker 2: And David said, you know, maybe Brad's your guy. Brad
1:55:32
Speaker 2: was at the peak of his powers then he had
1:55:36
Speaker 2: the sopranos and he had started turning Perlstein Gray in
1:55:41
Speaker 2: a bit of a studio. He did Bill Mahery had
1:55:43
Speaker 2: a relationship with Gary Shannling. He really had a lot
1:55:47
Speaker 2: of aspirations and energy. And I had a bunch of
1:55:52
Speaker 2: interviews with Bob with the Brad, I sent him to Bob.
1:55:56
Speaker 2: Bob gave me the thumbs up. He really put him
1:55:58
Speaker 2: through the trail. Seemed to be able and whatnot. And
1:56:01
Speaker 2: we started out and he ran into a buzzsaw with Pelicano.
1:56:07
Speaker 2: That was you know, there was two front page stories
1:56:09
Speaker 2: about him and that really knocked him off balance. I
1:56:14
Speaker 2: must say he recovered. But and when I left, he
1:56:20
Speaker 2: was in charge of Paramount, so I hired Brad.
1:56:24
Speaker 1: Okay, you have all this experience. What's your view of
1:56:29
Speaker 1: these businesses today? In your book you say somebody want
1:56:33
Speaker 1: to start a cable channel and you're laughing, And then
1:56:36
Speaker 1: I get emailed that Morgan Roland is starting a field
1:56:39
Speaker 1: and stream channel. The movie business with a twenty five
1:56:43
Speaker 1: straight drama failures. Where's it all going?
1:56:50
Speaker 2: Well, Morgan Wallin should save his money. I mean, he's
1:56:54
Speaker 2: pissing in the wind, wants to start a you know,
1:56:56
Speaker 2: in the cord cutting era where the TV revolution has ended,
1:57:01
Speaker 2: and it's winding down these linear networks. Unless you've got
1:57:04
Speaker 2: some exclusive product that's really unique, like news or sports,
1:57:10
Speaker 2: you know, it's most of this other stuff's all available
1:57:12
Speaker 2: on demand on streaming services. He'd be smart to start
1:57:16
Speaker 2: in a different way other than setting up a linear
1:57:18
Speaker 2: cable network. But now, I mean, it's no one likes
1:57:24
Speaker 2: to see these movie studios disappear. I mean, we saw
1:57:29
Speaker 2: a Fox get gobbled up by Disney. Disney had a
1:57:33
Speaker 2: real smart strategy about going digital, which was doubling down
1:57:36
Speaker 2: and getting more being a really invincible content supplier. And
1:57:47
Speaker 2: you know, now we're looking at the Ellison's coming in
1:57:49
Speaker 2: and buying Paramount. And when I looked at, for example,
1:57:55
Speaker 2: the alternatives for Paramount, it's like my old high school.
1:58:00
Speaker 2: You wanted to end up in good hands. You want
1:58:01
Speaker 2: it to be solved. And they were having tough time
1:58:05
Speaker 2: in the wake of a lot of the bad moves
1:58:07
Speaker 2: that had been made. And here you have David Ellison
1:58:10
Speaker 2: who actually likes movies. He makes movies, and he's good
1:58:16
Speaker 2: at it, and they've made some movies. Had a wayward talent,
1:58:20
Speaker 2: he understands the business. He's got a lot of money,
1:58:24
Speaker 2: and you know, he made a master movie, put Sherry
1:58:27
Speaker 2: Lansing on the board, you know, I mean, you get
1:58:30
Speaker 2: a sense that Paramount's not going to disappear, which is
1:58:34
Speaker 2: good news. I mean, the town doesn't want to see
1:58:37
Speaker 2: another studio disappear. I remember back when we started MTV,
1:58:41
Speaker 2: there was like forty record labels. You remember these days,
1:58:43
Speaker 2: a lot of them started by entrepreneurs and run by
1:58:46
Speaker 2: entrepreneurs who who basically had instincts and tastes, and they
1:58:50
Speaker 2: kind of modeled these labels after their own taste. It
1:58:52
Speaker 2: was a whole different game. Now there's like two and
1:58:54
Speaker 2: a half record companies and a lot of stuff in
1:58:57
Speaker 2: the outer rings, but it's a very different business. And
1:59:01
Speaker 2: now people all over the town are losing their jobs
1:59:04
Speaker 2: and they're thinking, is Ellison going to take over Paramount?
1:59:07
Speaker 2: I don't know, I mean, I know, I know they
1:59:11
Speaker 2: on paper it would make sense for them to do it.
1:59:15
Speaker 1: Which about Paramount buying Warner just to be clear.
1:59:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would make sense. I mean they could. They
1:59:20
Speaker 2: could fold up a lot of stuff, save more, you
1:59:23
Speaker 2: know the old arguments, you know, make efficiencies in the
1:59:27
Speaker 2: back office. They could keep the movie brands separate, and
1:59:30
Speaker 2: they'd have more clout and they could compete more avidly,
1:59:34
Speaker 2: but you know, it would mean another movie studio disappears.
1:59:38
Speaker 2: I love I love the area of the forty record companies.
1:59:41
Speaker 2: I thought that was really cool, more interesting. But someone's
1:59:48
Speaker 2: going to get someone's gonna you know. David Zaslov did
1:59:52
Speaker 2: the deal with Warner Brothers because he saw a discovery
1:59:56
Speaker 2: was going to be in sad shapes if they didn't
1:59:58
Speaker 2: latch onto somebody, and he was able to engineer a
2:00:02
Speaker 2: deal with John Malone, whereas they were able to actually
2:00:04
Speaker 2: buy Warner Brothers. It was sort of brilliant in a way.
2:00:09
Speaker 2: But in the meantime, while they're trying to save themselves,
2:00:12
Speaker 2: you know, we're seeing the exhibition business not being great.
2:00:17
Speaker 2: You know, there was I think some hope this summer
2:00:19
Speaker 2: that people would like to go to the theaters, but
2:00:22
Speaker 2: more and more people now have theaters in their homes
2:00:24
Speaker 2: of one form or another. And it's what it was
2:00:28
Speaker 2: the word they're using now, and not affordable. It's part
2:00:31
Speaker 2: of the unaffordability problem going to the movies. So a
2:00:36
Speaker 2: lot of the money has been sucked out of the
2:00:38
Speaker 2: movie business. I don't know what happens, Bob, but it
2:00:41
Speaker 2: seems like more consolidations probably in the wings. It seems
2:00:44
Speaker 2: like the theater exhibition business is going to diminish, and
2:00:48
Speaker 2: it seems like companies that are big are going to survive.
2:00:52
Speaker 2: At the same time, you look around the edges and
2:00:54
Speaker 2: you see, oh, there's creative companies like A twenty four
2:00:57
Speaker 2: and Nion who are like sort of in the moll
2:01:00
Speaker 2: of small movie companies of your where they have good
2:01:04
Speaker 2: tastes and they can find a good movie and market it.
2:01:06
Speaker 2: Within the big system, you still have like Fox search,
2:01:09
Speaker 2: like and create, buy and create a buzz around, you know,
2:01:13
Speaker 2: tasty movies. I've always been a guy who was happy
2:01:16
Speaker 2: to sort of move around the edges rather than be
2:01:19
Speaker 2: in the mainstream, you know, mainstream movie labels. You know,
2:01:24
Speaker 2: it's a high investment business. You got to pay a
2:01:27
Speaker 2: lot of money. With that movie that's out now with
2:01:31
Speaker 2: I'm forgetting the name, it's getting to be that time
2:01:34
Speaker 2: of night. But you know, with the Leonardo DiCaprio and
2:01:39
Speaker 2: Serian Penn, I don't have you seen that.
2:01:41
Speaker 1: No, I haven't. Paul Thomas Anderson movie.
2:01:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good. I mean, it's phil You look at
2:01:46
Speaker 2: that and you go, that's good. It was fun, but
2:01:49
Speaker 2: you know, it's made the economy. It kind of even
2:01:51
Speaker 2: though it made a couple of hundred million dollars, it
2:01:53
Speaker 2: kind of fell short of what it needed to make.
2:01:56
Speaker 2: And I know Wonners Brothers has had some other successes,
2:01:59
Speaker 2: So it's hard to say what's going to happen is
2:02:02
Speaker 2: but it's clear that one something's going to happen in
2:02:04
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers. And that's maybe the most legendary of all
2:02:07
Speaker 2: the movie studios. You know, the one with the most
2:02:10
Speaker 2: cachet about it is an NBC universe A going to
2:02:14
Speaker 2: do something? Is Netflix going to do something? I don't know.
2:02:17
Speaker 2: You know, I never thought that the tech guys, which
2:02:20
Speaker 2: I always include Netflix sort of in that category. I
2:02:23
Speaker 2: never thought they were that hot on buying movie studios.
2:02:26
Speaker 2: I mean, they'd figure, why the hell do I need
2:02:28
Speaker 2: to do that? I can't just license them.
2:02:31
Speaker 1: I think they would only be buying it for the titles.
2:02:33
Speaker 1: I can't imagine I'm getting into production, et cetera. But okay,
2:02:39
Speaker 1: you're off the radar with your clothing business. Then you
2:02:43
Speaker 1: end up coming in the side door, going in mainstream
2:02:46
Speaker 1: corporate America. Sumner cuts you loose and you have enough cash,
2:02:53
Speaker 1: but you're offered some big jobs. Ultimately, you work with
2:02:59
Speaker 1: Shane Smith Advice, you work with Oprah, you work with Bono,
2:03:02
Speaker 1: and all those things are very fulfilling, but it's one
2:03:06
Speaker 1: step removed from the game without mentioning names. I know
2:03:10
Speaker 1: people who are contemporaries and you say how much longer
2:03:13
Speaker 1: are you going to do this? And they say, I
2:03:15
Speaker 1: don't want to lose access. So emotionally, you were offered
2:03:21
Speaker 1: other big jobs subsequent to some nerve firing you with
2:03:27
Speaker 1: hindsight to say I played it exactly the way I
2:03:29
Speaker 1: wanted or did you say I played it? But I'm
2:03:34
Speaker 1: not happy with the way some people treated me where
2:03:36
Speaker 1: I was. What are your feelings about your post paramount activities?
2:03:42
Speaker 2: Listen, I never fully identified with my job, like I
2:03:44
Speaker 2: know a lot of people do an entertainment business. I
2:03:47
Speaker 2: just thought, you know, there's a lot of different things
2:03:49
Speaker 2: you can do with your life. I had a great
2:03:50
Speaker 2: run there twenty six years. I kept my toe in
2:03:53
Speaker 2: a little bit on boards of some companies. I like
2:03:56
Speaker 2: working with Advice, I like working with Oprah, but there's
2:04:00
Speaker 2: no access I don't need. I don't need that kind
2:04:02
Speaker 2: of access just for the sake but I have a
2:04:04
Speaker 2: circle of friends. If someone doesn't want to be my
2:04:07
Speaker 2: friend because I don't have a position of power in
2:04:10
Speaker 2: the Hollywood structure, well you know, I couldn't care less.
2:04:13
Speaker 2: I don't really need them as friends. I got plenty
2:04:16
Speaker 2: of friends I've never been. I'm happy. In some ways.
2:04:20
Speaker 2: I felt relieved I didn't have to deal with a
2:04:21
Speaker 2: lot of this michigansh that's going on right now, you know,
2:04:24
Speaker 2: to be in the big game with the big companies.
2:04:28
Speaker 2: I know for some people that's their life and blood,
2:04:30
Speaker 2: but it never was for me. I never fully identified
2:04:33
Speaker 2: myself with my job, so it was easier for me
2:04:36
Speaker 2: to have this transition than maybe some other people. So
2:04:40
Speaker 2: I have no complaints. I also feel, at my age,
2:04:44
Speaker 2: you know, I'm sort of got to do good or
2:04:46
Speaker 2: thing going on. I went back to Afghanistan for twelve
2:04:49
Speaker 2: years to work with a company. I was making hardly
2:04:52
Speaker 2: any money at it. To me, it was so exhilarating.
2:04:55
Speaker 2: I thought we were really you know, this was a country,
2:04:58
Speaker 2: a company that had social purpose baked into its agenda,
2:05:02
Speaker 2: gender equality, civilizing Afghans, connecting them each other, connecting them
2:05:07
Speaker 2: to or I loved it. Trying to replicate a bit
2:05:10
Speaker 2: of what we had done I had done in the past.
2:05:12
Speaker 2: So again, that was a business on the margins if
2:05:14
Speaker 2: there ever was want in the frontier market, and it
2:05:18
Speaker 2: was a thrill to be there and do that. You know,
2:05:20
Speaker 2: it wasn't it wasn't paying me a lot of money.
2:05:23
Speaker 2: But how much money do you need? You know? I
2:05:25
Speaker 2: don't understand why a billionaire, for example, thinks he has
2:05:30
Speaker 2: to have two billion dollars, But the hell you can't.
2:05:32
Speaker 2: You couldn't spend a billion dollars. You know, you really
2:05:35
Speaker 2: have to put your mind to it. That's money has
2:05:38
Speaker 2: never been my motivation. I wanted to have experience. I
2:05:42
Speaker 2: want to have full experiences that I enjoyed with people
2:05:45
Speaker 2: I like. I want to be able to see parts
2:05:48
Speaker 2: of the world I used to dream about and continue
2:05:51
Speaker 2: to do that. Stay healthy and have fun. It wouldn't
2:05:55
Speaker 2: be fun running one of these companies right now. That's
2:05:57
Speaker 2: another thing. It doesn't look like these guys are having
2:06:00
Speaker 2: a ball right back. And you were there back in
2:06:04
Speaker 2: the eighties and the nineties, people were having a lot
2:06:06
Speaker 2: of fun running these companies. That ain't the case now.
2:06:11
Speaker 1: Okay, Finally, as someone who's been married a couple of
2:06:14
Speaker 1: times number of relationships. Can someone balance a high powered
2:06:20
Speaker 1: job like this with life, the life work balance or
2:06:24
Speaker 1: really the nature of these jobs they're going to consume
2:06:27
Speaker 1: so much of your time and mental energy.
2:06:31
Speaker 2: Well, a good question. You know, you really give up
2:06:34
Speaker 2: a lot to really throw yourself into one of these jobs,
2:06:37
Speaker 2: you know, because they're all consuming. But you know, I
2:06:40
Speaker 2: look around and I see, you know, there's people who
2:06:44
Speaker 2: I look at my friends in Ginianopolis. He ran Fox,
2:06:48
Speaker 2: he ran Paramount. He was doing as big as anyone
2:06:51
Speaker 2: could do in the movie business. And he and and
2:06:54
Speaker 2: are still happily married. You know, look at Jeffrey Katzenberg
2:06:58
Speaker 2: or Steven Spielberg. They been executives and producers and whatnot.
2:07:02
Speaker 2: They're still married. Everybody doesn't get divorced. Peter Turning, Peter
2:07:05
Speaker 2: Urnan is a great example of someone who was at
2:07:07
Speaker 2: the top and figure out a way to do it differently,
2:07:10
Speaker 2: you know, not on the sidelines, but in his own
2:07:14
Speaker 2: little field and space, by investing in companies and doing
2:07:17
Speaker 2: it really smartly. Well, you know, I don't see that
2:07:21
Speaker 2: divorce is necessarily a phata company if you have a
2:07:25
Speaker 2: high powered job.
2:07:26
Speaker 1: No, Okay, it's been great talking to you. Always great
2:07:31
Speaker 1: talking to you Tom. The book, you know you've heard,
2:07:34
Speaker 1: the surface of the story covers Tom's complete life from Connecticut,
2:07:40
Speaker 1: from the Liverpool Docks to the Hollywood Bull. As Matt
2:07:43
Speaker 1: the Hoople would say, the book is great. I couldn't
2:07:47
Speaker 1: put it down. Unplugged by Tom Freston. Tom, thanks so
2:07:50
Speaker 1: much for taking this time with my audience.
2:07:53
Speaker 2: Bob always good to talk to you and I appreciate
2:07:55
Speaker 2: this the poortant opportunity to talk about the book. So
2:07:58
Speaker 2: I'll see you soon out there.
2:08:00
Speaker 1: Absolutely to take care until next time. This is Bob left,
2:08:04
Speaker 1: SAIDs