"Tom Freston"

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Speaker 1 It's so good to be here with you guys today. It's so fast to be here.

Speaker 1 It's been a while. No, it feels like it's been a while since I've said it's really good to be with you.

Speaker 2 It's really good to be with you guys. How are your headphones?

Speaker 2 Do they fit okay? Are they tight?

Speaker 1 My headphones?

Speaker 2 Yeah, for the record today.

Speaker 1 Mine are

Speaker 1 seen feels pretty good.

Speaker 1 Wait, you've got new headphones on, don't you, Sean?

Speaker 2 I do, yeah.

Speaker 2 They're new. I might wear them out.
I might wear them out.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 Because you want to look like Princess Leia?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think they look cool.

Speaker 1 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This whole thing was a setup because you wanted compliments for your new headphones? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Did you want to mention the company or something like that? Is that what you're angry?

Speaker 1 No idea what the company is. Oh, wait, I just got a text.
Welcome, it's an all-new smart list. Smart.

Speaker 1 Smart.

Speaker 1 Smart

Speaker 1 list.

Speaker 3 How about I fixed myself?

Speaker 1 No way.

Speaker 3 It's about time. I know how to fix myself.

Speaker 1 I saw you looking. I saw you looking and then doing stuff.
And I actually saw you do the class. You literally went like this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, tap the lips.

Speaker 1 That's how the brain works.

Speaker 3 Audibly went the button on the lips.

Speaker 1 By the way, JB, you have ruined forever. I noticed it yesterday again.
Somebody commented on it. Getting out of the car, I went,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 It tightens the core to make a little bit of a brain.

Speaker 3 Sean, do you do it now too?

Speaker 2 I do it when I get in the car too.

Speaker 1 I realize I've been doing it since I was 35 because of you.

Speaker 3 We're all getting that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so, well, this is, what number episode is this for us? Are we north?

Speaker 1 We're north of 200, right?

Speaker 1 Over 250, I think. Yeah, we're in the 280s now.

Speaker 1 No, really?

Speaker 3 I can now. I'm basically my own tech support now.
I can, I can know how to find the little

Speaker 1 we don't need to tell you 290 times.

Speaker 1 You know, that's the good news. That is true.

Speaker 2 Out of the three of us, who has the most technical problems?

Speaker 1 Do we get to vote or do you have to?

Speaker 3 I think I'm all right.

Speaker 3 I'll bet, Sean,

Speaker 3 you're worse because you're able to because Scotty can catch you every time.

Speaker 1 This is true.

Speaker 2 I scream my head off if I'm like, I can't log on.

Speaker 1 My computer doesn't.

Speaker 1 Who has the least?

Speaker 3 The

Speaker 3 least problems? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Technical problems.

Speaker 1 Not problems. Not world problems.

Speaker 2 No, it's always you. Why is that? Because that's what you do for a living.

Speaker 1 Well, we're probably used to the setup of the mic.

Speaker 2 Yeah, isn't that nice?

Speaker 3 That's what, and you also, you started, weren't you

Speaker 3 one of the original Geek Squad guys?

Speaker 1 I did do.

Speaker 1 I still own the name. What is it? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I did all the art.

Speaker 2 I went to a Dodgers game with Jason a couple of weeks ago, and you sure sure did. And then we went to the USC football game.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you did. And

Speaker 3 we had a decent quarter there.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, that was crazy.

Speaker 2 Jason and I, I had all the concessions that Jason

Speaker 1 was holding that.

Speaker 3 This guy looked like he was at a state fair.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Fuck.

Speaker 1 It did. It looked like I had like

Speaker 3 two armfuls.

Speaker 2 And I had like a soft pretzel, and Jason had his hot dog and his phone, and I had all the drinks and the pretzels. And the cheese dipping.

Speaker 1 I I once described you as a soft pretzel. That's funny.

Speaker 2 Just in knots all over.

Speaker 1 But it sounds like you're really living your best life, though, Sharon.

Speaker 2 But that was so embarrassing. That was so fun, but it was so embarrassing because somebody was in our seats, and then I felt like the whole stadium was looking at us as we were just standing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, somebody, you know, you show up a little bit late, and people spread out, and they get in your seats, and then you have to like, you have to, you show up at the aisle, and you're kind of in a half squat because you don't want to block

Speaker 1 you,

Speaker 1 these big dickhead actors,

Speaker 1 grocery actors

Speaker 1 right and everybody's like oh you're going to kick these people out

Speaker 3 but you have to like show proof of your tickets and you remember you used to used to pass your ticket down the aisle yeah i see him but now the tickets are on your phone

Speaker 3 tickets are on your phone you got to like pass your phone down the aisle people are touching your phone you know i don't like that will right and and these guys guess what here's here's the news while he's eating his hot dog yeah they wouldn't move yeah no they're like yeah i see this is your ticket but they told us to sit here i'm like who told you to sit the usher i said well i don't see the usher now.

Speaker 3 Well, you got to get them and tell them to move us.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 3 And then I'm so sit on the stairs with our groceries and wait.

Speaker 1 I mean, oh, God, it was the worst. It took like 10 minutes.
And then they finally got them out.

Speaker 3 And then they finally got out. Did it come to blows?

Speaker 1 Did it all? A family of four were relocated. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And just us two sat down. And now we got two extra seats next to us.
And we looked like super ass.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 I ate my pretzel on this on the stairs, and my cheese went everywhere.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 You mean actual cheese? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It wasn't a result of eating the pretzel, made your cheese go everywhere. You created cheese.

Speaker 1 No, it wasn't. Okay.
I didn't have any cheese. We'll save that for Smartless After Dark.

Speaker 1 Which we still haven't gotten off the ground.

Speaker 3 But still working on the logo.

Speaker 1 Which is funny because our guest today, I said Smartless. He often refers to it as shameless.
And I know he's joking in his tongue in cheek because I love it.

Speaker 3 It's pretty shameless. It is.

Speaker 1 And this is a guy who's really, you want to talk about Live the Life. This guy's really lived the life, okay? Oh, boy.
He starts starts out, he's the pride of Connecticut, sort of.

Speaker 1 He started out running a clothing company out of Afghanistan and India. No joke.
Back in like the early 70s when nobody was over there.

Speaker 1 He just, I mean, he's the kind of guy you'd find him on a night boat to Tangier. That's the kind of dude he is.

Speaker 1 Out of nowhere, he comes back after running, literally trying to avoid tariffs and running clothing illegally across the St. Lawrence into upstate New York.

Speaker 1 He then decides he's going to change everything and he goes and he starts to create, he creates this thing that literally changed the way that we saw music, fashion, culture, everything.

Speaker 1 It went global everywhere. Andy Warren.
Runs a bunch of little networks you might have heard of called Nickelodeon VH1 Company Central. Basically,

Speaker 3 Mr. Tom Freston.

Speaker 1 He becomes CEO of Viacom, and now he's the chair of the one campaign fighting poverty. He's done it all.
He's the coolest guy, and I'm happy to call him my friend you guys, it's Mr. Tom Freston.

Speaker 3 Cannot wait.

Speaker 1 Oh, Mr.

Speaker 1 Hey, guys.

Speaker 1 Can't wait to hear all about this fella. It's

Speaker 1 an honor to be here. Thank you.
Here on Shameless.

Speaker 1 You've seen all 10 seasons on Showtime for us.

Speaker 1 Shameless.

Speaker 1 Shameless.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 How do you and Will know each other, Tom?

Speaker 1 Just for hanging around in New York, out on Long Island. Yeah,

Speaker 1 we originally met through our mutual friend

Speaker 1 many years ago through Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy and Jane Buffett introduced us back in the day.
Tom's good friend,

Speaker 1 may he rest in peace.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm sorry about your loss.

Speaker 1 The great Jimmy Buffett. And who was, Jimmy, one of the things he did was he brought a lot of people together and introduced a lot of people.
Am I right about that, Tom? Yeah, he sure did. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He was.

Speaker 3 Tom, how did you meet Jimmy?

Speaker 1 I met Jimmy in the basement of a bar called JP's

Speaker 1 in Manhattan in the 70s. It was like, you know, at 5 a.m., you'd open up the...
one of those Bilco doors or 8 a.m. and walk out in the sunlight like a vampire.
But he would hang out there.

Speaker 1 It was like sort of a music industry hangout. So I met him there in 1977.
Wow. And we just, you know, would hang out and trips.
I would travel with him a lot. He liked to go, he liked to travel.

Speaker 1 And that was especially good, especially after he bought a jet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, was he flying planes back then?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he could fly all kinds of planes, the Jimmy Jets. Yeah, he was very serious about it.
He could fly seaplanes, you know, all kinds of

Speaker 1 big fancy ones as well.

Speaker 1 Tom, he had a few, Jimmy, Jimmy also crashed a few planes, didn't he? He did.

Speaker 1 He landed in Nantucket and sort of flipped it over.

Speaker 1 And there was other instances of

Speaker 1 seasons. One time when we were, I told that story when they did that

Speaker 1 show at the Hollywood Bowl in honor of Jimmy, and I told the story about

Speaker 1 he was going to do takeoff and landings on this little island. And he said, I said, what are you doing this morning? He goes, I got to go get certified.
I'm doing takeoff and landings.

Speaker 1 Do you want to go? And I go, yeah. And then he left the room and Jane turned to me and she goes, dude, he's crashed like three planes.
You're not getting on.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 The key word there is training.

Speaker 1 Do you want to come with training? No.

Speaker 1 So, Tom,

Speaker 1 I want to go all the way back. By the way,

Speaker 1 Tom's got a book that we're going to get. We're going to get into Tom's book in a second because I read it a while ago and it's phenomenal.

Speaker 1 But I will call Unplugged, which is fantastic, which is, I think, out now, right, Tom? It comes out November 18. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, but, you know, again, we've, we've known each other a little bit over the years, but I read your book. So, Tom, walk us through.
And I wasn't joking when I said you started,

Speaker 1 you started a clothing company in Afghanistan, in India. Yeah, I want to know how and why.
In 1970,

Speaker 1 how is one able to do that?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 let's see.

Speaker 1 I had been working in an ad agency in New York. I got assigned to Charmin Toilet Paper.
Sure.

Speaker 1 A tough account. Working with Mr.
Whipple and

Speaker 1 my old girlfriend was in Paris Coleman. I said, hey, you can't do that.
Come with me. We're going to cross the Sahara Desert.

Speaker 1 And I quit my job and a week later I was on a plane and I met her and we traveled around and then she left and I kept going.

Speaker 1 I tried for a whole year and at one point I I met some woman who said, you know, you've got to go to India. That's the greatest show on earth.
So I did do that.

Speaker 1 And I ended up loving India and Afghanistan. And I stayed for, I tried to figure out how can I live here.
This is like living a whole other, on a whole other planet back then.

Speaker 2 And what year-ish?

Speaker 1 This is 1972. So I stayed through 1979.
I started a couple of businesses. We would design and make clothes.
I mean, higher quality clothes we'd sell to Bloomingdales and so forth.

Speaker 1 And it became a big business. I mean, and I had a house in Delhi, and I was able to travel everywhere.
I was living like a pasha. It was wonderful.
And then a bunch of bad things happened to me. And

Speaker 1 not the least of which was Jimmy Carter put an embargo. It's sort of like what's going on today with the tariffs.
There would be no more clothing imports from India. And I had all this.

Speaker 1 stuff in production. Wow.
And it was a nightmare working there in those days.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I actually ended up smuggling three tons of stuff in from Canada. Yeah, wait, wait, wait, Tom, Tom, take us through that.

Speaker 1 So you get, by the way, this is like, so this before, obviously before the internet and all that stuff, so you guys are, this is all sort of phone calls and everything takes a little bit longer.

Speaker 1 And now you've got all these goods that you're sitting on and you got to get it into the States. And so you decide what?

Speaker 1 Well, I had met in my years there all these smugglers, you know, sort of rife with drug smugglers. And they would always say how easy it was to smuggle stuff into the United States.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 Just by putting it on a plane and just nobody checking it out?

Speaker 1 Well, no,

Speaker 1 they would send stuff in shipments.

Speaker 1 They would take stuff across borders. But in this case, I was allowed to bring stuff legally into Canada.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I figured, you know, if these long-haired goofballs could do it, I could do it. And I felt like I wasn't really committing a crime.
It was really foolish, I admit.

Speaker 1 But I just want to get some money back. I felt I had really been ripped off by the government with no prior announcement or anything.
So that was the end of my business.

Speaker 1 And I also have my business in Afghanistan kind of vaporized because there had been a communist coup there. Right.
But Tom,

Speaker 3 for a real soft

Speaker 3 Hollywood idiot like me, who any, this whole thing sounds just so foreign from anything I would ever

Speaker 3 imagine, let alone pursue.

Speaker 1 He won't go east of La Brea. Put it that way.
Yeah, because just forget it.

Speaker 3 Or south of the airport.

Speaker 3 What was your life like at that age, at that time, that gave you either the courage

Speaker 3 to have this wanderlust or

Speaker 3 maybe the opposite of courage.

Speaker 3 There was just stuff happening in your life. It was like, fuck all this.

Speaker 3 I just want to go to the end of the earth for something completely new, something completely different, because this ain't working.

Speaker 3 Was it one of the two?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was more of the latter. I mean,

Speaker 1 it was the 60s. So, you know, there was a lot of alienation around.
Freedom sounded like a good option. I decided early on I didn't want to really have a mainstream kind of life.

Speaker 1 I had taken a year off and sort of bartended around. That worked out.
But you had gotten your MBA. Right.
Yeah, I had an MBA. I did that.
That was a way to stay out of the draft in those days. Right.

Speaker 1 And then, so it was, I just wanted to sort of leave out of the mainstream life. And it sounded very exotic and interesting to be living in a place so foreign.

Speaker 3 What was it about the mainstream life that just didn't feel

Speaker 3 something that you were attracted to, especially given the fact that you had gone down this road of

Speaker 3 mainstream. You got an MBA and like you're set, you're ready.
You put a huge time and financial investment into the mainstream. And then you said, yeah, no, let's flip it.
Let's go 180 this way.

Speaker 1 It wasn't fun. Have you ever tried selling toilet paper?

Speaker 1 I actually have.

Speaker 1 And before that, I was on the G.I. Joe account, which was like, you know, the war toy of the military-industrial complex.
It was a very alienated time.

Speaker 1 A lot of people were quitting jobs and sort of trying to go off and do their own thing.

Speaker 2 So everything looked appealing.

Speaker 1 Everything looked appealing and it looked really exciting because I wasn't having any fun. I felt like I needed to stretch out a bit.
I'd been in school for like 18 years or something.

Speaker 1 So I was ready to go. And then I fell in love with this very foreign place.
And in those days, it was really foreign, you know.

Speaker 2 Also, age, because if you're young, you're like, well, I might as well try it now.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I was 25, 26, you know, I mean, young, so if not now, when? That's, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember you sort of describe in the book when you first get to Morocco, when you were still with your, traveling with your, your, your friend, your girlfriend, and just like meeting these people and they're all on the beach, like people you had met along the way.

Speaker 1 And you're like, look at this life. Everybody's, nobody's kind of, everybody's just kind of doing whatever they want a little bit, right? And it kind of, that opened your eyes to it.
And then so good.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah, there was a bit of a phenomenon. They call it the hippie trail.

Speaker 1 I mean, no one's self-identified as a hippie, but like in California or New York, people were in those days, if you wanted to drop out, you sort of went to a commune in a cold place in Northern California or somewhere upstate in New York.

Speaker 1 But in Europe, people would head south, you know, to Morocco or India or Lebanon and, you know, kind of like see how long they could travel. I'd meet people who travel for years.

Speaker 3 That sounds like a really sort of...

Speaker 3 contributing factor that it was in it was in society more so in society then than it is i think today uh more commonplace for folks to just you know pick up and get out and and explore a bunch of different corners for a few years and then presumably maybe come back and re-enter mainstream.

Speaker 3 Yeah, was that a bit more part of the culture than it is today?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, I think the world could use a little bit more of that today.

Speaker 1 You see, these kids are so anxious and they go to school and they're having panic attacks and they're being got to get out and you got to immediately start providing and accomplishing.

Speaker 1 I meet these kids, they say, I'm graduating from college, I'm starting work on Monday. Right.
Starting my career on Monday. So we'll take a take a break.

Speaker 1 you know the world's like the best educator out there traveling around

Speaker 1 out of curiosity Tom you do you give it did you impart that on your own sons just

Speaker 1 you know as much as you're comfortable with talking yeah I do I encourage them to they've become both of them have become good travelers and they're very comfortable you know going anywhere making their own plans and really proud of them in that regard did you notice a big change when they came back Well, they didn't go like, I mean, I traveled for a couple of years.

Speaker 1 They really,

Speaker 1 you know, would take,

Speaker 1 actually my oldest son he kind of went to work almost right away but then they none of them have really taken made extensive trips like I had right they're more caught up in this time go back to the to the Canada so did you end up bringing those clothes and all those goods into the US or no it was so easy

Speaker 1 you just but you did it yourself though Tom well I enlisted a guy I knew in Canada whose father used to be like a rum runner and he was ready for another trail another trip wow it's like smoking in the band.

Speaker 1 You came on the boat with the stuff yourself, though. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, you know, you go through the thousand islands. There's all these islands and, you know, then no one knows where the border is, really.
So, you know, and there's boats floating around.

Speaker 1 No one knows who's who. And ice wasn't around.

Speaker 3 Right, right, right. Did you end up learning any of the languages over there?

Speaker 1 You know, in India, you get pretty spoiled because... People speak English a lot.

Speaker 1 I mean, I could move my way around in Hindi.

Speaker 1 But in Afghanistan, I picked up a fair amount of Farsi which is the language I mean a Dari they could it's a dialect of Farsi I could get myself around the bazaars and you know order food and take taxis and you retain it now not so much yeah not so much wait so so Tom so you actually is this is a good

Speaker 1 you you you go out there because you've got this as Jason called this wanderless or this desire to get out in the world and we talk but there's not enough of that but you kind of bring a little bit you leave on on the sort of because you've come you you don't have a great corporate experience in that you're working on Charmin and G.I.

Speaker 1 Joe and you're like, fuck all this.

Speaker 1 You go out into the world and you come back and you kind of bring a little bit of that rebel attitude with you as you, because you re-enter into a corporate environment a little bit, but you bring a little bit of that sort of that rebellious nature into what you do.

Speaker 1 You start to work on pretty immediately on MTV.

Speaker 1 And can you talk to us how, I mean, it was like a perfect, you're the perfect guy for that because you were bringing that rebel spirit into the corporate world.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, I really loved traveling and being over there. And when I came back, I was like, wiped out of that life.

Speaker 1 What else do I really love? Well, I was really, I was a major fanatic about music and rock and roll.

Speaker 1 Good time for it.

Speaker 1 caught an article in Billboard magazine. I started studying where could I get a job? And there was a guy who said, you know, we're going to start a video music channel.

Speaker 1 That's going to be the cable, the TV revolution is starting. And they had already started Nickelodeon, and they had a thing called the movie channel.
So I got an interview.

Speaker 1 My brother knew a guy who had just gone to work there. So I got an interview and I made this case.
And funny, there was a guy named Bob Pittman who I was like 32 at the time.

Speaker 3 And the interview was with what company?

Speaker 1 This is called, then it was called Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company. It doesn't roll off the tongue.
It was a joint venture of Warner and American Express. Yeah.
Wow.

Speaker 1 So this guy, Bob Pittman, Pittman, who was 26,

Speaker 1 never bothered going to college. He was a big star.
They call him the long-haired one-eyed hippie. And he programmed these radio stations like with Don Imis.

Speaker 2 He would have got along with my mom. My mom had one on.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 I interviewed him. I said, I'm your guy.
They said, well, first thing, we're looking for people with no experience in television.

Speaker 1 Those were almost like the magic words. I said, wow, they didn't even have television where I've been living the last eight years.

Speaker 1 And I'm a music fanatic and you're looking for entrepreneurs and I know business and blah, blah, blah. And then he goes, you were a hashi smuggler, weren't you?

Speaker 1 I go, not really.

Speaker 1 And he goes, not really. That means you were.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you're hired. So I got a job on this initial team that started MTV.
And who was that team? It was you and Bob Pittman and you? Me and Bob Pittman. There was a guy named John Sykes.

Speaker 1 There was a guy named...

Speaker 1 Oh, boy. John Sykes.

Speaker 1 Steve Casey,

Speaker 1 who else was there? Carolyn Baker, Sue Steinberg. And there was about six or seven of us.
Fred Seibert, who was like really sort of the creative genius of the group.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we were said, you know, get this thing on the air by August 1st. We had like eight months to put this whole channel together.
So. Wow.

Speaker 3 And we will be right back.

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Speaker 3 And now back to the show.

Speaker 2 Did music videos...

Speaker 2 Were they already kind of happening on other platforms or somewhere and that's why you knew it would work?

Speaker 1 No, there was really very little awareness about music videos in the states they they existed in europe right because the radio stations there were still really regulated didn't play any music so the record companies there would make these videos and you could see them like in record stores or they would put them on tops of top of the pops on the you know on the bbc wow so but america and i i i at one summer i had a girlfriend in berlin i remember just going to she would work i go to a record store and just watch music videos all day it's one of those kind of days i was like thinking this is like a video wonderland wonderland.

Speaker 1 So I

Speaker 1 said, this is, you know, people are going to like this.

Speaker 3 Sort of build it and they will come kind of thing. You guys were the egg and then the chicken came along or vice versa.
And like those early videos, what was the early one?

Speaker 1 Like, remember, like Video Killed the Radio Star. Was the first one.

Speaker 3 Frankie goes to Hollywood.

Speaker 3 And I feel like Dire Straits had one of the early ones.

Speaker 1 Dire Straits had a bunch of early ones called Skate Away.

Speaker 1 Well, I was going to get into Dire Straits because it's actually

Speaker 1 a big part of the book. Jay, that's a really good point.
First of all, Video Killed the Radio Star was the first video you guys aired, right, when you first launched. Is that true? Yeah, I wrote it.

Speaker 1 And yeah.

Speaker 1 And you guys also, you started this thing, but I've heard stories from you and from Sykes that like you guys had like a basically like a one, like a closet with like a phone with like Cole waiting on it, right?

Speaker 1 You guys, it wasn't a big operation.

Speaker 1 That's called the cheap skates second line.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So then you guys started this.
And then you talk, but then Dire Straits had,

Speaker 1 they gave you guys the gift of all gifts because it was Mark Knopfler, from what I understand and what I've read, wrote that as a sort of

Speaker 1 almost like a rebuttal to the sort of, you know, music video and the corporatization of music and all that. Is that right?

Speaker 1 Money for nothing. Yeah.
It was all about our vapidity, that we were vapid. Yeah.
And yet the line in that that really sold you guys was, I want my MTV.

Speaker 1 And he had Sting sing it. And in those days, you know, those kind of bands could be worldwide, you know, could have worldwide hits.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And wherever I would go, because we took MTV around the world, people would know about us through that song. Wow.

Speaker 1 MTV had been preceded by that, by money for nothing. So Mark Knopfler gave us the greatest of gifts.
It was unreal.

Speaker 1 Like that idea that he did this thing is a, and then, but it became like the, almost the rallying cry.

Speaker 1 And you guys also got that that very line uh you you guys i mean you and your whole team at various points got different artists to scream out i want my mtv on camera and that was your

Speaker 1 yeah because the uh the cable companies didn't like us and didn't want to put us on and they they these were older guys they didn't get it and they didn't want to pay we were just somebody who's going to cut into their margins so we knew that wherever we were and for the first couple years we were only like in these towns in the the Midwest, like Tulsa.

Speaker 1 People loved us. They couldn't believe it.
But no one in New York or LA had it and never even seen it.

Speaker 1 So we knew if we could get people, these people to call their cable companies and demand their MTV, you could eventually force these people to put us on. And that really worked.
That's cool.

Speaker 3 With videos now having kind of cycled, I mean, they still sort of exist, but my God, you guys, you birthed it and it cycled into like just such a phenomenon, the whole, the addition of videos to the whole music industry.

Speaker 3 And now it's sort of settled into a place of sort of a sidecar kind of thing.

Speaker 3 What do you feel that the music video has

Speaker 3 what positive of it has remained in the music industry? Has it been additive?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know,

Speaker 1 music videos are still popular. They don't exist on MTV.
That's become sort of a reality show channel. And

Speaker 1 they make as many music videos today as they used to. A lot of them are made more economically, but

Speaker 1 you can get them all on the internet, on YouTube or on Vivo, and you get them on demand. So you don't have to sit around watching some channel to wait to see Nirvana.

Speaker 1 You can just click on it and watch it right away. So that sort of killed the MTV linear network model.

Speaker 3 You guys would, at the end of every video, you'd put the name of the song, the album, the band, and the director.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And you guys launched a bunch of really incredible directors into the film industry.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, the whole, there was a whole bunch of them.
And there was a whole issue after a couple of years, the director said, hey, how come our names aren't on there?

Speaker 1 We want to get some credit. Yeah.
And yeah, David Fincher, too. David Fincher was a great Russell McCahey.
There was a Spike Jones. I mean, lots of people came up that way.

Speaker 2 When you, when the, the, the, I just,

Speaker 2 we'll talk about MTV ending in just a minute, but the initial,

Speaker 2 like the launch, the logo of the rocket taking off, is that, that was the first image ever, right?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Of MTV. And was that just what it is, which is like we're launching a new show?

Speaker 1 We didn't have any money. And we realized that all this NASA footage was public domain.
So we could rip off NASA and man's greatest moment and kind of make it our own. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 But we got it for free. Oh, that's great.
And the logo that everybody loved and became iconic, we got that for $1,000 from some wise town. Wow.

Speaker 3 Try back. And it was sort of kind of, you guys, I'm sure we're kind of tongue-in-cheek how grandiose this whole thing is.
We're putting our flag on the moon and yeah, here comes

Speaker 1 it.

Speaker 1 We're going to rip off man's greatest moment and put our flag there.

Speaker 3 That's amazing.

Speaker 1 Tom, what was the moment that you guys realized that you had really broken through?

Speaker 1 I mean, there were so many, I remember as a kid, you know, there were like, like the, like when the thriller video hit, it was just everywhere.

Speaker 2 It was like half an hour, every hour.

Speaker 1 Was there a moment for you where you went like, holy shit, we really got something here?

Speaker 1 We're shifting culture. Yeah, it was a slow build.
You know, it took us a while to get to New York and LA where people could see us and then they could talk about us in the media.

Speaker 1 But then, I mean, two things. One was thriller Michael Jackson beat it, you know, and people say, oh, big artists are making videos and with big production budgets and they're irritating.

Speaker 1 John Landis directing that. And the second thing was live aid.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Live aid.

Speaker 1 Live aid, you know, ABC said we'll run, Bob Geldof came to ABC said we'll run three hours of it, sort of a highlight show. We said, hey, man, we'll run the whole thing for 16 hours.

Speaker 1 We got nothing else to do.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it was like the biggest show ever. And that really,

Speaker 1 really legitimized this. Wow.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there was nowhere else to see your favorite artist, really, unless you bought a ticket to a concert. Right.
It was the only channel that you could see these people.

Speaker 3 And the VJs were cool too. Remember, like Mark Goodman and

Speaker 1 Martha Quinn.

Speaker 1 Martha Quinn.

Speaker 1 You know, people forget, but for its day, it wasn't like a flying car stuff or anything, but MTV really was revolutionary. It was a whole new visual language for people.

Speaker 1 Of course, we've gone so far past that now, but it was sort of a groundbreaker in that way. Did you guys end up having all these, you got to know a lot of artists too

Speaker 1 through this?

Speaker 1 At first, you guys were trying to launch and get them to do stuff, and then then there must have been the tipping point where they're just coming at you and all the artists are whining and dining you guys, right?

Speaker 1 Sending you Rolexes and stuff.

Speaker 1 I didn't get any Rolexes.

Speaker 1 I got a Timex.

Speaker 1 No, but I mean it was true.

Speaker 1 We used to get like four or five videos a week, then we were getting 50 or 60. And so there was record companies set up whole departments just to service MTV.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I bet you guys were a real bell of the the ball.

Speaker 3 All these record label heads were probably working you guys like they used to work radio stations, right? Where they would ask for certain placement of certain videos at certain days and times, maybe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 We were the biggest radio station in the nation. Yeah.
Right. And

Speaker 1 it didn't always bring out the best in some of the people at MTV, you know, when you had that kind of

Speaker 1 power.

Speaker 2 And what did you think or feel when just recently they announced it's no longer, right?

Speaker 1 Well, they announced that in the UK for a bunch of channels that just play music videos and the MTV channel that just plays reality shows, you know, which really bugs me, but whatever.

Speaker 1 That's still there. But, you know, it needed to die a death because it can't exist really and be a business

Speaker 1 when you're competing with all these videos on the internet.

Speaker 1 And it's not like you have exclusive videos that the people that the internet doesn't have I mean there's no business there it's not going to grow I do think that the new the Ellisons and Paramount have a chance to really reimagine what MTV could be digitally and and figure out a because

Speaker 1 figure out a way to put together something more interesting than's out there now which is a lot of sort of siloed algorithm driven yeah well those fast channels if you if you if you want a fast channel you could just pick your favorite artist like Taylor Swift and just click on her and just watch all her videos.

Speaker 1 All her stuff in one stop shopping. So speaking of which,

Speaker 1 so you're at MTV and then you guys decide to, then you have a bunch of other things that I mentioned in the intro. Nickelodeon, VH1, and Comedy Central.
And this is great.

Speaker 1 So Comedy Central ends up becoming this huge thing, but it started.

Speaker 1 The way it started was kind of in response to what somebody else was doing. I love this story.
Walk us through that a little bit, how Comedy Central came to be.

Speaker 1 Okay, I was having a staff meeting one day, and someone slips me a piece of paper to say that HBO has just announced they're going to do a comedy channel. They're going to call it the Comedy Channel.

Speaker 1 And we went, oh, wow, they're getting into our business. They were the pay TV people.
We were like the little low-rent basic people. We said, well...
That means they're going to get in our business.

Speaker 1 They have a lot of money. They have all these, you know, these big stand-up shows with Robin Williams and everything.
What are we going to do?

Speaker 1 I said, well, we're going to announce our own comedy channel the same day.

Speaker 1 Let's announce we're doing one too, because then we'll be in every article that's ever written about that their competitors also doing a comedy channel. You have no idea.

Speaker 1 You wouldn't have a name or anything. But we had this thing called Nick at Night, and we would take like old TV shows and repurpose them and repackage them and everything.

Speaker 1 He said, at the worst comes to the worst, we can do like a version of that. But let's put our hat in the ring.

Speaker 1 And so we had a big battle with them for a couple of years, and finally we merged and it became Comedy Central.

Speaker 1 and they, they, because I thought if this worked for them, then they'd launch a movie channel, a music channel and a kids channel as well and be head-to-head competitors with a lot more money than us.

Speaker 1 So, so you basically start it, you hear our competitors are starting a comedy channel. And in that moment, you go, let's announce it.
So anytime they get mentioned, we get mentioned.

Speaker 1 And we don't even have a product yet. Right.

Speaker 1 And you said, and you, and you were like, and I remember reading in the book, you were like, you said to Frank Biondi, right, who you worked with over there, and you said to him, you're like, look, it'll buy us a couple days, and then by the time we have to make the actual announcement, we'll have time to come up with a name and what we're going to do.

Speaker 1 Is that true? Yeah. He was,

Speaker 1 well, I put him on the speakerphone to my staff.

Speaker 1 And he says, yeah, because he had been, he had left HBO and he did not have a great relationship with Michael Fuchs, who said he was like the king of this was his baby.

Speaker 1 So Frank was all in, you know, fighting like tooth and nail against, we're like a guerrilla operation fighting against HBO and I think HBO couldn't believe

Speaker 1 you know that we we we we did as well as we did it was all in smoke and mirrors and so when did you come up with the name how did you come up with programming and the whole thing for the channel well initially we called it like the two days later was we called it ha the TV comedy channel because

Speaker 1 it was Holler and an exclamation point sure

Speaker 1 you know and we had a great logo

Speaker 1 And it was TV comedy because what they were doing was just, they were going to rip like funny scenes out of, you know, TV shows and movies and some stand-up guys in front of brick walls and just put them together and they'd have like their equivalent of VJs.

Speaker 1 It would be like an MTV model. But, you know, we didn't think that would work.
We actually had tried that once. So we thought, well, we'll just run comedy shows.
So I did things to create headlines.

Speaker 1 I hired Fred Silverman, who programmed all the big networks at one time. We did deals with like Brian Grazer and, you know, we licensed stuff from Norman Lear.

Speaker 1 And we just would continue to throw out announcements. So we got Saturday Night Live, the original five years of that, you know, 75 to 80.

Speaker 1 And we built up a, you know, a decent show. And then when we merged, you know, we had to come up with the name, us and HBO, and Comedy Central was the name.

Speaker 1 And then the turning point for Comedy Central in your book that you describe is what really set you guys off was when you hired Jon Stewart. Is that right?

Speaker 1 We had hired Jon Stewart before. He had been at, he was on MTV in the late 80s, early 90s.
He had a show called the Jon Stewart Show. Yeah, I remember it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It ran for a while. So John was sort of in the stable.
We never found him. And we actually had a guy named Craig Clairbourne on the Daily Show first, who was a different type of guy.

Speaker 1 And then we replaced him with Jon Stewart. And John's vision was, look,

Speaker 1 let's just not do pop culture stuff why don't we take a crack at the news I'll be a fake newsman yeah and uh

Speaker 1 he got his voice doing that and just got better and better I mean I just I just watched you know he's on every Monday night again still I mean he's so brilliant he should run for president perfect but we had what came out of that was we had Jon Stewart Stephen Colbert John Oliver Samantha Bill Maher was on our channel first

Speaker 1 Dave Chappelle I mean it was a good launching place for young talent Jimmy Kimmel had the man show. You may remember that.

Speaker 1 I mean, Tom, you think about it, you name these people, all these people, musical artists,

Speaker 1 comedic voices, brilliant voices who came up under sort of the umbrella of stuff that you did.

Speaker 1 Do you ever, do you get a little satisfaction when you watch people now all these years later like, yeah, I was right about all of this?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and in truth, I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't the person who like picked everybody, but we had a great team there and we were always looking for edgy new talent that was coming up and get them, you know, get them young.

Speaker 1 And then they'd leave us. Like Bill Maher was on politically incorrect and then ABC hired him and then they fired him and he ended up at HBO and his show now is spectacular.

Speaker 1 And so you see now the front line of people who were sort of like the resistance almost. politically.

Speaker 1 It's all these comedians and they all, well, so many of them had their roots with us, although they've been in other places for a while. Colbert, Kimmel, Maher, Marr,

Speaker 1 and so on. And Steve Carell, too.
And Current. Steve Carell.
Yeah. So then,

Speaker 3 no, go ahead.

Speaker 1 Well, I was going to say, so then, because I want to get into all the one stuff, you know, God, we don't have enough time for everything. Tom, your life was too full.

Speaker 1 So you, you, while you're at Viacom, you become CEO of Viacom ultimately, and you work for a guy called Subner Redstone,

Speaker 1 which was,

Speaker 1 he was a difficult

Speaker 1 boss to serve is that a good way to put it that's very fair yes

Speaker 1 he fired he he fired every ceo including me including you and so you knew so he hires you ceo and that means what that means your days are numbered basically that means how long till i get fired but the thing is he always liked to fire people on holiday weekends so like he fired frank biondi on the 4th of july he fired mel karmaz in like on the memorial day and i got it on labor day so if you could make it through the summer season, pretty much you had another year of good times ahead.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 And one of the reasons,

Speaker 1 one of the things that I know there are a lot of issues, and you talk about it in the book, but you and I have talked about this before. It's widely known.

Speaker 1 There was a thing called one of the first social media sites out. There was a thing called MySpace.

Speaker 1 And it was up for grabs.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he wanted it. He's still on it.
I'm still on it. Right? Sean's still on it.
It's his main source of communication.

Speaker 1 So he wanted MySpace and

Speaker 1 so did News Corp, right? Is that about?

Speaker 1 Sumner had never heard of MySpace. He didn't hear about it until he found out that Rupert bought it.
And then he found out we'd been kicking the tires. And we never made a bid to buy it.

Speaker 1 But Rupert bought it and he went on the covers of all these trade magazines as the new media visionary. And that really annoyed Sumner.
Yeah. And he bought it for $560 million.

Speaker 1 I'll just say ultimately, Rupert sold it for $30 million.

Speaker 1 Wow. I'm still waiting for a thank you note.

Speaker 1 That was a reason, one of the reasons he cited for firing me. And right.
One of the reasons, which is you did him such a favor. And the other thing was

Speaker 1 you, you early on saw the power, the potential maybe of YouTube. Is that true? Yeah.

Speaker 1 YouTube kind of took away all of MTV's mojo, ultimately. I mean, who could have imagined what YouTube's become today? If you check out like YouTube TV and everything, it's amazing.

Speaker 2 And it's been around forever, and they still say it's the, quote, future. But how would you describe it?

Speaker 3 If an alien landed on the earth and you're trying to explain what YouTube is or was

Speaker 3 in its... in its inception, how would you describe it?

Speaker 3 Is it just a free sort of destination for

Speaker 3 user-generated videos? You just kind of upload anything you want, and it's just a gathering place for all that? Is that what YouTube Brilliant Core is?

Speaker 1 That's what it was initially, and that was like 2005. They launched it, and it was initially anybody could upload anything, and kids could comment on it, you could send stuff.

Speaker 1 It was a form of social media, person to person, and that was that was a whole new idea. And then, like, SNL would put up like some stuff, like with Andy Sandberg.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to think some of they would, you they media companies would use it as sort of a promotional vehicle. So they started to get more promotional content on there.
And then they've just

Speaker 1 and did you want to do you wanted to buy it? Did you saw it?

Speaker 1 We thought this is a whole new thing.

Speaker 1 And the world is going in this, you know, we had the TV revolution, now we got this digital revolution.

Speaker 1 And this digital revolution, this social media thing where people can communicate directly with each other. Right.
And people like us aren't gatekeepers anymore.

Speaker 1 You know, we thought, how how do we get in on this?

Speaker 1 You got to own a platform.

Speaker 1 And we made a, I wanted to make a bid on it,

Speaker 1 but it was difficult for a company like us. I mean,

Speaker 1 ultimately, Google bought it for $1.6 billion.

Speaker 1 The Biacom board thought it was a copyright infringement machine. It would make us liable for lots of lawsuits.

Speaker 1 And ultimately, after I left, they sued him for a billion dollars and lost 10 years later. But no one could have imagined what YouTube was able to morph into.
Right. You know, which is.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 you did see that there was the potential, even though you didn't know exactly what it would become, imagine how different the world would have looked had Viacom purchased.

Speaker 1 I mean, for $1.6 billion, it's right now the deal of the century.

Speaker 1 They're worth almost $600 billion YouTube. Wow.
That's unbelievable. I mean, I could buy all the media companies a couple times over.
Wow. And then $600 billion.

Speaker 1 On the side of that, you also helped these guys start Vice Media as well, right? You were instrumental in getting it. I was trying to work with Vice for a bunch of years.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was a wild ride. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's another fun. That was a lot of fun, too, though.
Yeah. Yeah.
And it crashed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's still around, though, isn't it? No?

Speaker 1 It's barely around. They have a little studio operation.
You know, they kind of

Speaker 1 imploded a bit. You know, they had a great run when they had that HBO series on that really kind of made them famous.
They had a whole suite of YouTube channels.

Speaker 2 After all of these successes, does any part of you still want to be involved in media?

Speaker 1 You know, I'm happy now. I'm not in it.
I mean, it's really, it seems like.

Speaker 1 A lot of the funds have been taken out of it. A lot of the money's been taken out.
You look at these companies that are sort of stripped down and are forced to consolidate.

Speaker 1 You know, I came up, it was a more optimistic time. Things were moving in in an upward direction.
You know, things were ascendant. Now it's like,

Speaker 1 you know, well, I have to tell you guys you're all in Hollywood. You know, what the situation is.
Barely, Tom. Yeah.
Barely. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 It does seem like, though, that we are at a bit of an inflection point that's not too dissimilar from

Speaker 3 sort of the launch of something like a YouTube, where

Speaker 3 were it not for the invention of the internet and then the personal communication device. You know, those two things together were the necessary components that make up a YouTube.

Speaker 3 Now we've got something similar perhaps in AI and its ability to be transformative and create these new platforms or entertainment options or what we have no idea about.

Speaker 3 Some ideas are scary, some ideas

Speaker 3 are interesting, but like maybe we're at another kind of launch moment.

Speaker 3 I'm sure you've done, I'm sure you read very interesting books and niche articles and periodicals and things like that.

Speaker 3 Does it not hold some kind of interest to you, this sort of this moment of pioneering it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the whole AI thing is sort of daunting.

Speaker 1 On one hand, you've got people saying

Speaker 1 it's going to create these machines that are going to kill us all.

Speaker 1 And on the other hand, it's going to open up this great new world and it's going to put, and someone else say, yeah, yeah, it's going to get put 20% unemployment on.

Speaker 3 But it seems like the big brains like you are really the only people that are uniquely qualified to really kind of cut through all that and say, yeah, it could be this, it could be that, but it also can be steered and can only be really properly steered by somebody that has a combination of your creative acumen and your business acumen and your time in the industry.

Speaker 3 So do you, are you not interested or excited to kind of grandfather some of that in there?

Speaker 1 I'm sort of following it all. It's not that there's not a lot of smart people involved.
You know, these AI guys from, you know, you always say, well, they're from up north.

Speaker 1 And you can see the battle in Hollywood.

Speaker 3 They need the media savvy, too, though.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 They're not this media savvy, but, you know, they're going to create new media. I, yeah, I'm curious and I'm watching.
And it's,

Speaker 1 they're just

Speaker 1 the amount of money that's being invested is just mind-boggling.

Speaker 3 But they need someone like you to steer it, though. You got, you know.

Speaker 1 I'm on a hand off the bench. Come on, get in there.
Wait, Tom, Tom, speaking of coming off the bench.

Speaker 1 If you were 26,

Speaker 1 26-year-old Tom Preston today, and you were just coming back from doing your, being

Speaker 1 off the grid for a couple of years, and you were going to start in this world today, what would you launch?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good question.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, I'd want to do something that I really liked. So I'd probably find my way somehow to the entertainment media business.

Speaker 1 You know, I would probably there and say, well, now, I mean, to your point, it is sort of in an inflection point. And you'd want to align yourself with someone who's smart.

Speaker 1 That's a business that's ascendant. So if you get in it and you choose the right place and they got the right plan, you're likely to be able to move up.
And

Speaker 1 I don't know which place that is, but that's probably where I would gravitate. And I feel confident that they're going to figure this out somehow

Speaker 1 in a way that doesn't put everybody out of work in the entertainment business.

Speaker 1 But I just heard something today.

Speaker 1 They have Channel 4 in the UK has these newscasters that are AI generated that sound exactly

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 it could be one of you guys.

Speaker 3 Well, it is. Well, yeah, Sean's got wires coming out of him.

Speaker 3 Well, it sounds like

Speaker 3 you are

Speaker 3 satisfied for sure with your accomplishments as well you should be.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 have you given yourself a chance to sit back

Speaker 3 and look at that guy who went off to India and Afghanistan

Speaker 3 and started in advertising and got his MBA and all that stuff? And

Speaker 3 have you landed at a spot that

Speaker 3 that is satisfying to you, given where you started, your frustrations early on.

Speaker 3 And it seems like you managed to create a space for yourself that combined all the things that you loved and that you were good at?

Speaker 1 Well, I kind of went full circle. I mean, if I look at my life in chapters, the chapter now, I'm doing a lot of not-for-profit work for like 18 years.

Speaker 1 I've been working with Bono as the board chair of the Thing to One campaign that really focuses on extreme poverty, infectious disease in Africa.

Speaker 1 And I find that very satisfying work. You know, we have red.
You're probably familiar with some of Red stuff, you know, with the Apple and everything.

Speaker 1 And that's interesting, keeps your arm into the private sector. But,

Speaker 1 you know, and it gives me a chance to really explore Africa a bit more, which I also enjoy. But so I'm sort of in that phase of life, I guess you could say.
I'm, you know, it's not like

Speaker 1 giving back, but I enjoy this kind of work and I like being an observer of what's going on in

Speaker 1 the media and entertainment business. Well, you also, it is giving back.
And you did start, you know, you started a media company in Afghanistan, which still exists today. Yeah, I did that.

Speaker 1 I went back to Afghanistan for 10 years until the Taliban arrived and built up a TV network there, which was fascinating. Oh, that's wow.
And

Speaker 1 not the not-for-profit, but meaning like you did that as it's not like that was going to be a huge windfall. It was more, it was sort of giving back to a place that you really loved.

Speaker 1 And you described the people, especially early on in the 70s when you first got there and what a wonderful place Afghanistan was and now you've got these people who are there sort of holding the line still still doing it right still broadcasting and in that time I remember you you would take young people who were there who are working for the company and send them over here and do semesters working at USC media school and stuff and give them and educate them and I mean that was a real thing that you did for a long time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I never escaped my fascination with Afghanistan.

Speaker 1 and it gets a bad rap these days admittedly but they're wonderful people and I was lured back there to start this TV net station which became very powerful and in terms I thought it was a way to you know change help change society connect Afghans to each other to the outside world for the first time for you know women, liberate women.

Speaker 1 It just seeing a man and a woman newscaster side by side sends a huge signal. Wow.
We brought music back after the, you know, the Taliban had outlawed everything.

Speaker 1 So we brought back music with the arts.

Speaker 2 And it's still running the network?

Speaker 1 Well, it's been, you know, it's been, we've now had, we had like 250 advertisers.

Speaker 1 Now we're down to one. Wow.
And it's energy drinks, like Red Bull kind of stuff. That's what they have there because there's no alcohol.

Speaker 1 But we've now switched into doing programming for school for women. So we're doing educational programming.

Speaker 1 And instead of advertisers, we're funded by people like Gates and other foundations, Malala Foundation.

Speaker 1 And we are making these episodes in Afghanistan inexpensively. We have a diaspora group of Afghan educators that help develop the curriculum.

Speaker 1 And so it's just kind of keeping people employed in this very difficult time.

Speaker 2 But these programs for educating women are still allowed?

Speaker 1 Yes, because we've picked sort of non-ideological subjects like mathematics, physics, things like that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so they're allowing it, yes. And

Speaker 1 there's a whole sort of digital part to it as well.

Speaker 1 It's just awful what's going on there. But

Speaker 1 this way, the business stays alive and you can employ 500 people. And

Speaker 1 women have basically been erased. from public spaces in Afghanistan.
They're not even allowed to talk when they're in public. Yeah,

Speaker 1 just imagine. So women who used to be able in that 20-year interval when we were there, which we blew, but people went to school, became parliamentarians, became lawyers, became, now they're just

Speaker 1 extremely depressed and at home.

Speaker 1 Man, Tom, you really,

Speaker 1 I know, what a life, dude. And you've done it all.
I mean, you do this kind of stuff and

Speaker 1 you help start MTV and you have a clothing company

Speaker 1 and you're smuggling clothes across the network, ha.

Speaker 1 And you talk in the book, you take Summoner Redstone to a sex club

Speaker 1 in Thailand,

Speaker 1 which you talk about in the book.

Speaker 1 That's crazy.

Speaker 1 I implore you to read this book. Is that true? Yes, yes, I did.
That's crazy. Well, just give us a little taste of, not too much of a taste.

Speaker 1 You don't want the full taste, but I kept telling him, you've got to come to Asia. We've got MTV in India.
We've got it in China and Taiwan. We've got it in Indonesia.
It's like the great market.

Speaker 1 You know, we were still really positive about how we could do in Asia. And he had never really been.

Speaker 1 And then he called me up to his office one day and he says, you You know, I've made up my mind I'd like to finally come to Asia with you. I go, Well, where do you want to go?

Speaker 1 He goes, I want to go to Bangkok.

Speaker 1 I go, Well, we don't really have any business in Bangkok. You know, that's like one place that there's a company there that's going to lay cable, but they haven't started yet.

Speaker 1 But he wanted to go to Bangkok, and then he told me quietly he'd like to go to some sex clubs.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I,

Speaker 1 you know, I had to go

Speaker 1 do some advance work, you know,

Speaker 1 to get him in a sex club. I wasn't really, I've been to Bangkok before a bunch of times, but I was not an expert on the sex club front, which is quite a scene there.

Speaker 1 One of the most interesting things is that,

Speaker 1 you know, it's become, because of the Vietnam War, it's become like the commercial sex capital of the world.

Speaker 1 And they have plane loads of Japanese and German men that come in to run wild in the various red light districts. And I'm thinking, wait, those were the two Axis powers.
Right.

Speaker 1 And now they're invading Bangkok. But yeah, I took Sumner to a, I did my job as a loyal employee and shepherded him around.

Speaker 1 You had to take your boss, you describe it, and you guys go into a room and this couple are lowered on a motorcycle

Speaker 1 having actual sex on the motorcycle. And you're there with your boss, and then he looks at you kind of like, we're good now.
And you just let yourself out, right?

Speaker 1 Well, no, I had to take him to another club after that. But the interesting thing about that club was it it was just filled with like regular people, Thai people and everything.
And

Speaker 1 you hear this roar, and a motorcycle slowly comes down to Small Harley, and there's this couple on there, and they're naked, and they're all greased up, and they're doing it, and the guy's revving the engine.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. And after a while,

Speaker 1 after a while, the people in the bar, the locals, they're not even looking. You know, it's like,

Speaker 1 people are fornicating on a motorcycle two feet over your head. Yeah, we got

Speaker 1 you like another beer.

Speaker 1 So then they got

Speaker 1 pulled back up into the ceiling. Yeah.
And then you've got, I mean, you did everything. You talk about, I mean, you literally, people go like, from here to Timbuktu, you literally went to Timbuktu.

Speaker 1 I want to end on you, the time you went to the music festival. I remember when you and Jimmy were going to go, you were talking about it.
And you guys, you and Jimmy Buffett went to this

Speaker 1 music festival, right? It's a festival in the desert out in the middle of the Sahara. Yeah.
So how did

Speaker 1 you burning man or like talk about your journey? Burning man with people on camels. It was like the local Toreg people would come.
It would be like,

Speaker 1 we love West African music. So I got a few other people, Chris Blackwell, my friend Bill Flanagan.

Speaker 1 We flew to

Speaker 1 Bamako, the capital of Mali, and then we got a plane. We took the Jimmy Jet.
We flew to Timbuktu. And we landed in the Timbuktu airport.
People, there's nothing there. There's no planes there.

Speaker 1 People are just running at our plane trying to sell us daggers, you know? And it was like you're in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 1 It's like a town in the desert. And we had to drive a bunch of hours from there to get to the

Speaker 1 festival. And you had your own security with you and a driver.
Talk about that. Yeah, we had one security guy from Bamako, and then we had another guy.

Speaker 1 And then when we got to Timbuktu, we said, we got to find a guy who knows how to

Speaker 1 get there. So we need a local guy who can find his way to the festival.

Speaker 1 So we hired this guy and we set out one morning to go to the festival and we're winding our way through the sand dunes and going and going and going. After about four or five hours,

Speaker 1 the security guy goes, stop, stop.

Speaker 1 And he gas the local guy and gets him out and they start screaming at each other. We don't know what's going on.
And he puts the guy in a headlight, takes out a gun and sticks it to his head.

Speaker 1 He says, I'm going to kill this motherfucker. Because he is taking us.
We're going in the wrong direction. And he was taking us to an al-Qaeda camp.
Al-Qaeda was kidnapping tourists in that area.

Speaker 1 And like there was just over the border in Mauritania there. There was a Germans they've been holding for a year.
And we were on our way there. And

Speaker 1 he said, I'm going to, and I'm a little bit buzzed. And I'm looking at this.
I'm going, Jesus Christ, man. I mean, I just came out in the desert to hear some music.

Speaker 1 And now I'm going to witness a murder. And I got a turban on my head.
Jesus. So we, Jimmy said, let the guy free.
We just leave him in the desert. And we picked up like a guy who was a hitchhiker.

Speaker 1 He had a cell phone with a Bob Marley ringtone. And that was enough.
He said he knew how to get to the festival. So we put him on board and off we went.

Speaker 2 You know, you could just watch MTV. You don't have to go

Speaker 1 across that.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievable. What a life.
It sounded like a good idea.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Well,

Speaker 3 good news for if you're like me or you finished listening to this guy talk and you're envious that you have not lived a life even halfway as interesting as him.

Speaker 3 The good news is we've got a a book to read about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So thank you for writing.

Speaker 1 Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu on sale as of November 18th

Speaker 1 from the great Tom Fresn.

Speaker 1 Proof that there's a big world out there. Get out into it, which is I say all the time.
And boy, did you do that?

Speaker 1 You are an inspiration to a lot of people, including me. You always have been.
You're a great dude. And

Speaker 1 honestly, I read this book, just I devoured it. It's so good.
So, Tom, thank you, you, man, for taking. This has been a long time coming.
I'm so excited to hear you. Thank you, Will.
Thank all of you.

Speaker 1 It's great to chat with you guys.

Speaker 1 I'm a regular fan.

Speaker 2 Yeah, nice meeting you, Tom.

Speaker 1 Love the podcast.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us. Thank you.

Speaker 1 The great Tom Fresn, you guys. Take care.

Speaker 1 Bye, guys. Bye, Tom.
Bye. Thank you.
Bye-bye. Bye, pal.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy.

Speaker 3 I'm uplifted and also depressed at the same time.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's exactly how I feel.
I know. I'm like, wow

Speaker 3 you know there was a there was a time when like i think i've probably told this boring story before but you know when my career was uh you know in a real dry place and i no talk about that i thought about going down to the tom bradley terminal here in lax the international terminal and just picking a destination up on the board and just i love that just go you can still start

Speaker 3 well i got the wife and the kids and you know it's it's a little awkward now no but you can just get up it's called deserting your family now but i was i was like you know 23 24 i was like tom's age and i was like let me just start over somewhere else where fucking being on it you know entertainment tonight isn't the end-all be-all and and and and and so

Speaker 3 i'm certainly not you know well boo hoo you know your life turned out so shitty no i'm very very grateful but man you listen to that it's like i just don't know if you i was gonna say you can't have both but he seems to have had both like he went he did that he came back and he was still a part of of, you know, mainstream society.

Speaker 1 And not only that,

Speaker 1 what's cool is he took all of that, that sort of that, that wanderlust as you described, and he took all and all those experiences and he brought it into that environment.

Speaker 1 And that's what set him apart and still sets him apart. He's like, he has such a broad worldview.

Speaker 2 He also, like he said, 18 years of school. So then he was like, anything is, I just got to get out.

Speaker 2 You know, like, I've just been reading books for 18 years.

Speaker 1 And it changes what you use as your sort of baseline norms that you think that you can. And so you come back and you're affected by these experiences.
You're like, no, well, why don't we just do this?

Speaker 1 You know, if you think about it, like, he does all the stuff that maybe being out in the world might, he might not have had.

Speaker 1 But then he's like, yeah, we're at MTV, we're going to start this, and we're going to start this comedy. It's like a drug.
It's like it changes your mind. And like, oh, YouTube, let's buy that.

Speaker 1 And everybody's like, no, Tom, no.

Speaker 3 I wonder if doing it

Speaker 3 at that age, though, is

Speaker 3 much more meaningful and significant than doing it. Let's say, like, you know, maybe after Maple goes to college, you know, Amanda and I take off and we start doing all this child.

Speaker 3 Like, are we too set in our ways then at that age, at 60, going around and like,

Speaker 3 can you really be affected?

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, there's one way. There's one way to find out.

Speaker 1 Just do it. Just do it.
I think, honestly.

Speaker 3 But what if it turns out, yeah, no, it was a waste of time. You're already stuck in your ways and now you're 70.

Speaker 1 But at least it's worth going to try to find it.

Speaker 1 And I would say, like, you hear that, it makes me want to say to my own kids and to my younger self and to anybody if you're under 30 or 40, whatever it is, whoever you are, put your phone down and get out in the world.

Speaker 1 You know, that's that's kind of, it makes you just think, like, just get out there.

Speaker 1 But don't put it down before you

Speaker 1 get it.

Speaker 2 Don't put it down before you get.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. Switch to Smartless Mobile and get a good plan.
Yeah. And then 10 gigs for 10 bucks.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 But it is true.

Speaker 1 Go out and have a rich life. And Jay, you were saying to him, like, like, do you have this moment now looking back where you feel a sense of satisfaction?

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, he's think of the stuff and the people he's met. Like, even now, he'll be like, if you follow him on Instagram and he'll be like, you know, I'm in Albania.
I'm in some like gourd.

Speaker 1 I'm talking to the prime minister and I'm doing this and that. And he's just, you know, I didn't even,

Speaker 3 is he married?

Speaker 1 He has a longtime partner,

Speaker 1 Carrie,

Speaker 1 who's amazing. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 3 So he's he's not, he's not still going around solo bopping around.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. No, but he's, she's a good friend and an awesome person in her own right.
Just amazing. Yeah.
And he's just, but he's always,

Speaker 1 he's just interested. Yeah, that's crazy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the key.

Speaker 2 You got to stay curious and interested the whole time, right?

Speaker 2 But it seems like everybody that was around him, everybody that was around

Speaker 2 had such fun.

Speaker 2 And I had fun today with all of you. And I think a good time was had

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