Pod Insights My First Million The insane true story behind MTV About this episode Sam & Shaan's hard-won CEO lessons in one guide: https://clickhubspot.com/eokb
Episode 829: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) sits down with Tom Freston to talk about the insane story of starting MTV and shaping America in the 80s and 90s.
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(4:04) Millionaire by 26, broke by 33
(8:49) The first days of MTV (no frontal nudity)
(14:14) Music Videos
(19:03) How to spot culture-changing talent
(27:12) Making your employees party together
(31:56) Nickelodeon, SpongeBob, and Building Legacy IP
(35:21) Programming for a Specific Audience
(37:33) The Facebook Acquisition That Almost Happened
(41:25) Founders Who Refuse to Sell
(43:29) Rupert Murdoch vs. Sumner Redstone
(45:23) MySpace, Big Bets, and Getting Fired
(47:55) Inside the writers room
(51:33) Oprah Calling
(54:00) The End of Monoculture and the Creator Economy
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Links:
Unplugged - https://a.co/d/0ef6YVu2
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Check Out Sam's Stuff:
• Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm
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Check Out Shaan's Stuff:
• Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com
• Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents.
• Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies!
Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC
• I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out:
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My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /
Transcript 12,683 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Shaan Puri? My MTV Hit List.
0:01 Speaker 01 MTV. MTV.
0:02 Sam Parr? MTV.
0:03 Speaker 01 MTV.
0:03 Sam Parr? MTV. You grew the company from zero to billions in revenue.
0:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, we were a high margin money machine. It was sort of the height of the cable TV revolution, which began to deteriorate in the early 2000s with the digital revolution.
0:16 Sam Parr? You helped create South Park, Chappelle's Show, Stephen Colbert.
0:19 Speaker 01 We had Jimmy Kimmel on, he got a start there. Bill Maher got his TV start on Comedy Central.
0:24 Sam Parr? You're recruited by Steve Jobs, same with Geffen, who is one of the most successful media business guys there ever is. You, I think, made an offer to buy Facebook. Is that right?
0:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, we were the first people. We went back and forth and we put a bid on the table and they turned us down.
0:39 Sam Parr? How big? What was it?
0:40 Speaker 01 It was like 1.7 million, billion, excuse me.
0:43 Sam Parr? When you were like trying to spot winning people or creatives, was there like a common theme?
0:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, well.
0:59 Sam Parr? I was trying to think of the way that I could introduce you. Tom helped found MTV, which was one of the most important networks when I was raised. Like going home and watching TRL at like 3:30 was like the greatest thing ever. But then you also owned VH1, Comedy Central, which meant you helped create South Park, Chappelle's Show, Jon Stewart's.
1:19 Speaker 01 Daily Show.
1:20 Sam Parr? The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert.
1:22 Speaker 01 We had Jimmy Kimmel on. I mean, he got a start there. Bill Maher got his TV start on Comedy Central.
1:27 Sam Parr? Yeah, it goes on and on and on. And then also, this is a business podcast, you grew the company from zero to billions in revenue.
1:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34 Sam Parr? How big did you?
1:35 Speaker 01 Billions. We got up to like eight or nine billion dollars. That includes consumer products, which became a big thing for us. Cause we would own the IP of all the Nick Toons, SpongeBob.
1:44 Sam Parr? Yeah, you had, you owned Nickelodeon, so rented.
1:46 Speaker 01 That was actually was the biggest business was Nickelodeon.
1:48 Sam Parr? Nickelodeon was?
1:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, by far.
1:50 Sam Parr? I want to talk about that business, but I just like wanted to like show like the traction, not only from a cultural, like you had your impact on culture, but also the business side, which those two aren't always correlated.
2:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a wonderful business. I mean, we were a high-margin money machine. Uh, it was sort of the height of the cable TV revolution, which, you know, began to deteriorate in the early 2000s with the, with the digital revolution. So, yeah, we had amazing business model. I mean, because we had, we had three revenue streams. We had subscribers, which is like one-third to 40%, you know, from cable operators or satellite operators, advertising, and then consumer products, movies, and other things that we would do.
2:31 Sam Parr? How old were you when you started it?
2:32 Speaker 01 I was the oldest guy. When we started MTV, the development team was seven or eight people, and I was 33, and I had run a business in India and Afghanistan. We used to design and make clothes and sell them to better stores here and in Canada and a couple of other countries. And I knew nothing about that business, but I wanted to live in India.
2:51 Sam Parr? Were you like a hippie, and you just like went over there?
2:54 Speaker 01 I wasn't a hippie. I was just, I had been working in an ad agency in New York, and they assigned me to Charmin Toilet Paper, and that was like the last straw for me, a line I couldn't cross. And a girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, called me from Paris, said, "Oh, man, you can't, you can't sell toilet paper. I'm going across the Sahara Desert. Why don't you, you should just come with me. Quit your job. Don't do this." I was on a plane like, you know, 10 days later.
3:18 Sam Parr? Which is weird, because I think I read that you graduated number one in your class from getting your MBA at NYU.
3:24 Speaker 01 I did that, yes. I went to business school primarily, originally to stay out of the draft, because Vietnam War was raging. And then in business school, I encountered people like Peter Drucker and professors. I was really entranced and turned on by business. And then when I got out of there, I basically decided I'd do menial jobs and bartend my way around for a year and sort of take what people would call now a gap year. So I worked like in Aspen in the Caribbean, and, you know, it was a well-rounded experience I'd recommend for anybody to do. I was sort of the king of the road kind of phase for me. Then I came back and got a job in an ad agency, which was interesting on another level, working in a big organization, a creative organization at its heart. And then I quit and went traveling.
4:11 Speaker 01 Crossed the Sahara Desert, we split up, I kept going, ended up in India and Afghanistan. And I, cause I had met another woman in Greece. She said, oh, you should go to India. That's like the Holy Grail. It's the greatest show on earth. In the seventies, it was, you know, sixty percent of people were under the poverty line. It was really way before, you know, the ninety economic reforms in India that really transformed the place. And so I decided I wanted to live there. Then I said, well, what am I gonna do? How can I support myself? Cause he couldn't get a job there in those days. And she had, she had told me, this woman in Greece, she had lived in Kathmandu. And she would make and design her own clothes. She was a former clothing designer who was sort of dropped out from New York City. And she would, lived in Kathmandu, like a queen.
4:57 Speaker 01 She would make and design these clothes and then take them overland and sell them on beach resorts in the Mediterranean in the summertime. She had her own sort of, you know, vertically integrated conglomerate. And I said, well, what if I scaled that up and I could do better stuff than the commodity imports? And find partners and build businesses and factories? And our peak revenue at the time was probably eight million dollars, but that was then.
5:21 Sam Parr? What year was that?
5:21 Speaker 01 This was nineteen seventy-two.
5:24 Sam Parr? So that could be like forty million today, right?
5:26 Speaker 01 It was good. I mean, I was, I was, I had my first million in my twenties.
5:30 Sam Parr? You're, how old were you?
5:31 Speaker 01 Twenty-five, twenty, I was probably, no, twenty-six, twenty-seven.
5:34 Sam Parr? Did you make a million? Did, were you able to take home anything?
5:37 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, I made it, but it was, but you've probably noticed, it was on paper.
5:41 Sam Parr? Oh, yeah.
5:42 Speaker 01 It was on paper, cause it was all tied up in inventory, it was tied up in receivables. You know, you felt I had to pay for goods in advance. It was fun.
5:50 Sam Parr? When you wound it down, I think you're what, like thirty?
5:53 Speaker 01 Thirty-three. I got, wound it down. I mean, I really got yanked out of the business because in Afghanistan, there had been a communist coup. That kind of drove me out of there. And then I doubled down on my business in India. And then of all people, having endured strikes and blackouts and dust storms and all these delays and having to pay. Hustle Jimmy Carter put us out of business. Because he put an embargo, not a tariff, but an embargo on clothing imports from India.
6:22 Sam Parr? So did you walk away with anything?
6:23 Speaker 01 No, I ended up smuggling three tons of clothes over the St. Lawrence River to meet a delivery date at Bloomingdale's. We were doing a big, they called the India, what's it called, Fantasy India. And I shipped clothes to Canada and then brought them in, you know, to try and put a dent in my debts. But I ended up broke, bankrupt, and deep in debt, you know, just like had my whole business yanked out from under me. It was the hardest work I'd ever done, or would ever do.
6:55 Sam Parr? Hey, everyone. Really quick, if you're enjoying this episode on CEO stuff, so delegating, having hard conversations with your team, hiring, then I've got something for you. So the team at HubSpot, they actually went and put together a bunch of best practices that Sean and I use in our own companies. And they put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand. And so if you want to just save yourself 10 years of headache and heartache, then you should check it out. I wish we had this a long time ago, would have helped me a lot. But there should be a QR code on your screen that you can scan, or a link in the description. So check it out. It's totally free and totally awesome.
7:30 Sam Parr? You're 33 and broke.
7:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, broke. And I'm going, coming back to New York, and all my friends who've grown up, they've gotten married, they have mortgages or whatever. So I said, I gotta change careers. I need a new line of business.
7:44 Sam Parr? Well, I heard that you read a book.
7:46 Speaker 01 Yes, I bought a book. The only self-help book I ever bought is called, and it was the first edition, What Color Is Your Parish?
7:53 Sam Parr? You're the second successful person I've talked to in the last month that said that book changed their life.
7:58 Speaker 01 That book so changed my life. And it is a simple premise. You have a series of skills that come out of your personality, and you've built them, and they're transferable from one industry to another. You can change careers. You can do different things. But at the heart of it, there's a few things you used to think about. You basically want to do something that you love and you're attracted to. I mean, that's a no-brainer. It would be great to get a business, you go to work in a business that's also not only that you love, but it's ascendant. So it looks like there's some forces that are making this business rise. And then they gave you all these exercises to determine what skills you have and how you match them up. So I sat around my kitchen and did them all and I said, voila, I want to go in the music business.
8:43 Speaker 01 Now, my brother was in the music business. I used to watch him. I say, well, I could do that. But I had an encyclopedic knowledge of rock and roll music.
8:51 Sam Parr? Okay.
8:52 Speaker 01 I got hired at the company that would become MTV and MTV Networks in March of 1980.
9:00 Sam Parr? When they started the company, when you guys all started the company, it was eight of you trying to figure it out. I think I read that you got like 35 grand a year. That was your first year's salary.
9:08 Speaker 01 That was, I got more than anybody. Everyone else was getting 30.
9:11 Sam Parr? What'd you get?
9:12 Speaker 01 I got 35.
9:13 Sam Parr? What was the seed money to start it?
9:16 Speaker 01 We had, when it finally got approved, we were the child of American Express and Warner Communications. It was a joint venture.
9:23 Sam Parr? Why would American Express want to be in the TV business?
9:25 Speaker 01 Good question. They got into, Warner Cable in the 70s had developed this interactive thing called Qube. It was going to be interactive television, if you can imagine such a thing, Q-U-B-E. And it was a test they had in Columbus, Ohio. And American Express thought this would be a great way for them to get into the interactive television business, which is the first, you know, iteration of it. So they formed a company and they said, we're gonna, we're gonna bid on and get franchises in big metropolitan areas because no one had cable. It only really existed in rural areas. So then they said, well, we're gonna have to feed this system. We need to feed it with some channels of programming.
10:07 Speaker 01 So they started a second, smaller company, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, or it's a mouthful, WASAC. And they started the movie, the movie channel, which was sort of like HBO, it was 24 hours of movies, just movies.
10:22 Sam Parr? Was it HB, is that the precursor of HBO?
10:24 Speaker 01 No, HBO was, had been around since 74. It was doing uncut movies and that was a big innovation. And it was using a satellite, which was our other innovation. We would, we would not use broadcast towers, but we would bounce off a geosynchronous satellite 23,000 miles up there. This is sound like outer space stuff. And the, this little satellite company, we had Nickelodeon and then we were gonna launch a whole, you know, portfolio of channels. MTV was one of them. It was, it was called, uh, we're gonna do a music channel of some kind. And it would be, instead of being a broadcast network, these things would be what we called then narrowcast. We're only gonna program one genre and we're gonna do it to one segment of a audience, you know.
11:09 Sam Parr? Because before it was like ABC, there's only like four channels and it was like, we gotta do everything for everyone.
11:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, every, and, and so basically, no one-
11:16 Sam Parr? So it's like, we're gonna be a niche network.
11:17 Speaker 01 We're gonna be a niche network, do one thing all the time, do it really well, build up, build up a relationship with our viewers and, you know, so we were sort of existing on the side of the highway. And that was a, you know, wonderful place to be because the, the major networks would live or die on their shows. People knew the, knew the shows. They didn't, they weren't really that conscious of whether it was NBC or ABC or whatever. We were gonna be places, not shows. So you're gonna watch MTV, you're gonna watch Nickelodeon.
11:45 Sam Parr? Was that a new idea?
11:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. The people who ran this company came out of the radio business. The media business had been so boring and unchanged for so long. The big innovation in the seventies was FM radio. That would kind of take over the AM dial and they would have, instead of these general interest stations, they would be like, they would have genres like soft rock or, you know, free form rock and roll music. So they kind of gradually sliced away the big AM radio stations and that was the model they, they saw happening in television too, niche programming.
12:21 Sam Parr? What was your seed funding?
12:22 Speaker 01 Twenty-five million dollars.
12:23 Sam Parr? That's a shitload.
12:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a shitload of money. But then again, uh, you know, we almost ran down to zero before we really had a business.
12:32 Sam Parr? What did you spend? If I, okay, so it was eight, eight of y'all, making 35 grand, so nothing, but you have 25 million dollars.
12:39 Speaker 01 Well, it was eight people who developed it and we, when we launched, by the time we launched it, We had hired other people because we had to, you know, run a network. We were running a 24-hour network, seven days a week.
12:50 Sam Parr? Which was insane because, uh, one of my heroes, Ted Turner, he had the idea of CNN and that must have been a little bit before.
12:57 Speaker 01 Well, a few months before. So CNN, ESPN, us, USA Network, we were all starting at the same time. It was really the beginning of the modern, what can cable network business. We were kind of pals.
13:09 Sam Parr? Yeah, yeah.
13:10 Speaker 01 We were all trying to break down the broadcast monopoly that had like a 90%, 95% market share. Who all thought we were idiots.
13:18 Sam Parr? Which is funny because like it's, you've been around long enough that I'm going to ask you about it later. Like you've seen cycles of like the innovator then gets disrupted and et cetera. It becomes like, you know, the main guy and gets disrupted. I think I read that by year five or year seven, you were doing like 70 million in revenue. Is that right?
13:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:37 Sam Parr? So that's like a pretty fast ramp up. I mean, 25 million is a lot for.
13:41 Speaker 01 Well, 25 million was the cost. I mean, we started with no, I mean, the 25 million was, was how much we had to, you know, invest in this company before we went broke, you know? So show me your business. We're going to give you a pot of 70, 25 million dollars. Let's see if you can get your business plan, which I think originally was four years to break even. Let's see what you can do. And we, we, we were stalled. And we had to, you know, figure out a hail Mary pass to kind of save us. Cause the cable operators who really had to carry us, and they were monopolists at the time. They didn't want to pay 10 cents a month for MTV.
14:17 Sam Parr? What was the business model?
14:19 Speaker 01 The business model was multiple revenue streams. We're going to have this narrow cast kind of programming strategy. And we're going to get into all these cable systems. But what really had to happen was the cable guy had to come and wire America. And so we were also waiting for what we thought was the inevitability of cable TV coming to every household in America.
14:41 Sam Parr? And you'd get 10 cents per.
14:42 Speaker 01 We would get for MTV, we would ask 10 cents a month. So a dollar 20 a year. And then that was only to be like one third of the revenue. The rest was to come from advertisers.
14:51 Sam Parr? And how many subscribers did you have?
14:53 Speaker 01 We had, in year three or four, when we were running out of money, we had only like two and a half million subs. We were really behind schedule.
15:02 Sam Parr? So only 250, that'd be 3 or 4 million dollars a year in subscriber revenue. Did you have any other revenue?
15:09 Speaker 01 We barely, barely. We had some advertiser revenue, but we didn't really have big enough numbers to attract advertisers of any significance. So we were running low and the roadblock we had was that the cable operators were going, no way. We don't, by the way, we don't even like this music. This is like something from the devil, you know, this is rock and roll and these guys were more like Elvis Presley fans or Bible thumpers. The guys who controlled the cable industry way back then.
15:34 Sam Parr? Which is funny because they experienced the same thing with Elvis.
15:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. But then, so we, we needed an ad campaign. We said, we have to really go for broke. I knew, because I was a marketing guy, I would go to these towns like Tulsa, which actually had MTV from day one, 100,000 homes. So you had a little microcosm where you could see what would happen if MTV was in a community and people went crazy for it.
15:58 Sam Parr? What, what did they like about it?
15:59 Speaker 01 They just liked that it was 24 hours of music videos. People had never seen music videos before. So this is a network that looked like, where the hell did this come from? We just, it just, one day it showed up on their TV set and there was all these groups they'd never heard of with all this fast cutting, this whole new visual style. And it was funny and irreverent and looked like some underground thing. And here it was on my cable TV. I didn't have to order it or anything. So if you were a music fan, you're going, wow, this is fantastic.
16:28 Sam Parr? Which is interesting because like MTV doesn't do music videos anymore, but I watch music videos all day on YouTube. So I have to, like the music videos are still relevant, I think.
16:38 Speaker 01 They make more music videos now than ever.
16:40 Sam Parr? That's what I thought. Like, what about that behavior? The idea of a music video, I guess if you pitched it to me in the 70s, late 70s, I would sort of react in the same way that I would react if, when TikTok, like, so you're telling me I'm just gonna watch people dance on the internet, or I'm gonna watch like people play video games on the internet? That sounds silly, but then I actually find myself doing it all the time. Was there like a conversation where it was like, someone's just gonna like? Pretend that they're singing and play music and that's what we're gonna be into?
17:09 Speaker 01 Well, the birth of the music video was basically in Europe. Television had not been deregulated, so there was, or radio, so the radio stations didn't even play music. If you can remember or you read history, there were these pirate radio stations that existed on boats off the UK that would, that could play like radio, like American style radio where they would be playing records all day. So they said, since we can't get on the radio, because there's no radios playing music, we need to get on one of these television shows. Like in the UK, there was a show called Top of the Pops.
17:42 Sam Parr? Yeah.
17:43 Speaker 01 And people would make music videos to use on that show, or hey, why not put them in record stores? That's where I saw them. I was living in Berlin and I used to go to this record store and they had a little tiny TV and I'd see music videos for the first time. And it was kind of like playful and low key and lo-fi and it was another way to reach the consumer to promote the sales of LPs. The CDs hadn't even arrived yet. So this new business came out of a need just to how do we find some exposure for our product, which was the album. So then, you know, but America didn't really have any exposure to the music videos because we had radio stations that played music all day long.
18:24 Speaker 01 They didn't have such a need here. So when we started MTV, we only had 160 videos. And they were largely from the UK or Europe, largely from the UK, from independent acts. And then when people saw these could really help sell records. We could sell a lot of records and you know, gradually the Bruce Springsteen's and the ZZ Top's started making them and new artists like Madonna would come on the scene who found video to be a really great imager for themselves. And they could use it very effectively and smartly. And gradually this business developed making these things, which you know, still exists today. Even though MTV, you know, for a whole bunch of reasons, just sort of gave up on them, which you know, I think was a mistake. Obviously a mistake.
19:07 Sam Parr? You were able to like find and employ all these amazing creative people. So like, uh, Steve, I forget Steve's last name, the guy who started SpongeBob SquarePants.
19:17 Speaker 01 Steve Hilburn, no.
19:18 Sam Parr? And then Mike Judge, who is did, uh, King of the Hill, Daria, uh, Beavis and Butthead, and then most recently Silicon Valley, the TV show. And then Matt and Trey from South Park, like all these amazing people. When you're talking to a young, unaccomplished person, because I think Steve, the SpongeBob SquarePants guy, I think he was a marine biologist. When you're like trying to spot winning people, not even ideas, was there like a common theme?
19:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, first of all, I really consciously wanted to make the company, like it was an eccentric, we were not a traditional media company. We were like this eccentric place that we would thrive on sort of offbeat, leading edge talent, whether that be musical or comedians or whatnot. And we would try gradually bring them into the mainstream. So we kept our, you know, pop culture kind of moves up from the street. So I wanted to have a really young employee base that was pretty loose and, you know, casual.
20:18 Sam Parr? I think I said that your, I think I read that your dress code was no frontal nudity.
20:22 Speaker 01 That was it, yes. We had the worst dressed group of people going in and out of any Manhattan office building, which would be a tie for today because no one seems to have a dress code. But in those days, everyone had to wear suits and ties, and it was really kind of straight laced. But I wanted it to be a fun place. And I wanted all the employees to know that our main aptitude was creativity and taking risks. So I would put creative people in charge of these networks. And I wanted to send a signal to the employees that creativity and finding people and nurturing them and having these relationships was absolutely core to our business. Because I, and people wouldn't stay in there a long time. People would come and work a few years and leave. But I wanted there always to be like a long line of creative people who wanted to get a job at our company.
21:07 Speaker 01 We were like a talent magnet at that point. And very good at spotting things. We would look for people who were sort of immersed and lived on the popular culture of the day. It wouldn't be unlike, say, record companies have A and R people who go out and try and spot young bands. And they would, you know, hire those bands and, you know, hopefully have some hits with them. But we would have people who... You know, when we started, for example, Yo MTV Raps, we really put hip-hop on the stage for America. We were the first people to really... It came from two interns. Well, there was an intern and a production assistant who lived downtown New York, who were part of the original hip-hop scene in a way, as fans. And they would be champions for that
21:52 Speaker 01 within the company. And they would bring this cast of characters that they knew to us.
21:57 Sam Parr? But did you get it? Like, when you saw someone rap for the first time, were you like, "Oh, I get how this could be big"? Or was it like, "I'm good at hiring people and just letting them do whatever"?
22:06 Speaker 01 I was good at, I guess, hiring people who were good at attracting people and had good instincts and good taste. I was, you know, you need someone who had a... was well-versed in the popular culture, who had good instincts, who had diplomatic skills, was able to spot talent and build relationships with these people. It wasn't like everybody we hired or got behind was a success. But we were, you know, we would find people like Mike Judge at animation festivals. He would go to places then where a lot of this young talent who had ideas in their head, and they were animators, but they didn't want to go to Hollywood and get immersed in the factory animation scene. I didn't meet him.
22:47 Speaker 01 The first thing I saw was a short called Frog Baseball. Beavis and But... It wasn't even called Beavis and But... It was Beavis and Butthead. And it was like, maybe a five-minute thing that this guy who worked with his name, Abbie Tracoli, who was an animation freak. I mean, he would go to all the festivals. He saw this in Austin, Texas. And it was Beavis and Butthead, and they would have a frog. And they would... Beavis would throw a frog, and Butthead would hit it with a bat. You know, it sounds kind of grim and gruesome, but just their attitude and sensibility and the way they laughed and the way they were dressed. Wow, this is... So the whole greenlighting process, if you will, was like, you know, a minute? Well, that's been, that's hilarious, these guys.
23:31 Speaker 01 How do we get this guy, Mike Judge, inside the tent? And how can we make it easy for him to kind of develop a series with us? That we, well, how do we do that? So we made a deal with Mike Judge and we started cranking out, you know, how, well, they can sit on a couch and rate music videos and talk about music videos, which is like, like how we imagine some people in our audience would be doing and make it funny. Matt and Trey, when they came to us with South Park, the head of programming at MTV at the time, Brian Grayden, he had commissioned a Christmas card to send to like 3,000 people. And it was a six-minute thing with these foul-mouthed kids who became the South Park guys.
24:10 Sam Parr? Wasn't it, was, and I think even at the time, wasn't there like still a talking turd? Like, was it?
24:16 Speaker 01 And that was, again, that was a case of, well, green light, that we needed a hit desperately on Comedy Central, that took like a minute. Okay, let's do that.
24:23 Sam Parr? Were you like, these guys are going to be special? Or were you like, they're just one of many?
24:27 Speaker 01 No, these guys are going to be special. By the way, this is the most original thing we have seen for a while. It's offbeat, there's nothing else like it. It's, it's, uh, pushes the edge, it's funny, it's irreverent, and, uh, it's going to get attention. And we made six episodes with them.
24:41 Sam Parr? First one was, uh, Cartman getting an alien up his ass. He's like an anal probe, I think, right?
24:46 Speaker 01 They had, they liked the anal probes, yeah. I know, it's funny, because this last season, where they really go to town on the Trump people, has been their most successful in terms of ratings and buzz and everything. I mean, they're really, uh, they're great guys. I'm friends with Matt, you know, to this day. And, you know, their success has been just great to watch. I mean, then they did The Book of Mormon. On top of that, they're talented guys.
25:08 Sam Parr? Yeah, they're generative.
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25:38 Sam Parr? So I hire creatives and I'm trying to get, basically like I hired content people and the best ones are oftentimes the biggest pains in the asses. And also, I love it. It's so it's kind of like a love hate thing. But I'm always looking for ways to increase my batting average of like finding young, talented people and giving them a shot and increase the likelihood of a hit rate from, I don't know what your hit rate was, but like, let's say it's like 30%, try to get to 60%.
26:03 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, it's exactly the same challenge we would have because they are a pain in the ass. I mean, that's the beauty about them. They're difficult. They really had a point of view and it was hard to move them from it. Or they had no point of view, they didn't want to do something and they didn't want to be told. They wanted, you know, they kind of follow their own north stars. And we would generally hire people who, if they were going to be on the air, they, they basically had a project under their belt when they came to us. It was they, they were selling something. People would come, you know, we were, they want to sell because they'd want to get on one of our networks. But finding the employees who would basically be the talent pickers or people who have to work with talent, that was a whole other skill, you know? These were people who didn't necessarily, you know, make things, but they would power
26:48 Speaker 01 creators. I would hire someone who would be basically the talent picker, if you want, if you get what I mean. Because I realized at some point, I don't have necessarily the instincts to do it myself because I was a little bit older and away from the action, which always seemed to focus on what's going on with 20-year-olds. What do 20-year-olds want? So the best thing is, how can you best connect with those people? I mean, I wasn't like an idiot, but I would find like a woman like Judy McGrath and she would always say, what we have to do is hire aberrant people. Because it's going to be aberrant people who are a pain in the ass, but they're going to bring us the most success.
27:28 Sam Parr? What's that word mean? I've never heard that.
27:30 Speaker 01 They are trouble. And they're like, they're not mainstream people. They were, people may be sitting in the back of the class when they were going to school and they, they don't have a lot of respect for the system. They're on an individual agenda, you know?
27:44 Sam Parr? There's small things that companies do in their culture that have big, big shifts and shape the culture. For example, one of my favorite companies to read about is this company called Rakuten. It's like eBay or Amazon of Japan. And they don't have cleaners in their offices, even though it's like a 10,000 person company or whatever. Because every day at 4:00 PM, the employees are expected to spend 30 minutes cleaning their area and tidying their area. And then like they have like assigned jobs, like this person takes out the trash, whatever. And like the idea being is like, we want to sweat the details. There was anything that you did that you found other companies should implement in order to get their people to do more things that could get them fired at another company,
28:27 Sam Parr? but at your company could give you like a 10x outcome?
28:30 Speaker 01 We would have parties that were kind of, you know, I wanted the place to have a bit of a wild vibe to it.
28:37 Sam Parr? Yeah, I heard at one of your parties, I think it was Jon Stewart, he was like, maybe he was thinking about signing with you guys to host The Daily Show, or he had just signed. And he goes to the holiday party and he sees you on the ground in the street because you were on someone's shoulders, chicken fighting, and you like fell over or something like that. And he was like, and he was like, these guys are drunken idiots. I'm in the perfect place.
29:01 Speaker 01 We had a lot of that. We have, you know, we used to have these girls. You couldn't do a lot of this stuff these days. But we used to have these girls in like, you know, short pants with bandoliers filled with shot glasses and holsters that had tequila bottles in them. And so we would have what basically were like wild parties and get togethers and social things.
29:19 Sam Parr? At my company, we don't do like that many, because I've got kids. And so like I go home. But like, I do think that like intentionally hosting parties, it sounds so obvious and silly, but I actually do think that like shifts culture a little bit.
29:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, and if you have a party, it's not a plus one party. I mean, people aren't bringing their husbands or wives or boyfriends or girlfriends. It's the people who work together. So try and build the bond up with them. So I want the salespeople to get to know some of the people in the animation department. You're a salesperson, you're also, you know, we got to sell, we have to sell this creatively because we are just small guys still and we're up against these big networks. So how do we take this creative ethos we think really powers our business and apply it to accounting and sales and other things like that? And let's have these people socialize together and become friends. People love working there. You say when we had the pandemic and the office culture disappeared for a few years and hasn't, isn't fully back yet.
30:17 Speaker 01 We used to have people who slept in their offices. They would be there 24/7. They couldn't wait to come in. It was like the center of their social life.
30:25 Sam Parr? What was the average age, you think?
30:27 Speaker 01 Eh, twenties.
30:29 Sam Parr? Were a lot of people sleeping around with each other?
30:31 Speaker 01 Yes.
30:32 Sam Parr? Was that good or bad?
30:33 Speaker 01 Well, you know, a lot of them are married and they're still, they're still married.
30:36 Sam Parr? What I would tell my coworkers, I'm like, this only ends well if it ends in marriage.
30:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, there was, there was that problem. But, you know, you have a lot of young people, they're working really hard, they're, you know, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, they're consumed with their work or twelve hours a day. I mean, the only place they're meeting people is at work. So, you know, people start having relationships. We would also, you know, show people what we're making and what we're doing. And when, when, when I would speak to the employees, we would have like these town halls where they could ask me anything they want. I would always lead with all the creative successes that we have and talk about the risks that we've taken and which risks have paid off and maybe which risks haven't. And then show programming and talk about who was behind it and have some of the creators
31:24 Speaker 01 come out and how we revered, say, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or John Oliver and so the stable of talent we were able to grow there to have, be there some interaction with that and the staff rather than focusing on our financial results. When I would speak to the company as a whole, I almost never spoke about our financial results. I never spoke about our relationship to Viacom, which was our parent company, which in many cases was a sin because the, the parent company always wanted synergy between the various divisions. The other divisions might have been, you know, Simon and Schuster or whatever. And, but we're, no one came to work there to work for, you know, Viacom. Viacom was this abstract public company. We don't even know what it does.
32:08 Speaker 01 They came to work at MTV or Nickelodeon. And then I had to knit together how do people at Nickelodeon who were largely better dressed and maybe came from a school teacher sensibility, good for kids, more sociably, socially conscious than the MTV or VH1 people, how do they all kind of fit together and think they're on the same team?
32:28 Sam Parr? Can you talk to me about the Nickelodeon business? You said that was the biggest business. I lived down the street from Sesame Street.
32:34 Speaker 01 You call it, you lived on the street?
32:36 Sam Parr? Sesame Street is sixty-third. Yeah, my in-laws live on Sesame Street because that's where.
32:41 Speaker 01 Run now by, it was, been run for a long time with Nickelodeon alumni.
32:45 Sam Parr? I've always been interested in that business because I think they're independent still, right? The Jim Henson company?
32:50 Speaker 01 Yes, there's the Jim Henson Company and then the Sesame Street Workshop, and I'm not sure the exact... Jim Henson Company is kind of separate from Sesame Street Workshop.
32:59 Sam Parr? But it's still a multi-billion dollar independent company.
33:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it runs on public broadcasting. They license the public broadcasting.
33:06 Sam Parr? What does it take to create a show or a piece of content that becomes legacy? And do you think can last for two or three decades?
33:14 Speaker 01 Well, you never know in advance. You're always hoping you're gonna do that. That's the home run. So not that it only lasts for decades, but you're able to also spin it off into, you know, consumer products. That's where the real money is. Or motion pictures. That's what we would do, you know? And historically, these characters would be chosen by, in sort of the factory world, the commodity children's space, but they would try and pick something and say, does it have... The word they had was "toyability."
33:47 Sam Parr? Toyability, that means like, can the character become a toy? What can't become a toy?
33:52 Speaker 01 You know, we had a show called Angry Beavers. I mean, you know...
33:55 Sam Parr? I watched that when I was a kid, yeah.
33:56 Speaker 01 There wasn't anything there, but our criteria for greenlighting a show and going in and producing it had nothing to do with toyability. It was, were we in love with these characters? And did we think it could be a good show and get good numbers and resonate with the audience in spite of the fact that maybe it isn't gonna be a consumer products bonanza? So we were really thinking, because it goes back to the creator. The creator who had these characters in his head probably wasn't thinking about toyability either. He had a more crystallized, simple idea as to what could happen here, rather than what would be the eventual spinoffs. And maybe he didn't want to interfere with that. He wasn't that interested in toys.
34:39 Speaker 01 So we would do things that we were in love with. And a lot of them turned out to have, you know, with SpongeBob and Rugrats and so many, there was a lot of consumer products that we could crank out in feature films. Because when we got linked up with Paramount, we set up film labels there on the lot, you know, for MTV and VH1 and Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, to develop films that would use the IP that we had generated and made famous on the television network.
35:10 Sam Parr? I have this feeling that a podcast must have one of the following three things in order to be good. You need to have a unique perspective. So for example, that could be LeBron James talking about basketball. It doesn't matter if he talks on the worst microphone ever. People are gonna love that because LeBron James is one of one. The second thing is really high end or unique production. For example, if you get the best voice actors and it has the best sound effects, you're like, okay, I like this because it's like a total immersive experience. Or the third one is world-class delivery, meaning a comedian. A lot of comedians that I listen to on podcasts, they can talk about anything, but they're so funny and good at delivering it that I'm into it. And so when I think of podcasting, I'm like, okay, those are like three attributes. Can I lean in on one of them?
35:53 Sam Parr? Did you think of attributes for some of your shows where like if it hits one or more of these attributes, this is a winner?
36:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, we used to have this thing we called filters, which is sort of like that. Does it pass through these filters that we would have? Nickelodeon, the Nickelodeon people were very conscious about having some kind of pro-social appeal. Off the top of my head, I mean, we used to think, yeah, man, we have basic values like non-violence, pro-kid, things kids liked. It was fun, it was funny, it was irreverent. And also, does it have sort of a modern presentation? We were trying to position ourselves as the sort of, I hate to use this word, but sort of the hipper children's network, the cooler children's network versus Disney, which was the powerhouse children's operation. We wanted to be sort of the modern version of the Disney thing. So those would be some of the filters we draw, we draw through.
36:48 Speaker 01 I can't have to go back and remember what they might have been for MTV or VH1. It usually had a lot to do with like its appeal to the very specific core audience we were going after.
36:59 Sam Parr? Did you have a name for that person?
37:00 Speaker 01 The ultimate person was a 24-year-old. That's who we would program to, 22 to 24-year-olds. And that, teenagers, we would never talk about anyone younger than that or have them appear on the air because the minute people 24 or older saw a teenager, they were gonna say goodbye. They didn't want to be part of some teeny bopper network, even though teenagers were maybe one-third of our audience. They were never. showcased on the air. Uh, but we would also get, you know, people who were older, uh, watching, but the core audience was on MTV was 18 to 24 year olds. Then we would really move it to like 22 to 24 year olds.
37:38 Sam Parr? I was reading about, uh, I was reading about you and, um, I think when I, I think that you said in the book, you were fired because you didn't buy MySpace and Rupert Murdoch bought it. And you were fired by.
37:50 Speaker 01 Sumner Redstone?
37:51 Sam Parr? Yes, Sumner Redstone, who, uh, was a mogul. Uh, it seemed like a real jackass though. And then you were recruited immediately, I think by Rupert Murdoch and a few other people to join, you know, whatever they had going on, but I don't think you took it. I think you were recruited by Bono. I also think you were recruited by Steve Jobs or you, and you had some affiliation with him, same with Geffen, who is one of the most successful media business guys there ever is. You knew Bowie, Jagger, all these guys. You said you bought Andy Warhol's old house. You, uh, I think made an offer to buy Facebook. Is that right?
38:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, we were the first people. We, we, we offered like $800 million cash with like a $900 million earn out, if you can imagine.
38:34 Sam Parr? Tell me the Mark Zuckerberg story.
38:35 Speaker 01 Well, this guy called me up one day, Kevin Wall, who, uh, I knew, knew from the music business, said, hey, I got this guy, you know, we, we, we were aware of social media was coming on and we were aware this is a big paradigm shift.
38:47 Sam Parr? What year?
38:48 Speaker 01 This would have been 19, this is 2005.
38:52 Sam Parr? So how, how old is Facebook?
38:53 Speaker 01 Facebook was still only programming to college kids.
38:57 Sam Parr? Oh, was it like three years old?
38:58 Speaker 01 I guess so, two, three years old and they, their revenue was like seven or eight million dollars a year. And Mark Zuckerberg had just moved to California and the business thing they were wrestling with, he came in to see us in Times Square and I always remember he was like wearing a hoodie and flip flops. It was February and I had him meet us at the MTV offices because I figured it'd be younger and it'd be interesting. He wanted to see what that was like.
39:23 Sam Parr? And he's only 21?
39:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. And their big, their big challenge was do we want to expand this, uh, to high school kids? Cause it's just college kids that could really be on Facebook and love Facebook. Could we, is it gonna be a mistake to expand our target audience to high school kids? The revenue was eight million dollars a year, I remember this. But we saw that, you know, social media was gonna be a big force in the business and was gonna grow because people now could, you know, they could connect directly to each other. The gatekeeper era was gonna begin to fade, but we didn't have the capabilities or skill set to really create our own social networks. So maybe we buy somebody else's and bring it in-house.
40:07 Speaker 01 So he came to see us, but he must have felt something good because discussions ensued with his team. There was a fellow named Ove Van Aden, who I believe was the first CFO. And we went back and forth and we put a bid on the table and they turned us down. How big, what was it? It was like 1.7 million, billion, excuse me. 1.7, what, how much cash? Eight hundred, nine hundred million, I'm trying, it was eight hundred, nine hundred million in cash. The rest was an earn-out. Okay, so Zuckerberg. He did not want his MTV. Eventually, we got turned down because the negotiations happened at a lower level than me.
40:48 Speaker 01 But I do remember at one point, he was going back to Dobbs Ferry, New York for Thanksgiving. And this guy, Michael Wolff, who was kinda heading the negotiations from MTV Networks. He said, you know, I could offer Mark Zuckerberg a ride on the plane. And he'd basically be like a captive audience for five hours or so. And, you know, maybe we can make some headway in the negotiation. Obviously, it didn't, didn't work out. You got on the plane, though? He got on the plane, his parents picked him up at the airport, yeah. So this is really way back in the folklore. Why didn't you invest in it? That's a good question. We didn't, we weren't thinking of that. We were thinking of like buying and owning something. We had, we had been a company that sort of grew organically and we had never bought anything.
41:33 Speaker 01 And we weren't really like a venture. We weren't really set up as a venture firm. And our company was always, the parent company was always sort of operating on a shoestring in terms of how much money we can really invest in our own businesses or buy other ones. I don't think we were thinking of doing an investment. That might have been a clever way to go. But he turned, they turned us down and they turned, everybody else showed up at the door, you know, it was Microsoft, Yahoo, everybody wanted to buy Facebook at higher and higher.
42:01 Sam Parr? I think about that all the time, to be 21 or 22 and being offered to be a billionaire and just the gall that he had. And I find that to be fascinating.
42:09 Speaker 01 And it's refreshing. You know, people would start a company and they, their purpose wasn't, well, one day I'm going to sell this company to Google or Facebook or somebody else. They wanted to start a company and have it work, you know, and grow and grow to the tree to the sky. It was the same thing with Steve Jobs and, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Phil Knight. They all started companies because they thought that was interesting fun. They saw something in the culture where they thought they could slide in with an innovation and make a business.
42:34 Sam Parr? But those people always end up richer.
42:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
42:36 Sam Parr? Not always.
42:37 Speaker 01 They're owners. They didn't check out. That's not to say you can't sell your business and do something else or sell your business and maybe stay with it. But these guys were true believers.
42:48 Sam Parr? Did you know Steve Jobs?
42:50 Speaker 01 Well, we went up once to see him at, uh, this is before the, uh, we went up to see him and we wanted to talk about maybe doing a joint venture with MTV and Apple. This is before iTunes. There's this guy who worked with me who had a digital name, Jason Hershorn, and he made the cases to Steve Jobs that iTunes wasn't the way to go. The way to go was to put together basically a music streaming service, which would have been like Spotify. And Steve Jobs was adamant about, no, that's not the way we're going to do it. We're going to, we're going to do, we had the iTunes model. And, uh, you know, he gave us a nice tour of the Pixar studios and, you know, we had a. Fine relationship, but he was someone we, of course, really idolized as an icon for
43:35 Speaker 01 us, a guy who could lead creatively. He was also, by the way, a pilgrim from India.
43:43 Sam Parr? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
43:44 Speaker 01 Not to compare myself to him, but I mean, he, he had, uh, he didn't have a straight ahead business mindset.
43:51 Sam Parr? Yeah, he made for us, um, Bill Gates, he was like, Bill, you need, you need to do some acid.
43:56 Speaker 01 Right.
43:59 Sam Parr? Which other icons did you, I, I read a ton of biographies and I'm always like trying to find like who I can learn something from. Which icons did you meet that you were like, this person needs to be studied?
44:11 Speaker 01 Well, there's Rupert.
44:12 Sam Parr? What did you think about him?
44:14 Speaker 01 Well, you know, he's a bold buccaneer, kind of old school, classic media mogul. I can't say I agree with the results of some of his political programming, but you've got to give him credit for a guy who take big risks.
44:31 Sam Parr? What was he like?
44:32 Speaker 01 Well, he, I got to know him a fair amount because his wife, Wendy Deng, was good friends with my, my wife, Kathy. So we would go on trips together and so forth. But, you know, he's quite, you know, he can be fun.
44:45 Sam Parr? Was he a workaholic?
44:46 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah. I mean, but he'd travel, yeah, the, the difference between him and my boss, who was Sumner Redstone, they were about the same in terms of age. Rupert was a little younger, but they were both big moguls who took bets. Sumner was always focused and almost entirely on people who might be screwing him so he could sue from an antitrust perspective. He was a former antitrust lawyer, or the stock price. Whereas Rupert Murdoch would fly around the world endlessly in his 727 and he would really understand the machinations of how the operations all worked.
45:22 Sam Parr? There's not a very many good biographies on Rupert. So I've been able to piece together a few, but there's a cool documentary about him a little bit on HBO right now. And there's stories about him being, the company being huge, billions in revenue. And he was still calling editors for certain headlines. I mean, like, you should change it to this, this and this, and people will buy more magazines or newspapers because of that.
45:45 Speaker 01 He knew the business. Whereas, I mean, he really knew how the business worked as something like that he can make a contribution to. And they'd say, oh, you know, it's the boss, he wants to do this. It's like, it's not just the boss who wants to do this, but he may well have a point. He had credibility with his underlings.
46:00 Sam Parr? I heard he made huge bets just over one little conversation. Like, I think it was, they bought MySpace, right?
46:07 Speaker 01 He bought it on a weekend.
46:08 Sam Parr? Yeah, I heard he bought-
46:09 Speaker 01 With no due diligence.
46:10 Sam Parr? How much did he pay for it?
46:10 Speaker 01 $560 million.
46:13 Sam Parr? And it obviously was shit. It was the wrong bet.
46:15 Speaker 01 At the time, that was, you know, you gotta remember, in 2000, we had the Time Warner AOL merger that was a disaster. That was the real first linking of a new media and an old media, legendary, legacy media company. And that kind of blew up. So everyone was paranoid about making big bet on digital media after that. So now it's like five years later. He just lays out on a weekend with no due diligence, buying this social media site that we, we had been looking at and were aware of in Santa Monica, just bought it over the weekend. And he became, because of that purchase, he became like, oh, he's the new media savant. He's like this old dude.
46:56 Speaker 01 But he also gets this because he's buying this hot up and coming media company, which of course, or new media company, which of course didn't work out. But this really aggravated my boss, Sumner Redstone, who really had never heard of MySpace until he heard that Rupert bought it.
47:10 Sam Parr? And he fired you just because?
47:11 Speaker 01 Well, I think there might have been other reasons, but a primary reason, like he told Charlie Rose, was that, you know, I, I had the prize and I let it go, and I let it go to Murdoch.
47:20 Sam Parr? And MySpace was the prize?
47:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, which ended up dissolving and being sold to Justin Timberlake for $35 million years later. So it wasn't much of a prize.
47:32 Sam Parr? Were you able to make money on this as you went?
47:34 Speaker 01 Personally?
47:34 Sam Parr? Yeah.
47:35 Speaker 01 Yes, we had, you know, we started, like I told you, we were everyone's making thirty, thirty-five grand a year. There was no stock options. People wouldn't even know what a stock option was in nineteen eighty. It wasn't like part of the normal nomenclature. You know, we, we just can't believe we have a job here. We're on a crusade. This is the greatest thing. It's gonna be the greatest thing. We're gonna sweep the nation with this thing. So they were like crusaders, but then we decided we, in nineteen ninety-five, Warner AMEX needed money and they made one-third of the company public. And everybody got like a little bit of stock options. So we saw, started seeing that the one, we were this hot company. We're MTV Networks. MTV was the first name, was a really hot commodity.
48:18 Speaker 01 So you get a, you know, everybody had a little taste. And then we got bought when we were sold, so all those stock options vested and paid out. But, you know, in today's, no one was becoming a billionaire or even a millionaire.
48:32 Sam Parr? I wanna ask about writing rooms.
48:36 Sam Parr? This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company, and you realize two things. One, you've done something great, but you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers, which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone, by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers, of other entrepreneurs, who are gonna hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense, and help show you the way. Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there.
49:20 Sam Parr? And they're hard to find. And if you can find them, it's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down, where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working, you're gonna be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying, shit, I barely grew. And business and... And in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid. We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and I know this stuff actually works whether you work with Hampton or you get your own group on your own. But having a group like this, a group of people who you meet with in real life, once a month, it can change your life. It changed mine
50:03 Sam Parr? and I know it will change yours. So check it out. Joinhampton.com. I was listening to you and Jon Stewart talk about that and the idea of a writing room is foreign to me because A, when I'm creative, I'm by myself. I prefer just to like, you know, my old company, I used to have to write a bunch of articles a week and I was like, I just need to go into a room by myself and not talk to anyone. What did a writer's room look like and what do you think made a writer's room successful in order to get the best outcome from a group of people?
50:34 Speaker 01 Well, I get it that is in my book in a bit. We didn't really have writers for a lot of what we did at MTV. There was stuff was really written individually. We didn't have a writer's room per se. At one point Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller launched the Fox network, which was going to be not just a broadcast network like the others, but it was going to focus on younger people. And they were putting on soap operas like Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210. So I said, well, our creative people are always trying to do something a little more ambitious. Why don't we do a soap opera? So we developed one and it was developed with this company and Boonam Murray, really successful folks, great people. They were young at the time and it came to me and it had a budget and
51:19 Speaker 01 in that budget was a big line item for writers. And I said, you know, we don't really have that kind of money to hire writers. We're probably going to make stuff for a hundred thousand dollars an episode or something like that, but we wanted to do it regularly and we had a lot of other financial needs for the money. So they went back and came back to me with, okay, we're eliminating the writers. What we're going to do is find seven or eight people and stick them in a loft down on Broadway and Prince Street. We found this loft and we're going to put hidden cameras in and we're going to tape them and then we're going to use what our real skill set was at the time was in post-production and editing. We will edit all this action from these kids and all this interchange
52:04 Speaker 01 into these episodes and that became the real world. Which really launched the modern version of reality television. That was nineteen ninety-two. But, um, you know, that was, uh, the birth of the real world. And then, you know, the, for the first season, the people who were in it, they had no idea they'd become reality stars because such a thing hadn't existed yet. Now, when they cast people to be in these various reality shows, which are everywhere, everybody knows they have to have sort of an outsized personality and, you know, be controversial and whatnot. But the success of the real world was just exploded because we found out young people wanted to see other young people on television. They wanted to see, they get a lot of social clues and whatnot. The real world, we were doing a thing with Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osbourne.
52:49 Speaker 01 And Sharon Osbourne was driving around in the back of a car with our head of programming, Brian Grayden, and she says, oh, you know, this day is crazy. If there was a crew following me around, you know, it would be an amazing reality show. So Brian, done. That was it. That became The Osbournes, which was the first celebrity reality show. Now there's like fifty categories of reality shows. There's a whole industry around them.
53:13 Sam Parr? What was the conversation like where you said, uh, we're not doing this writer stuff? Was there a unanimous agreement in the room?
53:18 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, everybody said, everyone wanted to do, let's do something. You know, we gotta get this show on the air and let's, this, this is a good idea. We could actually make this better than ever, make it real.
53:28 Sam Parr? Whose idea was it?
53:29 Speaker 01 Uh, well, Boone Murray had the idea. There was a fellow, uh, who was a champion for it internally named Doug Herzog, who eventually would go on and become, uh, the head of Comedy Central. And I'm sure there's some other people's names involved that I'm forgetting right now.
53:42 Sam Parr? Did you, were you on the board of OWN? Oprah's, is it OWN?
53:46 Speaker 01 I wasn't on the board, but I was hired by Oprah to be a consultant. When I got fired from Viacom, I went to Burma, which I had known from my travels in Asia, which was like the crazy uncle of Southeast Asia, run by a military dictatorship. There's no media there. I just wanted to disappear, uh, with my wife and just kind of rethink and see if I could get some epiphany about what I was gonna do next. And I got back to this place, we were up in the jungle, uh, and I got back to the hotel on a boat. You had to go by everywhere by boat and there's a message and there's a message for you in the office. They didn't have cell phones there, nothing. Oprah Winfrey called.
54:27 Sam Parr? Were you starstruck?
54:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I go, Oprah Winfrey, I don't even know Oprah Winfrey. Why is she calling, why is she calling me? So I got back in New York and I called her and she said, yeah, I called you. I saw that you left and I saw you got a big cheer, which I write about in the book. When I left the company, there was like all these people in the lobby to send me off. And says, I'd love to meet with you and talk with you. And why don't you come up to Montecito and I'll make you breakfast? Which I did and we become good friends. She helped me promote my book recently. I did an interview with her and I loved Oprah. I mean, there's no easier person in the world to speak to. She's curious, she knows a little bit about everything. And she's, she knows how to talk to people like, you know, nobody's business.
55:12 Speaker 01 So I mean, that's what she does for a living, right? She's always done that. So she's been able to carve out and set up this whole like modern media business. She was one of the first people like in the creator economy, which people would use that word today. I mean, here you have a creator who's, she's at the center of a media enterprise. You know, her, her ethos and everything, you know.
55:33 Sam Parr? Does she still, is that still its own company?
55:35 Speaker 01 Own is owned by Discovery. It was originally called the Discovery Health Network. And so she did a joint venture with Discovery, David Zaslove, much in the news. He called Oprah and he said, look, we'd like to change this Discovery Health Network, which is this sort of laying there. And what if you came in and made it the Oprah Winfrey Network? And we could have something really original and noteworthy. And so she hired me as a consultant and I did that for a couple of years.
56:05 Sam Parr? Man, it's just so crazy. I wonder if, if this stuff still exists, like the way that I've been, you know, I've studied Ted Turner. That's my hero. The way that it seems is like because, because cable was like the pipes. If you get in the pipes, the likelihood that you're going to be a somebody was, was a lot higher than, a little bit than what it is now.
56:22 Speaker 01 And that was the era of the monoculture in a way, you know, you, you, there was a, where things were controlled by editors and there was a barrier to get in. Now anybody can.
56:30 Sam Parr? Which is pros and cons.
56:32 Speaker 01 Yes.
56:32 Sam Parr? Con being if you were one of the, if you were Oprah, like it was, it was awesome.
56:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, because you had a built in audience. You had a head start over everybody. But you know, here you are, you're scrambling, you've built a business basically on your own wits, your personality, but you're competing with. Like
56:49 Sam Parr? Everyone.
56:49 Speaker 01 In and out.
56:50 Sam Parr? Yeah.
56:51 Speaker 01 Everybody's their own broadcaster.
56:52 Sam Parr? Well, do you have any advice to that? Like you've been on top of the game for like three generations now. Where do you think things are going to go? I know that I've heard you talk like where you're you seem a little frustrated with the rise of digital because that kind of made MTV less relevant. Because it kind of messed with the business model, messed with the margins, which made it all possible. Do you have any predictions on where it's going to go or tips on how to succeed right now?
57:18 Speaker 01 Well, you know, you see things emerging to me. I mean, I really don't look at everything, but I look at stuff like in the so-called creator economy. And you can see there's stuff, there's things now like Patron or Substack or everything where I always.
57:30 Sam Parr? Patreon.
57:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, Patreon rather. What I would do if I was 25 years old, you know, if I would, because I think of well, the same things. How could I align the things I like and care about and say, you know, if I could work for some type of enterprise and learn the business and enterprise that's really about powering creative people and getting them more famous and more relevant and how do you do it? I mean, you have to sort of be a master of social media these days and you have to have an intrinsic quality that will allow you to stand above everybody else, which is truly everybody else.
58:06 Sam Parr? Well, you know, it's funny is my company, The Hustle, it was a daily newsletter, which at the time was people kind of laughed at it, but I was like, I think this can get to a couple hundred million in revenue if we do it right. And we sold before we got there, but my competitors and like where the company that I sold now is like 200 hundreds of millions in revenue was was was possible. That was right. But I was inspired by Ted Turner. I read his biography. He's my hero. And I knew all, so I studied cable. So I read about cable cowboys and Liberty Media Media. Like I studied it like crazy. I've studied you like crazy. And at the time in 2014, right around when I was starting the company, Buzzfeed was popular and Vice was popular, but what was going on was their business models were going down because Facebook was pulling back reach.
58:50 Sam Parr? So they would get less clicks. And I was like, well, where's like the last bit of real estate that I could fully own and not rent? And it was newsletter newsletters. And you know who I got that idea from? Bob Pittman.
59:04 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
59:04 Sam Parr? Bob Pittman had this thing called the pilot group.
59:07 Speaker 01 I know. I sat, I had dinner with Bob Pittman last night, strangest it may seem. I mean, this is a synchronicity.
59:13 Sam Parr? You're one of your co-founders.
59:14 Speaker 01 He's a co-founder.
59:15 Sam Parr? And he had this thing called the pilot group where he would fund newsletter companies, one of them being Daily Candy, which sold for a hundred million dollars. I heard about that story and I was like, I'm just gonna copy that and do it with business news. And so that's how I started my first company, which we ended up selling four years in.
59:30 Speaker 01 They also involved Ben Lair. I'm trying to remember the name of the newsletter he had.
59:34 Sam Parr? Yeah, Ben, for Thrillist. Yeah, I was just like.
59:36 Speaker 01 Thrillist, yes.
59:37 Sam Parr? Yeah, I was like, I'm just gonna do what those guys did.
59:39 Speaker 01 It was good. I mean, newsletters had an era, digital media had an era.
59:43 Sam Parr? Still do, because Substack and Patreon, which you're talking about, they created their company because they saw what I was doing and they're like, yeah, that's cool, but why don't we just create the technology for it, which obviously is far more lucrative.
59:55 Speaker 01 Do you regret selling that company?
59:56 Sam Parr? No, because I was broke. I didn't pay myself much money. The business, the year I sold it, we sold it in February, the trailing year, we had done 12 million in revenue, that moving forward year, that forward year, we were gonna do like 18, so it was growing like a weed, it was doing great. But I paid myself like the first two years, like two grand a month, and so I was broke. The last couple of years, I started paying myself a little bit more money, but a few things happened. I sold in February of 21, so the Black Lives Matter protests were happening, COVID was happening, and I felt the world was like gonna end. And so the second that I had an opportunity to kind of cash out and have financial security for forever, I was like, I will do that in a heartbeat. So I don't regret it, but I regret being in the position to sell it.
1:00:38 Sam Parr? Meaning, I wish I could have owned it forever and still like had both outcomes. Obviously, that's not possible.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 It's a different form of the innovator's dilemma.
1:00:46 Sam Parr? What is that?
1:00:47 Speaker 01 The brokenness of scrambling with no money when you have a life to support.
1:00:52 Sam Parr? Well, my biggest takeaway from that era is I should have paid myself more money. But dude, thank you for doing this.
1:00:57 Speaker 01 I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed the conversation very much.
1:00:59 Sam Parr? I could talk to you all day. It was, you've been, you were the man behind the scenes of the content that shaped my childhood.
1:01:06 Speaker 01 Well, it's been great and it's been, you know, I, I've summarized it all in this book, which was a lot of fun to put together unplugged.
1:01:12 Sam Parr? It was good. I read it this past weekend. It was awesome. We didn't even get to it because I've seen you talk to it in some other podcasts, but like you got busted for having hundreds of pounds of pot on you and.
1:01:23 Speaker 01 And what they used to say advice, they said, what are you doing? Well, we're doing a lot of stuff that's really smart and a lot of stuff that's really stupid, which is sort of another version of the high and low.
1:01:33 Sam Parr? That's awesome.
1:01:33 Speaker 01 And they didn't do that. Yeah.
1:01:35 Sam Parr? Well, thank you.
1:01:35 Speaker 01 All right, we're off.
1:01:46 Shaan Puri? Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called The Science of Scaling by Mark Roberge. He was the founding CRO of HubSpot and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like Klavio and Vanta and OpenAI and he's asking about their strategies, their tactics and how they're growing their companies as, you know, head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or a head of sales that's looking to level up in your career, I think a podcast like this could be great for you. Listen to The Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts.
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