"Tom Freston"

Take the Jimmy Jet to Timbuktu: it’s Tom Freston. No experience in television, selling toilet paper, various red-light districts, and a Bob Marley ring-tone. It’s really good to be with you… on an all-new SmartLess.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sean Hayes?

  This episode of Smartless is sponsored by Google Book. You know, I'm lucky to have a lot of friends and having them over is great, but with hosting comes all the tedious stuff. The planning, keeping track of who's coming, managing schedules, making sure everything actually comes together. That's where Google Book comes in. It's a whole new kind of laptop. It comes with Google AI Pro, so you can create custom tasks with Gemini. For example, you can tell it to track RSVPs and manage your calendar, and it does that for you, even when the laptop's closed. So there's more time to focus on the fun parts of hosting. Basically, Google Book works hard, so you don't have to. Visit googlebook.com. Available in the Gemini app to Google AI Pro users

• 0:45Sean Hayes?

  in select regions for 18-plus users. Check responses for accuracy. Supervise closely. Interrupt when needed.

• 0:54Sean Hayes?

  It's finally the time of year. Maybe the weather is getting a little more crisp, or you're just clocking it from all the pumpkins at the grocery store, which means the holidays are just around the corner. Amazon delivers joy with low prices on the gifts you want, even this early in the season. Get ahead of the season, shop early gifts, top picks, holiday decor, and advent calendars at low prices. Get a head start on holiday gifting with Amazon's low prices. Shop now at amazon.com/holiday.

• 1:30Sean Hayes?

  The place you call home is important to you. So it's important to Allstate, because home is where you make all your memories. Things like inviting your friends over for game night and discovering that one of them takes charades way, way too seriously. It's these memories that make a house feel like home. If it's important to you, it's important to Allstate. Switch to Allstate, and you could save hundreds on home insurance today. Not available in every state. Potential savings vary, subject to terms and qualifications. Allstate North American Insurance Company and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.

• 2:06Sean Hayes?

  Sitting in traffic, huh? Watching an old lady with a walker make it further up the road than you have in the last 15 minutes? And of course, your gas tank is in the perfect spot between not a problem to stranded on the highway. Hit your booking point? Book with Southwest and enter airplane mode. Experience award-winning reliability, fly with the best crew in the sky, and never worry about change or cancellation fees. Now tell that old lady to slow down. Kids live around here. Southwest Airlines, enter airplane mode.

• 2:51Will Arnett?

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

• 2:52Jason Bateman?

  It's so great to be here with you guys.

• 2:54Will Arnett?

  It feels like 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 guys.

• 2:58Jason Bateman?

  It's really good to be with you guys. How are your headphones? Are they, do they fit okay? Are they tight?

• 3:04Will Arnett?

  My, my headphones?

• 3:05Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, for the record today.

• 3:07Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Jason Bateman?

  Everything seems, feels pretty good. Wait, wait, you've got new headphones on, don't you, Sean?

• 3:13Sean Hayes?

  I do, yeah. They're, they're new. I might wear them out. I might wear them out.

• 3:17Jason Bateman?

  Why? Because you want to look like Princess Leia?

• 3:20Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, I think they look cool.

• 3:22Will Arnett?

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

• 3:26Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Jason Bateman?

  Well, did you want to mention the company or something like that? Is that what you're angling for?

• 3:31Sean Hayes?

  I have no idea what the company is.

• 3:32Will Arnett?

  Oh, wait, I just got a text. Welcome, it's an all-new Smartless.

• 3:52Jason Bateman?

  How about I fixed myself?

• 3:54Will Arnett?

  No way.

• 3:55Jason Bateman?

  Guys.

• 3:55Sean Hayes?

  It's about time.

• 3:56Jason Bateman?

  I know how to fix myself now.

• 3:57Will Arnett?

  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.

• 4:03Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, tap the lips. That's how, that's how the brain works.

• 4:08Will Arnett?

  Audibly went.

• 4:09Jason Bateman?

  It's a button on the lips.

• 4:10Will Arnett?

  By the way, JB, you have ruined forever. I noticed it yesterday, again, somebody commented on it. Getting out of the car, I went, "Hooey!"

• 4:18Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. It tightens the core to make a little noise.

• 4:22Will Arnett?

  Sean, you do it now, too?

• 4:23Sean Hayes?

  I do it when I get in the car, too.

• 4:29Will Arnett?

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

• 4:32Jason Bateman?

  We're all getting that old.

• 4:36Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, so, well, this is, what number episode is this for us? Are we north, we're north of 200, right?

• 4:42Will Arnett?

  Bennett Robb, anybody?

• 4:43Sean Hayes?

  Over 250, I think.

• 4:44Will Arnett?

  Yeah, we're in the 280s now.

• 4:46Jason Bateman?

  I can, no, really? I can now, I'm basically my own tech support now. I can, I know how to find the little...

• 4:53Will Arnett?

  We don't, we don't need to tell you 290 times.

• 4:58Will Arnett?

  You know? That's the good news.

• 5:00Sean Hayes?

  It is true. Out of the three of us, who has the most technical problems?

• 5:06Will Arnett?

  Who gets, do we get to vote or do you have to own up to it?

• 5:09Jason Bateman?

  I think I'm, I think I'm all right. I'll bet, I'll bet Sean, you're, you're worse because you're able to, because Scotty can catch you every time you fall.

• 5:18Sean Hayes?

  I scream my head off if I'm like, I can't log on. My computer doesn't work.

• 5:22Will Arnett?

  Who has, who has the least?

• 5:23Sean Hayes?

  The least, oh, least problems?

• 5:25Will Arnett?

  Yeah, technical, not problems, not problems, not world problems.

• 5:29Sean Hayes?

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

• 5:32Will Arnett?

  Well, I'm more probably used to the setup of the mic.

• 5:34Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, isn't that nice? That's sweet.

• 5:36Jason Bateman?

  Well, and you also, you started, weren't you original, one of the original Geek Squad guys?

• 5:41Will Arnett?

  I did do, I did, I still own the name.

• 5:44Sean Hayes?

  What is it?

• 5:47Will Arnett?

  I still, I did all the art.

• 5:49Sean Hayes?

  I went to a Dodgers game with Jason a couple of weeks ago.

• 5:52Jason Bateman?

  You sure did.

• 5:53Sean Hayes?

  And then we went to the USC football game.

• 5:54Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, you did, and you had a decent, we had a decent quarter there.

• 5:58Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, that was crazy. We, Jason and I, I had all the concessions that Jason bought. I was holding them.

• 6:04Jason Bateman?

  This guy looked like he was at a state fair.

• 6:06Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Jason Bateman?

  Fuck.

• 6:09Sean Hayes?

  It did, it looked like, I had like popcorn.

• 6:13Jason Bateman?

  Old Bessie had two armfuls.

• 6:15Sean Hayes?

  I did, I had like a soft pretzel and Jason has a hot dog and his phone and I had all the drinks and the pretzels.

• 6:20Jason Bateman?

  And the cheese dipping sauce.

• 6:21Will Arnett?

  I once described you, I once described you as a soft pretzel, that's funny.

• 6:26Sean Hayes?

  Just in knots all over. Yeah.

• 6:28Will Arnett?

  But it sounds like you're really living your best life though, Sean.

• 6:32Sean Hayes?

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

• 6:40Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, so 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 like block.

• 6:49Will Arnett?

  And here come these big, these big dickhead actor Hollywood actors.

• 6:53Sean Hayes?

  Totally, totally.

• 6:54Will Arnett?

  Right. And there was like, oh, you're gonna kick these people out?

• 6:56Jason Bateman?

  I know. But you have to like show proof of your tickets and you remember you used to, you used to pass your ticket down the aisle. Yeah, see, yeah. But now the tickets are on your phone.

• 7:03Will Arnett?

  I used to love you.

• 7:04Jason Bateman?

  Tickets are on your phone. You gotta like pass your phone down the aisle. Now people are touching your phone, you know? I don't like that, Willie.

• 7:09Sean Hayes?

  Right.

• 7:10Jason Bateman?

  And these guys, guess what? Here's, here's the news.

• 7:12Sean Hayes?

  While he's eating his hot dog.

• 7:14Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, they wouldn't move.

• 7:15Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Will Arnett?

  No.

• 7:16Jason Bateman?

  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. Well, you gotta get them and tell them to move us.

• 7:26Sean Hayes?

  That's right.

• 7:26Will Arnett?

  No.

• 7:27Jason Bateman?

  So we had to sit on the stairs with our groceries and wait. I mean, oh God, it was the worst. It took like 10 minutes.

• 7:35Will Arnett?

  And then they finally got them out. And what was the attitude?

• 7:37Jason Bateman?

  They finally got out.

• 7:38Will Arnett?

  Did it come to blows? Did it almost come to blows?

• 7:39Jason Bateman?

  A family of four were relocated.

• 7:41Will Arnett?

  No.

• 7:42Jason Bateman?

  And then just us two sat down and now we got two extra seats next to us and we look like super assholes.

• 7:46Sean Hayes?

  And I ate my, I ate my pretzel on the, on the stairs and my cheese went everywhere.

• 7:51Will Arnett?

  Oh no. You mean actual cheese?

• 7:54Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Will Arnett?

  It wasn't, it wasn't a result of eating the pretzel made your cheese go everywhere?

• 7:57Sean Hayes?

  You created cheese. No.

• 8:01Will Arnett?

  Okay. We'll save that for Smartless After Dark, uh, which we still haven't gotten off the ground.

• 8:06Sean Hayes?

  No, still working on the logo.

• 8:08Will Arnett?

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

• 8:15Sean Hayes?

  It is pretty shameless.

• 8:16Will Arnett?

  Uh, it is. And, uh, this, this is a guy who is really, you want to talk about live the life. This guy's really lived the life. Okay?

• 8:21Sean Hayes?

  Oh boy.

• 8:22Will Arnett?

  He starts out, he's the pride of Connecticut, sort of. Uh, he started out running a clothing company out of Afghanistan and India. No joke, back in like the early seventies when nobody was over there. He just, I mean, he's the kind of guy you'd. You'd find him on a night boat to Tangier, that's the kind of dude he is. Out of nowhere, he comes back after running, literally trying to avoid tariffs and running clothing illegally across the St. Louis into upstate New York. He then decides he's gonna 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. It went global, everywhere.

• 8:58Jason Bateman?

  Andy Warhol.

• 8:58Will Arnett?

  Runs a bunch of little networks you might have heard of called Nickelodeon, VH1, Comedy Central.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Oh, this is old Mr. Tom Freston.

• 9:05Will Arnett?

  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.

• 9:14Jason Bateman?

  Cannot wait. Oh, mister.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Hey, guys.

• 9:18Jason Bateman?

  I can't wait to hear all about this fella.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  It's an honor to be here.

• 9:24Jason Bateman?

  Here on Shameless? You've seen all 10 seasons on Showtime for us?

• 9:28Will Arnett?

  Shameless.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Shameless.

• 9:32Jason Bateman?

  Welcome to the show.

• 9:33Sean Hayes?

  How do you and Will know each other, Tom?

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Just hanging around in New York, out on Long Island.

• 9:39Will Arnett?

  Yeah. We originally met through our mutual friend many years ago through Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy and Jane Buffett introduced us back in the day. Tom's good friend, may he rest in peace.

• 9:51Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, I'm sorry about your loss.

• 9:53Will Arnett?

  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?

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, he sure did.

• 10:02Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Jason Bateman?

  How did you, Tom, how'd you meet Jimmy?

• 10:06Speaker 03

  I met Jimmy in the basement of a bar called JP's 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, it was like sort of a music industry hangout. So I met him there in 1977. 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 and that was especially good, especially after he bought a jet.

• 10:38Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, was he flying planes back then?

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, he could fly all kinds of planes, the Jimmy jets. Yeah, he would, was very serious about it. He could fly sea planes, you know, all kinds of big fancy ones as well.

• 10:52Will Arnett?

  Tom, he had a few, Jimmy also crashed a few planes.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  He did, he crashed. He landed in Nantucket and sort of flipped it over and that was... And there was other instances of malfeasance.

• 11:05Will Arnett?

  Yeah, I remember one time when we were, I told that story when we, when they did that, that show with the Hollywood Bowl in honor of Jimmy and I told the story about he was, he was gonna do takeoff and landings on this little island. And he said, what are you, I said, what are you doing this morning? He goes, I gotta go get certified. I'm doing takeoff and landings. Do you wanna 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. Oh, my God. The key word there is training. Do you wanna come for training? No. So, so, Tom, I wanna go, I wanna go all the way back. By the way, Tom's, Tom's got a book that we're gonna get, we're gonna get into Tom's book in a second because I read it a while ago and it's phenomenal. But I Will is called Unplugged, which is fantastic, which is, I think, out now, right,

• 11:50Will Arnett?

  Tom?

• 11:51Speaker 03

  It comes out November 18.

• 11:53Will Arnett?

  Yeah, 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, you started a clothing company in Afghanistan and India. Yeah, I wanna know how and why. 1970. How, how is one able to do that?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Um, well, let's see, I was, I had been working in an ad agency in New York. I got assigned to Charmin Toilet Paper.

• 12:21Will Arnett?

  Sure.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  A tough, a tough account, working with Mr. Whipple. And this, my old girlfriend was in Paris, and I said, hey, you can't do that. Come with me, we're gonna cross the Sahara Desert. And I quit my job and a week later I was on a plane. And I met her and we, we traveled around and then she left and I kept going. I tried, for a whole year. And at one point, I, I met some woman who said, you know, you've gotta go to India. That's the greatest show on earth. So, I did do that 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.

• 13:03Will Arnett?

  And what, yeah, what year ish?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  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 Bloomingdale's and so forth. 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 uh

• 13:34Speaker 03

  not the 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 stuff in production.

• 13:47Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  And it was a nightmare working there in those days. Um, so I I actually ended up smuggling three tons of stuff in from Canada.

• 13:57Will Arnett?

  Yeah, wait, wait, Tom, Tom, take us through that. So so you get, by the way, this is like, so this before, obviously before the internet and all that stuff. So you guys, this is all sort of phone calls and everything takes a little bit longer. And now you've got all these goods that you're sitting on and you gotta get it into the States. And so you decide what?

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Well, I 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.

• 14:24Jason Bateman?

  Wow, but by just by just by putting it on a plane and just nobody checking?

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Well, no, they had, they would, they would, they would send stuff in shipments.

• 14:32Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  They would take stuff across borders. But in this case, I was allowed to bring stuff legally into Canada. And, you know, I I figured, you know, 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'll admit, I mean, but I just want to get some money back. I felt I had really been ripped off by the government with no, no prior announcement or anything. So that was the end of my business. And I also had my business in Afghanistan kind of vaporized because there had been a communist coup there.

• 15:05Will Arnett?

  Right.

• 15:06Jason Bateman?

  But Tom, can you, can you, for, for, for a real soft, uh, Hollywood idiot like me, uh, who any, this whole thing sounds just so foreign from anything I would ever.

• 15:23Jason Bateman?

  Imagine, let alone pursue.

• 15:25Will Arnett?

  He won't go east of La Brea. Put it that way, okay?

• 15:28Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, just forget it. Or, or, or south of the, of the airport. What, what, what was your life like at that age, at that time? That gave you either the, the courage to, to, to have this wanderlust? Or to, or maybe the opposite of courage? There was, there was just stuff happening in your life. It was like, fuck all this. I, I, I, I just want to go to the end of the earth for something completely new, something completely different, because this ain't working. Was it one of the two?

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was more the latter. I mean, I, I was, yeah, I was, it was the 60s. So, you know, there was a lot of alienation around. Freedom sounded like a good option. I, I decided early on, I didn't want to really have a mainstream kind of life. I had taken a year off and sort of bartended around.

• 16:17Will Arnett?

  But you had gotten your MBA, you'd, right?

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had an MBA. I did that, that was a way to stay out of the draft in those days.

• 16:25Will Arnett?

  Right.

• 16:26Speaker 03

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

• 16:36Jason Bateman?

  What was it about the mainstream life that just didn't feel, uh, uh, something that you were attracted to, especially given the fact that you had gone down this road of mainstream? You got an MBA and, and like you're, you're set, you're ready. You've 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.

• 16:58Speaker 03

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

• 17:06Speaker 03

  And before that, I was on the G.I. Joe account, which was like, you know, the, the war toy of the, uh, military industrial complex. It was a very alienated time. A lot of people were quitting jobs and sort of trying to go off and do their own thing.

• 17:20Jason Bateman?

  So, everything looked appealing?

• 17:21Speaker 03

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

• 17:38Jason Bateman?

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

• 17:43Will Arnett?

  How old were you?

• 17:43Speaker 03

  I was twenty-five, twenty-six, you know, I mean, young, so if not now, when?

• 17:48Jason Bateman?

  That's, yeah.

• 17:49Will Arnett?

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

• 18:08Jason Bateman?

  It sounds so good.

• 18:09Will Arnett?

  Right?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was a bit of a phenomenon, they call it the hippie trail. I mean, no one self-identified as a hippie, but like in California, 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.

• 18:22Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Or somewhere upstate in New York. 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. Yeah, I'd meet people who traveled for years.

• 18:35Jason Bateman?

  Well, that sounds, that sounds like a really sort of, um, contributing factor, that it was in, was in, more so in society then than it is, I think, today. 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, and re-enter mainstream. Yeah, was that, was that a bit more part of the culture than it is today?

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I think the world could use a little bit more of that today. You see, these kids are so anxious, and they go to school, and they're having panic attacks, and they're, they're being...

• 19:11Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, you gotta get out, and you gotta immediately start providing and accomplishing.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  I meet these kids, they say, "I'm graduating from college, I'm starting work on Monday."

• 19:19Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  "Starting my career on Monday." So, "Well, take a, take a break."

• 19:22Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  You know, the world's like the best educator out there, traveling around.

• 19:26Will Arnett?

  Out of curiosity, Tom, you, did you give, did you impart that on your own sons? Just, you know, as much as you're comfortable with talking about?

• 19:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:43Jason Bateman?

  Did you notice a big change when they came back?

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Well, they, they didn't go like, I mean, I traveled for a couple of years, they, they really, you know, would take...

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Actually, my oldest son, he kinda went to work almost right away, but then they, none of them have really made extensive trips like I had.

• 20:00Will Arnett?

  Right, right.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  They're more caught up in this time.

• 20:02Sean Hayes?

  Go back to the, to the Canada. So did you end up bringing those clothes and all those goods into the US or no?

• 20:08Speaker 03

  It was so easy.

• 20:11Sean Hayes?

  You just drove them over.

• 20:12Will Arnett?

  But you did it yourself, though, Tom.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:22Sean Hayes?

  Wow, it's like smoking the bandit.

• 20:23Will Arnett?

  You came on the boat with the stuff yourself, though.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So that, 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. And there's boats floating around, no one knows who's who, and ICE wasn't around.

• 20:39Sean Hayes?

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

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Uh, in Af- you know, in India, you get pretty spoiled, cause people speak English a lot. But I mean, I could move my way around in Hindi. But in Afghanistan, I picked up a fair amount of Farsi, which is the language. I mean, Adari, they could, it's a dialect of Farsi. I could get myself around the bazaars and, you know, order food and take taxis and.

• 21:03Sean Hayes?

  Do you retain it now?

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Not so much.

• 21:05Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Not so much.

• 21:06Will Arnett?

  Wait, so, so Tom, so, actually, this is a good, you, you, you go out there, cause you've got this, as Jason called this wanderlust, or this desire to get out in the world, and we talked, but there's not enough of that. But you kinda bring a little bit, you leave on, on the sort of, cause you've come, you don't have a great corporate experience in that, you're working on Charmin and G.I. Joe, and you're like, fuck all this. You go out into the world, and you come back, and you kinda bring a little bit of that rebel attitude with you, as you, cause 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. You start to work on, pretty immediately on MTV.

• 21:46Will Arnett?

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

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I really loved traveling and being over there and I, when I came back, I was wiped out of that life. What else do I really love? Well, I was really, I was a major fanatic about music and rock and roll and

• 22:07Jason Bateman?

  Good time for it.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  I 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 gonna start a video music channel. That's gonna be the cable, the TV revolution is starting and they had already started Nickelodeon. And they had a thing called a movie channel. So I got an interview. 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.

• 22:36Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Who, I was like thirty-two at the time.

• 22:39Jason Bateman?

  And the interview was with what company?

• 22:40Speaker 03

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

• 22:50Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, wow.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  So this guy Bob Pittman, who was twenty-six, never bothered going to college. He was a big star. They called him the long-haired, one-eyed hippie. And he programmed these radio stations like with Don Imus.

• 23:03Jason Bateman?

  He would've got along with my mom. My mom had one.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Anyway, he, I interviewed him. I said, I'm your guy. They said, well, first thing, we're looking for people with no experience in television. That was, those were almost like the magic words. I said, well, they didn't even have television where I've been living the last eight years. So, 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 hashy smuggler, weren't you? I go, not really. And he goes, not really. That means you were.

• 23:37Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  So you're hired. So I got a job on this initial team that started MTV.

• 23:44Will Arnett?

  And who was that team? It was you and Bob Pittman and you?

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Me and Bob Pittman. There was a guy named John Sykes. There was a guy named

• 23:51Jason Bateman?

  Oh, boy. John Sykes.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Steve Casey, 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. And, you know, we were said, you know, get this thing on the air by August first. We had like eight months to put this whole channel together. So.

• 24:15Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 24:22Sean Hayes?

  There's something pretty great about waking up and making a really good espresso or cappuccino at home, no coffee shop run required. And this time of year, it's even better. A hot cappuccino on a crisp fall morning, maybe a pumpkin spice latte on the weekend, or even an iced coffee in the afternoon. Delonghi has been doing this for more than 50 years, bringing Italian craftsmanship and that authentic coffee experience home. And if fall has you thinking about upgrading your own coffee routine, now is a great time. I have some friends visiting from out of town. I have my Delonghi ready to go. They love drinking coffee in the morning, and I can't wait for them to experience a Delonghi espresso. So whether you're starting your morning with an espresso or leaning into your favorite fall drink, make it at home with Delonghi.

• 25:07Sean Hayes?

  Bring the Italian coffee experience home. Shop Delonghi espresso machines today.

• 25:16Sean Hayes?

  This episode of Smartless is sponsored by Duluth Trading Company. Guys, Duluth makes gear for people who work their butts off. Duluth exists for doers and was founded on the philosophy that there's gotta be a better way, which explains why their flannels are both comfortable and practical. Armpit gussets and a bi-swing back give you freedom of movement no matter the activity, so you spend less time fighting with your shirt and more time getting the job done. They even make fire hose pants and workwear that is tough yet soft, made with 100% cotton fabric that once wrapped actual fire hoses. Isn't that crazy? Super cool. Duluth gear holds up year after year, so there's no need to replace your wardrobe every season. I got a flannel shirt from them, and I love it.

• 26:01Sean Hayes?

  It's super soft and cozy, and I can wear it outside of the store and then kind of maybe even sleep in it, I don't care. Duluth Trading Company for folks who work their butts off. Shop online or in-store.

• 26:17Sean Hayes?

  It's finally that time of year. Maybe the weather is getting a little more crisp, or you're just clocking it from all the pumpkins at the grocery store, which means the holidays are just around the corner. Amazon delivers joy with low prices on the gifts you want, even this early in the season. Get ahead of the season. Shop early gifts, top picks, holiday decor, and advent calendars at low prices. Get a head start on holiday gifting with Amazon's low prices. Shop now at amazon.com/holiday.

• 26:52Sean Hayes?

  Hey, everybody has that person on their holiday list that you need to get a gift for. You just don't know what to get them. Check this out. Looking for an easy stocking stuffer for the dude in your life? One who'll actually use? Grab an Old Spice Holiday Gift Pack. It's perfect. It's an incredible deal, since each ready-to-gift pack includes four full-size products: deodorant, body wash, body spray, and shampoo. Choose from scents like Swagger's Cedarwood Scent and Fiji's Palm Tree and Coconut Scent. Old Spice makes holiday shopping easy, which means more time for things like untangling yourself from the holiday lights. Oh, what? Get down from there. Buy Old Spice Holiday Packs

• 27:34Sean Hayes?

  for a limited time to give the gift of scent this holiday season.

• 27:42Sean Hayes?

  And now, back to the show.

• 27:45Sean Hayes?

  Did music videos, were they already kind of happening on other platforms or somewhere? And that's why you knew it would work?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  No, there was really very little awareness about music videos in the States. They existed in Europe.

• 28:00Sean Hayes?

  Right.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  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 Top of the Pops on the, you know, on the BBC. So, but American, I, at one summer, I had a girlfriend in Berlin. I remember just going to her. She would work. I'd go to her 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. So I, I said, this is, you know, people are gonna like this.

• 28:32Jason Bateman?

  Sort of build it and they will come, kinda thing. You guys were the egg and then the chicken came along, or vice versa. And, and like those early videos, what was the early one, like, I remember like- Video Killed the Radio Star.

• 28:43Will Arnett?

  Was the first one.

• 28:44Jason Bateman?

  Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Um, and, uh, I feel like Dire Straits had one of the early ones, too.

• 28:50Speaker 03

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

• 28:53Will Arnett?

  Well, I was gonna get into Dire Straits, cause it's actually, it's 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?

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:06Will Arnett?

  And, yeah, and, and you guys also, you started this thing, but I, 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 call waiting on it, right? You guys, it wasn't a big operation.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  That's called the Cheap Skates second line.

• 29:26Will Arnett?

  So then you guys started this, and then you, but then Dire Straits had, they, 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, um, almost like a rebuttal to the sort of, you know, music video and the corporatization of music and all that, is that right?

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Money for Nothing, yeah. It was all about our vapidity, that we were vapid.

• 29:51Will Arnett?

  Yeah, and yet, the line in that, that really sold you guys was?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  I want my MTV.

• 29:58Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  And he had Sting sing it, and in those days, you know, those kinda bands could be worldwide, you know, could have worldwide hits.

• 30:05Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 03

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

• 30:12Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  MTV had been preceded by that, by Money for Nothing, so Mark Knopfler gave us the greatest of gifts.

• 30:19Will Arnett?

  It was unreal, like that idea that like, he did this thing as, and then, but it became like the, almost the rallying cry, 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.

• 30:36Sean Hayes?

  To scream out, "I want my MTV" on camera and that was your.

• 30:40Jason Bateman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  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 was going to cut into their margins. So, we knew that wherever we were, and for the first couple of years, we were only like in these towns in the Midwest like Tulsa, people loved us. They couldn't believe it. But no one in New York or LA had it and had never even seen it. So, we knew if we could get people, these people to call their cable companies and to man their MTV, it eventually forced these people to put us on and that, that really worked.

• 31:14Sean Hayes?

  That's cool.

• 31:14Jason Bateman?

  With, with videos now having kind of cycled, I mean, they, they still sort of exist, but my God, you guys, you birthed it and it, it, it cycled into like, just such a phenomenon, the whole, the, the addition of videos to the whole music industry. And now it's sort of settled into a place of sort of a, a sidecar kind of thing. What do you, what do you feel that, that, that the music video has, has, uh, what, what, what positive of it has remained in the music industry? Has, has it been additive?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, you know, music videos are still popular. They don't exist on MTV. That's become sort of a reality show channel.

• 31:53Jason Bateman?

  Sure.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  And mute, they make as many video, music videos today as they used to. A lot of them are made more economically, but you know, they don't, you, you can get them all on the internet, on, on YouTube or on Vivo, uh, and you get them on demand. So you don't have to sit around watching some channel to, to wait to see Nirvana. You can just click on it and watch it right away. So that sort of killed the MTV linear network model.

• 32:19Jason Bateman?

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

• 32:27Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 32:27Jason Bateman?

  And it, you guys launched a bunch of really incredible directors into the film industry.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, the, the whole, there was a whole bunch of them. And there was a whole issue after, after a couple of years, a director said, "Hey, how come our names aren't on there? We want to get some credit."

• 32:42Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Jason Bateman?

  And, uh.

• 32:43Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, David Fincher too.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  David Fincher is a great, Russell, Russell McKehe, there was a Spike Jones. I mean, lots of people came up that way.

• 32:51Sean Hayes?

  When you, when the, the, I just, we'll talk about MTV ending in just a minute, but the initial, um,

• 32:59Sean Hayes?

  Like the launch, the logo of the rocket taking off? Uh, is that, that was the first image ever, right?

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:07Sean Hayes?

  Of MTV? And was that just what it is? Which is like, we're launching a new show?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Well, 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.

• 33:25Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  So we got it for free.

• 33:27Sean Hayes?

  Oh, that's great.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  And the logo that everybody loved and became iconic, we got that for a thousand dollars from some fly town.

• 33:34Sean Hayes?

  Wow.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Tribeca.

• 33:36Sean Hayes?

  And it was sort of like, kind of, you guys, I'm sure we're kind of tongue in cheek how grandiose this whole thing is gonna be. We're putting our flag on the moon and yeah, here comes something huge.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Right. We're gonna rip off Man's Greatest Moment and just put our flag there.

• 33:49Sean Hayes?

  That's amazing.

• 33:50Will Arnett?

  Tom, what was the moment that you guys realized that you had really broken through? 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. It was like so.

• 34:01Sean Hayes?

  Top of the hour, every hour.

• 34:02Will Arnett?

  Was there a moment for you where you went like, holy shit, we really got something here. We're, we're shifting culture.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  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. But then, I mean, two things, one was Thriller, Michael Jackson, Beat It, you know, and people say, oh, big artists are making videos with big production budgets and they're irresistible.

• 34:25Sean Hayes?

  And John Landis directing that.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  And the second thing was Live Aid.

• 34:28Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Will Arnett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:29Sean Hayes?

  Live Aid.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  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, we'll run the whole thing for 16 hours, we got nothing else to do.

• 34:41Will Arnett?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  We, it was like the biggest show ever and that really, uh, really legitimized us.

• 34:48Sean Hayes?

  Wow. Yeah, there was nowhere else to see your favorite artist, really, unless you bought a ticket to a concert.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:54Sean Hayes?

  It was the only channel that you could see these people. And the VJs were cool too, remember, like Mark Goodman and, uh?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Martha Quinn.

• 35:02Will Arnett?

  Martha Quinn.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  You know, you people forget, but you know, 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. Of course, we've gone so far past that now, but it was sort of a groundbreaker in that way.

• 35:17Will Arnett?

  Did you guys end up having all these, you got to know a lot of artists too through this, through this. I mean, they, at, at, 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? Sending you Rolexes and stuff.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  I didn't get any Rolexes.

• 35:38Will Arnett?

  Yeah, okay.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  I got a Timex.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  No, but I mean, it was true. 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.

• 35:54Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, I'll bet, I'll bet you guys were a, a, a real belle of the ball. 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?

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it was, uh, we, we were the biggest radio station in the nation.

• 36:14Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, right.

• 36:15Speaker 03

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

• 36:21Jason Bateman?

  Sure.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Power.

• 36:23Jason Bateman?

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

• 36:29Speaker 03

  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. That's still there, but I, you know, it needed to die a death because it can't exist really and be a business if, when you're competing with all these videos on the internet. 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 Ellison's and Paramount have a chance to really reimagine what MTV could be digitally and, and figure out, because.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 37:19Sean Hayes?

  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.

• 37:28Will Arnett?

  All her stuff in one, one-stop shopping. So, speaking of which, uh, uh, 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. So Comedy Central ends up becoming this huge thing, but it, it's, 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, how Comedy Central came to be.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  Okay, I was having a staff meeting one day and someone slips me a piece of paper to say that HBO's just announced they're gonna do a comedy channel. They're gonna call it The Comedy Channel. 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 gonna get in our business. They have a lot of money, they have all these, you have, do all these big stand-up shows with Robin Williams and everything. What are we gonna do? I said, well, we're gonna announce our own comedy channel the same day. 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.

• 38:35Will Arnett?

  And you have no idea for it.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  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. It's like, the worst comes to worst, we can do like a version of that, but let's, let's put our hat in the ring. And so we had a big battle with them for a couple of years, and finally we merged and it became Comedy Central. But, and they, they, cause I thought if this worked for them, then they'd launch a movie cha, a music channel and a kids' channel as well, and be head-to-head competitors with a lot more money than us, so.

• 39:08Will Arnett?

  So, so you basically started, 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, and we don't even have a product yet.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:21Will Arnett?

  And you said, and you, and you were like, and I remember reading in the book, you're like, you said to Frank Biandi, right, who, who you worked with over there, and you said to him, you, 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 gonna do. Is that true?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was, uh, well, I put him on the speakerphone to my staff and he says, yeah, because he had been, he had left HBO and he did not have a great relationship with Michael Fuchs, who, who said he was like the, the king of this was his baby. So Frank was all in, you know, fighting like tooth and nail against, uh, we were like a guerrilla operation, fighting against HBO. And I think HBO couldn't believe, uh, you know, that we, we, we, we did as well as we did. It was all in smoke and mirrors.

• 40:07Sean Hayes?

  And so when did you come up with the name? How did you come up with programming and the whole thing for the channel?

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Well, initially, we called it like the two days later was, we called it HA, the TV Comedy Channel. It was HA with an exclamation point.

• 40:24Will Arnett?

  Sure.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  You know, and we had a great logo. Uh, and it was TV comedy because what they were doing was just, they were going to rip like funny scenes out of, uh, you know, TV shows and movies and some stand-up guys in front of brick walls and just put them together when they didn't have like be their equivalent of VJs, 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, we thought, well, we'll just run comedy shows. So I, I did things to create headlines. I hired Fred Silverman, who programmed all the big networks at one time. We did deals with like Brian Grazer and, uh, you know, we licensed stuff from Norman Lear. And we just would continue to throw out announcements.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  So we, we got Saturday Night Live, the original five years of that, you know, 75 to 80. 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.

• 41:22Will Arnett?

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

• 41:30Speaker 03

  We had hired Jon Stewart before. He had been, he was on MTV in the late eighties, early nineties. He had a show called The Jon Stewart Show.

• 41:38Will Arnett?

  Yeah, I remember that, yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  It ran for a while. So Jon was sort of in the stable. We never found him. And we actually had a guy named Craig Claiborne on The Daily Show first. Who was a different type of guy. And then we replaced him with Jon Stewart. And Jon's vision was, look, let's, let's, let's just not do pop culture stuff. Why don't we take a crack at the news? I'll be a fake newsman.

• 42:01Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  And he got his ways 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.

• 42:11Will Arnett?

  He should run for president.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  But we had, what came out of that was we had Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Bill Maher was on our channel first, Dave Chappelle. I mean, it was a good launching place for young talent. Jimmy Kimmel had The Man Show. You may remember that.

• 42:29Will Arnett?

  Yeah, I remember that. I mean, Tom, you think about, you name these people, all these people, musical artists, comedic voices, brilliant voices who came up under sort of the umbrella of stuff that you did. 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?

• 42:50Speaker 03

  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. 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. And so you see now the front line of people who were sort of like the resistance almost, politically. It's all these comedians. And they all, so many of them had their roots with us, although they had been in other places for a while. Colbert, Kimmel, Maher, and so on.

• 43:29Will Arnett?

  And Steve Carell, too. And Carell. Yeah. So then, yeah, go ahead.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  No, go ahead.

• 43:36Will Arnett?

  Well, I was gonna 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 is too full. So you, you, while you're at Viacom, you become CEO of Viacom ultimately. And you work for a guy called Sumner Redstone. Uh, which was, uh, he was a difficult, um, uh, boss to serve. Is that a good way to put it?

• 44:00Speaker 03

  That's very fair, yes. He fired, he fired every CEO, including me.

• 44:07Will Arnett?

  Including you, and so you knew, so he hires you CEO and that means what? That means your days are numbered, basically.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  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 Karmazin 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.

• 44:31Will Arnett?

  Wow. And one of the reasons, one of the, one of the things that, I know there were a lot of issue and you talk about it in the book, but, and you and I have talked about this before, it's widely known. There was a thing called, one of the first social media sites out, there was a thing called MySpace. And it was up for grabs. And he wanted it. I'm still on it. Right? Sean's still on it, it's his main source of communication. So he wanted MySpace and, and so did, uh, News Corp. Right? Is that, is that fair?

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Sumner had never heard of MySpace. He didn't hear about it until he found out that Rupert bought it. And we had, then he found out we'd been kicking the tires and, uh, we didn't, we never made a bid to buy it. But Rupert bought it and, uh, he went on the covers of all these trade magazines as the new media visionary. And that really annoyed Sumner.

• 45:26Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  And he bought it for $560 million. I'll just say, ultimately Rupert sold it for $30 million.

• 45:33Will Arnett?

  Wow.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  I'm still waiting for a thank you note.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  That was a reason, he, one of the reasons he cited for firing me.

• 45:42Will Arnett?

  And right, one of the reasons, which is you did him such a favor. And the other thing was, uh, uh, you, you early on saw the power, uh, the potential maybe of YouTube. Is that true?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:57Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  YouTube kinda 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.

• 46:07Jason Bateman?

  And it's been around forever and they still say it's the quote "future." But how would you... If an alien landed on the earth and you're trying to explain what YouTube is or was in its inception, how would you describe it? Is it just a free sort of destination for user-generated videos? You just kinda upload anything you want and it's just a gathering place for all that? Is that what YouTube really at its core is?

• 46:35Speaker 03

  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. It was a form of social media, person to person. And that was a whole new idea. And then like SNL would put up like some stuff like with Andy Samberg. I'm trying to think some of... They would... 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...

• 47:06Jason Bateman?

  And did you want to buy it? Did you saw...

• 47:09Speaker 03

  We thought this is a whole new thing. And the world is going in this... You know, we had the TV revolution, now we got this digital revolution. And then this digital revolution, this social media thing where people can communicate directly with each other.

• 47:23Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  And people like us aren't gatekeepers anymore. You know, we thought, how do we get in on this? You know, you gotta own a platform.

• 47:31Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  And we made a... I wanted to make a bid on it.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  But it was difficult for a company like us. I mean, ultimately, Google bought it for 1.6 billion. The Viacom board thought it was a copyright infringement machine. It would make us liable for lots of lawsuits. And ultimately, after I left, they sued them for a billion dollars and lost 10 years later.

• 47:54Jason Bateman?

  Wow.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  But no one could have imagined what YouTube was able to morph into.

• 48:00Jason Bateman?

  Right.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  You know, which is...

• 48:02Jason Bateman?

  But 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... I mean, for 1.6 billion is right now the deal of the century.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  They're worth almost 600 billion dollars, YouTube.

• 48:18Jason Bateman?

  Wow, that's unbelievable.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  I mean, that could buy all the media companies a couple of times over.

• 48:26Will Arnett?

  And then

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Six hundred billion dollars.

• 48:27Will Arnett?

  On the side of that, you also helped these guys start Vice Media as well, right? You were instrumental in getting

• 48:33Speaker 03

  I worked with Vice for a bunch of years, yeah, yeah, that was a wild ride.

• 48:37Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Sean Hayes?

  That's another book.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  That was a lot of fun, too, though.

• 48:41Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  And it crashed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was

• 48:44Sean Hayes?

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

• 48:46Speaker 03

  It's barely around. They have a little studio operation, you know, they kind of 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 and

• 49:00Sean Hayes?

  Does any, after, after all of these successes, does any part of you still want to be involved in media?

• 49:08Speaker 03

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

• 49:14Speaker 03

  a lot of the fun's 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, you know, I came up, it was a more optimistic time, things were moving in an upward direction, you know, things were ascendant. Now it's like, you know, well, I have to tell you guys, you're all in Hollywood, you know, what the situation

• 49:37Will Arnett?

  Barely, Tom, barely.

• 49:38Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Sean Hayes?

  We'll be right back.

• 49:44Sean Hayes?

  Hey, guys, I know how hard it is to make like goals for yourself and like to commit to them and not back off from them. But look, committing to yourself starts with building habits that you can stick to. Make a better for you choice that you actually look forward to with Stars and Honey Protein Bars. Stars and Honey Bars have 15 grams of protein and only four grams of sugar, making them an easy better for you option to work into your everyday routine. Throw one in your gym bag for a post-workout snack, keep one in your glove compartment, or take a couple to the office to share with coworkers. And here's the really cool part, with Stars and Honey, you don't have to compromise between better nutrition and taste. Choose from delicious dessert-inspired flavors like iced lemon cookie, mint chocolate chip,

• 50:29Sean Hayes?

  red velvet, and peanut butter mousse. I wish I could have each one of those right now. After all, great nutrition only works if you actually want to keep eating it, right? Order Stars and Honey Protein Bars at starsandhoney.com or find them at Target stores nationwide. That's starsandhoney.com or pick up a box on your next Target shopping trip.

• 50:52Sean Hayes?

  It's finally that time of year. Maybe the weather is getting a little more crisp, or you're just clocking it from all the pumpkins at the grocery store, which means the holidays are just around the corner. Amazon delivers joy with low prices on the gifts you want, even this early in the season. Get ahead of the season, shop early gifts, top picks, holiday decor, and advent calendars at low prices. Get a head start on holiday gifting with Amazon's low prices. Shop now at amazon.com/holiday.

• 51:28Sean Hayes?

  Hey, everybody has that person on their holiday list that you need to get a gift for. You just don't know what to get them. Check this out. Looking for an easy stocking stuffer for the dude in your life one will actually use? Grab an Old Spice Holiday Gift Pack. It's perfect. It's an incredible deal, since each ready-to-gift pack includes four full-size products: deodorant, body wash, body spray, and shampoo. Choose from scents like Swagger's Cedarwood Scent and Fiji's Palm Tree and Coconut Scent. Old Spice makes holiday shopping easy, which means more time for things like untangling yourself from the holiday lights. Oh, what? Get down from there. Buy Old Spice Holiday Packs

• 52:10Sean Hayes?

  for a limited time to give the gift of scent this holiday season.

• 52:18Sean Hayes?

  And now, back to the show.

• 52:21Jason Bateman?

  It does seem like, though, that we are at a bit of an inflection point that's not too dissimilar from sort of the launch of something like a YouTube, where 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. 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 some some ideas are scary.

• 53:03Jason Bateman?

  Some ideas are are are interesting, but like maybe we're at another kind of launch moment. I'm sure you've done sure you read very interesting books and and niche articles and periodicals and things like that that does it does it not hold some kind of interest to you this sort of this moment of pioneering?

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the whole AI thing is sort of daunting. On one hand, you've got people saying that these it's going to create these machines are going to kill us all. 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, it's going to get put 20% unemployment on the board.

• 53:42Jason Bateman?

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

• 54:11Speaker 03

  I'm sort of following all this. 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 and you can see the the battle in Hollywood.

• 54:22Jason Bateman?

  They need the media savvy too, though.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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 they're just the amount of money that's being invested is just mind boggling.

• 54:37Jason Bateman?

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

• 54:41Speaker 03

  I want to come off the bench.

• 54:43Jason Bateman?

  Come on, get in there.

• 54:44Will Arnett?

  Wait, Tom, Tom, you're coming off the bench. If you were if you were if you were 26 and you 26 year old Tom Preston today and you were just coming back from doing your being off the grid for a couple of years and you were you were going to start in this world today, what would you launch?

• 55:00Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good question.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I'd want to do something that I really like, so I'd probably find my way somehow to the entertainment media business, you know, 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. 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 uh, I don't know which which place that is, but that's probably where I would gravitate. And I feel confident that they're gonna figure this out somehow.

• 55:35Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  In a way that that doesn't put everybody out of work in the entertainment business. Because uh, but I just heard something today, some uh, they have a, Channel Four in the UK has uh, these newscasters that are AI-generated that sound exactly, exactly like.

• 55:54Jason Bateman?

  Really?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Exactly like it could be one of you guys talking.

• 55:57Jason Bateman?

  Well, it is, well, yeah, Sean's got wires coming out of him. Well, it sounds like you are, you are, you are um, satisfied for sure with with your accomplishments as as well you should be. And so have you, have you given yourself a chance to sit back and and and and and look at that guy who went off to India and Afghanistan and and and and started in advertising and got his MBA and all that stuff and have you, have you, have you landed at a spot that uh, that is satisfying to you, given where you started, your frustrations early on?

• 56:40Jason Bateman?

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

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Well, I kinda went full circle. I mean, if I look at my life in chapters, the chapter now I do a lot of not-for-profit work for like eighteen years I've been working with Bono. I'm the board chair of this thing, the One Campaign, that really focuses on extreme poverty, infectious disease in Africa.

• 57:04Jason Bateman?

  Okay.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  And I find that very satisfying work. You know, we have Red, you're probably familiar with some Red stuff. With Apple and everything, and that's interesting, keeps your arm into the private sector, but. 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 giving back, but I enjoy this kind of work. And I like being observer of what's going on in the, in the media and entertainment business.

• 57:38Will Arnett?

  Well, you also, it is giving back and you did start, you know, you, you started a media company in Afghanistan, which still exists today.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did that. I went back to Afghanistan for 10 years until the Taliban arrived and built up a TV network there, which was fascinating.

• 57:52Will Arnett?

  And, and not, and not, not, not, not the not-for-profit, but meaning like you did that is, it's, it's not like that, that was like going to be a huge windfall. It was more, it was sort of giving back to a place that you, you really loved. And you described the people, especially early on in the seventies, 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, uh, uh, young people who were there, who were working for the company and send them over here and do semesters, working at USC, uh, 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.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I never escaped my fascination with Afghanistan. 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, chain, help change society, connect Afghans to each other, to the outside world for the first time, for, you know, women, liberate women. It just, seeing a man and a woman newscaster side by side sends a huge signal. We brought music back after the, you know, the Taliban had outlawed everything. So we brought back music with the arts and.

• 59:10Sean Hayes?

  And it's still running, that, the, the network?

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Well, it's been, you know, it's been, we've now had, we had like 250 advertisers. It was, now we're down to one.

• 59:20Will Arnett?

  Wow.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  And it's energy drinks, like Red Bull kinda stuff. That's what they have there, cause there's no alcohol. But we've now switched into doing programming for school for women. So we're doing educational programming. And instead of advertisers, we're funded by people like Gates and other foundations. Malala Foundation.

• 59:38Will Arnett?

  That's great.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  And we are making these episodes in Afghanistan inexpensively. We have a diaspora group of Afghan educators that helped develop the curriculum. And so it's just kinda keeping people employed in this very difficult time and...

• 59:52Will Arnett?

  But these, these programs for, for educating women are still, are now allowed?

• 59:56Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:02Will Arnett?

  Got it.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  And, uh, so there's, they're allowing it, yes. And, uh, and there's a whole, uh, sort of digital part to it as well. It's, you know, it's, it's just awful what's going on there, but...

• 1:00:16Will Arnett?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  This way, the business stays alive and you can employ 500 people. And, uh, you know, you, you, women have basically been erased from public spaces in Afghanistan. And they're not even allowed to talk when they're in public.

• 1:00:30Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  If you can imagine. So women who used to be able, in that 20-year interval when we were there, which we blew, but, you know, people went to school, became parliamentarians, became lawyers, became, you know, now they're just, you know, extremely depressed and at home.

• 1:00:46Will Arnett?

  Man. Tom, you really, you really... I know, what a life, dude. And you've, you've done it all. I mean, you, you, you do this kinda stuff and you, you, you, you help start MTV and you have a clothing company from a, and you're, and you're smuggling clothes across the thing. Network Ha. And you talk in the book, you take, you take Sumner Redstone to a sex club. Right. In Thailand, uh, which you talk about in the book, which is... That's crazy. Just a cra- I implore you to read this book. Is that true?

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I did.

• 1:01:16Will Arnett?

  That's crazy. Well, just give us a little taste of, not too much of a taste.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  You don't want the full taste, but we, I kept telling him, you gotta come to Asia. We've got MTV in India, we've got it in China, in Taiwan, we've got it in Indonesia. It's like the great market. You know, we were still really positive about how we could do in Asia and he had never really been. And then he called me up to his office one day and he says, you know, I've made up my mind. I'd like to finally come to Asia with you. I go, where do you want to go? He goes, I want to go to Bangkok. I go, we don't really have any business in Bangkok. You know, that's like one place that there's a company there that's gonna lay cable, but they haven't started yet. But he wanted to go to Bangkok and then he told me quietly he'd like to go to some sex clubs. Oh my god.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  I, you know, I had to go do some advance work, you know, to get him in a sex club. I wasn't really, I'd 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. One of the most interesting things that, you know, it's become, because of the Vietnam War, it's become like the commercial sex capital of the world. And they have plane loads of Japanese and Germans 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. And now, and now they're invading Bangkok.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  But yeah, I took Sumner to a, I did my job as a loyal employee and shepherd him around.

• 1:02:50Will Arnett?

  You had to take your boss, you just drive, and you guys go into a room and this couple are lowered on a motorcycle, having, having actual sex on the motorcycle. And you're there with your boss and then you, he looks at you kind of like, we're good now. And you just let yourself out, right?

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Well, no, I had to take him to another club after that. But the interesting thing about that club was it was just filled with like regular people, Thai people and everything in the, you hear this roar and a motorcycle slowly comes down, the small Harley, and there's this couple on there and they're naked and they're dog greased up and they're doing it and the guy's rubbing the engine. Oh my god. And after a while, after a while, the people in the bar, the locals, they're not even looking. You know, it's like, people are fornicating on a motorcycle, two feet over your head. Yeah, we got it. Would you like another beer?

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  This is that amazing. Pulled back up into the ceiling. Yeah.

• 1:03:41Will Arnett?

  And then you 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. I want to end on you, the time you went to the music festival. I remember when you and Jimmy were gonna go, you were talking about it. And you guys, you and Jimmy Buffett went to this music festival, right?

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  It's a festival in the desert, out in the middle of the Sahara.

• 1:04:03Will Arnett?

  Yeah. So how did?

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Like Burning Man or like?

• 1:04:06Will Arnett?

  Talk about your journey.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Burning Man with people on camels. It was like the local Toreg people would come. It would be like, oh, I love, we love West African music. So I got a few other people, Chris Blackwell.

• 1:04:18Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  My friend Bill Flanagan. We, we flew to Bamako, the capital of Mali, and then we got a plane. We, we took the Jimmy Jet. We flew to Timbuktu and we land in the Timbuktu airport. People, there's nothing there. There's no planes there. People are just running at, at our plane trying to sell us daggers, you know? It was like, you're in the middle of nowhere. It looks like, it's like a town in the desert. And we had to drive a bunch of hours from there to get to the festival.

• 1:04:48Will Arnett?

  And you had your own security with you and a driver. Talk about that.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. We had one security guy from Bamako and then we had another guy. And then we, when we got to Timbuktu, so we gotta find a guy who knows how to get that, get there. So we need a local guy who can find his way to the festival. 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, the security guy goes, stop, stop. And he gassed the local guy and gets him out and they start screaming each other. We don't know what's going on. Then he puts the guy in a headlight, takes out a gun, sticks it to his head. He says, I'm gonna kill this motherfucker. Cause he is taking us, we're going in the wrong direction.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  And he was taking us to an Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda was kidnapping tourists in that area. And like, there was just over the border in Mauritania there. There was a Germans they'd been holding for a year. And we were on our way there. And He said, I'm gonna, 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 and now I'm gonna witness a murder and I got a turban on my head.

• 1:06:00Jason Bateman?

  Jesus.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  So, we, Jimmy said, let the guy free, we just leave him in the desert and we, uh, picked up like a guy who was a hitchhiker. He had a cellphone with a Bob Marley ringtone. And that was enough. He said he knew how to get to the festival. So, we, we put him on board and off we went.

• 1:06:19Sean Hayes?

  You know, you could just watch MTV. You don't have to go all the way across that.

• 1:06:24Will Arnett?

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:06:25Jason Bateman?

  What a life.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  It sounded like a good idea.

• 1:06:27Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Jason Bateman?

  Well, um, good news for, uh, 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, the good news is we've got a book to read about it.

• 1:06:41Sean Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Jason Bateman?

  So, thank you for writing that.

• 1:06:43Will Arnett?

  Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, on sale as of November 18th, uh, from the great, uh, Tom Freston. Proof that there's a big world out there, get out into it, which is I, I say all the time, and boy, did you do that.

• 1:06:57Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Will Arnett?

  You, you are, you are an inspiration to a lot of people, including me. You always have been. You're a great dude and, uh, and honestly, I read this book, just I devoured it. It's so good. So, Tom, thank you, man, for taking, this has been a long time coming. I'm so psyched that you came on today.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you, Will. Thank all of you. It's great to, great to chat with you guys. I'm a regular, I'm a regular fan.

• 1:07:17Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, nice meeting you, Tom.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  Love the podcast.

• 1:07:20Jason Bateman?

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

• 1:07:22Will Arnett?

  Thank you, the great Tom Freston, you guys.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Take care.

• 1:07:25Will Arnett?

  Bye, Tom.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Thank you. Bye-bye.

• 1:07:28Jason Bateman?

  Bye, pal.

• 1:07:31Jason Bateman?

  Oh, boy. I, I, I'm, I'm uplifted and also depressed at the same time.

• 1:07:36Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly how I feel.

• 1:07:38Will Arnett?

  I know.

• 1:07:39Sean Hayes?

  I'm like, wow, fuck.

• 1:07:41Jason Bateman?

  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, you know, in a real dry place and I thought about-

• 1:07:51Sean Hayes?

  No, talk about that.

• 1:07:52Jason Bateman?

  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-

• 1:08:00Will Arnett?

  I love that.

• 1:08:00Jason Bateman?

  Just going there and starting over.

• 1:08:02Sean Hayes?

  You can still do that.

• 1:08:03Jason Bateman?

  Well, I got the wife and the kids and you know, it's a little awkward now.

• 1:08:06Sean Hayes?

  No, but you can just get up and go somewhere.

• 1:08:07Will Arnett?

  It's called deserting your family now.

• 1:08:09Jason Bateman?

  Well, 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, you know, Entertainment Tonight isn't the end all be all. And, and, and so I'm certainly not, you know, boo boo who, 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, you know, mainstream society.

• 1:08:41Will Arnett?

  And, and not only that, what's cool is he took all of that, that sort of that wanderlust as you described, and he took all, and all those experiences and he brought it into that environment. And that's what set him apart and still sets him apart. He's like, he has such a broad worldview.

• 1:08:58Sean Hayes?

  He also had, like he said, 18 years of school. So then he was like, I, anything is, I just gotta get out. You know, like, I've just been reading books for 18 years.

• 1:09:06Will Arnett?

  And it changes what you, 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 and you're like, no, well, why don't we just do this? 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, but then he's like, yeah, we're MTV, we're gonna start this and we're gonna start this comedy channel.

• 1:09:26Sean Hayes?

  It's like a drug. It's like it changes your mind.

• 1:09:28Will Arnett?

  And like, oh, YouTube, let's buy that. And everybody's like, no, Tom, no.

• 1:09:31Jason Bateman?

  I wonder if like, I wonder if that, doing it at that, at that age though, is, is, is 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. Like, are we too set in our ways then at that age at 60, going around and like, can you really be affected as much?

• 1:09:53Sean Hayes?

  Well, there's one way, there's one way to find out.

• 1:09:55Will Arnett?

  Just do it.

• 1:09:56Sean Hayes?

  Just do it.

• 1:09:57Will Arnett?

  I think honestly.

• 1:09:58Jason Bateman?

  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.

• 1:10:04Will Arnett?

  But but at least it's worth going to try to find it. 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. You know, that's that's kind of it makes you just think like, just get out there.

• 1:10:23Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, but don't put it down before. Don't put it down before you get.

• 1:10:27Will Arnett?

  No, no, no. Switch to smartless mobile and get a good plan.

• 1:10:30Jason Bateman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Will Arnett?

  Right. 10 gigs for 10 bucks.

• 1:10:33Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:10:34Will Arnett?

  But it is true.

• 1:10:35Jason Bateman?

  It is true, yeah.

• 1:10:36Will Arnett?

  Go out and have a rich life. And Jay, you were saying to him like, do you have this moment now, looking back where you feel a sense of satisfaction? 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, I'm talking to the prime minister and I'm doing this and that. And he's just, you know.

• 1:10:57Jason Bateman?

  I didn't even, I, I, is he, is he, is he married?

• 1:11:01Will Arnett?

  He has a long time partner, his, uh, Carrie, who's an, who's amazing.

• 1:11:05Jason Bateman?

  Yeah. Okay, so he's traced, he's not, he's not still going around solo, bopping around.

• 1:11:09Will Arnett?

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

• 1:11:20Jason Bateman?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:11:21Sean Hayes?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the key. You gotta stay curious and interested the whole time. Right.

• 1:11:25Will Arnett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Sean Hayes?

  But it seems like everybody that was around him, everybody that was around him.

• 1:11:30Will Arnett?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 1:11:31Sean Hayes?

  Had such fun and I, I had fun today.

• 1:11:34Jason Bateman?

  Oh.

• 1:11:35Sean Hayes?

  With all of you. And I think a good time was had. Bye, all. Everybody.

• 1:11:50Will Arnett?

  Smart. Less.

• 1:11:55Will Arnett?

  Smartless is 100% organic and artisanally handcrafted by Bennett Barbaco, Michael Grant Terry, and Rob Armjarf.

• 1:12:08Will Arnett?

  Smart. Less.

• 1:12:12Speaker 04

  No two businesses run the same, so banking for your business shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. That's why Atlantic Union Bank offers knowledgeable guidance and tailored solutions designed around your goals. Whether you're managing cash flow, moving money, or protecting your business from fraud, we make banking for your business both personal and easy. Call, visit us online at atlanticunionbank.com, or stop by one of our local branches today. Atlantic Union Bank, any way you bank.

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. It's the tangiest time of the year. For a limited time, head to McDonald's and get a McRib sandwich. Make it a meal by adding a medium fries and a soft drink like an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper. So grab a McRib sandwich and embrace the tang. Save time by ordering ahead on the app at participating McDonald's for a limited time. Dr. Pepper is a registered trademark of Dr. Pepper, 7-Up, Inc.