Bob Pittman

Bob Pittman is the former CEO of MTV Networks and co-founder of MTV. Beginning his career in media at age 15 as an on-air radio announcer, he went on to play a central role in launching MTV in 1981, targeting a youth audience with music video programming. Throughout his career, Pittman has held executive positions at several prominent companies, including AOL Networks, Six Flags Theme Parks, Quantum Media, and Time Warner Enterprises. He currently serves as the CEO of iHeartMedia, overseeing 863 radio stations in 160 cities across the United States and operating on an annual revenue of over $3.5 billion. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

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

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetra Grahamerton.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  1981, August 1, 81, we'd launched. And that world was a world of no information. There were three TV networks, ABC, NBC, CBS. And they decided when you were going to see programming. HBO had come along in the mid-'70s. There had been no really advertiser-supported networks, which of course MTV was. And there was an idea at the time that the consumer wanted choice, which we know is always true. And that instead of network programmers deciding when you could see kids' programming, music programming, news, sports, you would go to these 24-hour channels and get it at any time.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  So you put together your own array of programming that matched your needs. That was a really new thing. Think of it as a poor man's on-demand. I mean, there's no technology for on-demand then. So this was a way where you were going to get choice. So Turner launched CNN. A bunch of guys up in Bristol launched ESPN. Those were in the '70s? No, it was about 1980, I guess, along when we are. Right there. We're all right there together. How many homes had cable at this time? I think about 15 million. And so we developed this idea for a music service, all music. And I think the music had been on TV off and on for years and years, never particularly successful. And our thesis was it wasn't successful because they kept trying to make music fit the TV form, which was a narrative.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  So with MTV, they said, "We're going to make TV fit the music form, which is mood, emotion, makes you feel a certain way. Music's better than any drug for taking you to certain moods or where you want to go." And you had a generation that had grown up with TV. We were the first of the TV babies, my generation. And rock and roll, but the two had never come together. So the idea was, we're gonna put it together. And there were all these little video clips that had been produced. No one had been able to figure out what to do with them. So that was the general concept of what we were doing. The venture was owned by Warner and American Express 50/50 called Warner MX. The board of directors wouldn't approve the idea. Thought it was way too risky.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  So we got a meeting with Jim Robinson, who was the CEO of American Express. His lieutenant, his president, was Lou Gershner, who went on to fame at Nabisco and IBM. And Steve Ross from Warner Communications, David Horowitz, you probably remember, office of the president, Warner. We got a meeting with him to pitch him the idea. And we think the hard sell is gonna be American Express. And then inside Warner, there's this other thing brewing that the music companies were saying, wait a minute, if you do a music channel, we should do it, not that joint venture. And so there was, you know, lots of turmoil and dramas, there always are. And toward the end of the meeting, Jim Robinson, who is the chairman of American Express, looks at Steve and goes, I'm in for my 10 million. Steve, how about you?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  And he called the question. And Steve goes, uh, yeah, I'm in. And that was the way we got approval. Amazing. Was that the first time you ever met Steve Ross? No, I met Steve a couple of times before. And Steve had, David Horowitz sort of fell in love with me. And David was responsible for the cable company and the Warner MX joint venture. And had brought me to meetings. And Steve got, as we launched MTV, got very interested in it. And Steve wound up being one of my great mentors. And Steve would, you know, later put his arm around me and just say, come on with me to whatever. Meetings had nothing to do with music or MTV. But he was just letting me in and letting me see stuff and see how it worked.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  And I had been involved with some of the other stuff because originally I came over from NBC. The first channel we were gonna do was a pay service, sort of like at HBO. It was called the movie channel. At that time HBO was only on in prime time. It was off the rest of the day. Really? So we did a 24-hour all-movie service. Great idea. Which is a great. And then HBO realized what we were doing. So they started what is called a fighting brand. I had no idea what a fighting brand was, but learned very quickly called Cinemax. And they made it cheaper to the cable operator and they got more movies.

• 4:37Rick Rubin?

  So it was just a rip off of what you were doing?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Obviously, we proved that there was an opening.

• 4:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  They came in and so I had known Steve through the movie channel and through what we were doing with the movie channel and movies. But MTV is really what sort of turbocharged my relationship with him.

• 4:53Rick Rubin?

  It's an amazing story. I remember the impact it had on my life. It felt like there was the world before MTV and after MTV if you were a kid at that time.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And you know what's interesting is it had some interesting ancillary benefits, which we didn't realize. The three networks controlled what you saw and they made everything look like it basically was Des Moines. Everything was middle America. You didn't see what people in New York were wearing or London or. And when MTV came on, suddenly all these kids across America got to see what people in New York and LA and London were wearing. And fashions changed immediately. I think it was 1984. I got a CFDA award, the Council of Fashion Designers Award for the impact MTV had on fashion.

• 5:37Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And we also changed sort of the graphic look. At the time we launched MTV, every graphic design looked like Star Wars logos and, you know, the car dealer, everybody had it. And we came out with this sort of radically different design and opened people's eyes to, no, no, it doesn't have to be the way you've said it has to be.

• 5:56Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the I want my MTV program.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Well, the problem was that the cable operators really didn't want to take MTV because they were at that time charging companies for the access to the cable, like 25 cents a month. We didn't have 25 cents a month. So we said, well, what another idea? One of the guys that worked for me was Harvard MBA and was always whispering to me all this stuff. He goes, we should do consumer pull. And I go, what's that? He goes, that's where you get the consumers to demand the product instead of push distribution where you buy it. I go, great, sign me up. And so we hit upon this idea that we would come up with ad campaign, advertise MTV, and that the cable operator then would think they had to carry it because it was such consumer outcry.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And a guy named George Lois and a guy named Dale Pond, who'd been my promotions director at WNBC. They had an agency together. We hired them. And they came back originally with some spot that said, America's becoming a land of cable brats and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But embedded in that, call your cable company and say, I want my MTV. Well, Tom Fruston was our marketing guy and John Sykes was our promotion guy and Fred Seibert was the on-air look guy. They, I remember they all came over to my apartment on a, one night I was on Central Park West. And we go through all this and we go, you know, trying to land a cable brats is sort of cheesy and nothing connect. But that I want my MTV is exactly what we want. So we sort of recrafted the whole spot to be, I want my MTV.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And George Lois had done a campaign in the sixties called, I Want My Mapo with Mickey Mantle. And this often happens, sort of repurposed it for I Want My MTV and, and we didn't have a lot of money. But we would go market by market where they weren't carrying MTV and we run this campaign. And the kids would all call the cable company and they would flood the cable company and tie up all their phones. And they go, okay, we'll put it on. And after about two or three markets, we actually didn't have to put it on. We just had to threaten that we were going to do it because everybody had heard. And go, okay, we're getting rid of advertising in your market. You sure you don't want to go ahead and put it on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll put it on. And so that drove it. And it's interesting because MTV was a sort of success with the consumer immediately.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  But a dismal failure economically with advertisers and with the cable operators. So we really had to go redo the sort of business side of it. And that's ultimately how I went from being the creative guy, the head creative guy, to running the network.

• 8:27Rick Rubin?

  So tell me about going from the creative guy to the business guy. It's a very different hat.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  They came to me and said, look, this thing's not working. We, we projected we were going to do 10 million revenue first year. I think we did half a million dollars in ad revenue. Thought the cable operators were all come flying and, you know, as we said with the I Want My MTV campaign, didn't quite work out that way. And I was doing the marketing, you know, all the marketing and the creative stuff. There was another guy who was doing all the sales stuff. And they came to me and said, hey, kid, do you think you can run this thing? And of course, as every 28 or 29 year old would go, yeah, sure. And in my head, my calculus was, I was so sick of having to convince salespeople that I had a good idea. And they had this veto, go, oh, we can't sell that, I can't do that. So I go, hey, I have total creative freedom now.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  If I'm running this thing, I can choose anything. Of course, what I failed to realize was, once I'm running the business side, I got no time to be the creative. But that's sort of how I made the jump. And I discovered I actually loved the business side. And it was just as creative as the creative side. And bringing a lot of creativity and a new approach and willing to take chances. And by the way, not knowing too much, turned out to be a real benefit.

• 9:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it seems like it's often the case, like you don't know what you don't know. And that works to your advantage.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Right, right. But also was so focused, I knew what we were trying to do. So I had this great prism, this great filter of what MTV was and what it wasn't. And I think every product has this, I was the keeper of the vision. Like I was the editor in chief. I would say that belongs, that doesn't. It's not that that's a good idea or that's a bad idea, they just, they don't fit together.

• 10:07Rick Rubin?

  And you're probably also better at managing and dealing with creative people because you understood their.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:12Rick Rubin?

  You were not a bean counter.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  No, and by the way, I was still actively involved. You know, making that jump was just sort of opened up my life. And I began to see, oh, it all turns into dollars and cents. And I love the profit motive. My dad was nonprofit, was a minister. And I heard many dinner table conversations, oh, so and so. You just go, wow, it's really hard because you got to keep everybody happy. And everybody's got conflicting agendas. In business, it's like, it's profit. I mean, ultimately, it's a business. And we should get a return on investment. And that's the reason somebody invested MTV instead of a railroad. Because they get a better return. Or they, like, the likelihood's a better return. And once you figure that out, you go, okay, well, let's sort of figure this out.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And on the advertising front, no one wanted to buy cable advertising. It was like the agencies were like, no way. And everybody thought that these ad-supported networks would never work because the audiences were so small compared to the three big broadcast networks, even though we were targeted. So we figured out the agencies were probably not our friends. They had no vested interest. So like, if somebody's spending a hundred dollars on TV. And they only have to buy three networks. Why would they want to encourage the people to spend it on 20 networks, the same hundred dollars? Because it would just drive their cost up. I get it. So we figured out what we've got to do is we've got to go to the clients and get them to demand it.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And fortunately, we had a wonderful guy named Roger Enrico who ran Pepsi-Cola. And Roger figured it out very quickly. Kids love this. There were no ratings. They just had to use your gut. And by the way, Coca-Cola didn't advertise on MTV for six years because it was not measurable. At first, there were no ratings. Then when the ratings came out, we said we didn't fit their criteria. They needed 65% reach of the country and a three national rating. We didn't have any of that, so forget it, go away. Oh, by the way, in that period of time, Roger Enrico moved the market share the most it's ever been moved before after on Pepsi when he had an exclusive on MTV. Wow. And it was so powerful having that exclusive that Coke, if you recall, came out with the new Coke.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  They thought they had a product problem. Yes. So they developed a whole new product called New Coke. Yes. Turns out it wasn't that. It was that Pepsi was advertising on MTV and Coke was missing. And when Coke finally figured that out, they outspent Pepsi two to one for the next 10 years. Wow. But we went to people like Pepsi. And the way we got Pepsi is not by saying we'll buy some spots. It was like, we'll do some great stuff with you. We'll do a special about music and Pepsi. And it was really using our creative chops, which I had and which our people had, to talk to advertisers in a different way. And we would go to the movie companies. We would say, hey, let's do a world premiere of your picture. And I remember we did Prince and I forgot what was that movie after Purple Rain? After it was a... Under the Cherry Moon.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Under the Cherry Moon. And we did a contest where people would send in and we'd pick one and we did the premiere in their town. It turned out to be Sheridan, Wyoming. You can imagine Prince and Sheridan, Wyoming and all the MTV people descending on that town. But we would come up with ideas that would cause the advertiser, oh, I want that. And then we'd say, well, you've got to spend a million dollars on media as well to be able to get that. And they would call the agency and say, buy MTV. And so that's the way we broke through and we were the first profitable basic cable network. We had the highest ad revenue of any of the basic cable networks at the time. You know, from our standpoint, we sort of cracked the code on it. The other thing we cracked the code on is how to do stuff cheaper.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  TV production was very expensive. It was rooted in the past. When I was at NBC, I did a TV show after Saturday Night Live, sort of a little teaser for what MTV became.

• 14:07Rick Rubin?

  What was that?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  It was called Album Tracks. Ironically, my co-host was a guy named Yarlemon, called Lee Masters on the air at the time. Who was also doing the morning show at WNBC. And the president of NBC, Herb Schlosser, loved me, said, "You're going to TV. I want you to get some TV experience here. Do anything you want to after Saturday Night Live. Take this short time slot." But in that process, I could sort of see how they were producing and it seemed so slow and antiquated. And NBC was bragging about the fact that they'd gone from two operators for every videotape machine to one. They cut the cost of people in half to run their videotape machines.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  When we launched MTV, we had one operator for 30 machines. So we figured out how to just take quantum leaps and like.

• 14:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And it.

• 15:01Rick Rubin?

  Efficiency.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Sounds quaint today, but back then, let's go to the new tech. Let's use the new technology, not the old. Let's think about things in a new way. And again, going back to the point you made, not knowing was our greatest gift. And everybody, and we remarked it a couple of times, is nobody at MTV had ever done the job they had before.

• 15:22Rick Rubin?

  In general, do you try to find people who you think are smart and creative and who haven't done a job before when you're looking for people?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's funny, I am willing to do that. And by the way, my big breaks in life were because people gave me the shot to do that. I probably don't do it as much as I should. It requires you really to get in and understand the person and to have faith in them. But I do think every time I give somebody a job that's a big jump from where they were, they are spectacular performers. And often when you give people the same job for the third time, the performance is pretty mediocre.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  You were a on-air DJ when you were young? Yes, I was. Tell me about that. I started as a on-air DJ in Brookhaven, Mississippi, aged 15. Little, small towns couldn't afford to hire real talent. So they would hire high school kids for most of the shifts, pay them minimum wage. And I needed a job to pay for flying lessons. Already then, you were interested in flying? Oh, that was what drove me to media, was I needed a job. My dad had a friend who had a little airplane, two-seater, took me up in the fifth grade. And it was like, what? Changed my life. You know, you live in little, small-town America. You think the world is contained. And you get in an airplane. I'd never been in a commercial airliner.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  I had my pilot's license, whoever flew in a commercial airline. So, yet, I take off in this thing, and you go, what? The control, this... You see everything, you sense it. I don't know what that feeling is. Sense of freedom, is that part of it? It must be. It's freedom, it's control, it's see... It's actually, you see stuff from a different perspective. And I think I'm always drawn to seeing something from a perspective I've never seen before. And my grandfather, when I would go visit him, would take me to the little airport in Peking, Mississippi, and just let me climb all over plains, all day. And so, when I got to be 15, I tell my parents, I want to get my pilot's license and start flying. You can solo at 16, get your student license. And they go, well, you better get a job.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  And I tried to get a job in the men's clothing store where all the kids hung out after school. They said, you're too young. I tried to get the high-paying job in town, which was bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. No jobs. And I walked in this little radio station, a day-timer, went off the air when the sun went down. And there was an old guy named Bill Jones who owned it. He was there. And I said, I would like a job. And he said, well, do you have a good grades? I go, yeah, pretty good grades. He said, do you get in trouble? I go, not really. He goes, well, come in this room. And he put a reel, reel tape on, turned it on, microphone. He ripped some wire copy of the news and said, read this.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And I read it. He came back in a minute, listened to it and goes, that's good enough. Go to New Orleans, get your third-class radio telephone operator's license, who means I could control the transmitter. Uh huh. And you're hired. And so I began doing weekend work there at 15, and then later went to the other radio station and was was after school from 3 to 6 every day. Spent records too? Oh, yeah. We were at some music station. So we were playing it. And by the way, you also did stuff like Swap Shop of the Air, the Trading Post. Yeah, great. You know, all little town radio stuff. And so that got me money to pay for flying lessons. I probably wasn't attracted necessarily to the stations I was on there, but there was a underground radio station, Jackson, Mississippi, the 102.9 Stereo Rock, JDX FM, had this booming

• 18:53Speaker 01

  signal, went all the way from New Orleans to Memphis, and every kid listened to this station. What they played? It was like, well, back then, it was underground, which was, by the way, Dr. John the Night Tripper, or Fleetwood Mac, or Steve Miller Band, which were not popular yet. Yeah. You know, obviously Doors, et cetera. Uh huh. But we would play a track from the album, and we'd put the album away. You couldn't play anything else on the album for another day. The more obscure, the better. And that was a tasty track from Dr. John the Night Tripper. And before that, you were... So you, you know, you sort of pictured people with a tie-dye parachute hanging on their ceiling, smoking a lot of weed, kind of station. So I always said, I want to work at that station. 68, 69, what year was this? This was 69. 69. 6970. Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  So I drove up there one day, and I said, I want to meet the program director of the radio station. It was actually an AM station, it was very straight, and a part of a TV station, but they had this freaky FM. And so the guy comes out, guy named Bill Tanner, and I say, I want to work, blah, blah, blah. He said, what do you do? I said, let me hear your tape. And he goes, tell you what I'll let you do. I'll let you work Sunday mornings, which is like the worst shift in the world. You know, you're paid some paid programming on, then you get to play a little music. And so I got the job on Sunday morning. On your favorite station? On my favorite station. That's great. And so I worked Monday through Friday and down in in Brookhaven. And on Sunday, I would drive up and do this. How long a drive is that? Hour. And when I started college the next year, everybody knew me. From just this one little shift.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And suddenly I'm like, I'm getting caught up into it. And then I got interested in really commercial radio. And like, Boss Radio, KHJ in Los Angeles, and the Drake sound, and, and, oh, there's something else here. So I got hired by the Top 40 station. And I did 7 to midnight on the Top 40 station. Where was that? In Jackson, Mississippi, 1971. And I'm wildly ambitious. So I make all these air checks, recordings of my show, and send them out. There was no internet, no easy ways to communicate. Mail them off to all the program directors, all the radio stations I could find. If I could find their name, I typed a letter, sent them.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  After my freshman year in college, that summer, I was hired at WRIT in Milwaukee, Top 40. And I was gonna play the, do summer relief for everybody going on vacation. But as soon as I got there, a guy got hired to go to Chicago, so they gave me the midday show. Wow, I'm like an 18-year-old kid. What do I know about the housewife shift, the midday shift? Yeah. And there were people there who'd worked all over the country. And I began to, as you know, from your industry and this industry, learn about it. And the competing station in Milwaukee had a station in Detroit. They were just putting on the air an FM station.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And one of the guys that had been on the air in WOKY, or competitor, is hired as program director in Detroit. I sent him a note saying, hey, congratulations. If you ever have any jobs, let me know. And he goes, I do, you wanna come? And so I went out and did 10 at night till 2:00 in the morning. And to drive the Q truck, the prize truck, so you'd drive. Behind the car, a license plate H1, pull over. Could you imagine doing this thing? Pull over and you'll get a T-shirt. Unbelievable. And, and so that began my sort of really nomadic life. Like, stayed there a year, went to college at Oakland University. And one of the guys there got offered a job in Pittsburgh. He said, I don't want to go to Pittsburgh. You interested?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  And I go, I don't know, maybe. So I talked to the guy who was going down there, station manager, leaving the station in Detroit to go there. And I drive down with him to Pittsburgh. I'm 19 years old, mind you. On the way to Pittsburgh, I convince him I should program the radio station. I, I mean, how the hell do I? You know, I've, I've been, I've been a student. I've been listening to everybody. I think I know everything in the world. I think I'm a genius now. Yeah. And he agrees. They let me program the radio station. I go to Pittsburgh. But there's something about that enthusiasm. I don't know what it is, but they let me program the station. And I had this sort of quirky idea of what we should do with the station. What was the idea? Well, the greatest program director in my mind of my time was a guy named Buzz Bennett. I don't know if you remember Buzzy.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Buzz had worked for Drake. That was the big programmer at the time. And they had all these Drake stations, RKO stations. And Buzzy was a success there. And Buzzy had gone across the street to another station in San Diego and beat Drake. And he's the first guy to ever beat Drake. And then he's the hottest programmer. He comes to town and puts the station on the air for Cecil Heftal called 13Q. And they simulcasted originally on AM and FM. And in those days, AM was much bigger than FM. FM wasn't, didn't have full penetration of cars, et cetera. And they did really well, number one out of the box. And then they took the FM and turned it to beautiful music. So I say, they just did that. Why don't we make ourselves sound like 13Q's FM again?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And get people to think, because the FM had almost as much audience as the AM. Why don't we sound like we're 13Q? So 13Q did the great ripoff. We did the great zip off. We did whatever they did, we would just do it. Whatever music they're playing, we would play. And we're just gonna ride their coattails. And I think most people were humiliated to do that. I was, and I just wanted to win. And we actually beat them in the ratings. Wow, doing their thing. Yeah, right. How do you think it works that you could beat someone doing their thing? You know what? I think it was because, well, I understood their thing and agreed with their thing and liked their thing. Yeah. So I was totally into it. Yeah. Uh, wish I've thought of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And FM was just coming on too. Timing had something to do with it too. Always, doesn't it?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  So I, uh, I had that big success as this 19-year-old kid. And suddenly, people from the country noticed me. And I was at that stage where they go, yeah, but you're too young. And the general manager there, got him Charlie Warner, had been a part of Bill Paley's CBS. Had run their CBS radio rep firm, looked great, you know, St. Albans, Dartmouth. Wore the right suits, handsome, set everything. Huge company. Well, at CBS he was, but he got fired at CBS. The only job he could find at that time was in Pittsburgh as the general manager. So he came there and he became infatuated with me.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  He just loved the idea that I was 19, and by the way, I had a beard and had long hair and wore a T-shirt. I didn't want some playing the game. He just thought that was fabulous, just, you know, poking the bear in the eye. And he got fired in Pittsburgh, but got hired NBC in Chicago. So he calls me up and goes, you want to come to Chicago? And I'm 20 years old and somehow I got the NBC in Chicago when I was 20. And making more money than I ever dreamed I'd make, like five or six times the money my dad made. And I think back on my career now and say, you know, going from NBC to MTV, that's all probable. The improbable jump is to go from a small town in Mississippi, five years later,

• 25:57Speaker 01

  to be the afternoon guy and programming the big NBC clear channel station in Chicago. And it was all because, we talked about giving people a chance. Yeah. Charlie Warner was willing to take a chance on a 20-year-old kid to replace the 47-year-old programmer who was there to program the station. And, and I think today, you know, if somebody came to me and said, we're going to hire this 20-year-old guy. We're going to give him our, our biggest station, I'd go, no, we're not. Are you crazy? That's insane. Yeah. How he managed to pull it off, I don't know. Probably part of it was, it was a day of not great information flows. So he probably had a lot of choices he could make in Chicago that nobody at corporate knew about. Today, we know everything everybody's doing. Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  But he, he made that decision and then he and I went to, to WNBC together too. And was just like, you know, there are a couple of people who've changed your life. And yes, I was capable, obviously, as it turns out. But you've mentioned luck earlier. Yeah. But it's like luck. It's just like right place, right time. So you went to WNBC in New York? They three, we had a big success with the AM in Chicago. Changed it to country music, which I had nothing about. But I was one of those guys who was beginning to do research. In college, I majored in social methods and sociology and research. And we began, there was a group of us beginning to say, hey. How do you do research in the 1980s? This is, there's no internet yet. We did survey research, which no one had ever done. They were, they used to call the record store and say, what's selling?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  And of course, the record company said, I'll give you 10 extra albums to say, my record's selling well. So it was, by the way, I'm not sure if it was accurate about record sales. Yeah. And as you know, record sales don't necessarily correlate to what people want to hear on the radio. No. So we started this thing where we'd call people. It's just random. We had, back in those days, you could call anybody you wanted to. We'd go to the phone book and just randomly call people and ask them to join a panel to talk about music each week. And we would play little hooks of songs down the line to people and say, have you ever heard of this song? Uh, if you've heard of it, is it your favorite? I like it, but not my favorite. I like it, but tired of hearing it. Uh, I'm sort of neutral. I dislike it, or I dislike it so much, I change the channel when it comes on. Good question.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  So now we would, we would, every week we'd say, okay, well, this one's number one with the top category. This one's the one they hate the most. Over the years, we figured out, I like it, but tired of hearing it so much runs people off more than anything else. But we were able to develop it. So we built a playlist based on a random sample of listeners. So we could, we're really talking to them to find out what they wanted. So I used that for the country music, because I did no country music at all. And we became the number one country station in America almost overnight. Wow. And then I did it on the FM. Was anyone else using data yet in radio? There was a small group of us and we all traded notes. We got Todd Wallace and Steve Casey, who eventually was the music director at MTV when I was there.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  And we were all saying, I'm learning this, I'm learning that. How are you doing this? How do you get the people on the call? How do you get it so quick? What system do you use? And so we were regularly talking. And we were sort of the new Turks, the new kids. Nobody liked us. We were ruining the music. Business, but they gave me an edge and I did the FM station and beat the ABC FM, which at that time they were doing sort of album, uh, radio, album where you ended radio. Lee Abrams had been there a few, know Lee and that was where he made his mark. And we beat the ABC FM. We're the first ones to ever beat an ABC FM. So then they said, okay, could come to New York.

• 29:26Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  At age 23, I went there to program WNBC, had Don Imus in the morning and

• 29:31Rick Rubin?

  Incredible.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  All these big names and uh, so that was my, my big shot to get there.

• 29:36Rick Rubin?

  Amazing. Also interesting to have those similar minded people around the country who were sharing notes on the same things, which in most industries, people look at those as competitors, even if they're not direct competitors, but there's that sense of competition. You don't talk to those people. They're your enemies. But you saw that it was like a revolution.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  It was a revolution. The camaraderie always works. Every place I go camaraderie is really important. I mean, even we started MTV, that original group of people, we went to dinner together every night. We went on vacation together. We shared summer houses together.

• 30:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  We lived together. It was communal and it was collegial and you know, I'm a believer that nobody wins. Teams win.

• 30:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about WNBC.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Well, WNBC was um,

• 30:25Rick Rubin?

  It's the biggest radio station in New York?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  WABC was the biggest.

• 30:29Rick Rubin?

  ABC was the biggest.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  WNBC was the also ran and they couldn't quite get over the hump. Part of the problem was what I would do at each station I'd gone to, I would do some survey research to people who were listening to like WABC. What do you like about the station? What don't you like about it? Then I would go in their position, it would be whatever they said they liked. And we'd say, and we don't have the whatever they said they didn't like.

• 30:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  And then we'd talk about other station on the air and taught them so much, they began to change stuff. And it worked for me. So I sort of tried that and WABC was oblivious. They didn't change anything. By the way, the change, sound hadn't changed since the mid 1960s. So out of date, so wrong. But you know, I learned something which was people have habits.

• 31:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Don't screw with this. Like, you know, the people who take that magazine and go, I can make it look better. I'm gonna do a magazine redesign. They kill the magazine.

• 31:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Because good or bad, you're accustomed to it. That's what you know it as. And they wouldn't change. And finally, I think it was WBLS or WKTU came on the air. By the way, we were running behind them. It couldn't quite get them. Was it Disco at that time or past Disco? I think it was Disco that came on the air and they had a big rating and WABC freaked out. They fired the programmer. They brought a guy in who made the station sound really new and modern and the ratings died. We surged ahead and that's the way WNBC became number one. Amazing. And then how many years did you do that? I did that three years and Herb Schloss. Were you on air as well or no?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  New York was the first place I wasn't regularly on the air, but I would do fill-in. And if somebody went on vacation, I'd do a week shift. I was the guy that if Don Imus didn't come in in the morning, which unfortunately happened some, I'd get a call about 5:30 and say, Don's not coming in. I go, give me a minute. Stay on the air till I get there and would go do the shift. If you got that call, would you be bummed or would you be excited? Okay. I mean, the problem was if I was out till midnight, I wasn't planning on getting up at 5:00 AM. Yeah. So that was the bad part of it, but. But in general, it was fun to be on the air for you? Yeah, it was always fun. I was never great on the air. I'm too controlled. I have that switch which says, oh, I shouldn't do that. The greatest people on the air are the people who just let go.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  So tell me about the format of WNBC. It was top 40. I mean, CHR, play the hits, but heavy personality. We had Imus in the morning. When I got there, Don was like way off the reservation. We fired Don. Don couldn't get a job in New York, wound up back in Cleveland where he'd come from. And about a year later, somebody said, Don's cleaned up his act. You ought to go hear him. So I had no station, no internet or anything. I fly to Cleveland. I sit at the airport, have a radio, I turn it on and listen to his show. And they're right. He's really good. He's back. He's back. Yeah. So I come back and we hire him back to the morning show. And obviously he was spectacular

• 33:26Speaker 01

  and talented. And right after I left, they hired Howard Stern to do the afternoon show. They had soupy sales in midday. That was right after my time, but you know, it was about personalities. Again, I think back then I sort of discovered that what radio really is, it's a companion to people. You know, as soon as you could get cassette recordings and you know, 8-tracks, et cetera. I no longer had to listen to radio for the music. If I just wanted music, I could go to other places to go, no commercials, say exactly what I want. But you realize that companionship is critical. Today, probably more than ever, which is something.

• 34:04Rick Rubin?

  So you say that a playlist can't replace listening to radio for that period of time?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  You know what? It's a different experience.

• 34:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Actually, if you ask people, do you listen to a playlist and your music collection and radio? They agree with the statement. I listen to them both, but at different times for different reasons. And you'll see always, if somebody had a CD on, you'd see them listening to it, and then for some reason, they'd just turn on the radio. Why'd they do that? It's the middle of a song.

• 34:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  They can't be away from people. I mean, it's a different experience. On the radio, I know what's going on in the world. It's a camaraderie of people. It's a gang of people. We always make it sound like there are a lot of people listening. We have people, listeners, calling in, put them on the air.

• 34:44Rick Rubin?

  Sense of community.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  A sense of community. And they're listening for companionship. You know, it's interesting, the average person watches about 30 different TV networks in a month. The average person listens to two radio stations.

• 34:59Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  I ride to work with Ryan Seacrest every morning. I have for 20 years. I'm gonna listen to him until he's no longer there.

• 35:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  He's my buddy. I know everything about him. I keep track of him. He's talking about stuff relevant to me. I'm not gonna go anywhere else. People say, oh, my commercials come on. Everybody leaves commercials. Actually, in radio, they don't like TV. They don't leave on the commercial break. They leave on a song they don't like. On the commercial break, you know, commercials are sort of talking about stuff you need for your life. The same thing, you know, what's Ryan talking about? He's talking about people and clothes and cars and food and movies and TV shows. Same thing the commercials are talking about. So it is this sense of like, I'm with you. I'm gonna hang out with you. But I learned that sort of way back there at WNBC, and I was doing really well there, loved it,

• 35:46Speaker 01

  and was preparing to go be a TV programmer, because Herb Flosser said, you're in. I did the TV show after Saturday, and I've got sort of beginning to learn TV. And then Herb got kicked out and they brought a guy named Fred Silverman in. And suddenly I was not special anymore. And there was a group of us that we were actually called sort of sexist in those days of Herb's Boys. And it was a bunch of guys that Herb loved. And didn't matter what your boss said, you could call Herb and Herbert overrule. Lorne Michaels, who was doing Saturday Night Live, Dick Ebersol was doing late night. I think Donald Meyer was doing sports. Brandon Hardikoff may have been there by then. And me. And so when he got kicked out, it's like all of Herb's Boys were in trouble.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  That's when Lorne left Saturday Night Live, Dick Ebersol left. Olmeyer went to the disco. Everybody left. And so I'm like open to the idea of like, well, I don't know what I'm going to do now. I was have my life planned out. Everything was going to happen the right way.

• 36:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Like plans don't come true. And I got a call from these folks saying, you know, we're doing this cable programming company. We think the world's going to be narrow cast TV channels like I was describing to you. And, you know, you have radio experience. We think we like radio. Think you'd be good. Want you to come over. And so, I mean, it was a long process to get hired because some of the people there going, how can you hire this kid? How can you hire this kid with no TV experience? How can you hire this kid? And in the end, they gave me a shot. And originally did the movie channel and then MTV.

• 37:19Rick Rubin?

  Channel worked.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, movie channel worked and MTV. And we took Nickelodeon, which had been a preschoolers channel, which the cable company had been using to get cable franchises. I was saying, look at all the do good stuff we do and changed it to a tween channel, which Nickelodeon took off and just roared.

• 37:35Rick Rubin?

  And was the idea that there's this thing Disney and it's its own thing? And why don't we compete with Disney?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  We were like, we thought Disney was old looking. It wasn't cool.

• 37:46Rick Rubin?

  And it was at that time.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  It was at that time. And so Nickelodeon was like cool and hip, irreverent, sassy. It sounded in tune. And we had a same on air look. Got him Fred Seibert did MTV. I got Fred. We worked on it, did the Nickelodeon on air look with Jerry Layborn, who was the, who'd been in programming at Nickelodeon. And I gave her the shot to run the whole thing. And Fred and Jerry worked on this whole look again. So MTV was about mood and emotion. Very few TV networks at the time. Did anybody care about? They cared about the shows.

• 38:22Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Like, so I'm watching whatever show, the networks that I don't know. It's like my favorite show. And the networks were nothing more than delivery systems for shows. MTV was the first network where people say, I'm tuning in to watch MTV, see what's on. They're going to MTV, not a program.

• 38:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  And Nickelodeon began to, I'm going to turn on Nickelodeon, what's on? I don't know. I'm going to Nickelodeon. That the network became the, the object of desire. And that sort of changed how people did TV networks. And after us, other people had success with that as well.

• 38:54Rick Rubin?

  I remember also in the I want my MTV campaign. You had huge rock stars doing commercials, saying, I want my MTV. People who you could never hire to do a commercial for anything for any amount.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  I know. It was crazy. I mean, John Sykes talks about the idea, we want to get the Who. So he camps out at Bill Kerblich's office in London. And he gets across the street, he's got a setup of a camera and all. And he's just waiting. And he sees Pete Townshend come.

• 39:25Rick Rubin?

  The realist style.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  And he goes, he goes, hey, I need you to help with the MTV. And he goes, Pete looks a little befuddled. And he walks across the street with him and records, I want my MTV.

• 39:35Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Didn't know what he was.

• 39:37Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And I think seven or eight months later, we do something with the Who, they're on the air or something. And Sykes sees him and goes up to him thinking, hey, I'm your buddy. And he looks at him and goes, you, you, you're the one. And it felt like he'd been railroaded into it, but we had Mick Jagger, we had Madonna. Now Madonna was a new act then, so David Bowie, et cetera. The police who were like.

• 40:02Rick Rubin?

  You think if not for MTV, we would know who Madonna is today?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Boy, that's a great point. I think the biggest impact MTV had on the music business is we turned performers into celebrities.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  One of the first things we heard was people say, wow, I'm being stopped on the street and people saying, I saw you on MTV. They didn't stop many musicians back then because you didn't know what they looked like. And many musicians had trouble making the flip. It was like when sound came in for actors, similar. Right. I mean, and there were some of them fought it, didn't want it, took Bruce Springsteen a long time to do a video. And some people like Madonna just knew it. I mean, she was one of the first MTV artists. Michael Jackson just got it, understood it. Billy Idol, Prince. Oh, my God. It was just like, and they were lining up there, but they, I'm not sure would have been the stars they were, were they not the MTV stars? And it was sort of interesting to watch.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  I mean, we're in the middle of that revolution as well, but you think about what happened to the music business after those people became celebrities? Suddenly, the touring business is bigger. Suddenly endorsements are big. Suddenly, they have enormous sort of personal power as a celebrity. They've changed a lot. Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  What were some of the things that happened along the way at MTV that was like, couldn't believe this is happening? Well, you know, becoming profitable was, there was a guy named Drew Lewis, who had been Reagan's Secretary of Transportation. He had famously fired all the air traffic controllers, if you recall this. And I mean, tough, tough guy. And Warner AMX was two things. It was a programming company, Warner AMX Satellite Entertainment Company, which is where MTV was, and it's Warner AMX Cable. In the cable business, in the early 80s, they had made all sorts of promises to cities to get the cable franchise, to build out the big cities. The problem was, as usually happens, is people had made very uneconomic deals. And so it was crushing Warner AMX, these deals they had done.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  So they hired Drew Lewis to come in and fix it. Drew's just a tough nut, knows nothing. Just bottom line, basically. Bottom line. And Drew, it turns out, I had one of the meetings with him and I was talking about something we were doing with the Rolling Stones. And one of the people that worked for Drew goes, Drew, do you know who the Rolling Stones are? And he goes, no. You ever heard of Mick Jagger? No. And I go, boy, I am in deep shit. Drew takes me to lunch and says, okay, Bob, look, and it's complicated drama, but they don't like your boss, Jack Schneider, and they're gonna fire Jack Schneider eventually, and I need you to get ready to be that. And then he goes, but the first thing I need you to do is, MTV's gotta be profitable. Said, if you can't make it profitable by the end of the year, I'm gonna shut it down. And the board of directors, a couple of times, had said,

• 42:49Speaker 01

  we're gonna shut MTV down. Steve Ross had saved it. And now he's saying, we're gonna shut down. This guy's got the power to do it. So I came back for that meeting and go, I can't tell everybody that works for me that we're at risk of being shut down. So I just have to sort of suck it up, but I have to do something rather dramatic. So we cut costs like crazy. I mean, if you hear people from the early days creep, I think they're gonna say, oh, yeah, I remember working. Bobby's so creative. They'll say Bob was the cheapest son of a bitch I ever worked with in my life, because mine was fine, every penny I could, everywhere. And you had to. Survival, but I couldn't tell anybody. Yeah. Because it would bum them all out. So, I mean, we're riding high. The press is writing about us. Everybody loves us.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  The cable operators were getting it for free. And we decided, you know what? We need them to pay us. If they don't pay us, we pencil out. We're never gonna be profitable. So we go back and we do these fights with the cable companies, saying, I know we said it's free, you gotta charge for it. And in that time, a couple of the big cable operators trying to get leverage on us convinced Ted Turner, start the cable music channel to compete with MTV. And so they come out with the cable music channel. I remember I had learned on the movie channel, when HBO came out with Cinemax, I learned what a fighting brand was. All I had learned at one time. Yeah. So when Turner came out with cable music channel, I started VH1. Instead of him being able to compete with Cable Music Channel versus MTV,

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I want it to be Cable Music Channel versus VH1. Yeah. And if it had to kill VH1, fine, who cares? Yeah. It keeps MTV out of the fight. Yeah. So Turner said, "Well, we're free to the cable industry." I go, "VH1's free too." And then it goes, "Okay, well, we're gonna sell spots cheaper to the advertisers." They're gonna be $90 instead of the $300 you charge." I go, "Ours will be $80." So whatever they did, we just undercut. And after 34 days, he shuts down. 34 days? 34 days, he shuts down the Cable Music Channel, VH1, which we just did, I mean, they cost us $5 million. Yeah. Incremental, that's the whole cost of doing VH1, was $5 million. Yeah. We literally had a closet where we had some VJs in a closet

• 44:59Speaker 01

  with a fixed focus camera and a 3/4 inch machine, just cheap, cheap stuff. But we said, "You know, look, let's keep it going." And as you know, we, VH1, continued on and... Forgetting the cost of making the content for the channel, how hard was it to get access on a cable channel? How many channels are there? It was hard back then. It was really hard. And we didn't get MTV on in Manhattan for about the first three years on Manhattan. Wow, that's a long time. It was a long time. Yeah. And it was more rural America where everybody had cable, sort of then drifting up to the big cities. Which is interesting also, because it was very cutting-edge programming. Right, right. It was modern programming, it was not Des Moines. Scared the cable operators.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  When VH1 came, I go, "Okay, I have no money. How am I gonna get any distribution?" I hire all the famous disc jockeys in New York. Scott Shannon, Don Imus, Frankie Crocker, all are on VH1. And I go, "I'm gonna get on in New York." Don Imus goes on the air, we were gonna launch, I think it was January 1st. He's on the air saying, "Well, Jack Gault, the guy who ran Manhattan Cable, was gonna put us on, said, 'We're gonna be right there, VH1.'" Jack Gault calls me and goes, "What the hell are you doing?" Said, "We're not putting you on." And I go, "Do you want me to tell Don that?" And he goes, uh, no, no, don't tell him that. And we launched on Manhattan Cable. Unbelievable.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  So it was not, I want my MTV, but it was another sort of pressure tactic to get these guys to carry us. Amazing. And then how big did MTV grow? Well, you know, you know, MTV. And when did you leave? I left, we, we tried to do a management buyout. American Express decided they wanted to get out of the Warner MX venture. And there was a shotgun buy sell with Warner. So it was up for grabs. So David Horowitz, who had been the president of Warner's, had come down to MTV to be the CEO when we went public because they said I was too young, so. Was it the first time you went public with something? But yeah, it was. And how was that experience? It was great. I mean, I didn't know, I didn't know what I didn't know. Yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  And by the way, the day we were pricing the public offering? Yes. Is the day Ted Turner announced he was starting a competing service. So the stock goes, whoa, we almost didn't come out. But Shearson Lehman was taking us public, owned by American Express. They owned half of us, so we got out public. But we were under the cloud of, oh my God, Ted Turner, he'll kill you. He's Mr. Cable. Yeah. One of these kids know, how can they beat Ted Turner? Thirty-four days. Yeah, right. He, they're gonna kill him. So we got out public and then obviously after Turner went away, the stock goes up. And so David Horowitz had come down to be the CEO because they said I was too young to be the CEO of a public company. And they said, well, we'll let you be CEO in two years, but David's gonna come down for two years. So David and I, very close.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  He had been Steve's president of Warner's. And David and I set about to do a managed buyout. We interviewed a bunch of people. We're Forstmann Little, who was very big at the time, Teddy Forstmann, Nick Forstmann, Brian Little. They come in, we put together an offer. And Steve had decided that what he was gonna do is sell half of everything to Viacom. And that's the way he was gonna buy out American Express. He called me and said, look, I want you to go with this new thing and we're gonna do blah, blah. I said, well, Steve, I'll do it, but only if you'll meet with Teddy Forceman first and hear us. And he goes, okay, I'll do that. And Teddy gave him a big pitch, a lot of money for MTV, more than he ever thought he could make. And so he decides he'll sell it to us.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  And so we're going, my God, Fat City, I'm gonna own the company, we're gonna be it. And Teddy was a tough character. Steve was a constant negotiator. We had an agreement and Steve kept re-trading and re-trading and re-trading. And finally Teddy tells the investment banker, you can tell Steve he can go fuck himself. And by the way, no investment banker should ever go tell the client someone said that. And the investment banker told Steve that. And so Steve goes, oh, really? So he sends word over to Viacom. Viacom comes in with a competing offer and they wound up buying MTV. This was 1985. I sort of lost my dream, but

• 49:24Speaker 01

  I had 1% of MTV. And that was more money. I didn't have any money. Suddenly I've got like millions of dollars. By today's standards, I got screwed. But so I was like, well, maybe not such a bad thing that we got it. I signed a new five-year deal with Viacom. But as things go on, obviously, people are now coming to me saying, hey, you want to come here, do whatever. And it just bothered me that somebody had my company. Yeah, I left in 87. I went to MCA, came to me with a deal. Lou and Sid came and offered me a deal Irving actually set up, who was running the music company in MCA at the time, that they would finance a 50-50

• 50:03Speaker 01

  joint venture. I could go do whatever I wanted to do. And I go, great. And so I left. And I made sure Preston, who was my deputy at the time and a good friend, got the shot to be the president.

• 50:18Rick Rubin?

  Do you think if MTV continued with its original format of showing videos and having VJs, it may still be relevant today?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Which is a great question. Probably, I mean, we did some shows as sort of spice and some little anchors. But I would probably have never have done the narrative form on MTV.

• 50:41Rick Rubin?

  It felt like instead of being MTV, they were being regular television.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  But they were had the youth audience, they had the attitude, and they wound up being wildly successful.

• 50:52Rick Rubin?

  For a window of time.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  For a period of time. And I, as I say, I wouldn't have had the guts to do it because I had a vision. And so I could not see the other thing. And I think, you know, it happens with businesses, you know, the other group came in and said, okay, we'll still be music. Slowly but surely, it became more and more programs because it didn't start out instantly. It was.

• 51:12Rick Rubin?

  No, but there was a time when if you turned on MTV, you were not going to see music most of the time.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Right. And you know what's interesting? I think when Tom and Judy were really running it.

• 51:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  They kept their hand in music enough to hang on to all of that imagery and that audience. And they put out enough music shows. I think when Tom left, Judy left, Philippe de Molin running it. I think they just turned it into it's just a network.

• 51:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  And it lost its mojo. What made MTV so popular was the attitude. It just like, it was just cool. And, and we'd do shit to just make us seem cool.

• 51:52Rick Rubin?

  And it felt like counter-programming. It didn't feel like everything else.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:56Rick Rubin?

  It really was. It was everything and there was MTV.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  The original name that we wanted for MTV, my, my concept was TV One. And we're going to do TV a different way. And this is TV One. We couldn't clear TV One. So then we figured out we could clear TV M. So it's going to be TV M. And actually, one of Steve Case, who was the driest, sort of most analytical guy in the bunch, who was the music director, which is the analytical job. In a meeting, it very dry, he says, don't you think MTV sounds better than TV M? Well, yeah, does. Okay. And that second, it became MTV. Just like that. No study, no, you know, it was just like, yeah, okay, it's gonna be MTV. Yeah. Tell me more about Steve Ross. Steve Ross is an amazing guy.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Steve was a guy who I often talk about in business, it's math and magic. That you need. You have a podcast called Math and Magic. To me, it's always been my thing. By the way, Buzzy Bennett said that, because I thought was the greatest programmer ever. Yeah. Said it's the analytics, but it's also you gotta have the magic. I can do all this survey data and tell you what people want, that to make it exciting. And now I have to have the magic to make it exciting. And I believe that's true with every business. Every project is the math and magic. So Steve Ross had an interesting blend of that. He had unbelievable financial skills, just saw deals and numbers and understood it. But he also really appreciated the magic.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And although he may not have been able to create it, he loved the people who could. And supported it. And supported it. And worshipped it. And those were stars to him, not people to be tolerated, but those were people to be worshipped. Yeah. And I learned so much from Steve. Steve was the first guy I'd ever heard say something like this. He'd say, you know, Bob, you're never gonna be fired here for making a mistake. You're gonna be fired here for not making a mistake. Because if you're not making a mistake, tells me you're not trying anything new. And whatever we've given you to manage gonna wilt away under your management. You know, and, and he didn't say this, but I've added to it, and I'm sure he implied it. Is that mistakes are the byproduct of innovation. If you're gonna try new shit, at least half of it's not gonna work. Absolutely.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  And when we get ready to try something, I go, guys, don't get too carried away. Fifty fifty chance it works. Yeah. So let's just keep trying. But if you don't try it, nothing changes. The corollary that goes with that is you have to be biased toward quick decision making. Because when it invariably is wrong, change it. Yeah. Change it quickly, but don't sit there and study and review. Yeah, it's like, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick move. Yeah. And I learned that from Steve. And I learned to be bold. It's just like, who cares what people think? And Steve was an outsider. I mean, he was this group of guys, sort of, you know, out of Brooklyn, who were. Parking lot business originally. Parking lot, you know, office management, cleaning services.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  And Steve had started with his father in law's two funeral homes and was a funeral director. And just had an entrepreneurial eye. He goes, what do we do with all these limousines at night? Nothing. Let's start renting them out. So they rented out the great limousine service. And then they go, whoa, where are we parking them? That parking garage? Why would we buy the parking garage? And then that'll be better. And then he goes, wait a minute. We got a parking garage. And at this time, the rental car business was beginning to be developed. He said, let's start a rental car company and they can park in any of the parking lots in New York for free. And that'll be our special thing and you can rent them at the parking lots. Amazing. And so he just kept seeing one thing after another. And then he did a study about what businesses he should be in.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And the entertainment business came up high. So he said, we're going to get in the entertainment business. He bought Ashley Famous, the talent agency, Ted Ashley, Spencer Harrison, David Geffen had been working there as the music guy. And, uh, and then he had an opportunity by this bankrupt company called Warner Seven Arts. And they had to get rid of the talent agency because of the consent decrees about what the studios can own. And they wound up with Warner's. And, uh, he bought it with the thought of the movie company. But they discovered that all the money was being made with the record companies. And they had a billion little independent distributors. One of the great ideas was create, we, uh, one distribution organization, give them extra clout.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, Ahmed was running Atlantic. Yeah. Bo was running Warner's. And Joe Smith was working with, with him as the president of Warner's. And I think David was running Electra Asylum at the time. So that was off and went. And, but I just loved Steve because Steve would just encourage you to go take a big chance. Go, go. I love what you're doing. You know, it's not like, not critical and, but he was a deal guy. And just understood it. And if you weren't bothered by sort of the Brooklyn culture, like rough and tough. Yeah. Uh, I mean, I was in a meeting and my then boss, who had been at CBS, a very straight laced guy and very sort of CBS proper.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Said something in a meeting and Steve looked at him and goes, what, do you have a death wish? Saying, that's a stupid idea.

• 57:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  He was so offended, he couldn't even finish the conversation.

• 57:10Rick Rubin?

  He took it as a threat.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  And Steve didn't mean it. It's just like the way they talk.

• 57:13Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  And so I sort of learned that way. That's okay. I mean, I'm sort of even keel. And it's fine. It's like, everybody's bantering back and forth.

• 57:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  And Steve always said, in search of the breakthrough idea.

• 57:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How much time did you get to spend with him?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 57:30Rick Rubin?

  Tell me.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  You know, I would do, Steve would call me a lot and say, hey, we got a meeting with so and so, come on up. He would call me at the end.

• 57:38Rick Rubin?

  For things that were not part of your...

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Nothing. He would call, there was, he had a deal guy named Ed Abudi, who he worked closely with. And he would call me in like, four, five o'clock, I'd get a call from him, say, hey, Mr. Ross wants to see you. And I'd go up and Steve said, I'm thinking about doing this. He was always like, I'm thinking about some idea. And I'd start iterating, ideating with him. And he loved that. And then he'd say, get a booty, call a booty, get him in here. And, you know, they used to have cell phones or anything and I was supposed to have dinner with my wife. It's like, eight o'clock. I like, say, excuse me a minute. I'm not coming to dinner. And I'd be there till 11 o'clock with Steve, brainstorming and thinking. And I sort of turned out to be sort of a sounding board for him. And when we sold the company to Viacom,

• 58:23Speaker 01

  he said, look, you gotta go with the company, you know, you're part of the deal and blah, blah, blah. And when I left to go to MCA, he calls me, goes, what are you doing? Why didn't you come back here? And I go, I thought I was part of the deal. And he goes, ah, and so for two years, he kept trying to get me to come back. And finally, I bought my way out of the MCA deal and went back to Warner, went back to Steve. We were just doing the Time Warner merger. He hired me, didn't tell me we were merging with Time. I agree, I'm coming, he said, okay, now I gotta tell you something. We're gonna merge with Time. And uh...

• 58:55Rick Rubin?

  Once you agreed to come back, then he tells you that's the plan?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  And he said, what I want you to...

• 58:59Rick Rubin?

  What were your thoughts about that?

• 59:00Speaker 01

  I was sort of game for anything. And what, the way you pitched me was, he goes, listen, Bob, I need a successor. I want you to come back and be my successor, which like, very handy stuff for a man in my 30s.

• 59:10Rick Rubin?

  How old was he at the time, would you say?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Steve must have been late 50s, early 60s. And I was like, wow, what do you mean? And so then when we were going to merge the companies, well, I was going to come back to Warner and be in the office of the president. We were going to have three of us that were the office of the president under him, which sounded pretty great. Because he never had one president, he had like three guys. And I was going to be in that. Then he said, okay. So you would be part of everything. Right. And so then it goes, okay, we're going to merge with Time, but we're going to keep it separate. So we're still going to have an office of the president of Warner's and then the Time assets. And then he calls me and says, okay, we're not going to do that. And so I go find him. And so I wound up with being the head of basically new business, Time Warner Enterprises. And I had wanted to buy Six Flags theme parks,

• 59:58Speaker 01

  which was really sort of my burning desire when I came back. Why did you want to do that? I, you know, I don't know. When I was at MCA and we could buy companies was the whole idea. We tried to buy an ad agency, tried to buy J. Walter Thompson, wound up with about 5% of the equity of J. Walter Thompson. And we were going to make a hostile bid. And then a guy named Martin Sorrell shows up to also make a hostile bid. We briefly talk about doing something together. Martin knew they had Tokyo Real Estate. I didn't know that, which was about half the value of J. Walter Thompson. Wow. And so he bid more than we were willing to bid. But the stock had gone up so much, I mean, a quick win. I mean, we bought 5% of the company. And suddenly we had tripled our money. And, you know, the MCA guys go, hey, I like you.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  So I'm going out saying, what other companies can we look at? And I found Six Flags. It was owned by Wes Ray Capital, sort of a busted LBO. Were they the original owners? No, they were, had bought it. They bought it. And how many were there? How many Six Flags? There were only seven at the time, only in big cities, big, big parks. And I go to the MCA guys, I want to buy this. They go, we already have theme parks. I go to buy, I thought my deal was I could buy anything. Yeah. And they go, but not that. And so I'm. Talking to Steve, who was calling me pretty regularly, saying, hey, you should come back, blah, blah, blah. And I tell him about Six Flags. And he said, if you come back, I'll let you buy Six Flags. So this is sort of the deal. So when I, we were sort of divvying up responsibly. I said, look, let me buy Six Flags.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  I'll run that. And I'll run all the other new business. We'll go find new businesses and put everything there.

• 1:01:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  And which sounded pretty exciting to me.

• 1:01:31Rick Rubin?

  It's kind of like what you would have done at MCA if they let you do whatever you want, really.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Well, what's interesting, and this is again luck, as luck would turn out, you know this, in companies back then, they pay you great money, but you didn't get any equity.

• 1:01:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  So when we got ready to do the deal, in the Time and Warner deal, they had to borrow a lot of money, heavily loaded up on debt. And Steve goes, look, I can give you 50 million to buy it, but you got to go find somebody else with the 100 million of equity. And oh, by the way, cap them so they can earn more than a 30% IRR. And we got to be able to buy them back. And I'm like, all these conditions.

• 1:02:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  And I go, okay.

• 1:02:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  And I wound up getting Blackstone. Steve Schwarzman, at the time Henry Silverman was running the, and Roger Altman was there. And I'd gone in through Roger, who I knew. And we were sort of the first corporate deal. And there was a guy named Jimmy Lee at Chemical Bank, I think. I'm not sure they were yet, Chase. And Jimmy was going to put up the financing. But Jimmy and Henry Silverman called the guys at Time Warner, and they go, everybody who runs our companies has to own equity. And they go, well, our guy's here, we pay him well. They go, nope, got to give them equity. So I wound up with 4% of Six Flags, which, you know, mind you, I made a lot of money on MTV. I thought I made a lot of money for a kid, but as luck would have it,

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  I wound up with 4% of Six Flags. We bought it for 600 million. We eventually sold 51% for about a billion. And then they've sold the rest of it and wound up with 2 billion out of the value of Six Flags. And so that was the first real money I made.

• 1:03:10Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Was that. And it's just sort of luck. And I, again, I had a plan for-

• 1:03:15Rick Rubin?

  How long was the period that you-

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Five years.

• 1:03:17Rick Rubin?

  Five years. And did you build more Six Flags in those five years?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  No, I think we bought one in San Antonio, the eighth one, just as I was leaving from USAA. But I had a whole plan about Six Flags. I had this idea that- We were going to try and do, sort of take what Hertz had done and Avis. Where Avis, where number two, we try harder. Right now, there's one theme park in Disney and everybody else. So, we wanted to become the, sort of the worst in the category with Disney, instead of the best in the category without Disney. All of our parks were really big. They were actually bigger than Disneyland. So, we had a line bigger than Disneyland closer to home.

• 1:03:56Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Because we really marked competing with them. Their destination trips.

• 1:03:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Ours were day trips.

• 1:04:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  If people, someone said, Six Flags is not as good as Disney, I won. Because they thought of me in the category.

• 1:04:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  If they said, you're bigger than Disney.

• 1:04:09Rick Rubin?

  If you're in the conversation, you won.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  It's what Pepsi did. Pepsi did the Pepsi challenge not to compete with Coke, but to get away from all the other soft drinks.

• 1:04:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  And it became Coke Pepsi, they won.

• 1:04:19Rick Rubin?

  Did the parks change at all, or no?

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did a complete redo. And I'm a creative guy.

• 1:04:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  They didn't have a designer. They just outsourced it to people draw stuff. I hired a designer, his office was next to mine, and we said, we're going to turn these things back into theme parks. And by the way, when I do a ride, I'm not doing a roller coaster, I'm doing Batman the Ride.

• 1:04:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  I'm doing stuff that's all, you know, fantasy.

• 1:04:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  And so, we redid the parks and, and attendance went from about, it had been stuck at about 17 million for years and years and years. And we got it up to about 25 million by the time I, we sold the company.

• 1:04:52Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  And then, we sold it, and then that company sold it to a small theme park company that put the Six Flags brand and lots of other small parks. But, so it's nowhere near the same Six Flags that was when I was running it.

• 1:05:08Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the difference between a local anything, radio, versus when it becomes either syndicated or goes national. What's different?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's interesting. I think ultimately, everything is local, and the more local you can make it, the better. You know, with radio stations, I mean, what makes them so popular is it's very local. If you're listening to our-

• 1:05:28Rick Rubin?

  It's your station.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  It's your station. And we're talking about stuff in L.A. We're talking about stuff in New York. We're talking about stuff in Memphis. We're talking about stuff in Minneapolis. It's relevant to you. It feels like your next door neighbor, because we're talking about the same stuff your next door neighbor would be chatting with you if he was riding to work with you every day. And so, I think everything you can make local makes it so much better. And I think it's the the secret of it all. Technology has allowed us to do so much more localization. Because in the past, if we wanted a station to sound local, we had to hire people and put them in that market so that they would know what was going on in the markets. They could talk about it. Well, you know how good they were at finding out what was going on in the market? Not really good. They didn't know much. The internet wasn't around.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  When the internet came, you go, wow, I have perfect knowledge of everything going on in this town. But now, actually, I didn't. They don't need you to live in the town anymore because it used to cost us tons of money to broadcast from another town. Doesn't anymore. So, by the way, where do you want to live? Wherever you want to live, you can live. I just need you to be on the air in this town. And I need you to study this town of all the information so you are really relevant. And it has made our stations, smaller markets, so much better. Yeah. Our large markets, you know, we could already afford great talent and they were there. But occasionally, you have people who, you know, want to be in multiple places. Like, we got Ryan Seacrest is on 100 of our radio stations.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Charlamagne the God's on, you know, 100 radio stations. So, we're able to project and use these sort of really superstar talent in markets. And they're able to go in and do local breaks. So, they're doing stuff that's very relevant for the local. Sometimes they have a local person on their desk for that market that also does a lot of the local stuff as well. We're able to get high-value talent and make it very, very local. When did you go to Clear Channel? I went in 2010. When I left after AOL Time Warner, I was trying to retire before we did the Time Warner merger because I had always told myself that I was going to quit work by the time I was 50 if I made enough money.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  And when I went to AOL, I originally thought I'd made enough money because of Six Flags. And then I did Century 21 Real Estate briefly for a year. Made a lot of money off that one. And as part of Century 21, I went to AOL and said, I want to be your real estate section. Steve Case says, yes, yes, why don't you be on my board? I go, well, that might be fun. And then Steve, we know AOL was in a transition period. Losing a lot of money, stock market wasn't great. And Steve said, why don't you come down and help me? And originally run the AOL service, then became sort of the chief operating officer. We got rid of a couple of other businesses. But come down, help me run it. I've been on the board, stay on the board. So Steve and I were the two guys on the board.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  And I go, well, that sounds like fun. And I've done a year at Century 21, which is all I promised Henry Silverman to join the company. I would do. And that fixed it up and we'd taken the profit up 10x. That's pretty good. I did what I was supposed to do. And he blessings, okay, go, you know, go do it. And for once I didn't need money. So I said, just pay me whatever you want to pay me. And I don't need a contract. And just give me whatever stock you can give me. And it was the least thought out thing I've ever done. And obviously, you know, as things turn out, I made the most money there, made my a long shot. So it sort of was this interesting moment of the world was opening up and I had a front row seat.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  So when I decided to leave, I mean, we were just been on a tear. By the time I think 1999 comes around, we're the 10th most valuable company in America. Were at that time, a lot of money, 250 billion. It's a big company back then. And Steve had an idea that he wanted to always wanted to merge with Time Warner. And I thought there was zero chance Jerry would ever do that, having come from Time Warner. We had already been at Time Warner and now you're at AOL. And he wants to merge. I've been at Warner, then Time Warner. And now he wants to merge. When I go, I don't think so. I mean, you know, it's like, good, knock yourself out, have all the conversations you want. Yeah. He came back from China, he was on some trip, spent some time with Jerry and said, I think we merge. And I'm still very skeptical, thinking, well, there's no way.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  And I'm working on a deal to buy eBay from Meg Whitman. And we're working heavily and making great progress. And Steve goes, it's gonna happen, we're gonna, we're gonna do it. I go, really? And literally it's like the week he convinces me it's really gonna happen. Another one of these stories. And, and so we, that weekend, we get the boards together, they all approve it and. We do it, but I said I was gonna retire by then. I go, okay. Steve said, look, I need you to stick around for this. I go, okay, I'll stick around for this. And so it's exciting, too. And so Steve became the chairman, Levem was the CEO. Parsons and I were co-COOs and sort of split up into operating groups. So we began that and I kept thinking, I gotta have my moment to leave. Yeah. Cause I gotta, you know, I've worked since I was 15. Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  And everybody else has said, man, I was backpacked around Europe. I hadn't done any of that. I mean, a long vacation for me was, all I did was work. From 15. All I did was work and I was a little bitter. I was like a little mad. 2002, I finally say, Dick, I'm leaving. And I leave thinking I'm gonna do nothing. I'm a pilot and I love to fly. Yeah. And by then I have a pretty big airplane, so I go, I'm gonna see the world in my plane and we're just gonna do it. And I got two young kids then, addition to my older son. I'm just gonna load them up. We're gonna go, we're gonna go for six, seven weeks. We'd even go to Asia for six or seven weeks. I'd throw different kinds of clothes in the back. We'd live out of the plane. But after about six months, I'd actually done most of what I thought I wanted to do. And I go, now what?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  So I did some investing. I raised a small private equity fund and wasn't really working full time. But if I was working, I worked on that. And 2008 came along, 2009 with that market crash, which scared the hell out of me. I go, wait a minute, you can lose money in private equity? And I go, when I came out of it, we survived and were okay. I go, man, I'm never doing another fund. That's lose my money is one thing, but lose my friends' money is just untenable. So I decided I'd just do some investing myself. Rich Bressler was at TH Lee at the time. And he said, hey, look, CEO of Clear Channel stepping down. I know you don't wanna work again. You said you'd never be a CEO again, but would you just take a look at it? And I looked at it and go, wait a minute, you know what you guys have?

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  I didn't realize how big radio still was. I didn't realize these guys reached everybody in America with the radio station. They were 90%. I would not have guessed that. I still wouldn't guess it. Oh, by the way, more people listen to the radio today than did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It's unbelievable. It is just like, it is a part of people's lives, just a routine. It's like the power. Yeah. And so when I started looking at this, I go, man, you don't know what you've got. And he goes, well, that's sort of why I want you to look at it. And so I made an investment. And then they talked me into being the chairman of like the radio group and just I said, not full time, not help. Yeah. And then realized they needed a digital product for the service so that people could get the stations other places. And I realized very quickly I didn't know what they were doing.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  So I go, look, I came out, I know how to run this process and you know, we'll figure this out. And so I sort of got hands on and took over, said, we're going to build which being the iHeart radio app. And in the process, they go, you know, said you wouldn't be the CEO because you don't work too hard anymore. You're already working hard, why don't you be the CEO? And I go, you know what? Let me get this thing launched. And I'd had this whole plan that we're going to do this, launch it with what I called live a, you know, like a festival in Vegas for two days, just highlight iHeart and that's going to be it. Did you change the name of the company from Clear Channel to iHeart? Yeah. That was the game was I got there and then I said, look, let me get through it. We launched and I said, okay, I'll be the CEO, thinking I'll do it for a couple of years and here I am 15 years later. Yeah.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  How many stations does it have? We had about 850 stations. Is that similar to what it had when you bought in? And, and we are the number one podcast publisher by a mile. We have the number one digital radio app. Obviously our events, all of those tent poles are huge, whether it's Jingle Ball or Festival or the award show or the country festival or the Alter Ego Show are all in their own right, major events. So we've really expanded what the company is. We've really gotten into data and, you know, began to use that, built out the ad tech. You know, ironically, the advertising that works the best by far is broadcast radio advertising. Really? What all the advertisers want is all the digital stuff, which is ironic since the digital reaches so much less. Yeah.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, ad supported Spotify or ad supported Pandora, reach about 20% of America. We reach 90%. So no matter how good your message is. Only 20% are hearing it. And so what makes radio work so well is one, everybody takes us to work with them every day. They listen to us at work. They listen to us on the way home. They listen to us in the morning when they're getting dressed at home. And radio just clobbers it. But it's the hardest advertising to sell because all the agencies go, I want digital advertising. I'm set up my whole company to buy digital advertising. You're out of the mainstream here. It's harder for me to buy it. And I go, well, shouldn't you want the best stuff? The answer is no, you should want the stuff that's fit your process. So we re-engineered how you can sell broadcast radio. So it looks like digital.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  We have to get the data. We have to get the, you know, the same information available and the technology. So, you know, hands on keyboards can buy instead of phone calls and faxes. Yeah. When do you follow data and when do you go against data? Research is not policymaking. It just answers questions for you and then you have to make a gut decision. So the only difference between looking at data and no data is I have, something has conditioned my thinking, my gut a little bit. I still have to make a gut decision. Research never tells you what to do. And I think that's a misconception about, and I always look at research. I want to know everything I can know before I make a decision. And still going to be wrong a lot of time.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  We did a study two years ago with Malcolm Gladwell. It was looking at real America versus marketers. Cause my problem is marketers go, everybody listens. You don't know what you're talking about. So we did a study, just to highlight. And at that time, succession was the big show on TV for all of our friends. A hundred percent of marketers had heard of succession. Two thirds of real Americans had never heard of succession. Two thirds of Americans had never heard of an Aperol spritz. A third had never heard of a charcuterie board. The number one and two sports, participatory sports are not pickleball and golf. It's cornhole and bowling. And by the way, hunting and fishing's in the top five. And it's just people are so out of touch with what real America's looking at.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  And by the way, there are two things that real America really is important to them, that marketers are afraid of. The military and religion. Eighty percent of Americans still are of faith. Go to church.

• 1:16:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Maybe not all the time.

• 1:16:41Rick Rubin?

  Eighty percent.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Eighty percent.

• 1:16:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  But you know, if I, in a meeting, and I say, well, let's, let's show somebody in church, or let's get the pastor, what are you crazy? You can't touch that. That's so controversial. Uh, it actually turns out it's not real America. And we did the study, not to say to marketers, you're idiots, but to say, don't trust your instinct.

• 1:16:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Look at your data.

• 1:17:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Now make a gut decision. You know, math and magic. Look at the math. Now put the magic in. And you gotta do something creative with it. And it's usually not the obvious thing. The obvious thing is usually the worst thing to do. The most creative is sort of out of the blue.

• 1:17:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  But still is geared toward that.

• 1:17:17Rick Rubin?

  You said your dad was a minister.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what it's like growing up with a minister dad.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Essentially, my dad was, I say he's minister, and people conjure up these ideas of fire and brimstone. But he actually was really well educated from Mississippi. Went to graduate school at Emory in Atlanta, which is a very liberal school at the time. To divinity school, had a college degree. My mom had a college degree, which was, I think, my brother told me, two percent of households in Mississippi had two parents that were both college graduates, much less grad school. And my dad was a real thinker about stuff. Like, when I was a kid and everybody's misbehaving, my dad would say, look, I can't tell you what to do. You're gonna make your own decisions. So the only thing I'm gonna ask you to do is just listen to me before you make your decision. And then I trust you'll make the right decision.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  So, and when I was, later in life, when, you know, somebody's doing something bad, I say, what do you think of that, Dad? He said, I believe in the redemptive power of love. About forgiveness, love, and no anger, no hate. In my household, the dirty word was hate. We couldn't say hate. My mother would say, honey, we don't hate anybody. We don't hate. And if somebody were just a despicable human being, my mother would say, I wonder why they wanna be that way. So that was the household I grew up in. And, and my brother and I talk about how lucky we were to have that kind of household, where there was just enormous amount of unconditional love.

• 1:18:44Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Lot of support. And in the church was, for me, I'm not a regular churchgoer. But I'm, I would say I'm, I have certainly faith or spirituality. You know, when you grow up in the household, you hear your dad have too many conversations about so and so in the congregations wants it named after them, or they want that pew for them, or they gotta, you know, and just go, the politics. But what came through was really the power of service to others. I always loved the Hard Rock Cafe had that slogan. What was it? Love all, serve all? Yeah. And I go, you know, I like that. Love all, serve all. Yeah. It's like, why wouldn't I help people? Mo Austin was, I just loved Mo. Me too. And Mo was one of those guys that, I don't want to contrast him to Walter Yatnikoff.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Walter Yatnikoff, when something was going on, Walter would figure out how he had an angle to get you. Yes. When something was going that wasn't great, Mo would call you up and say, what can I do to help? Yeah. And you know who got the most benefit from that? Mo. Because, you know, when Walter tried to screw me or get something, you know, you just go, I'm not gonna get that guy anything or any power I don't have to. Mo, you go, I wanna do everything for Mo. Look at, Mo's always helping me. And he did favors for people every time he could do it, only because he could do the favor. Yep. Not because he expected anything in return. No. And I love people in business like that. And I think some of that probably came from my dad, my mom, and my childhood and where and how I grew up. Would you see your dad speak in church? Oh, yeah. What was that like? Tell me about that.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  He was the preacher, but you know, it was funny, in those days, I guess still now, the sermon was always trying to be relevant. Yeah. Like what you know, like What's going on in the news? Woody Allen movie or Yeah. You know, the TV show or something to make these values relevant. Cause what is the sermon about is how do we get through life? You know, how do we cope? What should we do? What's the right thing? How many people would be in church? In those days, it was a lot of people, but maybe 250. That's a lot. Yeah. Would you be proud of them when you'd see them? Yeah, I don't think you'd do, you know, with kids and parents, you don't sort of have that emotion. Later in life, I'm very proud of it. Yeah. But at the time, that's just what my dad did. I see. And, and I was sort of the kid, preacher's kids came in two colors.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  One that looked like preachers and the other that looked like, ooh, who's that kid? My brother was the first, I was the latter. Yeah. And probably spent too much time trying to prove I wasn't a preacher. But my, my dad knew what was going on. It's interesting, one, my oldest son was having some teenage problems and I must've been bitching about it. And my dad says, you know what? There's nothing he does that's so bad that's worth losing your line of communication over. And I thought, my dad knew a lot more about what I was doing than he let on. Wow. He just, he just revealed the secret. That's deep wisdom. And I repeated that to other people. Yeah. Kids going through it and go, nothing is worth losing your line of communication over. Don't make too big a deal about it. Wow. They'll get through it. That's beautiful. Do you pray?

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  You know, I think I pray, pray in a different way. I'm not sure who I'm praying to or what, but I feel absolutely connected to other consciousness. And I think it's ridiculous to think that there's not something else going on here. I've had sort of an interesting relationship with my mom, who, my mother always wanted a girl in the family. There hasn't been a girl since the 1890s in the Pittman family. And my daughter was finally born, Lucy Pittman, my mother was alive. This was like the greatest thing in the world, the daughter. I talked to my mother on a Sunday night and I was down in Mexico. I said, I'll see you in a couple of weeks and we'll fly through Jackson, see you.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  The nanny comes down, is up with the kids and she comes down and says, well, Lucy woke up in the night and was screaming. And screaming for me, tell me, tell me, come. And she said, I walked toward the room and there was a light on the room. I had to leave a light on the room. And I said, Lucy, and the light went off. And she said, I went in the room and I go, Lucy, what's going on? She said, there's somebody in the room. And she says, she looks around, goes, there's no one in the room. It's okay. And she said, I talked to her to go back to sleep and she finally went back to sleep. An hour later, my brother called and said, mom died in her sleep last night. And I go, wow, this is on her way out. She comes to see Lucy. That is wild. So all of us in the family talked to my mom.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  And my daughter, who, you know, barely remembers my mother, prayed to her. It's like, help me. Yes. Beautiful story. It's amazing, the mystical experiences that we can have if we've, if we're open and pay attention. Yeah. There really is magic in the world. I'm completely convinced that you, you know, we're all connected there. And, you know, I sat with my dad when he died, held his hand, my brother and I, and sort of talked him through it. He was sort of struggling. We go, Dad, it's okay. You know, you're great, you can go. Yeah. And he left. Yeah. But he was still breathing. The body was still breathing, the heart was still. And my brother and I both looked at each other, and he just left. Yeah. He left this body. And the body goes on for a little while, and then a couple hours later, it stops breathing,

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  and the heart stops. And my mother, I talked to her about stuff. And I think, if I'm making this up, am I just like, am I putting words up there and just? And I go, why would I be thinking that? I mean, where did it come from? And I, I do think we have that capability to connect. One of the awful things we do is we try and talk people out of intuition of just that feeling. And when I was a young kid, 20, 21, I went with my girlfriend to this thing called Silver Mind Control. And they, what they basically teach you is go down the level, like you're meditating. Go in a room, put a screen up, and put up stuff you need answers to, or that you want to visualize to see happen.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  And at the last day, you go around the room, there were like 300 people in a ballroom somewhere, I don't know any of them. And they said, go to 10 different people, and they tell you someone's name, and you tell them what's wrong with the person. And I hit 10 on 10. Wow. But when I hit them, I would say, I don't, I'm not sure anything, oh, cancer. And they go, right. And what they're teaching you is, why did you say cancer instead of diabetes? That's actually an answer. You don't trust it. Because it didn't like, it's like, but it just came to you. Yeah. Just say what comes to you. Yeah, it's subtle, but it's in us. And by the way, all of us who've done creative work. Yes. It is like, the stuff that just comes to you is usually the right answer. Yeah. You know, this whole thing of, don't overthink it. And usually, it's not our idea.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Right. Do you know what I'm saying? It's not like you can't really take credit for it, even though it does come through you. Right, right. It's just, it's just there. It's just there. It's just there. And you just see it that way. And by the way, and the stuff I. Have done that's really great, the stuff like a meteor hit me in the head. Yeah. It wasn't planned out, it wasn't worked out, it's just like, it's the epiphanies. And I, you know, at work, I preach to people that what really makes the difference in our business are the two or three epiphanies you have, not the day-to-day process. That just sort of keeps the train running. What makes the difference are those epiphanies where you go, I got it. Wait a minute. And we all have times of the day we do that. Mine is, I wake up in the night with them sometimes, and I do it and I take a nice hot shower in the morning,

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  sort of meditative shower, and the answers come to me. If I just got a block, I can't write something, suddenly I got it all in my head. In the shower? I just, I rush out and write down a speech, a promo, a spot, or something that I've been struggling with. It just comes to me. And if you don't write it down, it might go away. It goes away. And, and, and it's interesting, because I've, you know, talked to people about this creative process. That, you know, it seems, the one I believe works, is when we load ourselves up with all the facts, and then forget about it. Yeah. And then one day, in the most unexpected places, the answer comes to you. Yeah, you're not thinking about it. At all, it just flows. Yes. It's, I, I got it. Now, somebody like David Eagleman, who's the great neuroscientist from Stanford, will say,

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  your subconscious has been working on it. He calls the conscious mind the broom closet in the mansion of your mind. That most of us is the unconscious, the subconscious. And he said, the subconscious is working all the time. And when it's got something ready, it just hands it to you. I don't know whether it's that, or whether it's the cosmic, we're all tied together. Or maybe a little of both, right. All good. And he uses this example, he said, you know, you are sitting in a busy restaurant, and here's somebody say your name. Well, they said my name. And he goes, how did you hear that? He said, actually, your subconscious has been listening to everything that hit your eardrums. It only makes you aware of something when it's relevant. Yeah. And it explains a lot.

• 1:27:25Rick Rubin?

  You've talked about making decisions very quickly and moving things fast. Are there times not to move fast?

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you have a crisis, you gotta take a beat. Because your first reaction is gonna be hysteria.

• 1:27:39Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  And I just think, yeah, you take a beat. You just try and detach yourself a little bit and do it, but...

• 1:27:46Rick Rubin?

  It's almost the opposite of what most people would do. Most people would take time ruminating over something where there's no time pressure associated. And then in an emergency, they deal in the moment.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in an emergency, you say, okay, when do I have to have a decision? Well, we gotta make an announcement by tomorrow morning. Okay, then we have until tomorrow morning.

• 1:28:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Let's, let's think about it.

• 1:28:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Let's, let's sort of go through it and then ideate a bit.

• 1:28:13Rick Rubin?

  Are all businesses the same?

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  On one level, yes. You know, and if you love business, which I love, I can be as excited about Six Flags theme parks and Century 21 real estate as I am about America Online or iHeart. Businesses is an ultimate game. And with my kids, you know, you try and explain to them, why am I working so hard? And I think the best answer I ever had, someone told me this, I forgot who told me, but it was right, said, don't tell your kids that you don't like work and you're sorry you're working, because then they go, well, why the hell are you leaving me if you don't like it? Tell them you love it. And so I tell my kids, you know, work for me is like a video game for you. I can't wait to get up in the morning and start playing. At the end of the day, I don't want to put it away. And I just love thinking about stuff.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  I love the sort of the chess pieces that move around, like, oh, we can move this over here, this over here. By the time I go to bed, I'm working on this stuff and thinking about it, think about it in the night and wake up sometimes, have to make a couple of notes. But it just occupies my mind and keeps me stimulated. So on that level, all businesses, I could get excited about whether it's a business doing, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year or a business doing, you know, 40 billion in revenue.

• 1:29:25Rick Rubin?

  It's just problem solving, really?

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  I think it's problem solving, it's also the creative. It's the math and the magic. And I'm pretty good at math. I've got sort of a math mind. And I get really excited about the magic part and I just love other people who have the magic part. I love the debates. Father, I love the math people too. I do long debates with research people all the time. Well, I don't think it's showing us that. I think it's showing us this. What are we, how are we going to interpret that? And it's that, again, that camaraderie that comes from a process. And I think, look, you talked earlier about community. You threw it in a couple of times. I think it's about, we love our community. And business is my community. And the company I'm with is my community, my people, my team. And there's nothing I can't do for them. It's just like we're in it together.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  How much of your particular skill set do you think you learned in school? None. None? I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but like I went to probably the worst public school in America, Brookhaven, Mississippi. There were a couple of teachers who were really great. Sadly, in that era, if you were a woman, you didn't have many opportunities for jobs. So there were some brilliant women that were teachers that today would be investment bankers or lawyers or doctors or physicists or scientists or something. But back then, they were teachers. And I got a lot from them. Sort of, I was a good learner. I had really good grades and I did really well on the standardized test. But I was always just looking for something that interested me.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  I think some of my success is I'm not well-educated, smart but not well-educated. Yeah. So I never learned the wrong way to do stuff. Yeah. When I was 30, I went back to when they were, when I was at MTV and they were preparing me to be the CEO because I was too young. They were apoplectic that I wasn't a college graduate. I'd only done three years of college, never done my senior year. And so they put me in this advanced management program at the Harvard Business School, 13 weeks. And it's people who are sort of going to CEO next, go do the, this and... So I went and my first observation was, ah, now I know why people are asking me the wrong questions about my business. Yeah. They learned it in school. Yeah. That wasn't coming out of their head. They were just repeating something. Yeah.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  And I think not knowing allowed me to see things differently than others. I mean, we did MTV. I didn't know I was doing anything different. I was just doing what seemed like the logical thing to do. Mm hmm. And so other people maybe say, oh, my God, we're being disruptive. I did a lot of disruptive things in my career. I never once thought I was being disruptive. Yeah. I thought I was just. Yeah, you didn't know what you were disrupting. I was just like doing what seems to be, oh, we need this. Here's the way you do it. Yeah. I didn't know I was disrupting it. I'm sorry, guys. I didn't know I was disrupting it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do technical innovations change existing business models? You know what? I think they open up opportunities. In my business career, I think there's only one rule that I always follow. The consumer wants convenience.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  And if I can find something they like doing and make it easier, I'll have a winning product. So I'm constantly in search of what makes this easier. And when people say, here's a new business, and they go, well, you got to go two more steps. I go, that's not going to work. Yeah. And they go, oh, and you just push a button and it all happens. I go, that's going to work. So I have these sort of prisms I put it through, but put it through because I understand the consumer. And what I can't do a B to B business. I wouldn't know what to do. But I know consumer business as well because the consumer is the same consumer. And they've always been your whole life. Whether I'm selling them a house at Century 21 or trying to get them to watch MTV or trying to get them to listen to whatever. It's the same consumer. Yeah. And so they behave in a very reliable way

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  if you really study them and listen to them. What's the status of AM radio today? Surprising. It's still there. It's still doing well. You know, it doesn't have the audience it once had. But what's interesting is in time of need, people go to the AM. There's a wildfire here. You know where they're going to KFI. KFI and K and X out here. And KFI is ours. And by the way, we are 24 hours. All the feeds during the fires came from KFI. People know AM is there and it's their safety. When a hurricane comes along, when a tornado comes, when something, this terrible disaster comes, they go to the AM station. AM stations also tend to be pretty battle hardened. So when this storm hit the Carolinas, remember that?

• 1:33:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  There were places where there was no cell service. There was no TV. There was nothing except a couple of AM stations. They got every bit of their information from the AM stations. You know, when things are really terrible, they may not have an AM radio in the house. They go into their car, which has a battery. They turn it on and listen to AM radio. And they get the, and we know our job, by the way, is, our job is to serve the community. Normally that's keep them entertained, keep them, you know, companionship. In a disaster, it changes. It is like, stop what you're doing. Do nothing but give these people critical information they need. You know, if there's a flood in Houston, you'll hear people on the air calling in, I'm on top of my house. Where are you? We're going to send a boat for you.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  We're connecting boats to people and getting people out of these problems. And that to me, you know, you always want a bigger sense of purpose in what you do in life. And I think for all of us who work in radio, the bigger sense of purpose is we know we serve the community. And those AM stations are an integral part of serving that community. Maybe we don't get as big an audience. Maybe we don't make as much money on them. But when you gotta serve the community, give me my AM stations because they allow me to do something that the FM's can't do.

• 1:35:06Rick Rubin?

  Could you imagine any additional use for AM, considering how robust it is and how it covers the country? That's not happening now?

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  You know, it doesn't have a lot of spectrum with it. So you say, hey, I could repurpose it. You can't do a lot with that amount of spectrum. And so I dial up modem kind of spectrum. But it is, I think the best thing we can do is, you sort of say, what's the service of radio? Keep people company. What higher purpose is to keep people company? I mean, you and I have plenty of friends who probably make friends easily. A lot of people in America don't, and they're lonely. Was it 50% of Americans talk about having bouts of loneliness? And young kids, I just saw some study that was like, there was four statements which are predictor of depression. They were hanging in about the 20% range until about 2015, and then they took off up to about 50%.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  And you go, these people need somebody to hang out with. They need somebody who's not judgmental. They need somebody who's just, sounds friendly and nice, and gives them the information they're looking for and sounds interested in them. Yeah. And I just think, you know, when you sort of think about higher purpose, I go back to my dad as the minister. What higher purpose than just to put your arm around somebody and say, "It's gonna be okay." Yeah. Give you a hug. How has social media impacted the radio business? It's expanded it. Because before social media, Elvis Duran, Ryan Seacrest, Charlamagne the God, they would talk about things on the radio, but would have no idea whether the listener was responding unless they happened to call the request line. And you only had so many lines, and they're probably not very scientific.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  Today, if you watch them, they're all watching social as the show's going on. Ryan probably is the master of this. What's catching on? And if it's catching on, is it catching on the way or is it going left or right? And they can now move. And so these shows stay extraordinarily relevant to people in real time. And what else is real time out there? Nothing has this audience. I mean, we, we reach more people in the month than Facebook does. We reach more people in a month than Google does. And so when you've got this kind of reach, it's like, how do you stay relevant? And social allows us to stay in tune with that audience every minute. Tell me about your media consumption habits. I probably live on social too much. I listen to radio a lot.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Probably if I'm on TV, I'm just watching news. And then I'll watch the streaming services. My partner is in the movie and TV business, so she's always got something we should see. So she sort of keeps me relevant and watching interesting stuff. And I read every newspaper online. I read probably about six of them in the morning and check them hourly or through the day. I'm sort of a news junkie. Are you as in love with flying as you've ever been? I have been, but I've just stopped flying. I've gotten to the age where the insurance company basically says, you know, Mr. Pittman will insure you, but not with the liability limits you've had. And I go, I can't fly. And the truth is probably my reflexes are not what they were.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  I used to ride motorcycles a lot in my early 60s. I go, my reflexes aren't quite as good, so I'm going to give up motorcycles. And so now I'm riding the back, first time after 50 years. Yeah. And I don't go to the cockpit. How's it feel? It feels a little weird, but in some ways, this is probably a statement about aging. Is I, as a young guy, I used to love to learn to fly a new plane. I used to love to go to flight school every year. And I used to love all that stuff. And as I got older, it was a chore to go like, ah, I gotta go to school again. I gotta go again this year. And so, and sometimes when there's really a particularly rough night and the weather's bad and I know what the guys are going through up there, I go, huh, it's sort of nice being back here. Yeah. I'm not sweating. Yeah. They're sweating.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I've flown with those guys and I've flown the simulator with them, you know, and training with them in the past. So I know what they're going through and we know each other. So, you know, I have an appreciation of what goes on. But I, I still love airplanes and I flew helicopters and airplanes and just sort of stopped both. You know, if I weren't working, I would probably do the extra time to go, okay, let me go work with the insurance company and try and compensate them and do. But I go, eh, you know, 50 years, that's good.

• 1:39:25Rick Rubin?

  How did the technology of planes change over your life?

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Look, when I started, I flew very small airplanes and piston engines and, you know, those got a little more sophisticated, but at a certain point, I could afford to fly a turboprop and then did that and then I finally afford to fly.

• 1:39:40Rick Rubin?

  What's different about a turboprop?

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  A turboprop's got a jet engine spinning a propeller.

• 1:39:44Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  And a turbine. And then, you know, when you go to jets, you've got a turbine that, you know, you don't have the propeller on it, although you got a turbo fan, which is a hidden way propeller. Yeah, so that changed and we learned a lot more about sort of the mechanics of it and that was great. But what really has changed is the avionics, the navigation, the radios, et cetera. And if you think about what changes on an airplane and makes an airplane dated, it's usually the avionics. And on my plane, I've had the one I have now for 10 or 12 years, I have ripped out twice the avionics and put in all this stuff because it's just.

• 1:40:23Rick Rubin?

  It's all computerized, I imagine.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  And the technology's just changed so much.

• 1:40:26Rick Rubin?

  It's so much better.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  You go, okay, we need that. But it's not the engines or the wings or that stuff don't change that much.

• 1:40:33Rick Rubin?

  What do you attribute the interest in country music in our culture lately?

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  You know, I think country music has always been an interest in country music and it sort of goes up and down and it goes in cycles. You know, remember Urban Cowboy and, you know, that moment, oh, that's Rhinestone Cowboy. I mean, there are moments when it comes along. And I did this country music station back in 1974 in Chicago, knew nothing about country. And it used to be Howdy Partner. And what was different about our station was I made it sound like it was Top 40. And I hired a lot of old Top 40 disc jockeys from the Top 40 station in town, WLS. And we did giveaways, we sounded cosmopolitan, except we were playing country music. Now, people in country thought I was the devil because I was like changing it, but we didn't play to type. We just played like it's we're

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  normal people playing country music.

• 1:41:24Rick Rubin?

  It's music.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  And I think we're seeing the same thing here. And I think, you know, the more people who sort of touch country, it helps.

• 1:41:31Rick Rubin?

  There was a story a couple of months ago about the MTV News library being erased. Did you hear that story?

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Rick Rubin?

  Why would?

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Why would you erase anything?

• 1:41:40Rick Rubin?

  Why would you erase a library that you own? What's happening?

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  I don't know. It is, it's.

• 1:41:46Rick Rubin?

  Is there any answer you can come up with why it could possibly happen?

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Well, because somebody says, oh, you know how much money it costs us to store that stuff? And we have to have an archivist and we get rid of that job. It's the only possible reason I can think of. I once did a show called The Morton Downey Jr. Show.

• 1:41:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  And when we finished the show.

• 1:42:02Rick Rubin?

  It was a great show, by the way.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  He broke all the.

• 1:42:05Rick Rubin?

  It was a great show.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  He was a crazy guy. In the end, it was still a show where the producer cancels their own show. But it was, uh, he did so many breakthroughs in that show, but we finished with it. And then we've got all these tapes and we say, what are we going to do with them? And people say, well, no, but throw them away. And I go, we can't throw it. To this day, I pay Iron Mountain to store those tapes. They're probably sawdust by now or dust, the dust, but I can't bring myself to be the one to say, I'm going to erase anything that's ever existed.

• 1:42:35Rick Rubin?

  I'm glad you're not erasing them.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  It is crazy, huh?

• 1:42:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's like all those Tonight Show shows that were erased way back then. That was like, why?

• 1:42:43Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  How much money could you possibly be saving? And by the way, if you look at the history, every time you have something, you always make money on it in the future. There's another window, there's another use.

• 1:42:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's unbelievable.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:42:57Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the podcast, tell me about math and magic.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  When we first started getting into podcasting and began to be a pretty major publisher, I go, you know, I'd like to do one, but just for like marketers, because I talk to advertisers all the time. And I do a podcast, not for the general public, but for them. And I want to start off with people I know pretty well, because I know a lot of stories about them, all this stuff. But what I'm trying to drag out of them are those lessons that you could use insights. And so it's fun to do and I, uh, I really surprisingly enjoyed it, although I get lazy. And we'll go, ah, this maybe I'm going to be vacation time six months before I do another season. We do great research and the people help, but I do, I write the whole thing and I, and the hardest thing is to go. What's an angle I can talk about on this person that others don't know?

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  Or what do I know about this person? Or what do I see here? And you know, once I've got that, you know, writing the questions at all gets pretty easy. But it's trying to get that construct right. But I love it and it's a great way for me to stay current. And you know, even though I know people, even old friends, I do the research on them. I go, I didn't know that. But it's also, you know, it's a great way for me with friends to bring up stories to about, you know, what contributions like Fred Seibert to MTV, you know? Fred's the guy that did the on air look and you know, it's great to sort of give him the kudos and to put it down in an archive that, you know, he did it. So many people want to tell the story of things I've done who weren't even in the room. I don't even know them. How could they possibly know? Yeah. And so it's interesting.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  I mean, the people did these documentaries on MTV and I go, who are they talking to? And actually I did a math at magic. I've interviewed all the people who founded MTV with me and I edited together the real story of MTV. Great. And just took the pieces and just go, let's just tell the story because we were all in the room. Yeah. And it's the only way you'll ever really know. Yeah. It's an archive. I think there's a value in how, I mean, some of the podcasts I love doing for people is I want them to have a record of what they did. Yes. And so what I'm trying to do in 45 minutes is give the story of who this person is. And it's like Walter Isaacson, Walter, and when I sent Walter from time down to be the CEO of CNN.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  And when we had nine 11 happened and all the news was about nine 11, you couldn't get any other news. So Walter had this idea to put the scroll at the bottom that every news channel does today. He did it so he could put the other news there, even though they were covering nine That's when it started. And that was Walter who did that. Wow. And no one had ever given Walter the credit for it. So my podcast is great. Say, okay, Walter, you know, we're putting it on the record. You know, you're the guy that did that.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

• 1:46:24Speaker 03

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin? Counter-culture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamic? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin.

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.