Tom Freston

Tom Freston is a media executive, investor, and the cofounder of MTV Networks. His route to television began after an early entrepreneurial venture sourcing and exporting apparel in South Asia, before he joined the team that made MTV a defining global youth brand and grew the company’s roster to include Nickelodeon, VH1, Comedy Central, and CMT. He later served as CEO of Viacom, overseeing major entertainment businesses including Paramount Pictures and Simon & Schuster. His new memoir, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, chronicles his unconventional journey through business, media, music, and global travel. Freston is now a principal of Firefly3, a media-and-entertainment investment and advisory firm, and board chair of The ONE Campaign.

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

• 0:24Speaker 00

  When I was in college, this guy told me, you know, you'll go to Lake George and work there for the summer. Don't go home, stay in a resort town. I was a bellhop first, and it was like a bellhop where all these gamblers from the Saratoga Track would stay. They were big tippers. But I met these guys who came from Aspen. They would be in Aspen in the winter, and they were what they called on the circuit. They would work in resort towns. They were bartenders, or they became weed smugglers, or they became just free spirits. I learned from these guys and watching them that they didn't have a career path. Their career path was not to have a path at all. To improvise your life, experience would count more than anything

• 1:09Speaker 00

  else. And I learned more there probably than anything I did in college, and I decided it would be a lot more interesting to live my life sort of on the side of the road than going down the middle and take some years off and trying to mass experiences. At the same time, I was consumed with the Beat literature. So that was all about the journey is the destination kind of stuff.

• 1:32Rick Rubin?

  On the road.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  And I was on the road, and I went on the road. I mean, when I got out of, I went to graduate school to beat the draft, because I was an early baby boomer. I was born on November 22nd. I turned 18 the day of the Kennedy assassination.

• 1:47Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  That was like the day people thought the 60s started. So I was kind of going into adulthood then.

• 1:53Rick Rubin?

  What do you remember about that moment?

• 1:55Speaker 00

  I was a freshman in college. I remember coming out of this class, like around 1:30 or something. I was in Vermont, and you hear the news, and you were just like, what? You know, we hadn't had assassinations before.

• 2:08Rick Rubin?

  Did it seem impossible?

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Seemed impossible. And then you don't want to go watch the television. Well, the only television was in a four-story dormitory. There's one black and white TV. So that's where you spent the next three days watching this whole thing unfold. But people would say that that's when the 60s began. The whole country went into this profound depression, which was sort of awoken from with the arrival of the Beatles the following February.

• 2:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Which was a national salvation. Wow, people are happy. Things could be good again. And they brought the country kind of out of this sort of depressive state. And then we were off into the 60s. I decided early on I would want to like not have a mainstream life. I wanted to have a life of adventure and experience. And largely, that's what I've been able to do, doing different things.

• 2:58Rick Rubin?

  It's amazing. Do you think the guys who lived that life, were they all inspired by the Beatniks?

• 3:05Speaker 00

  No, I don't think so. They were, they were inspired, first of all, they were all kind of ski freaks. So they loved to ski. So they loved in Aspen. And Aspen in that era was, because I would, when I got out of school, I would work there. I remember I was a dishwasher, and I had all these menial jobs when I got out of graduate school. But they, they weren't inspired some, they weren't like readers.

• 3:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  They were like doers. They were chasing girls, having fun.

• 3:34Rick Rubin?

  So they would be like ski bums, which later became surf bums.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Ski bums, surf bums, beach bums. They were bums.

• 3:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  But then, you know, they were, they were.

• 3:43Rick Rubin?

  But they were after something.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. They were after, and they'd like to make money without having to work in a straight job. In those days, having a straight job was sort of, to this crowd, that was like arsenic, man. That was the last thing you want to do is give your life up, but work for somebody else on some conveyor belt.

• 3:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Life seems a lot more interesting not doing that. So, and then I moved to New York City in 1967. So I was sort of in the cradle of the birth of the counterculture in a way. So.

• 4:12Rick Rubin?

  Describe New York City. You arrive in 67. What do you see?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  I see dog shit all over the sidewalks. That was the first thing that struck me, because we didn't have that pickup law yet. And I just used to, God, there's a fucking thousands of dog shitting on the sidewalk. Every day, nobody's picking it up. But it was cheap. It was like such a rush, you know? It was like, I felt like I was at the crucible of all these things that were happening. I was living in Greenwich Village. Everything was affordable. I mean, I had an apartment. I found an apartment for $90 with two bedrooms.

• 4:43Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Which was a rent-controlled thing.

• 4:46Rick Rubin?

  Was the city fairly rundown then?

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It was rundown, and it was dirty. But it wasn't really like hitting sort of the crack epidemic state that it got into in the 80s. It was just rundown, dirty, inexpensive. And, but there was what was going on. There was a lot of political action because of the anti-war movement, civil rights movement. You know, you're sort of on the, the sexual revolution was kicking into gear, which was a wonderful thing. And I had just spent four years in Vermont. So this, to me, was like an emancipation at the greatest level. Yeah.

• 5:22Rick Rubin?

  And would you go out at night and see music?

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, at the time, on St. Mark's Place, there was this place called the Dom, that Andy Warhol used to run with someone else, but the Velvet Underground would be like the house band. Drinks were 50 cents. And they would project those Warhol movies on the velvets. And other bands went through there too. But then upstairs was the Electric Circus, which I'm sure you know about. But in the early days, the Electric Circus was kind of place you wanted to take acid, get high. And you know, I remember going in there the first time. I went into the Chambers Brothers were on stage, you know? And I was like, wow, this is like after two weeks in New York City.

• 6:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  There was that whole uptown, straight world that was going on. But in the village, it was, people could come and live there. I worry about the city about that now. It's just so expensive. You know, you see what we got, the new mayor and all. But I mean, apartments are five, $6,000. I don't know how a young person could come and be in New York, and particularly if you want to be an artist, or have a kind of artful life, or have to be, if you're off the conveyor belt, it's tough, you know?

• 6:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  And even the places that have been in Brooklyn, everything, they've all been gentrified. So.

• 6:33Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever go uptown when you lived downtown?

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got an apartment on East 58th Street. And that was, I would just go there, and then I would go right back downtown. So I was mostly all downtown. But I had, I lived in Lower Fifth Avenue. But I was mostly, and the school that I went to, because I went to business school, I figured I had to get out of the draft. I was going to get sent into the army. When I got out of college, they said, hey, man, you're gonna, you're gonna be in Vietnam by August. So you better do something about your draft status. And so why don't you go to graduate school? And I said, well, you know, I don't want to be a doctor. I don't want to be a lawyer. I mean, I don't know. They said, well, why don't you go to business school? I didn't even know there was such a thing. This is how out of it I was. They said, oh, yeah, you can go to two-year business school. So I

• 7:15Speaker 00

  applied to NYU. I got in, and the business school itself was down on Wall Street. Then it was down by the American Stock Exchange, behind which they were digging a hole for the World Trade Center. So I was mostly downtown, yeah.

• 7:30Rick Rubin?

  And how much of what you learned in business school had any relevance to your life in business going forward?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it did. You know, because, one, I got, I kind of always coasted through school. When I got to business school, I had this professor, and it was, the standards were higher, the students were smarter, and if I failed, I knew I'd get drafted. So I had this professor, Peter Drucker. He was sort of a management guru of the time. He was the guy, and he had all these classes on innovation and change. And he would talk about the central things in a business are really kind of artistic thing, marketing and innovation. Innovation was finding things that existed already and putting them together in a new way. It wasn't like an invention. That was like a spark plug going off in my head. And then I tried to figure out, well, we have this new demographic, as marketers

• 8:20Speaker 00

  would say, this new youth culture coming in. I was curious as to who would be the people who would find the cracks in the system and create businesses that could deal with this and do business with this up-and-coming new anti-war, the whole laundry list.

• 8:38Rick Rubin?

  People like you.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. How is this going to work? Because these would be fun things.

• 8:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  But anyway, so I learned a lot about him, about spotting innovation. And you know, what also thing it gave me was confidence. I had confidence that I had this diploma. I knew how business worked. I could read a P and L. So I didn't feel like some idiot. So life's largely about going around and building up your confidence in several ways. So it worked for that.

• 9:07Rick Rubin?

  What was your first job after that?

• 9:09Speaker 00

  I got out of there, and I, I became a dishwasher in Aspen, Colorado.

• 9:15Rick Rubin?

  Back to your.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I went back.

• 9:17Rick Rubin?

  Ski bum life.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Because I, then I also went in, I got out of the military the same time I got out of graduate school. I didn't look for a job. I didn't want to get a straight job. That was an anathema. So I thought I was going to go on the road. I'd only been in school my whole life. So I went to Aspen. I had some friends out there. I got hired as a dishwasher, worked my way up the ladder to waiter. And then I split and went to San Francisco, went to Mexico, ended up in the Virgin Islands. I was a bartender there. That was wonderful. I had a great time.

• 9:45Rick Rubin?

  What drew you to the Virgin Islands?

• 9:47Speaker 00

  I could work there, and it was warm. It was winter. I'd gone to Mexico, thinking I could get a job like naively. So I said, where's a really warm place where I could? And St. Thomas sounded pretty good. So I got a job there as a bartender in a really nice place, and met a whole other crew of crazy people who were there at the time. And then I, the other guy, and then I got fired. The only, I got fired twice in my life. The guy wanted to give my job to his buddy who'd just got out of prison. So I ended up going to Martha's Vineyard. Again, this was like being in places, all of these places, this is before mass tourism. So it was before the vineyard was ruined. Not ruined,

• 10:32Speaker 00

  but you know, before they had a jet port, and before Aspen got commercialized and became like a billionaire's playground. And the Virgin Islands, this is before cruise ships and all of that. So you could still buy rum for a dollar a bottle. And there was a lot of like interesting characters around. So I did a year of that. I got a job. Then I went back to New York. I got a job at an ad agency.

• 10:56Rick Rubin?

  That was that experience?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  It was interesting, but I didn't do it that long. I worked on G.I. Joe. This is at the height of the Vietnam War. Now I'm peddling war toys.

• 11:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  But we had to change G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe had come to America the same month as The Beatles. He was a bestselling war toy in history, but they, we had to change him, reposition Joe as a action man, because the war thing wasn't working out. So we gave him a discharge and he became looking for mummies' tombs and going to outer space.

• 11:22Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  And then I got assigned, I did work for Scope mouthwash, which just drove me crazy, because I would say mouthwash doesn't really work. But then they wanted to assign me to Charmin toilet paper. This is what really changed my life, Rick. They said, "We like you. We think you're on a fast track. We think you'd be great on the Charmin toilet paper count." They had this guy, Mr. Whipple.

• 11:43Rick Rubin?

  I remember.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  I just said, "Man," I was already alienated, and I was like so susceptible to getting back on the road and traveling. You know, Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album had just come out. I just saw a movie walkabout everywhere I looked. It was about hitting the road and taking off. And then they gave me all this research, one weekend to read, and it divided America into three categories of toilet paper users: rollers, folders, and crumblers. And with all this cycle and analytic stuff about the cycle, it was crazy. And of course, we're going after the crumblers, because they use the most.

• 12:20Rick Rubin?

  [laughing]

• 12:22Speaker 00

  They use the most and they go more often. And those people live in cities. I'm thinking, my neighbors in this building are probably all crumblers. You know, they don't have time to sit around a can all day. So my old girlfriend called me from Paris and she said, "Oh, man, you can't do that. You can't do that. Come with me. I'm gonna go across the Sahara Desert. I'm gonna, we're gonna hitchhike, maybe make it to the Canary Islands." I was on a plane like a week later.

• 12:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  And that was it. We did that. Eye-opener. We spent a couple of months together, went down through the Sahara. I slept on some boat. We ended up in the Canary. She took off. And then for the next ten months, I hitchhiked all over the world by myself.

• 12:58Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  It was incredible, life-changing year. I mean, I didn't make a phone call in one year. There was no email, obviously. There was nothing. I would send aerograms home. And then when I was in Greece on a beach, a girl told me, you know, "You should go to India." I saw her in this cafe, and she was selling all these beautiful dresses and things and that she would make. She lived in Kathmandu. She lived there for four years. She was from New York, Long Island. And she had quit being a regular designer. And she said, "India's the greatest show on earth. I'm my own vertically integrated enterprise. Look what I do. I design, make this stuff. I take it overland. I sell it in Italy and in Greece."

• 13:40Speaker 00

  I filed that away, and I decided I'd go to India. I went there, and I went overland, hitchhiked across Asia, through Iran and Turkey. And then when I went into Afghanistan, that was just like it. You know, I've been involved in Afghanistan now for 50 years. I went to Afghanistan, India, but this was the 70s. These countries, Afghanistan, people think of some warring nation now. But then it was, it was like there was no cars, there was no signs, there was no advertising. It was exotic. It was beautiful. The people were friendly. They were optimistic about their future. And I decided I would try and start a business there. And then I went to India, which even though it had half the

• 14:23Speaker 00

  population of today, it still had 500, 600 million people. It was like a madhouse. I did all that, and I met some people I thought could be partners.

• 14:34Rick Rubin?

  How'd you communicate with people, with the different languages?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Well, in India is not a problem generally, because India, the English left them the English language. So many, anyone you're kind of dealing with could speak some level of English. Afghanistan is a little more difficult. Most people that you would deal with would speak a form of Dari, which is dialect of Parsi. But you know, you could pick up a couple thousand words rather quickly, so you could deal. But people I would deal with also spoke English.

• 14:59Rick Rubin?

  Hmm.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  So I found partners, and I decided, I got a partner in the States, and we set up and started a company. The idea would be, let's, "I knew nothing about this." But I said, "I wanted to live here. I want to get a house in India. This is where I want to live." And I did this for eight years. Then we made a country.

• 15:15Rick Rubin?

  You lived in India for eight years?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  In Afghanistan, yeah. We started a company, and we became very successful out of the box. And we were always in vogue in Mademoiselle. I hired a designer.

• 15:24Rick Rubin?

  It was a fashion?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, we just make high-fashion clothes for stores like Bloomingdale's or Bendel's. And it wasn't like the lower-market, lower-margin stuff. But I hired a good designer. We set up a showroom in Manhattan. We just did it as we went along. And you know, I was like a millionaire in my twenties. And I was living like a king. I had this house with servants, and I would go back and forth. I had a Royal Enfield motorcycle in New Delhi. Every day was fantastic. It's like every day I traveled that year I took off was just, I never knew what adventure awaited me. But India was the most difficult thing I ever did, because nothing worked there in any of this place. So you really required a lot of elbow grease and planning.

• 16:13Speaker 02

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• 16:49Speaker 02

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• 17:31Speaker 02

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• 18:27Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the difference between living in New York City and living in New Delhi.

• 18:35Rick Rubin?

  They're both very crowded, busy places.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  They're both crowded. New Delhi would be more crowded and lower-rise. It didn't have the high-rise intensity of New York. When I lived there, it was 6 million people. I was just there, and now it's 30 million people. You could see blue sky then. Now you can't see anything because of the pollution. But it was, that was the most tumultuous decade in India's history, were the 70s. There was riots and blackouts, and they had a constipated government system. It was very socialist incarnation. They've since liberalized in the 90s, and things changed a lot. But the difference was, New York's full of eye candy, but nothing can beat India. It's the greatest show on earth. I mean, you go around

• 19:18Speaker 00

  a corner, could be a marching band, it could be an elephant. I mean, and then making friends there and getting, and learning how to navigate things which are so complex and complicated was really, for me, really satisfying. And I used it as a base, because I traveled to every state in India. They only had 14 states then, but I would go to all of them. And at one point, the Maharajas were running out of rupees, so they started changing their palaces into hotels. And I'd always find them and go live to be like a Maharaja for a weekend.

• 19:48Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  And it was inexpensive. I mean, things were so cheap, but it was endlessly fascinating. And my fascination with India and with Afghanistan, you know, continues to this day. I would read everything I could about both of these countries. And, but eventually, my business got closed down. I had, everything I had was blown up. So, well, in Afghanistan in 78, there was a coup d'etat by these two crazy communist parties that, they were like gangs that couldn't shoot straight. They overthrew the government. And even the Russians, they didn't believe this was happening, but they decided that Afghanistan was gonna go

• 20:32Speaker 00

  communist. It's like the last country in the world to go communist, to give it a shot. And that was bad news for my partner and me and everything. You know, we were not in the communist program. And then they had a coup, and then the coup was kind of dangerous. There was like tanks in the street, people shot and everything. I made it out of there. Went out through the Khyber Pass and made it back to my house in Delhi. And I said, "Wow." Well, that was my sense of invincibility was really broken.

• 20:57Rick Rubin?

  How old were you then?

• 21:00Speaker 00

  It was seventy eight, I must have been twenty seven, twenty seven years old. My Indian business, which was the bigger part of my business, we were really cooking. And in nineteen seventy eight, this is like months afterwards, we had never been so busy. And we had this big promotion coming up with Bloomingdale's called Fantasy India, it was called, and we were going to be in all their windows and everything. And Jimmy Carter announced that they were going to be an embargo, not a tariff on all imports from India. He was under pressure from domestic manufacturers. This comes out one day, you're just told this one day. And I had all this money tied up in production and my whole life, I've been working at this for six, seven years, seven years already.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  So I shipped three tons of clothing to Canada. And then I smuggled it all in over the Saint Lawrence River with a Canadian client of mine, whose father used to be a rum runner through the Thousand Islands. I'm not kidding you.

• 21:58Rick Rubin?

  I believe you.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  This would end up helping me get a job later at MTV with Bob, a guy named Bob Pittman. This story, we would go load it on a boat and go to this island, it was so easy. This American island on the Thousand Islands, it had a bridge to the mainland, so you could land on the dock, load it in the truck and drive back to New York. So I did that, but that really meant the end of my business. That was my last gasp. That just put a small dent in my debt. So I came back, I was thirty three. I had made and lost a fortune. I had a little empire, it was all gone and I'm like...

• 22:31Rick Rubin?

  It wasn't gone because of anything that you did. It was just geopolitical...

• 22:34Speaker 00

  A series of unfortunate events, yes. Nothing that I did. We were, we were hotter than ever in both places. Everything was going great. You know, of course, we had cash flow problems and it was really difficult all the time to do business there, but I was saying after Cobras and riots and dysentery and all these things that would happen to us, it's Jimmy Carter puts me out of business.

• 22:58Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  So I had to come back and start over. And I saw this book in a window, says, "What color is your parachute?" It's the only book, self-help book I ever bought in my life. And it made this case that you have transferable skills, it's the kind of book you could have written, that you have skills that you can apply in different areas. And you really only should be working on things you love. So how can we match your skills with what you love and where you think you're good? So they give you a couple of exercises. It came out to me well, rock and roll music. My brother worked for Columbia Records and one of the tips was, look for companies that are ascendant, that are likely to be on a curve of getting higher because mobility would be good.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  So I see this interview in Billboard by a guy saying, "We're going to start this video music channel." This is in seventy nine.

• 23:48Rick Rubin?

  And the inspiration to look for these things is from this self-help book that you just happened to see in a bookstore window?

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:55Rick Rubin?

  And pick up?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  I said, "Well, I need a little career advice here." You know, I'm thinking, because people were thinking, "Where you been for eight years, man? You've been running around Asia in flip flops and you're back here." Meanwhile, all these people that I knew, they'd all gone on in their lives, married, kids and everything. I'm thirty three. So I see this interview, my brother knows a guy who works there in this small embryonic company, they had just started Nickelodeon and the movie channel. And I get an interview. And the guy says, "We're looking for people with no experience in television." Because we're starting a revolution here, we can't afford to pay people who, you know, from NBC or ABC. This is nineteen eighty now. So I said, "I don't have any experience with television." Where I was living for eight years, they didn't even have television.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  So I made the case, "I'm an entrepreneur, I knew my music inside out, I can operate on a low level, I'm entrepreneurial." I showed them this business that I had built and all the, I would be in Vogue and Mademoiselle and all these magazine articles. And Bob Pittman said to me, he's putting together the team of eight people. He says, "What were you doing? Were you smuggling hashish?" And I go, "Not really, not really." That means you were. He goes, "You're hired." So I got hired to be like the marketing guy of a team of eight that had to put the whole idea of MTV together and get it on the air like in eight or nine months.

• 25:19Rick Rubin?

  Was that the first time you met Pittman?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was twenty six, I was thirty three. I was the only guy over thirty on this group. I mean, we were all crusaders.

• 25:28Rick Rubin?

  But you had the credentials.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  I had credentials, but you know...

• 25:31Rick Rubin?

  You were a smuggler.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, he thought that was a cool thing. You know, you're a real smuggler. And I'm thinking, "Well, I wasn't really a big dope smuggler, I had a substantial business." But hey, if that's what lights your light up, that's fine, go ahead and think it.

• 25:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Who was that first cast of characters?

• 25:47Speaker 00

  You might know John Sykes.

• 25:49Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm still friends with him. There was John, there was a woman named Gail Sparrow. Yeah, you, God, you were in there early yourself, Gail Sparrow, who I love, she passed recently. Carolyn Baker, I think she's passed. There was a guy named Steve Casey, he was out of the radio world, there was a bunch of radio guys. And there was Robert Morton, you must know Morty, who was, who, the day we went on the air, he quit to go, says, "I'm out here." He got us up with our studio and everything. He says, "I did my job, I'm going to go work for this guy who's starting a TV show, it's in development at NBC named David Letterman." So Morty just did that for years, now he's selling real estate in Malibu.

• 26:26Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  He's, he's great. But anyway, that was the original group and you know, we all were making no money. We all worked out of a hotel room, we just ate pizza, hung out, it was day and night. It was like, it was a classic startup.

• 26:39Rick Rubin?

  How long was it from that until something hit the air?

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Nine months.

• 26:43Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Fred Seibert was the other one, he was the key guy, he was our creative director. And we decided, we wanted to look on like anything else that had ever been made and we would try and grab our energy from the downtown New York art scene and the downtown New York music scene and music videos that had not been seen by most Americans. It was a new thing. I mean, there were clubs downtown, like the Ritz that would play music videos. We tried to garner some of that energy and positioning ourselves as sort of this underground force that's really different. Now, it's hard, but if you go back and think, it wasn't flying car stuff, but back in nineteen eighty one, eighty two, the idea of cable and something like MTV was pretty radical.

• 27:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  People would look at it and go, "What is this?" They never really...

• 27:32Rick Rubin?

  It wasn't so long that they were just three networks and they were all pretty much the same.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they were all playing Love Boat and they all, and so now, now cable's starting, so you have CNN and ESPN, you have these networks, these were the new things, the narrow casters, "We're going to do one thing all the time for a single audience, not for everybody."

• 27:50Rick Rubin?

  And there were maybe seventy or eighty channels then?

• 27:52Speaker 00

  No, there was twenty five.

• 27:54Rick Rubin?

  Oh, twenty five at first?

• 27:55Speaker 00

  It was, it was really started small, then the big thing was in the mid eighties, it went up to fifty four, then saying one day that we're going to have a hundred channels. Someone said, "There was a song, someone had about five hundred channels." But now, of course, that whole monoculture and gatekeeper thing where editors and programmers had all this control, it has all dissolved and gone away because of digital and social media, et cetera. But anyway, so I was there for the heyday. The, the eighties and the nineties and the early two thousands were like the heydays of the cable TV revolution, which then became the digital revolution.

• 28:29Rick Rubin?

  Did MTV start national or no?

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, because we, we would bounce off a satellite, so the footprint, the whole country, you could get it. The problem was, the cable operators were the gate, they had to agree to carry us and pay us ten cents, but no one wanted to do that. There was only a few places where we did it, so for a couple of years, we ran along with only two million subscribers.

• 28:48Rick Rubin?

  Where were the places?

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Middle America. Like Tulsa would be our biggest system, a hundred thousand homes, Des Moines, Wichita, Syracuse, New York, nothing in any of the big markets, New York or LA.

• 29:00Rick Rubin?

  It's interesting, because of the downtown nature of the programming, to end up in middle America was probably a bit of a stretch for middle America, don't you think?

• 29:10Speaker 00

  It was.

• 29:11Rick Rubin?

  It seems like.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  It really was, it really was a stretch. I mean, we didn't get in any of the big cities because they didn't have cable.

• 29:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  The cable guys hadn't come yet, you know, they hadn't built out the cable systems. But in these middle America systems, they had cable largely for reception purposes, because there was bad reception, distant signals, we can amp it up. And so when we hit Tulsa, it was like a bomb went off. And no one in New York or LA ever felt it, it was like a neutron bomb, but I did, because I was the marketing guy and I would go to these towns. I can remember just showing up at the airport to rent a car and I had an MTV button on and the lady behind the counter goes, "Wow, where did you get that?" I said, "How do you know about MTV?" She says, "Everybody knows about MTV, it's been here a month and a half now, it's all anyone talks about." And then I remember going to a radio station and they were telling me how much more easy

• 30:00Speaker 00

  it is for them to play new music. And then he takes me to a bar, it's like, like a sports bar and there's a TV on, it's like a Trinitron. And they're all watching MTV in this bar like it's a Knicks game or something. And I was just standing there trembling and thinking, no one else at the company knows this is happening. Nobody gets it at home, no one feels the vibe, I'm actually in a market where this is really going on. And so people were going in, asking for haircuts, like some of these bands from England, we had a lot of indie bands. The early days of MTV were all these lo-fi videos and it was fun, it was Devo and so. Ultimately, we were going out of business and we had to get these cable operators who

• 30:42Speaker 00

  were older guys, didn't want to pay us the money and maybe they thought that we were sort of a tool of the devil in a way, some of them.

• 30:48Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  And that's how the I Want My MTV campaign came along, said, "Let's, there's one group that likes us." The record companies didn't like us, the advertisers didn't like us, and the cable guys didn't like us, but who liked us were the fans, the music fans. And let's have them call their cable company and say, I want my MTV.

• 31:09Rick Rubin?

  It's a great campaign.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  It started in the 50s. There was a campaign called I Want My Mapo. And that idea, there was this guy, George Lois, who was this crazy advertising guy, the maddest of the mad.

• 31:22Rick Rubin?

  Brilliant guy.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:24Rick Rubin?

  He did the covers of Esquire.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, George was a character. I used to go down to his house. He'd like wake up at three in the morning and have like four hours sleep a night. He had a whole other life from like three to seven. You know, as a guy who lived a long time, he was this foul-mouthed Greek dude, very funny. So he just said, hey, fuck these cable operators. We brought him in with this guy named Dale Pond. You guys are getting nowhere being next to the cable operator. Fuck them. It's I want my MTV. Let's get the world's biggest rock stars to validate this. And let's put a campaign together and let's roll in these markets and let's advertise at really high levels like it's a blockbuster film that's coming. And these cable operators are going to surrender quickly, put up the white flag and add MTV to their cable lineups like that.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  So we had, he said, well, you need, who we get? Cause he had done it with Mapo. He'd done it with Wolf Chamberlain and Mickey Mantle, all these big sports stars.

• 32:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Said, he says, you gotta get fucking Mick Jagger. He's the biggest star of the world. So me and Sykes and this guy Les Garland, we all, Les got Mick Jagger, Sykes had to get Pete Townshend, I had to get David Bowie. And we all went out to get these guys. And sure enough, I did these things for a couple of years. We would add a million subscribers a month for two years.

• 32:36Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  And we got fully distributed and it was go to the fans.

• 32:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How long did it take?

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Took a couple of years to ramp up to like big distribution. We knew it was just a question of time. We can only do so many markets at once. And once he got started, it was like, uh, you know, and then we had, you know, things like Live Aid came along and music videos became a thing. So, yeah, it was fun.

• 32:59Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think record companies didn't like MTV, considering they would pay people to play music on the radio?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  You would think, Rick.

• 33:07Rick Rubin?

  You'd think this is the best promotion.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  The promotion guys loved us.

• 33:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  But the lawyers, who you've seen, remember how the lawyers jumped in front of digital when that came around with everything, you know, they, they didn't want to give us music videos for free. And we said, look, these are like three minute commercials for your records and they didn't want to do deals with us. Ultimately, they had to, because the artists wanted to do it. And the promotion guys, the record, and they knew it sold a lot of records. I mean, those were the days where you could sell millions of records. So.

• 33:41Rick Rubin?

  You'd think that would be what they would want, the record companies.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  You know, the business affairs and record companies historically have been like the department of no.

• 33:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  After Napster, there was all these other people who came out with digital ideas. Their strategy was to shut them all down. Now it's going to be interesting to see how they deal with AI. It's like the next turn of the screw. But finally, and we ended up paying the record companies money in the end, but in the, in the beginning, we didn't. They thought we were building a business on their backs because we were so successful. And we also had Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and all these other networks. They, they said, you're playing our music and you're worth all this money on Wall Street? And we're just some Bupkis record company. We're like a distributor. That's not right. I'm going to get all the, Bob Morgado told me, who ran Warner Electric asylum at one point, drove it into the wall. I'm going to get all the record companies together and we're going to take you down.

• 34:34Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Which he never did. Eventually the record companies got wise. The iPod came along and iTunes came along and now they're, they're making money again, but they're always looking around the corner because AI is coming down the pike.

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• 36:26Rick Rubin?

  After the I Want My MTV campaign, what would you say the next big breakthrough for MTV was?

• 36:33Speaker 00

  The big, biggest one was Live Aid. Geldof came around, said, we're going to do this show. It's going to be in Wembley and it's going to be in Philly and we're going to have this big lineup. We're going to raise this money for Ethiopia. There's this famine going on and see if you'd like to carry it. Well, we got nothing else to do. I mean, of course we'll do it. We'd love to.

• 36:53Rick Rubin?

  A music channel, big concert.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  They said, well, you know, we'd already done this deal with ABC. They want, they only wanted a three hour highlight show. I said, well, we'll run the whole thing.

• 37:02Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  So that was a big thing and that kind of elevated us again. And then it was like Michael Jackson, Thriller, Beat It, all those. The music videos got better. And then after Live Aid happened, next thing you know, we're on the cover of Newsweek and Time Magazine. And then we kept going and trying to reinvent it and tool it up. We brought hip hop on.

• 37:25Rick Rubin?

  With Yo MTV Raps.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Yo MTV Raps. I mean, back then BLS wasn't playing it, you know, the.

• 37:30Rick Rubin?

  Nobody was playing.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Nobody was playing. We said, well, we'll play it. You must have known Ted and Peter Doertie.

• 37:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I knew him well.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  So they cooked up a little pilot. They put it on and got huge ratings just with no promotion. It like wasn't the highest rated music.

• 37:44Rick Rubin?

  It was the only place you could hear hip hop music.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  And we were putting it in people's living rooms in Des Moines and middle America, and they had never seen anything like it. So we brought a whole new cast of characters into our life and a whole new music thing kind of got started and it was so fun and it was, I mean, the, the whole thing, it could crystallize into the Walk This Way video. So that kind of sanctified hip hop for the rock audience.

• 38:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  The young, young rock audience who in many ways, people just never look back again. And then, you know, I was very instrumental in the international rollout of MTV because in the late eighties, we saw that countries were loosening up and allowing cable and satellite to happen. And even in England, they, they had no music shows. They just had the BBC pretty much barely just started with Channel Four. So we took MTV around the world, all doing, we had 50 different versions of it in different languages around the world. And for me, that was a lot of fun. And for me, it was easy because I had that international experience way back. So what I found was that

• 38:48Speaker 00

  my earlier life of working at hardscrabble, king of the road, kind of menial labor jobs, going to a business school and then working in Asia for eight years. It was a perfect setup for me to work for an eccentric media organization that wanted to be sort of left of center. I don't mean politically, but you know, sort of, and experimental and open to take chances and willing to improvise and just kind of work off the, by the seat of our pants. So for me, it, it was a perfect destination. It was all the things I love was in that job. Animation, film, music, video, international travel, working with a lot of odd people,

• 39:33Speaker 00

  building relationships with people at the record labels or with artists. It was a lot of fun.

• 39:38Rick Rubin?

  How would you describe the qualities of the most creative people you've come in contact with over the course of your life?

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Curiosity. They were good editors and had good instincts. They trusted them. They were maniacally obsessed with the space they were in. They were also good people pickers. One thing I found is in a creative organization, if you pick a, any organization, I guess, if you pick a bad person, they're gonna pick other bad people. And next thing you know, without you knowing it, you're deconstructing your own organization. I always wanted the main aptitude of our little enterprise, which we called MTV Networks, to be creativity. So I would put always a creative person in charge of the network rather than a salesperson,

• 40:30Speaker 00

  which was a traditional way. Because I wanted people to know that that is what we aspire to be. That we are about creativity. We're kind of making our own road and we're improvising. We're gonna take risks. And if we get the creative process right and we can connect with whoever we're trying to connect with, all the things in our business that need to happen will fall into place if we're successful. So that was sort of a guiding principle of mine. I had like people like Judy McGrath. She was wonderful in every way, shape or form as a creative executive. And also she had hands-on skills. So she, she'd always say, we have to continue to hire the aberrant ones. Because that's where we're gonna get our ideas from. They're gonna come from the street.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  We're dealing in popular culture. These ideas are coming off the bottom. Doug Herzog was another example. You know, he came to work for us when he was 23 at MTV. And then he ended up running Comedy Central, sort of in its prime when we were running John and Stephen Colbert and everybody. And John Sykes. He took what had been a sort of fella running VH1 and brought in Bill Flanagan. And we did like Behind the Music. We did 120 of those. And we had a whole bunch of series, pop-up video, and got VH1 into a viable business. And then there was Nickelodeon. We used the same strategy there, which was we wanna be the Disney of the 90s. We wanna be cool. We're gonna find animators who don't work in the, in the Hollywood animation system of Hanna-Barbera, but have characters living in their heads.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  We're gonna build an animation facility and then we're gonna plug them into it. So they can just think and do it and we can, we can run out what they have conceptualized. So you look at SpongeBob and Rugrats. We go Ren and Stimpy. And we had quite a hit parade that came out of Nick. And then you look at Beavis and Butthead with Mike Judge. I mean, we had people who were good. To be a good executive, you needed to have good instincts in hiring people and picking material. You need to be a bit of a diplomat. You had to have a sense of good strategy and a bit of emotional intelligence.

• 42:30Rick Rubin?

  How different would you say the culture of MTV was from CBS, let's say? Just to pick another network?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Hugely different. We were much younger. I mean, I'd say in our prime there, I mean, the average age was probably low 30s, high 20s. We had the worst dressed group of people going in and out of any Manhattan office building, you could imagine.

• 42:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  People thinking, what's going on?

• 42:58Rick Rubin?

  Not a lot of suits.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  No suits. The only dress code rule we had was no frontal nudity. This was an era where at CBS, you had to wear a suit and a tie. There was many layers of management. We tried to keep things really flat so we could move quickly. Something doesn't work, we'll fix it or throw it out and we'll move on and do something else. Because none of the things we would do really involved an absolute amount, a huge amount of money. So we could afford to just throw something out and just keep working. If something doesn't work, no one's gonna hold it against us. The idea that we would be experimental is not something you would see at a broadcast network, which had, in fairness to them, they had a big legacy business and they couldn't just operate sort of like we did off the cuff and improvise so much.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Because they had to keep their businesses growing up year by year. And if they had things that worked, they had to continue to build on those and very strategically build another one. So they were a lot more deliberate. I'd say we had more of a bebop culture and they were more like a classical orchestra.

• 44:00Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the state of music video when MTV started. There were not loads of videos yet, were there?

• 44:06Speaker 00

  No, they were mostly made in Europe. Because in Europe, there was no real form of commercial radio to play your record. And the only way, you need to get on top of the pops in the UK or something. So people would make music videos and they would play them in record stores. That's where I first came across them. I spent one summer in Berlin. I had a girlfriend and when she'd go to work, I'd go to the local record store where you could actually get a record and go into a booth and play it, see if you like it. But they also had a little TV, little tiny TV. So they play these music videos. And I go, I go, wow, that is pretty amazing, you know, that they do this. Because it was sort of a whole new video vocabulary, new video style. In the early days, they were more fun, lo-fi, people were experimental, you know, nothing

• 44:51Speaker 00

  was really awfully sophisticated. But at their heart, they were fun. No one was making like dark music videos. There was like Duran Durans running around some boat with a bunch of pretty girls. Or you had Devo going around saying whip it and whipping people's skirts off. I mean, it was really just low-key. Some people were serious about it early on, like David Bowie. I mean, he really saw himself as a video artist also. But in the early days, it was cheap and we only went on the air with 160 videos. They largely came out of the UK. Independent labels would have them.

• 45:25Rick Rubin?

  So it wasn't music that was already really popular on the radio for the most part?

• 45:30Speaker 00

  No, these were bands that had-

• 45:31Rick Rubin?

  It was alternative music.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  It was alternative music by alternative bands. And there was no radio over there. But there wasn't popular on the radio here, no. Because we were, it was like AOR radio. This format of, they're still banging the classic rock. They weren't calling it classic rock yet because it wasn't yet classic. But it was that same group of artists.

• 45:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Fleetwood Mac, Stones, Beatles, et cetera. Whereas these new bands, they got categorized in the early 80s as new wave.

• 45:57Rick Rubin?

  They'd be maybe on college radio.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  That would be the domain of college radio. That's who we were playing, yes. But it turned out there was, with videos, they could tap into a mainstream or a larger audience. Because when people see a video that they like, they get familiar with the music more quickly. And next thing you know, they're humming something, you know, by Crowded House. And they're gonna buy the record. So the whole process of the music video could telescope the familiarity period to get people to ultimately go out and buy the record.

• 46:29Rick Rubin?

  How would you say music video changed the music business?

• 46:34Speaker 00

  It changed it in good and bad ways. It made the era of the international superstar possible, even the domestic superstar possible. It made sub-genres of music, like alternative and heavy metal and hip-hop. It allowed them to elevate and become more national and move out of that sort of marginal space into becoming a more broad appeal kind of music form. It made image more important in some cases than the music. I mean, you look at Milli Vanilli, there's the classic cases, Vanilla Ice. You know, and a video was just one more thing you could do wrong. But there were, you know, you had Madonna and people who looked at it as an art form that would complement their music and help them build the image that they wanted for

• 47:18Speaker 00

  themselves in a way that they thought was smart.

• 47:21Rick Rubin?

  Do you think Prince or Madonna or Michael Jackson would have become who they were without MTV?

• 47:28Speaker 00

  This sounds arrogant. But I think MTV helped them become bigger, faster, without a doubt. Those are all real artists and you're not gonna knock them down. And they would find, if there wasn't a music video, they would find other ways to get popular. But MTV and music videos was a way to kind of help short-circuit the system and the path to superstardom.

• 47:51Rick Rubin?

  What was the first non-music show on MTV?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Well, at one point in the mid 80s, we decided we gotta kind of change things up a bit. And the first real show, I guess, was Remote Control. There was a guy named Joe Davola. I don't know if you knew Joe?

• 48:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  And they made a thing in somebody's basement. So let's do a quiz show. You know, and Adam Sandler got his start there. We made it for like $10,000 to $15,000 an episode. That was a big hit. And people said, what are you doing that for? That has nothing to do with music, but it got good ratings. I mean, then the creative cadre at MTV was always looking to be more ambitious. They said, well, let's not just play music videos, let's do other things. And meanwhile, Fox had launched the Fox Network, which was a broadcast network, a fourth one that was targeting younger people. They had Melrose Place. They had a couple of these soap operas. We said, well, maybe we could do a form of soap opera. So we developed, they developed this thing and they brought it to me. And I said, you know, we can't do this.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  It requires a lot of writers. We just don't have that kind of money. So I went back to John, Boonam Murray was the production company. And we came back and I said, we got another idea. We're really good at post-production. Why don't we rent a loft in Soho? Put like eight or nine kids in there and we'll just have cameras going and then we'll assemble it afterwards into this episodic television series. We'll call it The Real World. It was the first real reality show, series. And that didn't come about because of some brainstorm. Let's, let's invent a new genre. It was like we were just too cheap to hire writers and we thought of another way to do this. And it turned out to be a whole new genre for the whole television industry, which plagues us to this day.

• 49:34Rick Rubin?

  When was the Osbournes in the story?

• 49:37Speaker 00

  The Osbournes started in like, I'd say 1990, and that was really classic. Brian Grayden was in a car with, we were shooting something with Ozzy and Sharon, and he said something, "Oh Sharon, your life is crazy." He says, "You know, if you had a camera crew following me around, you wouldn't fucking believe what my life is." So, "Well, okay, let's do it." So that, that was like a one-minute pitch, a 15-second pitch. So that became the first celebrity reality show, and that was a big hit.

• 50:07Rick Rubin?

  And then I remember you used to do big events around spring break that were kind of a big deal.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Yes, we found out that when we decided to shake things up around 86, 87, I had Pittman on the way out, because he left and appointed me president. He said, "Well, let's set up a bunch of groups to figure out where do we go from here." We had to, I was convinced we had to continue to reinvent ourselves and reimagine ourselves. We can't just play music videos back-to-back with a couple of tour dates. We could be, we could be more substantive and we could, we could grow this business if we do other things. And let's get out of the studio, because they're just cooped up in there. Let's go to events and tag on to events. Let's do spring break. And we would do a whole bunch of spring break.

• 50:46Rick Rubin?

  You just picked places where kids would go.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, and kids, what we found out was kids love to see themselves on camera. Hence, that sort of led to the reality show appeal. You know, we would get all these bands, Mr. and Mr. would come and people would play at spring break, and we'd never be invited back. I mean, we did Daytona Beach, they would pay us money to come and set up. The City Fathers would throw us out, and then we'd go to some other town. And, you know, we were gradually being banned in all these towns, but other towns kept thinking, "Well, we'll give it a try." So it was, it was liberating for people to get out of the studio and for us to do these types of things. And it was good for the, for the production people, because they got really good at this. We were really good at putting on events. I mean, the Video Music Awards, the Movie Awards, all these types of shows would be.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Also, the Video Music Awards could bring in $75 million in one night.

• 51:37Rick Rubin?

  How did the VMAs come to be?

• 51:39Speaker 00

  In 1984, we said, "We're doing all right now." Let's see if we can create a show that sort of puts music videos on a stage and sort of, maybe we do something that's the antithesis of the Grammys, which at that point in time was a very stale show. And let's make it irreverent. And our first one was in Radio City Music Hall in 1984 with Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler were the hosts. And that's when Madonna came out and did Like a Virgin.

• 52:04Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  We'd always have these sort of seminal moments at the shows, and so it became really popular. And it was good, because again, it was our people became more proficient producers.

• 52:16Rick Rubin?

  Why did Pittman decide to leave MTV?

• 52:19Speaker 00

  We had tried to do a leveraged buyout. In the last days, we tried to buy the company ourselves, because we were owned by Warner Communications and American Express. American Express wanted out. Warner Communications was suffering because of the Atari debacle. They had to sell stuff, so they wanted to sell us. So we said, "Well, we'll sell it to us." So we got involved with Teddy Forstman, a Forstman, little, trying to do a leveraged buyout. This is 1986. And then, instead, Steve Ross decided to sell it to these fellows who had a company called Viacom.

• 52:51Rick Rubin?

  Why did he decide that?

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Because they wanted to pay a few dollars more.

• 52:55Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  He got on a helicopter in New York City, and when he got off in East Hampton, he had changed his mind. And that set.

• 53:01Rick Rubin?

  He had told you he would sell it to you first?

• 53:03Speaker 00

  We were close. I mean, and Bob was kind of doing the deal, so this was Bob's deal.

• 53:08Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  And it was like, "Okay, fuck this." I, I, everyone was thinking, "Maybe the bloom's off the rose at MTV. I gotta get out of here." So John Sykes left, Les Garland left, a lot of the original people left. But before Pittman left, he made me president. And I'm thinking, "Hey, I just got out of Afghanistan and India for eight years. This is a good idea. I'm gonna see if we can, I'm gonna stay here."

• 53:30Rick Rubin?

  Keep it alive, yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Keep it alive. I mean, we're gonna have another incarnation. We're just getting warmed up. But the problem was, we had these owners who were really kind of old school, and they were not fun.

• 53:42Rick Rubin?

  What was Viacom's business at that time?

• 53:44Speaker 00

  At that time, they, they owned a series of TV stations. They, they were formed because they had the spin-off from CBS. They had all the syndicated library from CBS. Government mandated that. So they had bought Showtime. Then they had about a million cable subscribers in various case, small cable systems. They had a few radio stations, a few television stations. But they were not from our world. They didn't get us. So they came in and they didn't last long. I was made president, and the guy didn't like, he said, "You need a co-president to help you." They came out to see us. We were having a management retreat in Gurnee's in Montauk. Rather than tell us, "We're really happy to own you."

• 54:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  "You've built this great thing. We see this great future for you. We know you have a lot of stock options, and I don't, our lawyers tell us we don't have to pay them off." That was the only silver lining of this deal. This is what they told us. "And by the way, you spend too much money running your operation." These guys were sort of penny pinchers. So they were displaced by Sumner Redstone.

• 54:44Rick Rubin?

  How soon?

• 54:46Speaker 00

  Within a year.

• 54:47Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Bob Pittman called me up one day. He'd already left. And he said, "Listen, I just met this billionaire, Sumner Redstone. He's at the Carlisle Hotel. He's trying to buy Viacom. He thinks the guys running it are running it into the ground. He's this crusty guy, and he wants to see, he needs this inside information." I had been told a week earlier that if any of us got caught talking to him, we'd be fired. But I was ready to sort of leave myself. They were making my life miserable. So I snuck into the Carlisle Hotel with Jerry Laborn, who ran Nick, and we saw him and gave him the whole pitch that we had given these guys, saying that there's a whole world that's opening up, and we could be like the leader in kids, teens, and young adult programming

• 55:29Speaker 00

  and cable and satellite by investing money in this and taking it somewhere great. We could do films and this, that, and the other thing. And I, basically, I was trying to sell a company we didn't own to a man we didn't know, thinking that maybe this guy is better than these guys, so who knows? We have nothing to lose.

• 55:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  So he ended up stepping up and buying Viacom in a big, famous takeover battle in the late 80s. And I became sort of Sumner's golden boy, in a way.

• 55:56Rick Rubin?

  What was your relationship with him like?

• 55:59Speaker 00

  It was, one of the first things he did when he got the company was hire this guy Frank Biondi, who kind of beat HBO, who became my, he was the CEO of Viacom. Sumner was sort of the chairman. And Sumner, for the first few years, would defer to Frank. I got to learn how the whole business worked, because now I'm on like the operating committee. And I loved Frank. But Frank got fired, because he was getting credit for making a lot of good moves, and Sumner wasn't getting, he's sort of Trumpy. He wasn't getting the kind of credit he felt he deserved.

• 56:29Rick Rubin?

  That's unbelievable.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  So he fired Frank, and he said, "I'm gonna have two other guys run it and report to me."

• 56:35Rick Rubin?

  What did Frank do after?

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Frank got a job, worked for Universal. He became a CEO out there. He did a bunch of other things. He ended up living next to OJ Simpson. I always, that's what I always remember. My main takeaway. But I loved Frank. I loved his wife.

• 56:49Rick Rubin?

  It seems crazy that something's working and growing and taking that apart. It's just a wild idea.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Ego. It's all about ego. And you could be predisposed not to like somebody, because you think they're taking some of this sunshine away from you, and you overlook the fact that.

• 57:06Rick Rubin?

  It's his sunshine. He owns it.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, right. You're petty. You want to get credit for everything is the but. Frank ran us with a really light hand. I was there for 67 quarters when I was like the head of MTV Networks. Every quarter, we were up, what they would say on Wall Street, double digits. So we were the least of their problems, so they kind of left us alone. Sumner had meanwhile acquired Paramount Pictures, so had a seat at the Hollywood table. Then he went out and acquired CBS.

• 57:38Rick Rubin?

  What was Sumner doing before all this?

• 57:40Speaker 00

  He ran drive-in movie theaters. He was a theater exhibitor. Started with a handful of drive-ins and then moved in into, you know, he became a pretty national amusements, some of the nicer movie theaters in the country. You know, we were 65 when he bought Viacom. He wanted to become a Hollywood player and build an entertainment conglomerate at that age, which at that point in time, I thought, "Wow, man, that's old, pedal that I know." But he was very tenacious and litigious, and he was always nice to me. I realized that people who tried to really get close to him ultimately would, would leave early. They would not last. So I just was in my own little environment. We were in a different building, and I would endear myself to him like,

• 58:22Speaker 00

  "Hey, we're gonna do a Unplug with Tony Bennett, your pa, you know, from your era."

• 58:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  So, you know, he got to meet Tony Bennett. He just loved that kind of stuff.

• 58:31Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about Unplug. That was a great series. What was the first one? Do you remember?

• 58:35Speaker 00

  The first one was like, we were, we were in, had Bon Jovi booked to do a Video Music Awards at the Universal Amphitheater. And then John said, "Well, you know, a couple of guys in the band can't make it. It's just me and Richie." And then I think it was Alex Coletti. I don't know if you know Alex?

• 58:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Great guy. He said, "Well, look, we'll have a B-stage out there. Why don't you and Richie come out and play acoustically?" It was a huge, it turned out to be one of the highlights of the show. Because we were at the height of all this, not heavy metal, but I mean, you know, it was all those bands with the W. Warren and Winger and all this kind of hair. The hair band era. It's like, "Let's bring the temperature down. Let's do something a little more authentic, that has some credibility, stuff that we like." So we did one with Paul McCartney, and we did hundreds of them. That became a real hit, to the point where Eric Clapton's Unplugged sold 25 million records.

• 59:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, Tears in Heaven.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Tears in Heaven, and Bob Dylan did it.

• 59:28Rick Rubin?

  I think there was a great Neil Young one as well.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  They did one at the Ed Sullivan Theater, this before Colbert took it over. They really rolled out the carpet and did a great job, and he had that band playing with them. And then they decided, they got back and looked at it and said, "We must have been a little kooky or something. We're gonna redo it." So they redid it in LA. I remember going to both tapings. I was a big Neil Young fan. Yeah, he had a great one. And then one of the best ones was Nirvana, of course, with Kurt. That was one of the epic ones. There was, you know, so many of them were great. And I keep wondering why they weren't playing them. I mean, you know, the Paramount people, they changed their name to Paramount and MTV. They just, things all stayed on shelves. They didn't play any music. All the music people there left.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  They stopped playing music. It was just a bunch of C-level reality shows. It had no vibe, and it had no reason to exist, and they just kind of disbanded it.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

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• 1:02:02Rick Rubin?

  Do you know how the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" came about?

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Yes, I have a good story about that in the book.

• 1:02:09Rick Rubin?

  Tell me.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  That was like the gift that kept giving. Mark Knopfler wrote it sort of as a takedown of MTV. He was in a TV store and, "Look at these yo-yos. That's the way they do it. Money for nothing, chicks for free." So he wrote this song.

• 1:02:24Rick Rubin?

  Sarcastic song.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  Sarcastic song, like we couldn't care less. But it turned out, he gets Sting to do the chorus, and it became an international hit. Now, this was the era in 1985 of the international supergroups, international pop stars. Be famous everywhere. This is before a lot of these countries had their own local stars to deal with. So everywhere you would go, this song was there. So when I would go like to countries in Asia or in Europe, they knew about MTV from this song. We were very happy to have that song, but it was started as a takedown, yeah.

• 1:03:02Rick Rubin?

  That's great. I love it when songs take on a life of their own that no one can guess or control.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Rick Rubin?

  When it even reverses its original mission, it's just such a great joke.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Well, this was a great example of that, to reverse its original mission. Rather than knocking MTV and people going, "Oh, screw that." It was like, "Well, where do I get it?"

• 1:03:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, we became the calling card of MTV. It's amazing. Tell me more about some of the early creative choices in the look and feel of the network.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. We wanted it to look unlike anything else. And we wanted to draw from the sort of, you'd say that mashup of punk and graffiti and everything that was going down in art down in the early 80s. In fact, we even had Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel do art breaks for us. But we wanted to draw from that talent pool. We wanted to use full cell animation. Just the logo itself, we thought, made a great statement. We developed that logo and we decided it's going to be a container and we're going to fill it up and change it all the time. It's not going to be static. It's going to break all the rules of logo making that had ever existed.

• 1:04:08Rick Rubin?

  It would always change.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  And turned, it became one of the most famous logos of all time. So that was sort of a signature that let you know this was not like, you know, a normal kind of television network. And then we would try and just do really odd things that kind of worked as non sequitur. So in terms of the style, the content, it was like, we would do strange, offbeat, funny things. We tried to have a sense of humor about us. We would, we could make fun of ourselves. And it was effective because people, people loved, if you've talked to people to this day, they would say, "Oh, what I liked about MTV, especially in its early incarnation, was a lot of the funny animated stuff they would put up between the videos and the promos that we do." We would have something like, "Hey, kids, don't watch that.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  Watch this." I mean, it'd be simple little things and we'd just throw them in there and it was really effective. Because we were, even though we were working out of a midtown office building, we were trying to draw from that downtown vibrant collision of all that stuff that was going on.

• 1:05:13Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the idea of having VJs. Was that always there from the beginning?

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  It was. You know, a lot of the early MTV people came from radio. Bob Pittman among them.

• 1:05:23Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  They had DJs. So they were DJs, VJs, they were sort of a traffic cop. That was it. The original role was seen for them to be sort of like a traffic cop. That was, this is, talk a little bit about this, talk a little about that. But it didn't really work as well as it did on a radio station because on a radio station, a DJ's sort of there in real time. He could take calls from the audience.

• 1:05:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Here, you're taping stuff out of sequence that's going to be dropped in. You're not actually doing it. But we hired a cross-section of people to be the VJs and it was felt, put a human face on the network. We needed to have some, it was another form to bolster our identity. VJs came and went and we had credible music DJs like Mark Goodman was, came out of the DJ world and others. At one point, I remember we even hired Frankie Crocker.

• 1:06:12Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  To work on VH1 and Don Imus, who were big.

• 1:06:16Rick Rubin?

  Big radio guys.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  Big radio guys.

• 1:06:18Rick Rubin?

  Was it obvious that you were going to be the guy to run MTV for the long haul or was that not the case early on?

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, after Bob left, I was like the guy and I did that for 17 years. But then as the business got bigger and we launched like Comedy Central and TV Land and other networks and got in other business, I became sort of the head of MTV Networks. So I wasn't really running MTV per se. I had brought in Judy McGrath and she was running MTV and then also VH1 was under her umbrella and a couple of other things, some of our digital enterprises. So I was, and that was probably somewhere in the 90s. So my hands-on role, as we got to be bigger and bigger, was less and less.

• 1:07:02Rick Rubin?

  Was the corporate job as much fun as the hands getting dirty job?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  No. The corporate job at MTV Networks was good because I was really dealing with all of our networks. But when I got the corporate job, when Sumner Redstone fired Mel Karmazin, he made Les Moonves and I co-presidents of the company. And that meant I was really in a whole other world. I was now going to deal with Wall Street guys. I was going to deal with bankers. I was going to deal with.

• 1:07:30Rick Rubin?

  It was a full corporate job.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  It was a full kind of corporate job. I still had my people reporting to me and I loved them and I still would go to shows and, but I wasn't in there like I was and it wasn't as much fun. But I figured, "Hey, I'll give this a shot. I can learn a new trick or two." And I did. But then we split up the company into two pieces and I became the CEO of just Viacom and Les became the CEO of CBS Inc., two companies.

• 1:07:56Rick Rubin?

  Why did that happen?

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  Our stock had stalled. We were like in the mid 2000, 2005. And what was happening was that Apple and Yahoo and all of these digital companies were ascendant and they were really making a dent in our business. We were now called legacy media. And we really had to figure out a way to compete in this world. And at one point, Sumner said, "Well, look, we're going to cut this company in half and we have the growths companies," which was MTV Networks, BET, Music Publishing, a couple of other things. And you'll be that because we're going to grow and we're going to morph into digital. And then the other part of the company, which was assembled over the years, included Simon

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  and Schuster and Showtime and stuff that wasn't really growing fast. So there's two categories to stock. The value stocks that just throw off money and then the growth stocks. So they said, "The best way to do this," because buyers are confused, this was bullshit sold to us by investment bankers, "was make two companies." It was the exact wrong thing to do at the exact wrong time because at that time, other companies were doubling up. They're figuring, "I'm going to, I'm going to make my business, whatever legacy business I'm in, I'm going to make it bigger." Look at Disney. Bob Iger went out and bought Lucasfilm. He bought Pixar. He bought Marvel. I know we're content makers, but let's just be better at that. We're not going to get into social media. We're not going to do these kind of things. And that turned out to be a better strategy, which was to bulk up rather than to kind

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  of slim down.

• 1:09:28Rick Rubin?

  But that was the pitch of it?

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  That was the pitch. The same guys who collected a lot of fees assembling this conglomerate. Like, "What do you got a movie studio for that's not going to grow? What do you got Simon and Schuster for? That's not going to grow." But they were sold as good things to buy at the time.

• 1:09:45Rick Rubin?

  They were blue chip companies as well, weren't they?

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  They were blue chip companies, but they weren't.

• 1:09:49Rick Rubin?

  Fast growth.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  They weren't fast growing like these digital guys and we were never going to catch up to these digital guys. But Sumner was a man who was obsessed, not so much about the operations of his company and how it worked, the way that say Rupert Murdoch, his arch nemesis, would. He was obsessed with the stock price because that would bring his net worth up. And they told him that the way the stock price is going to rise is if you disassociate yourself with these value-driven companies whose stocks aren't going high. So he was sold a bill of goods and followed it through. And there were people on my team who said, "Well, I think we'd be better off that way because it's kind of messy dealing with Les Moonves's guys because we got to agree on

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  certain things. We can't move fast and let's just be on our own track, if you will."

• 1:10:41Rick Rubin?

  So then what was under your world at that time?

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  It was Famous Music Publishing, MTV Networks, which was MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, Comedy Central, the whole international enterprise. We had a big consumer products business. We bought some digital websites. But it was mostly MTV Networks, Famous Music, and BET.

• 1:11:01Rick Rubin?

  How did BET get in the picture?

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  BET was bought by Mel. Mel Karmazin bought it for $3 billion in the early 90s because Bob Johnson wanted to get out. And Mel said, "Well, listen, this is a good business. It could be doing better. I could buy it and fit it in with the other basic cable networks I have because it's a good fit. We could eliminate some jobs in the back office." Sort of a classic consolidation play. And that's how BET came to be. So Bob rode off with a good payout and Deborah Lee came in to run it.

• 1:11:32Rick Rubin?

  What was the story of Comedy Central? How did that come to be?

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  We were having a staff meeting one day. And someone slipped me a piece of paper that says HBO is announcing a basic cable comedy channel called The Comedy Channel. They're announcing this today. And I go, oh, man. That's bad news. HBO was like the most funded. They had an army of Ivy League educated people all over the country running around with cable systems. They did all these comedy specials with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams and so forth. And they're getting into basic cable business, which is a very different business from the pay cable business. And if this works, they're going to come after us with a music channel and a kids' channel because we were making loads of money. And they were looking for a way to grow their business. So within a couple of minutes,

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  there was a fellow named Fred Seibert. We talked, he says, well, let's announce a comedy channel. I said, you know, if we announce a comedy channel today, the day of their release, we will be in every press release as a competitor to them. So they won't be able to say they're the first ones and they have a clear runway.

• 1:12:38Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  We could throw a monkey wrench into their plans. We need to do it today. We don't have to have everything lined up, but we can just leak it and put it out there. And by the end of the week, we'll have a name, we'll have a format, and we can talk some kind of bullshit.

• 1:12:50Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  With mirrors and things. So I called my boss and put him on the speakerphone, Frank Biondi, who had been fired by Michael Fuchs. And this comedy channel was his brainchild. And Frank remembered. And I said, Frank, I'm here with my team. I'm going to put you on the box, you know, talk to them. We think that the entrance of your pal, Michael Fuchs and HBO into our business is treacherous. They've announced this thing. And what we want to do is announce our own thing, even though we have no idea what it is.

• 1:13:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  But let's get in the game. Let's put our hat in the ring. And he goes, do it. So we did it. And so this began what people would call the comedy wars. And they said, well, their idea was to rip funny clips from stand-up, sitcoms, movies, and kind of run it like MTV where you'd have a comedy jockey, whatever they would call it. And it would be sort of a random thing like what we did with music. But we had tried that on VH1. We knew it didn't work. So we had that, you know, kind of tucked away in our brain. And I said, you know, we also had a thing called Nick at Night, which was we took a lot of old line sitcoms and stuff and kind of sexed them up.

• 1:13:58Rick Rubin?

  I watched it all the time.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  You know, we did a lot of fun animation and stuff in between it. So that's what we decided to do. We would be a T. We call ourselves Ha, the TV Comedy Network. I went out, we got the Mary Tyler Moore Library. We did deals with like Brian Grazer and Ron Howard at Imagine. We did deals with Rob Reiner and Castle Rock. And I hired Fred Silverman, who was the big programmer of the big three. There was a lot of smoke and mirrors to make it look like we were really doing something, even though we weren't going to go on the air for another year and a half. We announced advertiser deals with advertisers we had. So the bottom line was none of the cable operators would take either of us. Because we were the two big cable programming companies. And they didn't want to piss us, either one off.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  So we were all sitting there with these ideas. And HBO had launched, but no subscribers, sort of like what MTV was going through in the early eighties. So at the end of the day, after we each spent hundreds of millions of dollars, Frank and Michael Fuchs called it a truce. And they said, why are you going to do a deal with John Malone for half of your company to get distribution? We should just be doing this together. Let's put our hatchets away and go at it. So we announced a new Comedy Central. So the day before it was going to be announced, Frank calls me and says, well, I got an interesting piece of news. Michael Fuchs is that before we consume the deal, he doesn't want you to be at the press conference. He doesn't want you in the room. So I have obviously annoyed him.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  And I said, well, that's like a first grader. That's bullshit. I run the division. I'm in charge of it. I can't be in the room? And he goes, well, you know, I wanted to get the deal done. And it's no big deal. Let's just get it over with. So I, you know, I squatted and that's what happened. And so we started Comedy Central. And then a couple of years later, Fuchs was gone and called it then Comedy Central. And, you know, we had a few things there that put us on the radar. Matt and Trey with South Park, which Doug Herzog, that was like a three-minute pitch. That became a big hit show for us. So it took a big hit that even though we had six episodes, millions of people signed up for Comedy Central just to see that.

• 1:16:06Rick Rubin?

  Those six episodes. That was it.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  Yes. And then we started The Daily Show. And we had this guy Craig Kilborn for two years. Les Moonves hired him away to be late night on CBS. And we got Jon Stewart, who we'd worked with before. And Jon's idea was let's do a show on political humor. And people were saying, I don't know, you know, political humor. But we're a creator-based company. Let's see what Jon has up his sleeve. And it turned out it was The Daily Show and this incarnation that's run like dozens of Emmys and everything like that. And spawned Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell and John Oliver and this whole cast of characters. And now inhabit television and a bunch of other places.

• 1:16:47Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  And then HBO sold their half to us. So we owned all of it. Yeah, Comedy Central was a lot of fun. Yeah. Bill Maher started his career there. Jimmy Kimmel started his career there. Dave Chappelle. He started with The Chappelle Show on Comedy Central. So again, sort of like MTV, a good eye for emerging talent and a willingness to stick with that talent and let them perform. And we'll be the beneficiaries, hopefully, of what they're doing.

• 1:17:16Rick Rubin?

  And I love that also started as we don't want the competition taking this space. So we'll just throw our hats in the ring. And it turns into this.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Rick Rubin?

  Jugernaut.

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  Worth billions of dollars. And it turned out, you know, we didn't have any idea what it would be.

• 1:17:32Rick Rubin?

  You can't really know in advance.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Rick Rubin?

  But you just.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:17:36Rick Rubin?

  Make the best choice you can in the moment.

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  Let's improvise, use our instincts. Let's put our hat in the game. What's the worst thing that could happen? We fail, we pull out. We were good at hiding our bluff.

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• 1:20:05Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about writing the book.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  I never thought I'd ever write a book, but I had written a bunch of magazine articles. I like to write. So I said, well, I don't want to make this a business book. You know, that's kind of boring. But I would, let me just find a series of stories. Let's make it more of an adventure book that covers a little bit of my young life, but then a lot about my business in Asia and my travel experiences and adventures and what sort of made me and what my values became to be. And then the MTV networks and Viacom piece. And then I get fired and I go off. And I go back to Afghanistan for 12 more years.

• 1:20:40Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Yes. I went back for 12 more years to work at a TV network. This fellow I had met in my last years of Viacom, this incredible guy, still one of my best friends. He grew up in Australia. He was in Afghan. His father had been ambassador to Assad Mosany. His father had been ambassador to Japan. And when the communist coup happened in 78, he was a young kid living in Japan. They got put out on the street. They were like homeless, homeless Afghan diplomats. And then they went, they went to Australia, you know, grew up, went to college. He went back to Afghanistan and got a license to open a radio station. Then he got a license there on a TV station. He knew nothing about any of this. Meanwhile, he got in touch with me because his girlfriend heard that there was some guy at MTV

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  who used to have a clothing business in Afghanistan, and she was starting one. So she wanted to meet me. And I couldn't wait to meet her because I hadn't talked to anybody from that country in years. And she said at one point, well, you got to meet my boyfriend. He's the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan. At which point I like coughed up my Pellegrino. I go, what? Yes, he's starting the first TV network there. So we became fast friends. And when I got fired from Viacom by Redstone, he, after Bono called me, he called me and said, come back to Afghanistan. And I'm thinking, perfect circle. I started my career there. I left because of a coup and the communists. I went into a media business, learned it. And now I'm getting cashiered again.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  And what better to go back to a country that I love?

• 1:22:12Rick Rubin?

  A believable story.

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  And help people there. Because this enterprise did more to change the attitudes of Afghans than all the $2 trillion we wasted. You know, connect Afghans to each other for the first time. Connect them to the outside world. Let's help socialize them and do things. And we had versions of The Daily Show, a big news operation. So I love going back there. I mean, I wouldn't be there all the time, but I would get four trips a year. I remember telling my wife Kathy, I said, I'm so happy. I'm working with Assad now. I'm on the board. I'm mentoring people. I'm a consultant. And I get four free trips to Afghanistan. And she goes, what's second prize? Five free trips?

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  But I was back there in my element. So rather than take another big job at a big company that's gonna pay me boatloads of money, I said, "If I follow my spirit, I want to go back there." I mean, Kabul was so changed and they had been through this 40 years of war and the Taliban and so forth. And then we also started business in Yemen. We started a business in Ethiopia, which I loved because the music scene in Ethiopia was fantastic. And there was no war going on there, so I really liked going there. At one point, I had even a satellite network going into Iran.

• 1:23:23Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing. Why did you get fired from MTV?

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Sumner hired me to be the CEO of Viacom. And I was for eight months because he was upset that I did not buy MySpace. Our big challenge in the mid 2000s was the paradigm has changed totally now. We have things like YouTube where people can upload, share, and comment and have a peer-to-peer relationship. The gatekeeper status of what we used to do is over. People want to see, say, a music video, they can just watch Nirvana with their mouse. They don't have to wait for it to come around on a linear network. So how do we get into this new action? Well, we met with Mark Zuckerberg. We were the first people to make a bid for Facebook. He came in to see us in 2005. We bid $1.8 billion. Can you imagine that? That's like walking around money for him. Of course, he turned us down.

• 1:24:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  And then MySpace had been out there. We had looked at it and kicked the tires. We weren't convinced we were gonna buy it. But Rupert Murdoch came in and bought it over a weekend when I was in Hawaii with my family. And he bought it with no due diligence. He thought that MySpace was the future. Social media was the future. He was right, but when they bought it, they just junked it up with advertising and the whole thing fell apart. He sold it for $35 million. But Sumner was upset. He had never even heard of MySpace, but he heard that Rupert Murdoch, his arch enemy, bought it. And I had been looking at it and didn't buy it. And Rupert's now on the cover of all these magazines as some kind of digital genius, and he isn't. And plus, he had his estate lawyer, Philippe Dumont, was very eager to have my job, as it turns out. I was running Paramount also, Paramount Pictures.

• 1:24:57Rick Rubin?

  What was that like?

• 1:24:59Speaker 00

  That was interesting. You know, I had to hire a new studio head. And we had been a producer there. We had made like 40 movies.

• 1:25:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Under the guidance of Sherri Lansing, who was at Paramount. But when Don Doljan left, Sherri became the head of Paramount, reporting to me. I loved Sherri, but she decided she was gonna leave, so I had to find out who else I was gonna hire. I also had to figure out, how do I learn the movie business? I'm like a cable guy. And Bob Daley from Warner Brothers, when he was with Terry Semel, they ran Warner Brothers Pictures for decades. They were the kings of Hollywood.

• 1:25:34Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  They tried to hire me to run the Warner Music Group, so I had a relationship with them. I didn't take that job. So I asked Bob Daley if he would be my mentor and teach me the business. So I would always spend the summers in our offices in LA. So I would go over from my Santa Monica office to his house in Bel Air. And he was like the Bob Daley Film School. P&Ls, financing, international distribution. So I kind of got smart, smart enough to pretend I knew the business. And then it turns out I had to hire a new studio head. And I thought that the culture at Paramount could use some upgrading. It was a bit old school. So I was in Beirut one day, trying to sell MTV to people there to do a Middle Eastern version of it

• 1:26:18Speaker 00

  with someone that had been out all night, got a horrible hangover, and David Geffen calls me from Hollywood. And I'm like looking over out my window, squinting at the Mediterranean. And he says, "I got the perfect guy to run Paramount." I go, "Good, I need it." We'd been interviewing people, but none of them, all the people I wanted, like Stacey Snyder, were under contract. I need somebody. He says, "We have to get someone from outside the business. We're not gonna get a former studio head." Brad Gray. Brad Gray ran Grillstein Gray. He was at the peak of his power, Sopranos, Bill Maher Show. So I had several meetings with Brad. He made a good case. I would sneak over and meet him at his house in the Palisades. I had him meet Sumner. I had him meet Bob Daley.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  Bob gave him the thumbs up, so I went with Brad. And Brad became the new studio head. Brad was an ambitious guy, and he kept that ambition kind of quiet. He had impeccable credentials from a distance, but just as he's getting into the job, this Pellicano scandal reared its head. And he had two front-page stories about how he had hired Anthony Pellicano for Gary Shandling and some other things. He didn't look good. He looked like he was a part of a nasty story, which really kind of got him off to the wrong foot in Hollywood. On the other hand, we decided we needed to scale up. We needed more movies in the pipeline, and we could buy the DreamWorks library. They had a library of 60 films, Apollo 13, a bunch of...

• 1:27:44Rick Rubin?

  Good films.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  Good films.

• 1:27:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  And it was Geffen and Kassenberg and Spielberg. I knew Geffen really well. I knew Kassenberg very well. He was like our biggest client for years with DreamWorks Animation. But we ended up buying DreamWorks and putting it together with Paramount, which I thought was brilliant. And that's when I got fired, right after that happened. And then when I left, that relationship, which I had such high hopes for, kind of fell apart because Brad did things that were annoying and pissed off David and Steven Spielberg. And they eventually bought their way out of it. And Philippe Dumont, my successor, kind of said, "You know, if DreamWorks leaves, they don't matter to us." That's not the kind of thing you want to say in Hollywood.

• 1:28:31Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:28:32Speaker 00

  But this is not my problem anymore because I have fled the coop.

• 1:28:35Rick Rubin?

  Did your relationship with Sumner continue after you left?

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  He fired me on a Labor Day weekend. He liked to fire people on holiday weekends. He fired Frank on a Fourth of July. He fired Mel on a Memorial Day. I used to say, "If I can make it through Labor Day, I'm good for another year." But sure enough, he called me on Labor Day. I had been playing tennis up in Malibu. And I came back, I had all these messages on my machine, like, "Where the fuck are you?" But anyway, I went over there. I knew I was gonna get fired because I called the head of lawyer who worked for me, a general counsel. He said, "Well, you better call Sumner. He's looking for you." I can say, "I can see so, yeah." I said, "Is this the ultimate conversation, Mike?" He goes, "Well, I'll leave that up to Sumner." So I knew then I was getting fired.

• 1:29:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  So he told me, "I've got bad news for you and me." Sit down on an ottoman across from him in his Franklin Canyon home. "And the bad news is the board wants me to fire you." And I just got up and left. That was it. And I didn't see him for years till I saw him at a restaurant. And he came over and grabbed me at the shoulders. And I said hello, but then I never really had a relationship with him after that. I couldn't believe that would happen. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

• 1:29:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Now I'm off on another chapter.

• 1:29:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Rick Rubin?

  It seems like each of the things that maybe seemed like didn't go well always led to something more interesting after.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  Which leaves me to be blindly ambitious about some other thing going wrong. I've been very blessed to be born at the right time, when kind of figure you win the birth lottery being born in the United States in the middle of the 20th century as a white guy.

• 1:30:14Rick Rubin?

  Did you learn about yourself at all through writing the book?

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about that.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  I had always been going so fast, Rick. I never really had time to pull back and look. I wasn't stripping things out. And I realized this all seemed like it was almost part of a master plan. Everything kind of led perfectly from one thing to another with the timing being right. And the values that I developed and learned in these early years when I was either sort of king of the road bartending around or working and living in really tumultuous Asia in those years, really equipped me really well when paired up with my passion for music and whatnot for my job at MTV Networks and Viacom. And then, when I left, I thought I'd, rather than take a big job at another company, I'd do a bunch of things with people that I liked. And I did a thing with Oprah.

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  Bono called me to run the ONE campaign in Red, and that got me back into Africa, which I love to do. And I had been really affected by extreme poverty in my years in Asia. And so I was really excited to do that. I've been the board chair there for 18 years. I went back to Afghanistan for 12 years. So the Taliban sort of put a video out about me, and I said it wasn't safe to go back.

• 1:31:28Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Rick Rubin?

  That's wild.

• 1:31:31Speaker 00

  Well, they said I was the teacher of Saad Mosany, who runs this godless bunch of television networks. And I was a CIA spy in Afghanistan in the 70s, which I said I should not, probably shouldn't go back for a while.

• 1:31:48Rick Rubin?

  When are expertise and experience negatives?

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  I think they could be negatives when you're dealing with a new thing. If you're dealing with something that could be new and innovative, you might bring a little too much of that with you that could cloud your...

• 1:32:05Rick Rubin?

  The old way, yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 00

  Cloud your ideas. That's why John Lack said to me, "We're looking for people with no experience in television."

• 1:32:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  "Let's hire a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing, who are smart and entrepreneurial. And if you have too much expertise and experience, you could get a little full of yourself anyway."

• 1:32:23Rick Rubin?

  Think you know something.

• 1:32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you lose your humility.

• 1:32:26Rick Rubin?

  Dangerous. How would you compare MTV to Sesame Street?

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  Well, they both went after discreet audiences and that's all they did. I mean, for kids and Sesame Street was distinctly pro-social on top of being really cleverly animated. We did a Sesame Street deal in Afghanistan.

• 1:32:46Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:32:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, we got the Sesame Street thing. We did a whole version in Farsi.

• 1:32:52Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  And we had to add a couple of other characters. We couldn't keep the count because in Afghanistan, they don't like vampires. But they were self-contained creative units, so they were quite similar. They created most of their programming themselves. In the case of MTV, yes, we licensed music videos, but the bulk of the other stuff we did ourselves. And we relied on a cast of characters and we were on for long periods of time.

• 1:33:23Rick Rubin?

  And I feel like there's some parallel there in just how new Sesame Street was when it came out and how new MTV was when it came out. And they were both doing things in a new way and both had this meteoric rise.

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  In both cases, you would say, why didn't someone think of that earlier?

• 1:33:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  Such an obvious thing.

• 1:33:43Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the difference between entrepreneurs, which you were before you got into corporate life, and the mentality of the corporate people.

• 1:33:52Speaker 00

  Entrepreneurs will look for openings, will move quickly, do not thrive well in really structured organizations. They're generally good at people picking and they have a lot of energy, whereas if you're in a big corporation, you're like, you're not necessarily a cog in a machine. It depends how the corporation's set up, but it's a less lively life and it's more procedural and more drawn out. Things don't move as fast. Something's in development or we're going to put it in turnaround or let me ask so-and-so. Let's have a meeting. There's a lot of meetings when you're in a corporate life. Where if you're around entrepreneurs, they don't like a lot of meetings. If they have them, they want them to be quick.

• 1:34:32Rick Rubin?

  And it sounds like the example of throwing your hat in the ring for comedy was not a typical corporate move.

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  No, and we always was conscious of that. Like, how do we maintain, be a spry entrepreneurial company that can improvise and take risks and not be something stuck in its past? Let's continue to reinvent whatever we're doing and let's just try new things. Let's take risks. And let's not be a stodgy old company. Let's not have a dress code. Let's not do a lot of things that regular companies do. If we have a Christmas party, let's make it really wild.

• 1:35:06Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Vice.

• 1:35:08Speaker 00

  Ah, Vice. When I was the CEO of Viacom, Spike Jones came to me with two guys from Vice, Shane Smith and Eddie Moretti. And Spike, who I loved, was a great source. He brought us the Jackass Gang way back. He loved all these kind of genre magazines and marginal people and looking around. So he thought the Vice guys were great. And they were, at the time, trying to do a deal with MTV for some kind of digital thing and they were having troubles. And they thought that the MTV guys didn't get it. So they went to Spike and Spike said, well, look, maybe let me get you a meeting with Tom. Maybe we can break the logjam. So they come into my office and they sit down and they tell me what they're doing.

• 1:35:52Speaker 00

  And Spike says, you know, these guys are like, they're like the truffle pigs of Cool. They're on the edge, they're doing stuff nobody else is doing. They have their eye out, they're entrepreneurs, they built a business, they want to migrate it up to a bigger level. And Shane got up and made a presentation and he said, you know, we're all the trouble spots. We think that the birth of YouTube is the biggest thing to happen. This is like the same year YouTube debuted. You know, they're going to need content. And I'm thinking in the back of my head, well, I need content. I need someone who can make content for me that's compelling and doesn't cost a fortune.

• 1:36:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 00

  I mean, the people at MTV now, some of them have agents. It's really gotten inflated and bureaucratized in a way. So these guys were raw entrepreneurs. They operated lean. They were doing things in places I really cared about. So they said, we got a video we'll show you. So they showed me this video and on the cover of the video was an Afghan truck. The video consisted of three segments they had done. They had gone to this border town between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which used to sell all opium and hashish and now sells weapons. And they're in there shooting off AK-47s and doing all this gonzo stuff, dressed up like Afghans. And I'm thinking, this is hilarious. And then they go to Chernobyl and they're going to go around looking for werewolves with weapons.

• 1:37:14Speaker 00

  This is before the Ukraine war, obviously.

• 1:37:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Speaker 00

  And they have cocktails with them. And then they have one about like, we're visiting pygmies in the Congo. I go, this is weird stuff. So, okay, let's do a separate deal on your video business. We'll call it vbs.tv. That would be it. And you keep your magazine business as it is. I said, we would fund it and I did it and then I got fired. So I'm gone. They didn't get along at all with my successor. Shane is a character. Meanwhile, in 2009, three years after I left, I get a text from Shane. He goes, Tommy Gunn, he used to call me, we need to have some drinks. Meet me in Williamsburg. So I'm like, I go over and meet him in Williamsburg. I said, what has happened since we last chatted? They've built a business.

• 1:38:01Speaker 00

  They built this suite of digital channels. They're getting millions of views. They have a library of the weirdest stuff you can imagine. He was with Eddie Moretti again. And when I came into the bar, it was like I had three shots of tequila in front of me. It was at a place in Williamsburg. He goes, say hello to your three little friends, drink those and we'll talk. So it was that kind of night. And then I remember they took me to a restaurant and then next thing they threw me into a black car. We go to The Box. Everybody at The Box, you would think the President of the United States showed up. I'm thinking, who are these guys, man? So anyway, well, we're trying to really amp up the business now. Why don't you come on board, help us raise some money? And I got them involved with this company, Rain. Got them like 20, 30 million dollars from Rain.

• 1:38:45Speaker 00

  And they put me on the board, made me an advisor. And I got, I said, this is fun. This reminds me of me in the old days. This really remind me in the day Shane was surrounded by all these bearded guys living in these warehouses in Brooklyn with, they all had the gold vice ring. So I really enjoyed it. They wanted to start a TV network, which I told them was a mistake. Shane was a hard person to be a mentor to. He's an amazing salesperson, but he was transfixed with doing deals. Deals, deals, deals, deals, deals. I mean, we had deals with News Corporation, we had deals with Disney. I mean, I had all A and E invested, all these Silicon Valley people invested. People kept investing money in this thing. And he huffed and puffed it and blew it up like no one else could have, but then it just

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  kind, they had an opportunity to sell it to Disney and they blew it. Then for more money, they did a deal with TPG, this really tough-as-nails private equity company. And they basically borrowed a lot of money that they said was an investment, but they had to pay like a high interest rate and kind of put the company into a death spiral. And people began to leave and it was not a happy ending.

• 1:39:49Rick Rubin?

  But you were attracted to getting back to the counterculture.

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  Exactly. And not getting back to doing a good job at it.

• 1:39:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  Look, Shane, for all his faults, he had an amazing amount of good points. I mean, he really wanted to inform a younger generation about what was going on in the rest of the world that they had largely ignored.

• 1:40:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Speaker 00

  This was a part of the world that I was heavily emotionally invested in and had spent time in. I had them get the deal at HBO. Went and took them to Plepler and Plepler signed them up, brought in Farisa Kari, brought in Bill Maher and that really put them on.

• 1:40:19Rick Rubin?

  And that was one of the most popular shows on HBO.

• 1:40:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we ran it for six years. Then we got Josh Triangle to come in and be the producer.

• 1:40:25Rick Rubin?

  He's great too.

• 1:40:26Speaker 00

  Josh is great. So all of this was going great until there was just an over ask and over focus on deals. And all of a sudden, we're not operating like an entrepreneurial outfit. It's like a thing where we're pissing away a lot of money, wasting a lot of time, spending money on things you shouldn't be spending money on. And someone wants to buy you and you over-negotiate it and goodbye. But it was a fun ride.

• 1:40:52Rick Rubin?

  I bet.

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  I mean, a lot of billions of dollars were lost.

• 1:40:56Rick Rubin?

  How does corporate culture eventually undermine successful creative ventures?

• 1:41:02Speaker 00

  It does if the corporate culture is the wrong culture. You know, your corporate culture, if it's one that stays nimble and respects creativity and isn't involved in just trying to grow a tree to the sky. And if you have a healthy culture and in that company are a lot of creative people and there's a line outside your door of young people who want to come work there, you've got a culture that can continue to work. The problem has been, is companies that existed like that, which you saw a lot of in the record business. You had a lot of these independent labels like Island and A and M and they all got gobbled up into these rollups. So now, when we started MTV, there was 40 record companies, sellers, two and a half.

• 1:41:43Speaker 00

  I don't think that's been good for creativity because everybody now is facing this thing about earnings. Our earnings have to be up there. We can't have a lot of mistakes. Puts a lot of pressure on people, which causes people to slow down. A lot of the creative cultures kind of tended to fade away because the places that had them, that we knew, got assimilated into larger public companies where all of a sudden you're playing now by public company rules.

• 1:42:11Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely. And it sounds like you were lucky that over the years, even in your corporate situations, there'd be someone like Frank Piondi that you resonated with and they allowed you to do your thing.

• 1:42:23Speaker 00

  Right. Because two things would happen, like Frank was a good and smart guy and he knew we were doing something he didn't fully understand, but it was working.

• 1:42:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Speaker 00

  And it was the same with Mel Karmazin, who had a reputation as a really hard-ass business guy running radio stations. But he also kind of let us go with a light hand. Even if you're delivering good results, there's a probability that you're going to get a boss who says, well, I want to get in there, roll up my sleeves. That's sort of what happened when I left. I'm going to roll up my sleeves and see, do we really need Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Do we really need two of those guys? You start hearing stuff like that and you know, everybody's going to leave.

• 1:43:00Rick Rubin?

  Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

• 1:43:06Speaker 00

  I guess I didn't believe when I was young that the world was going to change the way it has. I was unable to foresee some of the big geopolitical shifts and things. I think part of that was just that I was young. I didn't believe that you could get a job in the entertainment business and have such fun. I didn't believe that I could have a career that actually would be fun and adventurous. I always thought that growing up and getting out of school and getting a grown-up job was going to consign me to a life of conformity and being the organization man. It wouldn't be as joyful. But it turned out that wasn't true.

• 1:44:07Speaker 06

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

• 1:44:22Speaker 05

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin?

• 1:44:26Speaker 05

  Counter-culture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The Tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics? 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. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

• 1:45:09Speaker 05

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath, and see where you are drawn.