In Search Of Excellence - Bob Pittman: How a Kid With a Glass Eye Became A Radio Star and Founded MTV at Age 27 | E40

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Bob Pittman desperately needed $10 for his first flying lesson but was turned down for a job at a retail store and another at Piggly Wiggly. Refusing to take no for an answer, he walked into his local radio station and managed to snag a position that paid $1.65 an hour – never imagining that this perseverance would set him up to become not only a pilot, but the co-founder and former CEO of MTV Networks, COO of AOL Time Warner, CEO of Six Flags, CEO of Century 21, and a co-founder and CEO of iHeartMedia – the leading audio company in the United States whose broadcast reaches over 250 million Americans every month. In this episode, Randall and Bob discuss:- Bob’s experience growing up in the segregated South- Leaving your comfort zone to identify problems and find solutions- How Bob’s passion for aviation led him to the radio industry- The necessity (or not) of a college degree- Moving a company from a $20 million operating loss to turning a profit within 18 months- How companies can create a brand without spending millions on marketing- Why success and failure are the same thing- The critical importance of marketing- The great opportunities in working for a company nobody’s ever heard of- 3 key elements to success- And other topics…Bob Pittman is a rockstar radio and TV programmer, marketer, investor, and media entrepreneur. He is currently co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of iHeartMedia, the leading audio company in the United States. iHeartMedia owns 863 radio stations, reaches over 250 million people every month, and had $3.85 billion in revenues over the last 12 months.Bob is also the former COO of AOL Time Warner after its $180 billion merger, the former CEO of Six Flags Theme Parks, the former CEO of Century 21 Real Estate, and the former CEO of Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the world's largest outdoor advertising companies. He is a founding member of the Pilot Group, a New York-based private investment firm whose investments include Huffington Post, Zynga, and Facebook. Bob is also a co-founder of Casa Dragones Tequila, a host of a podcast called Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Market, and is also a dedicated philanthropist among many other organizations.Resources Mentioned:Incognito, by David EaglemanNew York’s Public TheaterRock and Roll Hall of FameTime Magazine’s Man of the YearSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

One of the things I tell kids today, young people, is look around at a lot of things. Passion isn't something you plan. It comes out of nowhere. You know, you're going to spend more time at work than you are spending the money you make at work. So you ought to have something at work that you love. Some people do stuff that makes them a lot of money. Some people do things that barely pay the bills.

But whatever you're doing, you should do things that barely pay the bills. But whatever you're doing, you should do something that you really enjoy doing. Welcome to A Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings. We all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there.

My guest today is Bob Pittman. Bob is a rock star radio and TV programmer, marketer, investor, and media entrepreneur who has had multiple careers in a number of consumer-focused industries. He is the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of iHeart Media, the leading audio company in the United States. iHeart owns 863 radio stations, reaches over 250 million people every month, and had $3.85 billion in revenues over the last 12 months. Bob is a former CEO of Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the world's largest outdoor advertising companies, the former co-founder and CEO of MTV Networks, the former COO of AOL Time Warner after

its $180 billion merger, the former CEO of Six Flags Theme Parks, the former CEO of Century 21 Real Estate, the founding member of The Pilot Group, a New York-based private investment firm, and a co-founder of Casa Dragones Tequila. Bob is the host of a podcast called Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, and is also a dedicated philanthropist among many other organizations. He's the former chairman of New York's Public Theater, the former chairman and current board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, and a board member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He's won too many industry awards to name. In 1984, he was a runner-up for Time Magazine's Man of the Year. Bob, it's a true pleasure to have you on my show. Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thank you. It's great to be here.

I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personalities, our values, and the preparation for our future. You were born in Jackson, Mississippi, then moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and then in junior high, you moved to Brookhaven, Mississippi, a town of 10,000 people. Your mom, Lenita, was a schoolteacher, and your dad, Warren, was a Methodist minister in the executive branch of the church. He was what is called the district superintendent, where he presided over a group of churches and moved ministers in and out of the churches, which led you to have an interesting childhood, which required you to move at least five times when you were young, all to locations in southern Mississippi, which was

racially segregated at the time. Your parents were very educated, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes, and you had no money. You lived in a warm, loving, and nurturing house where it was about ideas and caring about other people. You couldn't say the word hate, which you didn't even know until you were much older how unusual that was. The worst you ever heard your mother say about somebody was, I wonder why they want to be that way. You said you couldn't have asked for a better childhood and that if there was such a thing as a parental lottery, you would have won it. Can you tell us about the influence your parents had on your life, your dad's mission to fight segregation, how the KKK came after your dad a few times,

some of the atrocities you saw as a kid, what happened to your mother's cousin and the conversation you had with your mother 30 years later after watching an NPR special on the civil rights movement, and in search of excellence, how important is it not to sit by silently and have the courage to stand up for what's right, even if we're going to face negative consequences, and even possibly when it may put you or your family's life in jeopardy? Well, I think you've covered a lot there, so let me start with it. I think, as you mentioned, I didn't realize what an unusual household I had until I got older.

I never saw, in the entire time I lived in the household, I never saw my parents fight. They disagreed, but they had very civil discussions about their disagreements. They may have been frustrated, but they kept talking, and they worked through everything. And I lived in a household that valued ideas, had strong values of right and wrong, and felt the need to be in service to others. I think that's the reason my dad was a minister. My mother was from a farm family, seven kids, and was always in service of others. I don't think my mother ever asked for something for herself, but was always asking what others needed. And I think, you know,

the lesson you take out of that is the richness of life is not getting stuff. The richness of life is giving stuff. That when you help someone, when you're worrying about someone else, you have no time to be bothered about anything going wrong in your own life. I grew up in, as you pointed out, in the segregated South, born in the 1950s, grew up in the 50s and 60s. And everything that happened in the civil rights movement really happened in that period of time in the South. When I started school, there were colored-onlys and white-only bathrooms, schools, absolutely blatant and oppressive segregation. By the time I graduated from high school, my class was 50-50 white-black. So everything happened then. And there were a lot of people that made that happen.

Certainly, you have to start with the black community, which I think, you know, under some spectacular leadership, really began to push for the rights they certainly deserved and thought they should have and had. I think there were people, the white community, who realized this was a horrible injustice. And not only is there shame in being a part of that community, but also an idea of what do you do to change it? And was there a lot of resistance to change? Absolutely. Although it's interesting, you know, I was talking to some people in the civil rights movement many years later, and they were saying, actually, the biggest problem were not the absolute racists, because they could just take them head on.

The worst were people who say, yes, you're right, but let's just take some time, and said that was the biggest problem they faced. And I think this sense of urgency was very important, and one that my dad took as one of his great missions and his head of the districts and the churches and his role as a minister. It goes back to when John Kennedy was assassinated. My dad volunteered to go on the local radio station to say a prayer for him, and the people at the radio station said, don't give your name. You'll be in danger, which seems crazy. And there were two parts of the Methodist Church, which was very organized, two conferences that were actually in the same

geographic location. One was black and one was white. And my dad led the fight to integrate the two. And I remember as a young kid, I had this memory of this little red book he kept reading all the time called Robert's Rules of Order. And my dad understood that when make it sound like my dad was the only one. But there was this group of people that just said, look, it's time. This has to come to an end. You can't take more time. We can't keep delaying this. Even if you think it's wrong, then let's do something about it right now. You mentioned my mother's first cousin, who she grew up with very close. I think they actually lived in the same household for a while, was the school superintendent in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which obviously plays a very big role in the civil rights movement, if you remember the awful events there. He threw a Klansman's child out of school for harassing some black students. And one weekend, they came and shot up my mother's cousin's

daughter's bedroom. Now, fortunately, she happened to be gone and was visiting someone else. But I think it put him in this position of not knowing what to do to protect his family and having that in conflict with what he knew was the right thing to do. And sadly, he wound up committing suicide. So there were many stories going on in this age, and I think, of course, the unsung heroes of this were probably the little church ladies who you would think would not have any power, but they absolutely were ferocious and were standing up for what they thought was the right thing to do. And it was very hard for these racists to fight these little old ladies, because the little old ladies had enormous standing in the community, and they really honestly didn't give a shit.

And so, you know, it was an interesting time to see these various people come up and see the impact they had in this world. And fortunately, it got on, you know, certainly we're not where we need to be in America. But boy, if you want to talk about awful, whatever we have today is a zillion times better than what we had then. And it was, you know, as I look back on it, sort of the embarrassment and shame of having lived in that world. You mentioned my mother.

My mother was in New York. I think it was the early 90s that PBS had a great show on the civil rights movement. And my mother and I were watching it every night. And one night my mother turned to me in tears and just said, I can't for the life of me figure out how we let that go on. And that stuck with me because it always reminds me that when you're sort of born into something or something's always happened, it's sometimes not easy to see the injustice or the wrong in it because it's the comfort zone and that you have to constantly get out of the comfort zone. And I think even in business, there are things we do that are wrong and aren't right. And just at what point do you realize that's not right? I think we saw a lot with the Me Too movement and thought there were a lot of people that there's things going on in the workplace that people accept that as normal,

that they shouldn't have, but they accept it as normal because it had always gone on. And I just think for all of us, we need just to tune our ears and our eyes up a little bit to make sure we see things as they're happening. When you were six years old, you were at a family reunion at Thanksgiving at a little farm outside of Holly Springs, Mississippi, and one of your uncles put you on a horse. He was giving all the kids rides, and the horse reared up, threw you off, and stepped on your face. You lost an eye, but you were very lucky the horse didn't kill you. You were the kid with the glass eye. The kids were extraordinarily cruel and made fun of you. Having an artificial eye made you a bit of an outsider. The experience of feeling like an outsider gave you a little bit

of detachment that allowed you to develop some empathy. In addition to your glass eye, you were also painfully skinny like your dad. You were six feet tall and 120 pounds. There are a lot of kids out there who are bullied. 20% of the students in the United States are victims of bullying, most of which happens in middle school. Like you, I was badly bullied as a kid because I had a serious stuttering problem. Can you tell us how being bullied had a profound influence in your life and in search of excellence? What's your advice to those of us who have experienced serious hardships in our early childhood, who in contrast to your thinking that

their hardships have helped them or been good experiences for them, instead look at them as being a major factor or the one factor that has prevented them from either improving their position of life or reaching success? Well, I think the big picture is that there's something good that comes out of everything. And there's some lesson in everything. And there's something, some twist of fate and twist of life. I do think some people have problems and then they see themselves as victims and become paralyzed or they learn something from it. And for me, I wouldn't be the marketer I am. I wouldn't be the programmer I am.

I wouldn't have that sense of the consumer if I weren't an outsider. If something hadn't pushed me out to where I was on the outside looking in, examining people. And I do think that probably put me on a path I would have never been on had I not had that accident. And it does give me an enormous amount of empathy, which I think helps me in personal relationships. The downside in personal relationships, I do feel like an outsider, so I have to work very hard to not be detached, but to climb in as well. When you were younger, your grandfather ran a lumber mill for a very wealthy family in southern Mississippi. The company he worked for had its own plane. Your grandfather's nephew was a corporate pilot, and he also flew for Delta Airlines. Your grandfather could use a plane,

whatever he wanted, but would never get on an airplane. But when you went to visit him in Peking, Mississippi, he would take you to the airport to entertain you, let you crawl all over the airplanes, and look at them and watch them take off and land. From that point on, you were obsessed with airplanes. So when you were 15 years old, you told your parents that you wanted to get a pilot's license, and they told you you'd better find a job. You tried to get a job at the hip place, a men's clothing store named Jack's Shop, where all the kids hung out

after school, but they said you were too young to work there. Then you tried to get a high-paying job in town, which was bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, but they had no jobs. Then you walked into a radio station in Brookhaven, Mississippi, where a guy named Bill Jones had a little daytime show on the radio station that signed off when the sun went down. He asked you if you had good grades and you said they were pretty good. Then he asked you if you got into trouble and you said no. Then he said, come in here. He put you in a room with a tape recorder and a microphone and asked you to read the news of the day off of something called the teletype machine, which was a device that could send and receive type messages through various communication channels. It was an audition. You do it and he listens to it and tells you he wants you to go to New Orleans to get your third class radio

telephone operator's license so you could run the transmitter they were using. And you did it and you finally got a job as a part-time disc jockey. Your pay was $1.65 an hour. In those days, 1968, you could rent an airplane for $10 an hour. We're going to talk about the start of your radio career in a few minutes, but before we do, let's freeze frame it here. The distance between Brookhaven and New Orleans isn't like driving 15 to 30 minutes across town to your tutor. It's 134 miles each way, a two-hour drive, meaning four hours for a round tripper. I think I'm a pretty good parent. I support my kids in whatever they do. I have five kids. I encourage them to pursue their dreams and passions.

But I might hesitate on this one for practical reasons, given the logistical difficulties, unless it was maybe during the summer. But even then, 15 years old, I don't know. In search of excellence on a scale of 1 to 10,000, how important is it to have passion when we're trying to achieve not only our professional goals, but our personal goals? And what's your advice to those who don't have the kind of passion

you did when you were 15 years old and also don't have it when you're 25, 35, or 45 years old and are worried about or definitively think that you're never going to have the kind of passion that will give them the courage and the motivation to pursue and achieve their dreams. You know, I think you find passion. And for me, I wasn't passionate about radio. I was passionate about airplanes. Radio was a job. And oh, by the way, in those days, and remember, we're in the rural South.

The reason so many people have pilot's license, because it was really far to everywhere. No one thought anything about driving to Memphis, driving to New Orleans, unlike people who live in an urban setting. So that was sort of normal. But I think the passion for me came from, I found a job and that was going to pay for flying lessons. Oh, by the way, I not only was the part-time disc jockey, I also washed planes at the airport. I would pump gas. I would do bets, like the instructor who said, if you can take off this tail drag without running into the runway lights, I'll give you an hour of free instruction. So I did everything to get flying lessons,

but I developed a passion for it. And it's one of the things I tell kids today, young people, is look around at a lot of things. Passion isn't something you plan. It comes out of nowhere. And somehow I got really, really interested in radio. And the bug bit me. And it's interesting. I look back now.

I was 20 years old when I was hired at NBC in Chicago, WMAQ. And I think it's five years earlier, I was a part-time disc jockey in Brookhaven, Mississippi. How on earth did that happen? You get lucky breaks, but part of a lucky break is to know to take it, to know to do it, and follow that. And in the 20s, I think 20s are about people trying a lot of things until something hits them and they go, oh, I love doing this. You know, you're going to spend more time at work than you are spending the money you make at work. So you ought to have something at work that you love. I've often described to my kids, my work, it's like a giant video game. I can't wait to get up in the morning and start playing. At the end of the day, I don't want to put it away. And I think that's what we're in search of in whatever

we do. And some people do stuff that makes them a lot of money. Some people do things that barely pay the bills. Some have to do multiple things. But whatever you're doing, you should do something that you really enjoy doing. And I look at my age, work is my golf. My friends go out and golf. I like to run and futz around with work stuff. That that is a real passion and a real stimulation and just arouses my curiosity and gives me a place to focus it. You got your license at 15 and flying has remained one of your passions in life. You've been a pilot for almost 50 years and have flown more than 6,000 flight hours. You have an airport transport pilot's license. You're also rated for helicopters and three types of jets. And after you became

successful, you bought your own planes and your own helicopter. Football is the most popular sport in America. And if you know anything about the game, you know the quarterback is the most important player on any team, and that the best quarterbacks can see the entire playing field, which allows them not only to better execute a game plan, but also to make split-second adjustments on their play calling depending on what they see. Did seeing things from many thousands of feet in the air at a young age and over the course of your life from the sky give you a different perspective in life and a vision of where you wanted to go by allowing you to see things others couldn't? And if so, how has your ability to see things from that unique perspective influenced your success?

I think the biggest problem we always have is opening up our blinders and seeing bigger things and the bigger picture. Flying for me has always been great because when I fly, I've had to forget about everything else. It clears my brain. It's almost like meditation for me. And if I'm really in a scary situation, bad weather, right down the minimums, I really have to focus. And so I think those pieces of my day or my life of being able to just shut off all the stress, all the other stuff that I think is important to me and just focus on one thing is really good. What it also allowed me to do is I saw the country. I would fly, as planes got bigger and bigger, I'd fly New York to LA.

But the planes I had, it took me about two days to get to Los Angeles. And I had about six or seven fuel stops along the way. And I would usually invite friends, hey, you want to fly to LA with me? Come on, it'd be a great trip, like road tripping. And we would stop in these little towns and I'd borrow a crew car, which most FBOs have, fixed-based operators, where you get your gas. So while they're filling me up, I'd head to town and just sort of look around the little town. Maybe I'd grab a bite to eat, come back to the airport and just have this wonderful road trip stories from all sorts of places. And the people I met, the people who flew with me, and I would try not to stop in the same places multiple times. I'd try and stop in

different places to see more of the country. And I think that part of flying was great because I got to see and hear and feel so many different things. I also rode motorcycles a lot when I was a young guy and did enormous road trips. In 92, I did my first cross-country trip in New York, San Francisco, and the group of guys I rode with, we called ourselves the Bridge Club because we went from the George Washington Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge. We took mainly two-lane highways. We rode 10 hours a day, rode like maniacs, just would be exhausted at the end of the day and had such a great time.

But we got to see so many people and see so many things. And one thing you realize is every human being has at least one good story. And if you only see somebody one time, everybody's interesting. And we had so many interesting experiences along the way. And I had to push everything out of my brain and I had to clear my mind to just be ready for whatever would happen. And that to me was a very cleansing experience, just like flying. So flying and motorcycles were my way of doing it. Plus they combined my curiosity, which I got through all the road tripping. This episode of In Search of Excellence is brought to you by Sandy.com. S-A-N-D-E-E.com. We are a Yelp for beaches and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world,

more than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. Sandy.com provides beach goers around the world with detailed, comprehensive, and easy-to-use information to help them plan their perfect beach getaway at home and abroad, and to make sure you're never disappointed by a beach visit again. Plan the perfect beach trip today by visiting sandy.com. That's W-W-W dot S-A-N-D-E-E dot com. The link is in our show notes. Stay sandy, my friends. I want to talk about the importance of education, which I think is one of the most important ingredients to our future success. I want to start that with the start of your career and mix that in together. Your parents greatly valued education. They were college graduates, and at that time,

only 2% of the households in Mississippi had both parents with college degrees, and only 1% had graduate degrees. For those of us who go to college, the normal path is 99% of us enter the working world and get a paid job after we graduate. You were in the other 0.1%, probably 0.01%. After graduating Brookhaven High School, you went to college your freshman year in Jackson, Mississippi. They had a big underground radio station there, 102.9 Stereo Rock, that went all the way from Memphis to New Orleans. When you showed up on campus as a freshman, people knew who you were, which was sort of cool and sort of surprised you. You worked at a couple of stations in Jackson. That's when the radio bug hit you. You worked at 102.9 and then went to top 40 station,

WRBC. And then in the summer after your freshman year, you got a job in Milwaukee with the intention that you'd go back to Mississippi for your sophomore year. But that never happened. The station's competitor had a sister station, WDRQ in Detroit. I'm from Detroit. I love that station. I grew up with it. And they hired you as a full-time research director. So you went there. At that point, you're making more money than your dad. And after that, someone convinced you to let you program a station to be on the air at WPEZ in Pittsburgh, where you also became the program director. At this point, you're having a lot of success and you're only 19.

In Pittsburgh, your boss's boss got fired and he went to work at WNBC in Chicago. And after he got there, he called you and asked you if you wanted to go there and program that station. He said they were changing your music to country. And you told him you didn't know anything about country music. And he told you that you'd figure it out, which you did. You built one of the biggest country stations in the US. It was a huge win for you. It was an AM station. Then they gave you the FM station, which played rock music. At this point, you're 20 years

old. You stayed there for three years. And then they sent you to WNBC AM in New York to fix problems they were having at that station. You're there a few months, then you got some starring roles in the station's TV commercials and also on a late-night rock TV show. Now, you're only 23, and you're on a rocket ship to what seemed like an amazing career in programming. Your status as a rising star also had other perks. At that point, the incredible and famous Studio 54 nightclub was in full swing, and you were enough of a minor celebrity to get on the VIP list when you needed to and which you loved. Let's freeze frame it here and focus on the education part of the story. During the years you were moving from city to city and working for different radio stations and killing it,

you were still going to college here and there. You bounced between four different universities, including the University of Pittsburgh and Oakland University, which is located in the suburbs of Detroit, very close to where I grew up. But you never graduated, which isn't that unusual. 66.2% of high school graduates go to college, 19.4 million of those in total, 19.4 million students in total. And of these, 1.9 million are full-time students to 7.5 million are part-time students. The average cost for a student living on campus at a public four-year in-state institution is $25,770 a year or $102,828 a year over four years. And it's nearly double that for private colleges. Nearly 64% of all college students take out loans with the average loan structure to be

paid off in 10 years, but they don't take 10 years to pay off. The average loan is $29,719, and it actually takes 21 years on average to pay off, which means that when you graduate, you're expecting to pay off your debt by the time you're 32, but the reality is that you may not pay it off until your mid-40s. In search of excellence, how important is going to college to not only our future success in business, but also our personal growth as young adults? What's your advice to those who, regardless of the cost, don't think they needed to be successful? My dad had really good advice for me. He said, stop this radio thing. Stop working. Just go to college for four

years. It's the only time in your life you're going to have no responsibility, and you've got independence, and you're going to think of a lot of things that are important to developing you. Obviously, I didn't listen to him. And I think that education is great. I think anything that opens our minds is great. I do really worry about the cost of college. And I think there are many kids who go to college who don't need to go to college, don't want to go to college. They really just want a job. They'd be much better off in some certificate program, some training program for IT or plumbing, electrician, whatever. There are plenty of wonderful ways to make a great living and have a

robust life without going to college. So I am not sure it's for everybody. And I think probably the world's sort of coming around to that point of view. Also, we can get educated without actually going to college today. The information, the resources, the courses are available in many other places other than a university. So you really wind up paying a lot for a diploma as opposed to the learning. I know plenty of tech folks who never graduated high school who are brilliant. And by the way, sit around and some of the best thinkers about big topics and big discussions and read dense scientific information. So clearly they

didn't need to go to college to do that. But I do think it is this interesting transition period between being a part of a family where you are under someone else's control and where you discover your own independence, which is your future as an adult. I think sort of as a corollary to that, I do worry mightily about how kids today find their independence because so much of that transition period is proving to yourself that you're not your parents. It's one of the reasons we like to rebel and we'd like our parents to say, what? That's terrible. You can't wear that. What did you do to your hair? Oh, I hate your friends. Those are all signals to us when we're young people that, oh, good, I'm not my parents.

But when I left home from Mississippi to Milwaukee, my parents had no idea what was going on in Milwaukee. There was no Google Maps. There was no internet. They knew nothing about Milwaukee unless it hit the national news. And long distance phone calls were very expensive. So we did one every two weeks for a couple of minutes because it was expensive. And I saw my parents maybe once or twice a year. And other than that, I was on my own. I could do anything and they would never hear about it. We had nothing in common. My mother would write me a letter once a week of news from home, and that was it. Today, my kids, my two younger kids are in college. My older son is in Spain.

And by the way, I can track them on my phone because we have, you know, the find me on it. So I see where they are at any one moment. We have a constant text, group text going about everything going on. Oh, I missed my flight. Oh, I had going about everything going on. Oh, I missed my flight. Oh, I had this. Oh, can you do this? What restaurant should I go to? And we're all helping each other. But I worry, how do they get their independence out of that? And not just my kids, but all kids. Now, I've worried about that. And then someone reminded me that probably until the 1920s or 30s, that's actually the way all households function,

is they did do everything together and they knew everything and no one had any independence. So it was only 30 or 40, 50 years maybe that there was this idea of independence from your family. Maybe we're just going back to it. Going back to your career, you're a rising star working at WNBC Radio when a few of your mentors, including Dick Eppersall, who later became president of NBC Sports, and Lorne Michaels, who created and still produces Saturday Night Live, and Herb Schlosser, who was then the president of NBC, all recruited you to a company called Warner MX Satellite Entertainment Corporation. They were starting a programming company to create specialized cable networks, and they wanted you to help create

it. Many of our listeners, most of our listeners are too young and won't be able to relate to this, but at the time, only 18 to 20% of the country had cable television. And as crazy as this sounds today, at that point, no basic TV network had ever succeeded. Not a single one had ever made money. There was a real question mark as to whether any advertising-supported basic cable network could ever be profitable. The company had an idea to launch a new cable channel that featured music videos, sort of a video radio station. There were a lot of challenges with doing this. Among many, there were only about 250 music videos that had ever been made at the time, which wasn't enough to have a channel, but you made a calculated risk that if you played those 250 videos and MTV was a

success, the music industry would make more of them. And if you weren't successful, it didn't matter if they made any more videos because you were going out of business anyway. On August 1st, 1981, you launched MTV with 6 million cable subscribers. The first video you played was the song Video Killed the Radio Star by the British New Wave band Buggles, which is followed by You Better Run by Pat Benatar, number three, Wish You Won't Dance With Me by Rod Stewart, which is followed by You Better You Bet by The Who. MTV was a massive hit people loved and everybody wanted to watch it. But as expected, I lost money after you started. Advertising comes very slowly to any new medium or product. You projected $10 million in ad revenue for the

first year and only did $500,000 and almost went out of business. Two years after you started, you were given responsibility of reducing the network's $20 million operating loss to a $12 million loss. If you did, the network was going to pull the plug and shut it down. You did better than that. By the end of that year, MTV turned a profit and you were on your way to creating one of the most famous and iconic brands in history. It's 41 years old today and isn't what it used to be, but at its peak, it was seen in 350 million homes around the world in a total of 140 countries. There were a lot of factors that led to MTV's incredible success, but can you tell us about the shadows on people's faces and the

roles that scrappiness and originality played in its success? And in search of excellence, what's your advice to those starting new businesses or are working in businesses that have radical ideas, ideas that challenge every single rule of how things have been done for the last 50 years? How do we get the courage to try something different? Well, let me start. I'm going to correct you on one thing. Your research is fantastic, except Herb Schlosser was the big boss, ran NBC at the time, president

of NBC. Herb had a group of people who were sort of behind our back called Herb's Boys. Dick Ebersole was one. Lorne Michaels was one. I was one. There were three or four others. And Herb got kicked upstairs to RCA, and we all lost our mentor. And that's when Lorne left Saturday Night Live for that period of time. Dick left NBC, and I left to go to this new company called Warner MX Satellite Entertainment Corporation, which they recruited me to be their programming guy. And yes, we did launch MTV. It was projected to do 10 million in revenue, did 500,000. That sort of great consumer success, but dismal business failure got me the job as

the chief operating officer and the CEO eventually of MTV Networks. And we were, as you mentioned, the first profitable basic cable network. One of the important things about it, people say, oh man, great network. You had such a great idea. I go, what we really did that was so important is we figured out how to do TV on another cost basis. And we say, what's the lesson for entrepreneurs is cost matter and profit matters. I know we go through periods where we think earnings don't matter. They do. If you're not earning money, believe me, investors expect you to eventually earn money. And I think that that is one of the great lessons of MTV. When I was at NBC and doing the show Album Tracks, which ran after Saturday Night Live

on the NBC ONOs, we had a one tape operator. When I first started, you had two tape machine operators for every machine. They figured out how to do it with one operator per machine. They cut the engineers in half. When we launched MTV, we had one operator for 30 machines. We didn't want to cut it in half. We wanted to come up with an entirely new cost basis. And shadows on the face, people stepping in and out of light, Those were all things which cost a lot of money to get right. And the question I would have when people said, oh, well, we'll have shadows on face. Who cares?

And by the way, really, who cares if it's going to double and triple the cost of doing the show? And by the way, I think it made us look more real, made us look more human, made us look more of the moment. So I think for entrepreneurs, the idea is what are you really trying to essentially do? And what is not important? What's the noise? What are the old rules? What's got you hung up that you should pay no attention to or should discard? And the one thing, again, I think you can't discard is we're in business. Business is about making money, about creating value. You've got to have a business plan that makes money. And when you begin to deviate from that plan, if you're not making money, you need to figure out a way to

get it back on plan to make money. And eventually, that's what the world rewards in terms of the investors who are putting up the money. Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Bob Pittman, one of the most influential people in media, television, and radio during the last 30 years. Be sure to tune in next week to part two of my awesome conversation with Bob. you