SmartLess - "Tom Freston"

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Take the Jimmy Jet to Timbuktu: it’s Tom Freston. No experience in television, selling toilet paper, various red-light districts, and a Bob Marley ring-tone. It’s really good to be with you… on an all-new SmartLess. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of SmartLess ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's so good to be here with you guys today. It's so great to be here with you guys. It feels like it's been a while, no, it feels like it's been a while since I've said it's really good to be with you guys. It's really good to be with you guys. How are your headphones? Do they fit okay? Are they tight? My headphones?

Yeah, for the record today. Yeah. Everything feels pretty good. Wait, wait, you've got new headphones on, don't you shiny? I do, yeah. They're new. I might wear them out. I might wear them out.

Why? Because you want to look like Princess Leia? Yeah, I think they look cool. Wait, wait, wait, wait. This whole thing was a setup because you wanted compliments for your new headphones? Yeah. Well, did you want to mention the company or something like that? Is that what you're angling for?

I have no idea what the company is. Oh, wait, I just got a text. Welcome, it's an all-new smart list. Smart. How about I fixed myself? Guys, guys, it's about time. I know how to fix myself now. I saw you looking, I saw you looking, and then doing stuff.

And I actually saw you do the class. You literally went like this. Yeah, tap the lips. That's how the brain works. Audibly went. It's a button on the lips. By the way, J.B., you have ruined forever. I noticed it yesterday again.

And somebody commented on it, getting out of the car, I went, hui! Yeah. It tightens the core to make a little noise. Sean, do you do it now, too? I do it when I get in the car, too. He'll go, hui. Hei.

I realize I've been doing it since I was 35 because of you. We're all getting that old. Yeah. Yeah, so, well, this is, what number episode is this for us? We're north of 200, right? Ben and Rob, anybody? Over 250, I think. Yeah, we're in the two 80s now.

I can, no, really? I can now, I'm basically my own tech support now. I can, I know how to find the little... We don't need to tell you 290 times. You know, that's the good news. It is true. Out of the three of us, who has the most technical problems? Who gets, do we get to vote, or do you have to own up to?

I think I'm all right. I'll bet, I'll bet, Sean, you're worse because, you're able to because Scotty can catch you every time you find. I scream my head off if I'm like, I can't log on. Who has the least? The least problems? Yeah, technical. Tech problems.

Not problems. Not world problems. No, it's always you. Why is that? Because that's what you do for a living. Well, more probably used to the setup of the mic. Yeah, isn't that nice? That's sweet.

Well, and you also, you started, weren't you one of the original geek squad guys? I did do. I did. I still own the next. name what is it yeah yeah i still i did all the art i went to a dodgers game with jason a couple weeks ago you sure did and then we went to the u sc football game yeah you did and you had a decent we had a decent quarter there well yeah that was crazy we jason and i i had all the concessions that jason i was holding this guy looked like he was at a state fair yeah fuck it did it looked like i had like

old bessie had and two armfuls I had like a soft pretzel And Jason has a hot dog And his phone And I had all the drinks in the pretzels And the cheese dipping song I once described you as a soft pretzel That's funny

Just a knots all over Yeah But it sounds like you really live In your best life though But that was so embarrassing That was so fun But it was so embarrassing Because we somebody was in our seats

And then I felt like the whole stadium Was looking at us as we were just standing Yeah so you know You know you show up a little bit late And people spread out And they get in your seats and then you have to like, you have to, you show up at the aisle, and you're kind of in a half squat

because you don't want to, like, block the line behind you. And here come these big, these big dickhead actor. With all our groceries. Yeah. Totally. Right. And there was like, oh, you're going to kick these people out. I know.

But you have to, like, show proof of your tickets. And you remember, you used to pass your ticket down the aisle. It's so embarrassing. But now the tickets are on your phone. I used to love you. Tickets are on your phone. You got to, like, pass your phone down the end up. People are touching your phone.

You know, I don't like that, Willie. Right. And these guys, guess what? Here's the news. While he's eating his hot dog. Yeah, they wouldn't move. Yeah. No.

They're like, yeah, I see this as your ticket, but they told us to sit here. I'm like, who told you to sit? The usher. I said, well, I don't see the usher now. Well, you got to get them and tell them to move us. That's right. And then I'm so we had to sit on the stairs with our groceries and wait. I mean, oh, God, it was the word.

It took like 10 minutes. And then they finally got them out. And then they finally got out. Did it come to blows? Did it almost come to blows? A family of four were relocated. And just us two sat down And now we got two extra seats next to us

And we looked like super assholes And I ate my pretzel on the stairs And my cheese went everywhere Oh no You mean actual cheese Yeah It wasn't a result of eating the pretzel Made your cheese go everywhere

You created cheese No Okay We'll save that for Smartless after dark Which we still haven't gotten off the ground But I'm still working on the logo Which is funny because our guest today I said Smartless

He often refers to it as shameless And I know he's joking in his tongue and cheek Because I love him It is pretty shameless It is and this is a guy who is really You want to talk about live the life This guy's really lived the life Okay

Oh boy He starts out He's the pride of Connecticut Sort of He started out running a clothing company Out of Afghanistan and India No joke Back in like the early 70s

When nobody was over there He just I mean he's the kind of guy You'd find him on a night boat to Tangier That's the kind of duty he is Out of nowhere He comes back after running, literally trying to avoid tariffs

and running clothing illegally across the St. Loris into upstate New York. He then decides he's going to change everything, and he goes and he starts to create, he creates this thing that literally changed the way that we saw, music, fashion, culture, everything, it went global, everywhere. He runs a bunch of little networks

that you might have heard of called Nickelodeon VH1 Comedy Central. Oh, this is old Mr. Tom Preston. He becomes CEO of Viacom, and now he's the chair of the one campaign fighting poverty. He's done it all. He's the coolest guy, and I'm happy to call him, my friend. You guys, it's Mr. Tom Freston.

Cannot wait. Oh, Mr. Hey, guys. I can't wait to hear all about this fella. It's an honor to be here. Here on Shameless? You've seen all 10 seasons on Showtime for us? Shameless.

Shameless. Welcome to the show. Wait, how do you and Will know each other, Tom? Just for hanging around in New York, out on Long Island. Oh, yeah. We originally met through our mutual friend many years ago through Jimmy Buffett back, Jimmy and Jane Buffett introduced us back in the day.

Tom's good friend, may you rest in peace. Yeah, I'm sorry about your loss there. The great Jimmy Buffett. And who was, Jimmy, one of the things he did was he brought a lot of people together and introduced a lot of people. Am I right about that, Tom? Yeah, he sure did. Yeah, he was just...

Tom, how'd you meet Jimmy? I met Jimmy in the basement of a bar called J.P. in Manhattan, in the 70s, it was like, you know, at 5 a.m., you'd open up one of those Bilko doors or 8 a.m. and walk out in the sunlight like a vampire. But he would hang out there. It was like sort of a music industry hang out. So I met him there in 1977. Wow. And we just, you know, would hang out and trips. I would travel with him a lot. He'd like to go to, he liked to travel. And that was especially good, especially after he bought a jet.

Yeah, was he flying planes? back then? Yeah, he could fly all kinds of planes. The Jimmy Jets. Yeah, he was very serious about it. He could fly sea planes, you know, all kinds of big fancy ones as well. And Tom, he had a few, Jimmy also crashed a few planes. He did.

He landed in Nantuckin and sort of flipped it over. And that was one. And there was other instances of Mountheasans. One time when we were, I told that story when they did that, that show at the Hollywood Bowl in honor of Jimmy and I told the story about he was going to do takeoff and landings on this little island

and he said, I said, what are you doing this morning? He goes, I got to go get certified. I'm doing takeoffs and landings. Do you want to go? And I go, yeah. And then he left the room and Jane turned him and she goes, dude, he's crashed like three planes. You're not getting on it. Oh my God. The key word there is training. Do you want to come for training? No.

So, Tom, I want to go I want to go all the way back. By the way, Tom's got a book that we're going to get into Tom's book in a second because I read it a while ago and it's phenomenal. But I Will is called Unplugged, which is fantastic, which is I think out now, right, Tom? It comes out November 18. Yeah.

So, but, you know, again, we've known each other a little bit over the years, but I read your book. So Tom, walk us through, and I wasn't joking when I said, you started a clothing company in Afghanistan and India. Yeah, I want to know how and why. 1970. How is one able to do that? Well, let's see. I had been working in an ad agency in New York. I got assigned to Charmin toilet paper.

Sure. A tough account. Working with Mr. Whipple. And my old girlfriend was in Paris call me. I said, hey, you can't do that. Come with me. We're going to cross the Sahara Desert. And I quit my job. And a week later, I was on a plane. And I met her, and we traveled around and then she left and I kept going I tried for a whole year and that at one point I I met some woman who said you know you've got to go to India that's the greatest show on earth so I did do that I and I ended up loving India and Afghanistan and I stayed for I've tried to figure out how can I live here this is like living a whole other on a whole other planet back man and what yearish this is 1972 so I stayed through 1970s

I started a couple of businesses. We would design and make clothes. I mean, higher quality clothes we'd sell to Bloomingdale's and so forth. And it became a big business. I mean, and I had a house in Delhi, and I was able to travel everywhere. I was living like a pasha. It was wonderful. And then a bunch of bad things happened to me.

And not the least of which was Jimmy Carter put an embargo. It's sort of like what's going on today with the tariffs. There would be no more clothing imports from India. And I had all this stuff in production. Wow. You know, it's a nightmare working there in those days. So I actually ended up smuggling three tons of stuff in from Canada. Yeah, wait, wait, Tom, take us through that.

So you get, by the way, this is like, so this before, obviously, before the Internet and all that stuff. So you guys, this is all sort of phone calls and everything takes a little bit longer. and now you've got all these goods that you're sitting on, and you've got to get it into the States. And so you decide what? Well, I had met in my years there all these smugglers, you know, sort of rife with drug smugglers, and they would always say how easy it was to smuggle stuff into the United States.

Wow. Just by putting it on a plane and just nobody checking? Well, no, they had, they would send stuff in shipments. Yeah. They would take stuff across borders. But in this case, I was allowed to bring stuff legally into Canada. And, you know, I figured, you know, if these long-haired goofballs could do it, I could do it.

And I felt like I wasn't really committing a crime. It was really foolish, I would admit, I mean. But I just want to get some money back. I felt I had really been ripped off by the government with no prior announcement or anything. So that was the end of my business. And I also had my business in Afghanistan kind of vaporized because there have been a communist coup.

there right but tom can you can you for for a for a real soft uh hollywood idiot like me uh who any this whole thing sounds just so foreign from anything i would ever imagine let alone pursue he won't go east of lebraia put it right way okay just forget it or or south of the of the airport What was your life like at that age, at that time that gave you either the courage to have this wanderlust or maybe the opposite of courage? There was just stuff happening in your life. It was like, fuck all this. I just want to go to the end of the earth for something completely new, something completely different because this ain't working. Was it one of the two?

Yeah, it was more the latter. I mean, I was, yeah, it was the 60s, so, you know, there was a lot of alienation around. Freedom sounded like a good option. I decided early on I didn't want to really have a mainstream kind of life. I had taken a year off and sort of bartended around. But you had got in your MBA, right? Yeah, I had an MBA. I did that.

That was a way to stay out of the draft in those days. Right. And then, so it was, I just wanted to sort of leave out of the mainstream life, and it sounded very exotic and interesting. to be living in a place so foreign. What was it about the mainstream life that just didn't feel something that you were attracted to, especially given the fact that you had gone down this road of mainstream?

You got an MBA, and like you're set, you're ready. You put a huge time and financial investment into the mainstream, and then you said, yeah, no, let's flip it, let's go 180 this way. It wasn't fun. Have you ever tried selling toilet paper? And before that, I was on the G.I. Joe account, which was like, you know, the war toy of the military industrial complex. It was a very alienated time. A lot of people were quitting jobs and sort of trying to go off and do their own thing. So everything looked appealing. Everything looked appealing and it looked really exciting because I wasn't having any fun.

I felt like I needed to stretch out a bit. I'd been in school for like 18 years or something. So I was ready to go. And then I fell in love with this very foreign place. And in those days, it was really foreign, you know. Also age, because if you're young, you're like, well, I might as well try it now. I was 25, 26, you know. I mean, a young, so if not now, when. That's, yeah.

Yeah, I remember you sort of describe in the book when you first get to Morocco, when you're still with your traveling with your friend, your girlfriend, and just like meeting these people and they're all on the beach, like people you had met along the way and you were like, look at this life, everybody's, nobody's kind of, everybody's just kind of doing whatever they want a little bit, right? And it kind of, that opened your eyes to it. It sounds so good, right?

Yeah, there was a bit of a phenomenon they called it the hippie trail. I mean, no one self-identified as a hippie, but like in California, New York, people were, in those days, if you wanted to drop out, you sort of went to a commune in a cold place in Northern California or somewhere upstate New York. But in Europe, people would head south, you know, to Morocco or India or Lebanon and, you know, kind of like see how long they could travel.

I'd meet people who travel for years. Well, that sounds like a really sort of contributing factor, that it was more so in society then than it is, I think, today. More commonplace for folks to just, you know, pick up and get out and explore a bunch of different corners for a few years and then presumably maybe come back and reenter mainstream. Yeah, was that a bit more? part of the culture than it is today?

Yeah, you know, I think the world could use a little bit more of that today. You see, these kids are so anxious, and they go to school, and they're having panic attacks, and they're being... You've got to get out, and you've got to immediately start providing and accomplishing. I meet these kids. They say, I'm graduating from college, I'm starting work on Monday. Right. Starting my career on Monday.

So we'll take a break. Right. You know, the world's like the best educator out there traveling around. Out of curiosity, Tom, do you give that, did you impart that on your own? sons just, you know, as much as you're comfortable with talking about? Oh, yeah, I do. I encourage them to. They've become, both of them have become good travelers, and they're very comfortable, you know, going anywhere, making their own plans and really proud of them in that regard. Did you notice a big change when they came back?

Well, they didn't go like, I mean, I traveled for a couple of years. They really, you know, would take, actually my oldest son, he kind of went to work almost right away, but they, none of them have really made extensive trips like I had. they're more caught up in this time go back to the to the canada so did you end up bringing those clothes and all those goods into the u.s or no it was so easy you just but you did it yourself though tom well i enlisted a guy i knew in canada whose father used to be like a rum runner and uh he was ready for another trail another trick wow it's like smoking the bandit you came on the boat with the stuff yourself though Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you go through the thousand islands.

There's all these islands, and, you know, then no one knows where the border is really. Right. And there's boats floating around. No one knows who's who. And ice wasn't around. Right, right, right. Did you end up learning any of the languages over there?

In India, you get pretty spoiled because people speak English a lot. Yeah, it was a British occupation. But I mean, I could move my way around in Hindi. But in Afghanistan, I picked up a fair amount of Farsi, which is the language. I mean, Adar. They call it's a dialect of Farsi. I could get myself around the bazaars and, you know, order food and take taxis. Do you retain it now?

Not so much. Yeah. Not so much. Wait, so Tom, so actually, this is a good, you go out there because you've got this, as Jason called this wanderluss or this desire to get out in the world and we talk, but there's not enough of that, but you kind of bring a little bit, you leave on the sort of, because you've come, you don't have a great corporate experience in that. You're working on Charmin and G.

like fuck all this you go out into the world and you come back and you kind of bring a little bit of that rebel attitude with you as you because you re-enter into a corporate environment a little bit but you bring a little bit of that sort of that rebellious nature into what you do you start to work on pretty immediately on MTV and can you talk to us how I mean it's like a perfect you're the perfect guy for that because you you were bringing that rebel spirit into the corporate world Well, you know, I really loved traveling and being over there. And when I came back, I was, like, wiped out of that life. What else do I really love?

Well, I was really, I was a major fanatic about music and rock and roll. Good time for it. I was caught an article in Billboard magazine. I started studying where could I get a job? And there was a guy who said, you know, we're going to start a video music channel. That's going to be the cable, the TV revolution is starting. And they had already started Nickelodeon. And they had a thing called a movie channel.

So I got an interview. My brother knew a guy who had just gone to work there. So I got an interview when I made this case. And finally, there was a guy named Bob Pittman. Yeah. Who I was in like 32 at the time. And the interview was with what company? This is called, then it was called Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company.

Wow. Doesn't roll off the time. It was a joint venture of Warner and American Express. Yeah, wow. So this guy Bob Pittman, who was 26. never bothered going to college he was a big star they call him the long-haired one-eyed hippie and he programmed these radio stations like with don i miss him he would have got along with my mom my mom had one-home anyway he i interviewed him i said i'm your guy they said well first thing

we're looking for people with no experience in television that those were almost like the magic words i said well sure they didn't even have television where i've been living the last eight years so and I'm a music fanatic, and you're looking for entrepreneurs, and I know business, and blah, blah, blah. And then he goes, you were a hashy smuggler, weren't you? I go, not really. And he goes, not really. That means you were.

So you're hired. So I got a job on this initial team that started MTV. And who was that team? It was you and Bob Pittman and you. Me and Bob Pittman, there was a guy named John Sykes. there was a guy name Oh boy John Sykes

Steve Casey Who else was there Carolyn Baker Sue Steinberg And there was about six or seven of us Fred Seiberd Who was like Really sort of the creative genius

Of the group And you know We were said You know get this thing On the year by August 1st We had like eight months To put this whole channel together So

Wow And we will be right back and now back to the show did music videos were they already kind of happening on other platforms or somewhere and that's why you knew it would work or no there was really very little

awareness about music videos in the states they existed in europe because the radio stations there were still really regulated didn't play any music so the record companies there would make these videos and you could see them like in records stores or they would put them on top of the pops on the you know on the BBC so but American I I at one summer I had a girlfriend in Berlin I remember

just going to her she would work I go to a record store and just watch music videos all day it's one of those kind of days I was like thinking this is like a video wonderland so I I said this is you know people are going to like this sort of build it and they will come kind of thing you guys were the egg and then the chicken came along or vice versa and and like Like those early videos, the early one, like, remember, like Frankie killed the radio star. Was the first one. Frankie goes to Hollywood. And I feel like Dyer Straits had one of the early ones, too.

Dyer Straits had a bunch of early ones. Yeah. Called Skateaway. Well, I was going to get into Dyer Strait because it's actually, it's a big part of the book. Jay, that's a really good point. First of all, video killed the radio star was the first video you guys aired, right, when you first launch. Is that true? Yeah.

Yeah. And, yeah. And you guys also, you started this thing, but I've heard stories from you and from Sykes that like you guys had like a basically like a one, like a closet with like a phone with like call waiting on it, right? You guys, it wasn't a big operation. That's called the Cheapeskates second line.

Yeah. So then you guys started this. And then you, but then Dyer Straits had, they gave you guys the gift of all gifts because it was Mark Knopfler from what I understand and what I've read, wrote that as a sort of almost like a rebuttal to the sort of music video and the corporatization of music and all that. Is that right?

Money for nothing, yeah. It was all about our vapidity that we were vapid. Yeah, and yet the line in that that really sold you guys was, I want my MTV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had Sting it, and in those days, you know, those kind of bands could be worldwide, you know, could have worldwide hits. Yeah.

And wherever I would go, because we took MTV around the world, people would know about us through that song. Wow. MTV had been preceded by money for nothing. So Mark Knopfler gave us the greatest of gifts. It was unreal, like that idea that, like, he did this thing, and then, but it became like the, almost the rallying cry. And you guys also got that very line.

You guys, I mean, you and your whole team at various points got different artists. to scream out, I want my MTV on camera. And that was your... Oh, yeah. Yeah, because the cable companies didn't like us and didn't want to put us on. And these were older guys. They didn't get it.

And they didn't want to pay. We were just somebody who was going to cut into their margins. So we knew that wherever we were, and for the first couple of years, we were only like in these towns in the Midwest, like Tulsa. People loved us.

They couldn't believe it. But no one in New York or L.A. had it and never even seen it. So we knew if we could... get people, these people to call their cable companies and demand their MTV. He could eventually force these people to put us on and that really worked.

That's cool. With videos now having kind of cycled, I mean, they still sort of exist, but my God, you guys, you birthed it and it cycled into, like, just such a phenomenon, the whole, the addition of videos to the whole music industry.

And now it's sort of settled into a place of sort of a side car kind of thing. What do you feel that the music video, has, has, what positive of it has remained in the music industry? Has it been additive? Yeah, you know, music videos are still popular. They don't only exist on MTV. That's become sort of a reality show channel.

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

You guys would, at the end of every video, you'd put the name of the song, the album, the band, and the director. Yeah. And you guys launched a bunch of really incredible directors into the film industry. Yeah, you know, there was a whole bunch And there was a whole issue after a couple of years,

the director said, hey, how come our names aren't on there? We want to get some credit. Yeah, David Fincher, too. David Fincher was a great, Russell Mulcahy. There was Spike Jones. I mean, lots of people came up that way. When you, when the, I just, we'll talk about MTV ending in just a minute, but the initial, like the launch, the logo of the rocket taking off,

is that, that was the first image ever, Right? Yes. Of MTV. And was that just what it is, which is like we're launching a new show? Well, we didn't have any money, and we realized that all this NASA footage was public domain. So we could rip off NASA and man's greatest moment and kind of make it our own. Yeah, yeah.

So we got it for free. Oh, that's great. And the logo that everybody loved them became iconic. We got that for $1,000 from some prize town. Wow. And it was sort of kind of, you guys were I'm sure we're kind of tongue-in-cheek, how grandiose this whole thing is going to be, we're putting our flag on the moon

and, yeah, here comes something cute, right. So we're going to rip off man's greatest moment, and this is going to put our flag there. That's amazing. Tom, what was the moment that you guys realized that you had really broken through? I mean, there were so many, I remember as a kid, you know, there were like, like the, when the thriller video hit,

it was just everywhere. It was like so. Top of the hour, every hour. Was there a moment for you where you went like, Holy shit, we really got something here. We're shifting culture. Yeah, it was a slow build. You know, it took us a while to get to New York and L.A.

where people could see us and then they could talk about us in the media. But then, I mean, two things. One was thriller, Michael Jackson, and beat it, you know. And people say, oh, big artists are making videos with big production budgets, and they're irresistible. And John Landis directing that. And the second thing was Live Aid. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Live Aid. You know, ABC said, we'll run Bob Geldof came to. ABC said, we'll run three hours of it, sort of a highlight show. We said, hey, man, we'll run the whole thing for 16 hours. We got nothing else to do. So it was like the biggest show ever, and that really, really legitimized us. Wow.

Yeah, there was nowhere else to see your favorite artist, really, unless you bought a ticket to a concert. It was the only channel that you could see these people. And the VJs were cool, too. I remember like Mark Goodman and Martha Quinn. Martha Quinn. You know, people forget, but for its day, it wasn't like a flying car stuff or anything, but MTV really was revolutionary. It was a whole new visual language for people.

Of course, we've gone so far past that now, but it was sort of a groundbreakinger in that way. Did you guys end up having all these, you got to know a lot of artists, too, through this, through this. I mean, at first you guys were trying to launch and get them to do stuff, and then there must have been the tipping point where they're just coming at you and all the artists are whining and dining you guys, sending you Rolexes and stuff? I didn't get any Rolexes. Yeah, okay.

I got a time X. No, but, I mean, it was true. We used to get like four or five videos a week, then we were getting 50 or 60, and so there was record companies set up whole departments just to service MTV. Yeah, I'll bet you guys were a real bell of the ball. All these record label heads were probably,

working you guys like they used to work radio stations right where they would ask for certain placement of certain videos at certain days and times maybe yeah yeah it was uh we were the biggest radio station in the nation yeah right and it didn't always bring out the best in some of the people at mtv you know when you had that kind of sure power and and what did you think or feel when just recently they announced it's no longer right well they announced that in the UK for a bunch of channels that just play music videos and the MTV channel it just plays reality shows you know which really bugs me but whatever that's still there but you know it needed to die at death because it can't exist really and be a business if it when you're competing with all these

videos on the internet and it's not like you have exclusive videos that the people that the internet doesn't have I mean there's no business there it's not going to grow. I do think that the new the Ellisons and Paramount have a chance to really reimagine what MTV could be digitally and figure out a way to put together something more interesting

than's out there now, which is a lot of sort of siloed, algorithm-driven. Yeah, well, those fast channels, if you want a fast channel, you could just pick your favorite artist like Taylor Swift and just click on her and just watch all her videos. Oh, there's stuff in one-stop shopping.

So, speaking of which, so you're at MTV, and then you guys decide to, then you have a bunch of other things that I mentioned in the intro, Nickelodeon, VH1, and Comedy Central, and this is great. So Comedy Central ends up becoming this huge thing, but the way it started was kind of in response to what somebody else was doing. I love this story. Walk us through that a little bit, how Comedy Central came to be. I was having a staff meeting one day and someone slips me a piece of paper to say that HBO's just announced they're going to do a comedy channel they're going to call it the comedy channel

and we went oh wow they're getting into our business they were the pay TV people we were like the little low rent basic people we said well that means they're going to get in our business they have a lot of money they have all these do all these big stand-up shows with Robin Williams and everything

what are we going to do I said well we're going to announce our own comedy channel the same day. Let's announce we're doing one too because then we'll be in every article that's ever written about that their competitors also doing a company. And you have no idea for it.

We wouldn't have a name or anything. But we had this thing called Nick at Night and we would take like old TV shows and repurpose them and repackage them and everything. At the worst comes the worst, we can do like a version of that. But let's put our hat in the ring. And so we had a big battle with them

for a couple of years and finally we merged. became comedy central but and they they'd because i thought if this work for them then they'd launch a movie channel a music channel and a kid's channel as well and be head-to-head competitors with a lot more money than us so so you basically started you hear our competitors are starting a comedy channel and in that moment you go let's announce it so anytime they get mentioned we get mentioned and we don't even have a product yet right and you said and you were like and i remember reading in the book you're like You said to Frank Biondi, right, who you worked with over there, and you said to him, you're like, look, it'll buy us a couple days.

And then by the time we have to make the actual announcement, we'll have time to come up with a name and what we're going to do. Is that true? Yeah, he was, well, I put him on the speaker phone to my staff, and he says, yeah, because he had been, he had left HBO and he did not have a great relationship with Michael Fuchs, who said he was like the king of this was his baby. So Frank was all in, you know, fighting like tooth and nail against... We were like a guerrilla operation, fighting against HBO. And I think HBO couldn't believe, you know, that we did as well as we did. It was all in smoke and mirrors. And so when did you come up with the name?

How did you come up with programming and the whole thing for the channel? Well, initially we called it like the two days later was we called it Ha, the TV comedy channel. It was hot in an exclamation point. Sure. You know, and we had a great logo. And it was TV comedy because what they were doing was just, they were in a ripped, like, funny scenes out of, you know, TV shows and movies and some stand-up guys in front of brick walls and just put them together

when they'd have, like, their equivalent of VJs. It would be like an MTV model. But, you know, we didn't think that would work. We actually had tried that once. So we thought, well, we'll just run comedy shows. So I did things that create headlines. I hired Fred Silverman, who programmed all the big networks at one time. We did deals with, like, Brian Grazer, and, you know, we licensed stuff from Norman Lear.

And we just would continue to throw out announcements. So we got Saturday Night Live, the original five years of that, you know, 75 to 80. And we built up a, you know, a decent show. And then when we merged, you know, we had to come up with the name, us and HBO, and Comedy Central was the name. And then the turning point for Comedy Central in your book that you describe is what really set you guys off was when you hired John Stewart.

Is that right? We had hired John Stewart before he had been... He was on MTV in the late 80s, early 90s. He had a show called The John Stewart Show. Yeah, I remember it. It ran for a while. So John was sort of in the stable. We never found him.

And we actually had a guy named Craig Clairborne on the Daily Show first, who was... different type of guy and then we replaced him with John Stewart and John's vision was look let's let's just not do pop culture stuff why don't we take a crack at the news

I'll be a fake newsman and he got his voice doing that and just got better and better I just watched a you know he's on every Monday night again still he's so brilliant he should run for president but we had what came out of that was we had John Stewart Stephen Colbert John Oliver

Samantha B Bill Maher was on our channel first, Dave Chappelle. I mean, it was a good launching place for young talent. Jimmy Kimmel had The Man Show. You may remember that. Yeah, I remember that. I mean, Tom, you think about, you name these people, all these people, musical artists, comedic voices, brilliant voices, who came up under sort of the umbrella of stuff that you did. Do you ever, do you get a little satisfaction when you watch people now, all these years later, like, yeah, I was right about all of them.

this. Yeah, and in truth, I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't the person who, like, picked everybody. But we had a great team there. And we were always looking for edgy, new talent that was coming up and get them, you know, get them young. And then they'd leave us. Like, Bill Maher was on politically incorrect. And then ABC hired him, and then they fired him, and he ended up at HBO.

And his show now is spectacular. And so you see now the front line of people who were sort of like the resistance almost politically. it's all these comedians and they all so many of them had their roots with us although they have been in other places for a while cobert kimmel mar and so on and steve korel too and korel yeah yeah go ahead no go ahead well i was going to say so then because i want to get into all the one stuff you know god we don't have enough time for everything time your life is too full so you you while you're at viacom you become CEO of viacom all ultimately, and you work for a guy called Sumner Redstone,

which was, he was a difficult boss to serve. Is that a good way to put it? That's very fair, yes. He fired every CEO, including me. Including you. And so you knew, so he hires you CEO, and that means what? That means your days are numbered, basically. How long till I get fired?

But the thing is, he always liked to fire people on holiday weekends. like he fired Frank Biondi on the 4th of July, he fired Mel Carmas in, like on the Memorial Day, and I got it on Labor Day. So if you could make it through the summer season, pretty much you had another year of good times ahead. Wow. And one of the reasons, one of the things that, I know there were a lot of issue, and you talk about it in the book, but you and I have talked about this before, it's widely known, there was a thing called one of the first social media sites out there was a thing called MySpace. and it was up for grabs.

And he wanted it. I'm still on it. I'm still on it. It's his main source of communication. So he wanted MySpace, and so did News Corp. Right? Is that fair? Sunder had never heard of MySpace.

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

and he bought it for $560 million I'll just say ultimately Rupert sold it for $30 million Wow I'm still waiting for a thank you note that was a reason he one of the reasons he cited for firing me and right one of the reasons

which is you did him such a favor and the other thing was you early on saw the power, the potential maybe of YouTube. Is that true? Yeah. YouTube kind of took away

all of MTV's mojo, ultimately. I mean, who could have imagined what YouTube's become today? If you check out, like, YouTube TV and everything, it's amazing. And it's been around forever,

and they still say it's the, quote, future. But how would you... If an alien landed on the earth and you're trying to explain what YouTube is or was in its inception. How would you describe it? Is it just a free sort of destination for user-generated videos? You'd just kind of upload anything you want,

and it's just a gathering place for all that. Is that what YouTube really is? That's what it was initially, and that was like 2005. They launched it, and it was initially anybody could upload anything and kids could comment on it. You could send stuff. It was a form of social media, person to person. And that was a whole new idea.

And then, like, SNL would put up, like, some stuff, like, with Andy Sandberg. I'm trying to think some of... They would... Media companies would use it as sort of a promotional vehicle. So they started to get more promotional content on there. And then they've just... And did you want to buy it? Did you saw...

We thought this is a whole new thing. And the world is going in this, you know, we had the TV revolution, now we got this digital revolution. And this digital revolution, this social media thing where people can communicate directly with each other. And people like us aren't gatekeepers anymore. You know, we thought, how do we get in on this? You know, you've got to own a platform. And we made a, I wanted to make a bid on it. But it was difficult for a company like us.

I mean, ultimately Google bought it for 1.6. billion the biocom board thought it was a copyright infringement machine it would make us liable for lots of lawsuits and they ultimately after i left they sued them for a billion dollars and lost 10 years later but no one could have imagined what youtube was able to morph into right you know which is but you did see you did see that there was the the the potential even though you didn't know exactly what it would become imagine how different the world would have looked had viacom purchased I mean, for $1.6 billion is right now the deal of the century? They're worth almost $600 billion here, too.

Wow, that's unbelievable. I mean, I could buy all the media companies a couple times over. Wow. And then... $600 billion. On the side of that, you also helped these guys start Vice Media as well, right? You were instrumental in getting... I work with Vice for a bunch of years, yeah.

Yeah, that was a wild ride. Yeah. That's another book. That was a lot of fun, too, though. Yeah. And it crashed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still around, though, isn't it?

No? It's barely around. They have a little studio operation. You know, they kind of imploded a bit. You know, they had a great run when they had that HBO series on that really kind of made them famous. They had a whole suite of YouTube channels. Does any, after all of these successes, does any part of you still want to be involved in media? You know, I'm happy now.

I'm not in it. I mean, it's really, it seems like a lot of the funds been taken out of it, a lot of the money's been taken out. You look at these companies that are sort of stripped down and are forced to consolidate. You know, I came up, it was a more optimistic time. Things were moving in an upward direction, you know. Things were ascendant. Now it's like, you know, well, I have to tell you guys, you're all in Hollywood. You know, what the situation was coming in.

Barely, Tom. Yeah. Yeah. we'll be right back and now back to the show it does seem like though that we are at a bit of an inflection point that's not too dissimilar from uh sort of the the launch of something like a youtube where um were it not for the invention of the internet and then the personal communication device you know those two things together were the necessary components that make up a YouTube.

Now we've got something similar, perhaps, in AI and its ability to be transformative and create these new platforms or entertainment options or we have no idea about. Some ideas are scary. Some ideas are interesting. But maybe we're at another kind of launch moment. I'm sure you've done,

I'm sure you read very interesting books and niche articles and periodicals and things like that that does it not hold some kind of interest to you this sort of this moment of pioneering maybe? Yeah, and the whole AI thing is sort of daunting. Yeah. On one hand, you've got people saying

that it's going to create these machines are going to kill us all. And on the other hand, it's going to open up this great new world and it's going to put, and someone else say, yeah, it's going to get put 20% unemployment on the board. But it seems like the big brains like you are really the only people that are uniquely qualified to really kind of cut through all that and say, yeah, it could be this, it could be that, but it also can be steered and can only be really properly steered by

somebody that has a combination of your creative acumen and your business acumen and your time in the industry. So are you not interested or excited to kind of grandfather's some of that in there? I'm sort of following it all this. It's not that there's not a lot of smart people involved. You know, these AI guys from, you know, you always say, well, they're from up north. And you can see the battle in Hollywood.

They need the media savvy, too, though. Yeah. They're not this media savvy, but, you know, they're going to create new media. Yeah, I'm curious and I'm watching. And it's, they're just, the amount of money that's being invested is just mind-boggling. But they need someone like you to steer it, though.

You got, you know, put your hand up off the bench. Come on, get in there. Wait, Tom, Tom, speaking off the bench, if you were, if you were, if you were 26-year-old Tom Preston today, and you were just coming back from doing your being off the grid for a couple of years, and you were going to start in this world today, what would you launch? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Well, you know, I'd want to do something that I really liked, so I'd probably find my way somehow to the entertainment media business, you know.

probably there and say, well, now, I mean, to your point, it is sort of an inflection point. And you want to align yourself with someone who's smart. That's a business that's ascendant. So if you get in it and you choose the right place and they got the right plan, you're likely to be able to move up. And I don't know which place that is, but that's probably where I would gravitate. And I feel confident that they're going to figure this out somehow in a way that doesn't put everybody out of work in the entertainment business because uh but i just heard something today it's um they have a channel four in the uk has uh these newscasters that are AI generated that sound

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

And it seems like you managed to create a space for yourself that combined all the things that you loved and that you were good at. Well, I kind of went full circle. I mean, if I look at my life in chapters, the chapter now I do a lot of not-for-profit work for like 18 years I've been working with Bono. I was the board chair of this thing to one campaign

that really focuses on extreme poverty, infectious disease in Africa. Okay. And I find that very satisfying work. You know, we have red, you've probably familiar with some red stuff, you know, with Apple and everything. And that's interesting, keeps your arm into the private sector. But, you know, and it gives me a chance to really explore Africa a bit more, which I also enjoy. But so I'm sort of in that phase of life, I guess you could say. I'm, you know, it's not like giving back, but I enjoy this kind of work.

And I like being an observer of what's going on. and in the media and entertainment business. Well, you also, it is giving back, and you did start, you know, you started a media company in Afghanistan, which still exists today. Yeah, I did that. I went back to Afghanistan for 10 years

until the Taliban arrived and built up a TV network there, which was fascinating. Wow, that's great. And not the not-for-profit, but meaning like you did that is, it's not like that was like going to be a huge windfall. It was more, it was sort of giving back

to a place that you, you really loved and you described the people, especially early on in the 70s when you first got there and what a wonderful place Afghanistan was. And now you've got these people who are there sort of holding the line, still doing it, right? Still broadcasting. And in that time, I remember you would take young people

who were there who were working for the company and send them over here and do semesters working at USC media school and stuff and give them and educate them. And, I mean, that was a real thing that you did for a long time. Yeah. I mean, I never escaped my fascination with Afghanistan. And it gets a bad rap these days, admittedly.

But they're wonderful people. And I was lured back there to start this TV net station, which became very powerful. And in terms, I thought it was a way to, you know, help change society, connect to Afghans to each other to the outside world for the first time for, you know, women, liberate women. Just seeing a man and a woman newscaster side by side.

sends a huge signal. We brought music back after the Taliban had outlawed everything, so we brought back music with the arts. And it's still running the network? Well, it's been, you know, it's been, we've now had like 250 advertisers. It was, now we're down to one.

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

Oh, that's great. And we are making these episodes in Afghanistan inexpensively. We have a diaspora group of Afghan educators that help develop the curriculum. And so it's just kind of keeping people employed in this very difficult time. But these programs for educating women are still, are now allowed? Yes, because we've picked sort of non-ideological subjects like mathematics, physics, things like. that. Got it.

And so they're allowing it, yes. And there's a whole sort of digital part to it as well. It's, you know, it's just awful what's going on there. Yeah, for sure. This way, the business stays alive and you can employ 500 people. And, you know, women have basically been erased from public spaces in Afghanistan. And they're not even allowed to talk when they're in public. Yeah.

Wow. Just awful. And so women who used to be able, in that 20-year interval, when we were there, in which we blew, but, you know, people went to school, became parliamentarians, became lawyers, became, you know, now they're just, you know, extremely depressed and at home. Man, Tom, you really, you really, you really, I know, what a life, dude, and you've, you've done it all. I mean, you do this kind of stuff, and you, you, you help start MTV, and you have a clothing company from a, and you're, and you're smuggling clothes across the network, hot, network. huh and you talk in the book you take Semner Redstone to a sex club in Thailand

which you talk about in the book which is just a create I implore you to read this book. Is that true? Yes, yes I did. That's crazy. Just give us a little taste of not too much of a taste. You don't want the full taste

but I kept telling him you've got to come to Asia. We've got MTV in India we've got it in China and Taiwan we've got in Indonesia and it's like the great market. You know, we were still really positive about how he could do in Asia. And he had never really been. And then he called me up to his office one day. And he says, you know, I've made up my mind. I'd like to finally come to Asia with you. Where do you want to go? He goes, I want to go to Bangkok. I go, we don't really have any business in Bangkok. You know, that's like one

place that there's a company there that's going to lay cable, but they haven't started yet. But he wanted to go to Bangkok. And then he told me quietly he'd like to go to some sex clubs. Oh, my God. You know, I had to go do some advance work, you know, to get him in a sex club. I wasn't really, I'd been to Bangkok before a bunch of times, but I was not an expert on the sex club front, which is quite a scene there. One of the most interesting things is that, you know, it's become, because of the Vietnam War, it's become like the commercial sex capital of the world.

then they have plane loads of Japanese and Germans men that come in to run wild in the various red light districts. And I'm thinking, wait, those were the two Hax's powers. Right. And now they're invading Bangkok. But, yeah, I took Sumner to a... I did my job as a loyal employee and shepherding him around. You had to take your boss, you described it,

and you guys go into a room, and this couple are lowered on a motorcycle, having actual sex. on the motorcycle, and you're there with your boss, and then he looks at you kind of like, we're good now, and you just let yourself out, right? Well, no, I had to take him to another club after that, but the interesting thing about that club was it was just filled with, like,

regular people, Thai people and everything in the... You hear this roar, and a motorcycle slowly comes down to a small Harley, and there's this couple on there, and they're naked, and they're all greased up, and they're doing it, and the guy's revving the engine. Oh, my God. And after a while, after a while, the people in the bar, the locals, they're not even looking.

You know, it's like, people are fornicating on a motorcycle two feet over your head. Yeah, we got it. Would you like another beer? So then they got pulled back up into the ceiling. Yeah. And then you got, I mean, you did everything you talk about,

I mean, you literally, people go like, from here to Timbuktu, you literally went to Timbuktu. I want to end on you, the time you went to the music festival. I remember when you and Jimmy were going to go, you were talking about it. And you guys, you and Jimmy Buffett went to the, this music festival, right? It's a festival in the desert

out in the middle of the Sahara. Yeah, so how to... Like Burning Man or like... Like Burning Man with people on camels. It was like the local Toreg people would come. It would be like, oh, I love, we love West African music, so I got a few other people,

Chris Blackwell, my friend Bill Flanagan. We flew to Bamako, the capital of Mali, and then we got a plane. We took the Jimmy Jet. We flew to Timbuktu, and we land in the Timbuktu airport. People, there's nothing there. There's no planes there.

People are just running at our plane trying to sell us daggers, you know? It was like you're in the middle of nowhere. It looks like a town in the desert. And we had to drive a bunch of hours from there to get to the festival. And you had your own security with you and a driver. Talk about that. Yeah, we had one security guy from Bamako, and then we had another guy. And then when we got to Timbuktu,

so we got to find a guy who knows how to get there. So we need a local guy who can find this way to the festival. So we hire this guy, and we set out one morning to go to the festival. And we're winding our way through the sand dunes and going and going. After about four or five hours, the security guy goes, stop, stop. And he gazzed the local guide and gets them out, and they start screaming each other. We don't know what's going on.

And then he puts the guy in a headlet, takes out a gun, sticks it to his head. He says, I'm going to kill this motherfucker. Because he is taking us, we're going in the wrong direction. And he was taking us to an al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was kidnapping tourists in that area. And, like, there was just over the border in Mauritania there. There was the Germans that had been holding for a year. And we were on our way there.

And he said, I'm going to, and I'm a little bit buzzed, and I'm looking at this. I'm going, Jesus Christ, man. I mean, I just came out in the desert. to hear some music, and now I'm going to witness a murder, and I got a turban on my head. Jesus. So we, Jimmy said, let the guy free. We just leave him in the desert,

and we picked up like a guy who was a hitchhiker. He had a cell phone with a Bob Marley ringtone, and that was enough. He said he knew how to get to the festival. So we put him on board, and off we went. You know, you could just watch MTV. You don't have to go across that. It's unbelievable.

What a life. It sounded like a good idea. Yeah. Well, good news for, if you're like me or you finish listening to this guy talk and you're envious that you have not lived a life even halfway as interesting as him. The good news is we've got a book to read about it. Yeah. So thank you for writing.

Unplugged adventures from MTV to Timbuktu on sale as of November 18th from the great Tom Fresson. Proof that there's a big world out there. Get out into it. which is I say all the time, and boy, did you do that. Yeah. You are an inspiration to a lot of people, including me. You always have, and you're a great dude. And honestly, I read this book, just I devoured it.

It's so good. So, Tom, thank you, man, for taking. This has been a long time coming. I'm so psyched that you came on today. Well, thank all of you. It's great to chat with you guys. I'm a regular fan. Yeah, nice meeting you, time.

Love the podcast. Thanks so much for coming on and talking to us. Thank you. The great Tom Freston, you guys. Take care. Bye, God. Bye, Tom. Bye, Tom.

Thank you. Bye, bye, bye, pal. Wow. Boy, I'm uplifted and also depressed at the same time. Yeah, exactly how I feel. I know, I'm like, wow. You know, there was a time when like, I think I've probably told this boring story before, but, you know, when my career was, you know, in a real dry place.

No, talk about that. I thought about going down to the Tom. Bradley Terminal here in L.A.X, the International Terminal, and just picking a destination up on the board and just... I love that. Just going there and starting over. Well, I got the wife and the kids, and, you know, it's a little awkward now. No, but you can just get up and go somewhere. It's called deserting your family now. I was like, you know, 23, 24. I was like Tom's age, and I was like, let me just start over somewhere else where fucking being on, you know, entertainment tonight isn't the end-all be-all. And so I'm certainly not...

you know, bo-boo-hoo, you know, your life turned out so shitty. No, I'm very, very grateful, but, man, you listen to that. I just don't know if you, I was going to say, you can't have both, but he seems to have had both. Like, you went, he did that, he came back, and he was still a part of, you know, mainstream society. And not only that, Jay, what's cool is he took all of that, that sort of that, that wonderlust, as you described, and he took all those experiences, and he brought it into that environment, and that's what set him apart. He still sets him apart. He's like he has such a broad world view.

He also, like he said, 18 years of school. So then he was like, anything is, I just gotta get out. You know, like I've just been reading books for 18 years ago. And it changes what you use as your sort of baseline norms that you think that you can, and so you come back and you're affected by these experiences. And you're like, no, well, why don't we just do this? Yeah.

You know, if you think about it, like he does all the stuff that maybe being out in the world, he might not have had. But then he's like, yeah, we're at MTV, we're going to start this. and we're going to start this comedy channel. It's like a drug. It's like it changes your mind. And like, oh, YouTube, let's buy that. And everybody's like, no, Tom, no.

I wonder if, like, I wonder if doing it at that age, though, is much more meaningful and significant than doing it. Let's say, like, you know, maybe after Maple goes to college, you know, Amanda and I take off and we start doing all this challenge. Like, are we two set in our ways then at that age at 60 going around and like, can you really be affected as much? Well, there's one way. There's one way to find out.

Just do it. Just do it. I think, honestly. But what if it turns out? Yeah, no, it was a waste of time. You're already stuck in your ways, and now you're 70. But at least it's worth going to try to find it. And I would say, like, you hear that.

It makes me want to say to my own kids and to my younger self and to anybody if you're under 30 or 4, whatever it is, whoever you are, put your phone down and get out in the world. You know, that's kind of, it makes you just think, like, just get out there. Yeah, but don't put it down before you get a smartless mobile plan. No, no, no, switch to smartless mobile and get a good plan. Yeah, and then 10 gigs for 10 bucks.

Yeah, right, but it is true. It is true, yeah. Go out and have a rich life. And Jay, you were saying to him, like, do you have this moment now looking back where you feel a sense of satisfaction? Like, yeah, he's, think of the stuff and the people he's met. Like, even now he'll be like, if you follow him on Instagram and he'll be like, you know, I'm in Albania. I mean, some like gourd, I'm talking to the prime minister and I'm doing this and that, and he's just, you know.

I didn't even, is he married? He has a long-time partner, his, uh, Kerry, who's amazing. Yeah, okay, so he's true, he's not, he's not still going around solo bopping around. No, no, no, he's, no, but he's, uh, she's a good friend and an awesome person, uh, in her own right, just amazing. Yeah, and he's just, but he's always, he's, he's just interested. Yeah, that's, yeah, you know. Well, that's the key. You've got to stay curious and interested the whole time, right?

But it seems like everybody that was around, everybody that was around us had such fun. And I had fun today with all of you. And I think a good time was had. Bye, oh, everybody. Smart. Smartless is 100% organic and artisanly handcrafted by Bennett Barbico, Michael Grant Terry, and Rob Armjarf. Smartless.