Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Bob Pittman

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

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

Tetragrammaton. world was a world of no information. There were three TV networks, ABC, NBC, CBS. And they decided when you were going to see programming. HBO had come along in the mid-70s. There had been no really advertiser-supported networks, which of course MTV was. And there was an idea at the time that the consumer wanted choice, which we know is always true, and that instead of network programmers deciding when you could see kids programming, using programming, news, sports, you would go to these 24-hour channels and get it at any time. So you put together your own array of programming that matched your needs. That was a really new thing. Think of it as a poor

man's on-demand. I mean, there's no technology for on-demand then. So this was a way where you're going to get choice. So Turner launched CNN, a bunch of guys up in Bristol launched ESPN. Those are in the 70s? No, it was about 1980, I guess, along when we are. Right there. We're all right there together. How many homes had cable at this time? Think about 15 million. And so we developed this idea for a music service, all music. And I think the music had been on TV off and on for years and years, never particularly successful. And our thesis was it wasn't successful because they kept trying to make music fit the TV form, which was a narrative. So with MTV said, we're going to make TV fit the music form, which is mood, emotion, makes you feel a certain way, music's better

than any drug for taking you to certain moods or where you want to go. And you had a generation that had grown up with TV. We were the first of the TV babies, my generation, and rock and roll, but the two had never come together. So the idea was, we're going to put it together. And there were all these little video clips that had been produced. No one had been able to figure out what to do with them. So that was the general concept of what we were doing. The venture was owned by Warner and American Express 50-50 called Warner Amax. The board of directors wouldn't improve the idea. Thought it was way too risky. So he got a meeting with Jim Robinson, who was the CEO of American Express. His lieutenant, his president was Lou Gershner, who went on to fame at Nabisco and IBM.

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

the way we got approval to be. Amazing. Was that the first time you ever met Steve Ross? No, I met Steve a couple of times before. And Steve had, David Horowitz sort of fell in love with me. And David was responsible for the cable company and the Warner MX joint venture and had brought me to meetings. And Steve got, as we launched MTV, got very interested in it. And Steve wound up being one of my great mentors. And Steve would, you know, later put his arm around me and just say, come on with me to whatever. Meeting said nothing to do with music or MTV, but he was just letting me in and letting me see stuff and see how it worked. And I had been involved with some of the other stuff because originally I came over from NBC to first channel we were going to do was a pay

service, sort of like at HBO. It was called the movie channel. At that time, HBO was only on in prime time. It was off the rest of the day. Really? So we did a 24-hour all movie service, which is a great. And then HBO realized what we were doing. So they started what it's called a fighting brand. I had no idea what a fighting brand was, but learned very quickly called Cinemax. And they made it cheaper to the cable operator. And they got more movies. So it was just a rip off of what you were doing. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, we proved that there was an opening. Yeah. They came in. And so I had known Steve through the movie channel and through what we were doing with the movie channel of movies. But MTV is really what sort of turbocharged my

relationship with him. It's an amazing story. I remember the impact it had on my life. It felt like there was the world before MTV and after MTV if you were a kid at that time. And you know what's interesting is it had some interesting ancillary benefits, which we didn't realize. The three networks controlled what you saw. And they made everything look like it basically was Des Moines. Everything was Middle America. You didn't see what people in New York were wearing. or London, and when MTV came on, suddenly all these kids across America got to see what people in New York and L.A. and London were wearing, and fashions changed immediately. I think it was 1984. I got a CFDA award, the Council Fashion Designers Award for the impact MTV had on

fashion. And we also changed sort of the graphic look. At the time we launched MTV, every graphic design looked like Star Wars and, you know, the car dealer, everybody had it. And we came out with this sort of radically different design and opened people's eyes to, no, no, it doesn't have to be the way you've said it has to be. Tell me about the I want my MTV program. Well, the problem was that the cable operators really didn't want to take MTV because they were at that time charging companies for the access to the cable, like 25 cents a month. We didn't have 25 cents a month.

So we said, well, another idea. One of the guys that worked for me was Harvard MDA and was always whispering to me all this stuff. He goes, we should do consumer pull. And I go, what's that? He goes, that's where you get the consumers to demand the product instead of push distribution where you buy it. I go, great, sign me up. And so we hit upon this idea that we would come up with ad campaign, advertise MTV,

and that the cable operator of them would think they had to carry it because there was such consumer outcry. And I got in George Lois and I got in Dale Pond. who had been my promotions director at WNBC. They had an agency together. We hire them. And they came back originally with some spot that said, America's becoming a land of cable brats and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But embedded in that call your cable company and say, I want my MDV.

Well, Tom Frustin was our marketing guy, and John Sykes was our promotion guy, and Fred Seibert was the on-air look guy. I remember they all came over to my apartment on one night. I was on Central Park West, and we go through all this. go, you know, trying to land of cable brats is sort of cheesy and then connect, but that I Want My MTV is exactly what we want. So we sort of recrafted the whole spot to be, I Want My MTV. And George Lois had done a campaign in the 60s called I Want My Mapo with Mickey Mantle,

and it sort of repurposed it for I Want My MTV. And we didn't have a lot of money, but we would go market by market where they weren't carrying MTV, and we would run this campaign. and the kids would all call the cable company and they would flood the cable company and tie up all their phones and they go, okay, we'll put it on. And after about two or three markets, we actually didn't have to put it on,

we just had to threaten that we were going to do it because everybody had heard. And go, okay, we're getting rid of advertising your market. You sure you don't want to go ahead and put it on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll put it on. And so that drove it. And it's interesting because MTV was

a sort of success with the consumer immediately, but a dismal failure economically with advertisers and with the cable operators. So we really had to go redo the sort of business side of it. And that's ultimately how I went from being the creative guy, the head creative guy, to running the network. So tell me about going from the creative guy to the business guy. It's a very different hat.

They came to me and said, look, this thing's not working. We projected we were going to do $10 million revenue first year. I think we did half a million dollars in ad revenue. Thought the cable operators were all come flying. And, you know, as we said, but they, I want my MTV campaign, didn't quite work out that way. And I was doing the marketing, you know, all the marketing and the creative stuff. There was another guy who was doing all the sales stuff.

And they came to me and said, hey, kid, do you think you can run this thing? And of course, as every 28 or 29 year old ago, I go, yeah, sure. And in my head, my calculus was, I was so sick of having to convince salespeople that I had a good idea. And they had this veto go, oh, we can't sell that. I can't do that. So I go, hey, I have total creative freedom. Now, if I'm running this thing, I can choose anything. Of course, what I failed to realize was, once I'm running the business side, I got no time to be the creative. But that's sort of how I made the jump. And I discovered I actually loved the business side. And it was just as creative as the creative

side. And bringing a lot of creativity and a new approach and willing to take chances. And by the way, not knowing too much turned out to be a real benefit. Yeah. It seems like it's often the case. Like you don't know what you're you don't know, and that works to your advantage. Right, right. But I also was so focused, I knew what we were trying to do. So I had this great prism, this great filter of what MTV was and what it wasn't. And I think every product has this.

I was the keeper of the vision. Yeah. Like I was the editor-in-chief. I would say, that belongs, that doesn't. It's not that that's a good idea or that's a bad idea. They just, they don't fit together. And you're probably also better at managing and dealing with creative people because you understood there.

Absolutely. You were not a beam counter. No. And by the way, I was still actively involved. You know, making that jump was just sort of opened up my life. And I began to see, oh, it all turns into dollars and cents. And I love the profit motive. My dad was nonprofit, was a minister.

And I heard many dinner table conversations. Oh, so on, so he's got, wow, it's really hard because you've got to keep everybody happy and everybody's got conflicting agendas. In business, it's like it's a problem. I mean, ultimately, it's a business. And we should get a return on investment. And that's the reason somebody invest in MTV instead of a railroad, because they get a better return. Or the likelihood's a better return.

And once you figure that out, you go, okay, well, let's sort of figure this out. And on the advertising front, no one wanted to buy cable advertising. It was like the agencies were like, no way. And everybody thought that these ad-supported networks would never work because the audiences were so small compared to the three big broadcasts. networks, even though we were targeted. So we figured out the agencies were probably not our friends. They had no vested interest. So like, if somebody's spending $100 on TV and they only have to buy three networks, why would they want to encourage the people to spend it on 20 networks, the same $100 because it would just drive their cost up? I get it. So we figured out what we've

got to do is we've got to go to the clients and get them to demand them. And fortunately, we had a wonderful guy named Roger Enrico who ran Pepsi Cola. And Roger figured out very quickly, kids loved this. There were no ratings. They just had the user gut. And by the way, Coca-Cola didn't advertise on MTV for six years because it was not measurable. At first, there were no ratings. Then when the ratings came out, we said we didn't fit their criteria.

They needed 65% reach of the country and at the re-national rating. We didn't have any of that. So forget it. Go away. Oh, by the way, in that period of time, Roger and Rico moved the market share the most that's ever been moved before or after on Pepsi when he had an exclusive on MTV.

Wow. And it was so powerful having that exclusive that Coke, if you recall, came out with the new Coke. They thought they had a product problem. Yes. So they developed a whole new product called New Coke. Yes. Turns out it wasn't that.

It was that Pepsi was advertising on MTV, and Coke was missing. And when Coke finally figured that out, they outspet Pepsi two to one for the next 10. years. But we went to people like Pepsi, and the way we got Pepsi is not by saying we'll buy some spots. It was like, we'll do some great stuff with you. We'll do a special about music and Pepsi. And it was really using our creative chops, which I had and which our people had to talk to advertisers in a different way. And we would go to the movie companies. It would say,

hey, let's do a world premiere of your picture. And I remember we did prints. And I forgot, what was that movie after Purple Rain? After it was a... Under the Cherry Moon. Under the Cherry Moon. And we did a contest where people would send in and we'd pick one and we did the premiere in their town. It turned out to be Sherrod in Wyoming. You can imagine Prince and Sheridan in Wyoming and all the MTV people descending on that town. But we would come up with ideas that would cause the advertising, oh, I want that.

And then we'd say, well, you've got to spend a million dollars in media as well to be able to get that. And they would call the agency and said, buy MTV. And so that's the way we broke through. And we were the first profitable basic cable network. We had the highest ad revenue of any of the basic cable networks at the time. You know, from our standpoint, we sort of cracked the code on it. The other thing we cracked the code on is how to do stuff cheaper. TV production was very expensive.

It was rooted in the past. When I was at NBC, I did a TV show after Saturday Night Live, sort of a little teaser for what MTV became. What was that? What was that called? Album tracks. Ironically, my co-host was a guy named Yarl Mohn called Lee Masters on the air at the time.

Oh, amazing. Who was also doing the morning show at WMBC. And the president of NBC, Herb Schloser, loved me, said, you're going to TV. I want you to get some TV experience here. Do anything you want to after Saturday night live. Take this short time slot. But in that process, I could sort of see how they were producing,

and it seemed so slow and antiquated. And NBC was bragging about the fact that they'd gone from two operators for every videotape machine to one. They cut the cost of people in half to run their videotape machines. When we launched MTV, we had one operator for 30 machines. So we figured out how to just take quantum leaps and like, and me, it sounds quaint today. But back down, let's go to the new tech. Let's use the new technology, not the old. Let's think about things in a new way.

And again, going back to the point you made, not knowing was our greatest gift. And everybody, and we remarked it a couple of times, is nobody at MTV had ever done the job they had before. In general, do you try to find people who you think are smart and creative and who haven't done a job before when you're looking for people? Yeah, you know, it's funny. I am willing to do that. And by the way, my big breaks in life were because people gave me the job. shot to do that. I probably don't do it as much as I should. It requires you really to get in and understand the person and have faith in them. But I do think every time I give somebody a job

that's a big jump from where they were, they are spectacular performers. And often when you get people the same job for the third time, the performance is pretty mediocre. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is a is something different, something clean, something precise. Athletic nicotine, not the primitive products found behind convenience store counters, not the aggressive buzz that leaves you jittery, but a careful calibration of clean energy and focused clarity. Athletic nicotine, the lowest dose tobacco-free nicotine available, made entirely in the USA. No artificial sweetness, just pure, purposeful elevation.

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I started as an on-air DJ in Brookhaven, Mississippi, age 15. Little small towns couldn't afford to hire real talent, so they would hire high school kids for most of the shifts, pay minimum wage. And I needed a job to pay for flying lessons. Already then you were interested in flying. Oh, that was what drove me to media was I needed a job. My dad had had a friend who had a little airplane two-seater, took me up in the fifth grade, and it was like, what, changed my life? You know, you live in a little small town America. You think the world is contained, and you get in an airplane.

I've never been in a commercial airline. I have my pilot's license whoever flew in a commercial airline. Wow. So, again, I take off in this thing, and you go, what, the control, you see everything, you sense it. I don't know what that feeling is. sense of freedom? Is that part of it? It must be. It's freedom. It's control. It's seeing. It's actually, you see stuff from a different perspective. And I think I'm always drawn to seeing something from a perspective I've never seen before. And my grandfather, when I would go visit him,

would take me to the little airport in picking up in Mississippi and just let me climb all over planes all day. And so when I got to be 15, I tell my parents, I want to get my pilot's license and start flying. You can solo at 16. Get your student license. And they go, we better get a job. And I tried to get a job in the men's clothing store where all the kids hung out after school. They said, you're too young. I tried to get the high-paying job in town, which was bagging groceries at the piggly-wiggly, no jobs. And I walked in this little radio station, a daytimeer, went off the air when the sun went down.

And there was an old guy named Bill Jones, who owned it. He was there. And I said, I was like, a job. He said, well, do you have a good grade? So I got pretty good grades. He said, do you get in trouble? I don't know, really. He goes, well, come in this room.

and he put a reel, real tape on, turned it on, microphone. He ripped some wire copy of the news and said, read this. And I read it. He came back in a minute, listened to it and goes, that's good enough. Go to New Orleans, get your third-class radio telephone operators license. You mean I could control the transmitter. And you're hired. And so I began doing weekend work there at 15,

and then later went to the other radio station and was after school from 3 to 6 every day. You spin records too? Oh, yeah, we wrote some music station. And so we were playing it. And by the way, you also did stuff like Swap Shop of the Air and the Trading Post and, you know, all Little Town Radio stuff. And so that got me money to pay for flying lessons. I probably wasn't attracted necessarily the stations I was on there.

But there was a underground radio station, Jackson, Mississippi, the 102.9 stereo rock, JDX FM, had this booming signal, went all the way from New Orleans to Memphis. And every kid listened to this station. What they say? It was like, well, back then it was underground, which was, by the way, Dr. John the Night Tripper or Fleetwood Mac or Steve Miller Band, which were not popular yet. Yeah. You know, obviously doors, et cetera. But we would play a track from the album, and we'd put the album away. You couldn't play anything else on the album for another day.

The more obscure, the better. And that was a tasty track from Dr. John the Night Tripper. And before that, you were, so you sort of pictured people with a tie-dye parachute hanging on their side. ceiling, smoking a lot of weed, condestation. So I always said, I want to work at that station. 68, 69? What is this? This was 69? 69. 70. So I drove up there one day. And I said, I want to meet the program director of the radio station. It was actually an AM station. It was very straight and a part of a TV station, but they had this freaky FM. And so the guy comes out, got in Bill Tanner, and I say, I want to work. I said, what do you do? He says, let me hear your tape. And he goes,

tell you what I'll let you do. I'll let you work Sunday mornings, which the doors shift in the world. You know, you're paid some paid programming on, then you get to play a little music. And so I got the job on Sunday morning. On your favorite station? On my favorite station. That's great. And so I work Monday through Friday and down in Brook Haven. And on Sunday, I would drive up and do this. How long will the drive is that? Hour. And when I started college the next year, everybody knew me. But just this one little shift. And suddenly I'm like, I'm getting caught up into it. And then I got interest in really commercial radio and like boss radio khj in los angeles and the drake sound and and oh there's something else here so i got it hired by the top 40 station and i did seven to midnight

on the top 40 station where was that in jackson mississippi 1971 and i'm wildly ambitious so i make all these air checks recordings to my show and send them out no internet no easy ways community. I mailed them off to all the program directors, all the radio stations I could find. If I could find their name, I typed a letter, sent them. After my freshman year in college, that summer, I was hired at WRIT in Milwaukee, top 40, and I was going to play the do summer relief for everybody going on vacation. But as soon as I got there, a guy got hired to go to Chicago, so they gave me the midday show. Wow. I'm like an 18-year-old kid. What do I know about the housewife shift? The midday shift, and there were people there who worked all over the country, and I began to, as you know, from your industry and this industry, learn about it. And the competing station in Milwaukee had a station in Detroit. They were just putting on the air in FM station. And one of the guys that had been on the air in WOKY competitor is hired as program director in Detroit. I sent him a note saying, hey, congratulations. If you ever have any jobs, let me know. And he goes, I do. You want to come?

So I went out and did 10 at night till 2 in the morning and to drive the Q truck, the prize truck. So you'd drive behind the car, the license plate, H-1, pull over, or could you imagine doing this day? Pull over and you'll get a T-shirt. Unbelievable. And so that began my sort of really nomadic life. I stayed there a year, went to college at Oakland University, and one of the guys there got offered a job in Pittsburgh. He said, I don't want to go to Pittsburgh. You interested?

And I go, I don't know, maybe. So I talked to the guy who was going down there, station manager, leaving a station in Detroit to go there. And I drive down with him to Pittsburgh. I'm 19 years old, mind you. On the way to Pittsburgh, I convince him, I should program the radio station. I mean, how the hell do I, you know, I've been a student. I'm listening to everybody. I think I know everything in the world.

I think I'm a genius now. Yeah. And he agrees. They let me program the radio station. I go to Pittsburgh. But there's something about that enthusiasm. I don't know what it is, but they let me program the station. And I had this sort of quirky idea of what we should do with the station.

What was the idea? Well, the greatest program director in my mind of my time was the guy named Buzz Bennett. I don't know if you remember Buzz. Buzz had worked for Drake. That was the big programmer at the time. And they had all these Drake stations, RKO stations. And Buzzy was a success there. And Buzzy had gone across the street.

at another station, San Diego, and beat Drake. And he's the first guy to ever beat Drake. And then he's the hottest programmer. He comes to town and puts the station on the air for Cecil Heftel called 13Q. And they simulcast the original AM and FM. And in those days, AM was much bigger than FM. FM wasn't, didn't have full penetration of cars, et cetera. And they did really well, number one out of the box.

And then they took the FM and turned it to beautiful music. So I say they just did that. Why don't we make ourselves sound like 13 Q's FM again and get people to think, because the FM had almost as much audience as the AM, why don't we sound like we're 13 Q? So 13Q did the great rip-off. We did the great zip-off. We did whatever they did. We would just do it.

Whatever music are going to play, we would play. And we're just going to ride their coattails. And I think most people have humiliated to do that. I wasn't. I just wanted to win. And we actually beat them in the ratings. Wow. Doing their thing.

Yeah, right. How do you think it works so you could beat someone doing their thing? You know what? I think it was because, well, I understood their thing and agreed with their thing and liked their thing. Yeah. So I was totally into it. Yeah.

Wish I've thought of it. Yeah, yeah. And FM was just coming on too. Just timing had something to do with it too. Of course, always, doesn't it? So I had that big success as this 19-year-old kid and suddenly people from the country noticed me. And I was at that stage where they go, yeah, but you're too young.

And the general manager there. Got him Charlie Warner, had been a part of Bill Paley's CBS, had run their CBS radio rep firm, looked great, you know, St. Albans, Dartmouth, wore the right suits, handsome, set everything. Huge company. Well, it's CBS, he was, but he got fired at CBS. The only job he could find at that time was in Pittsburgh as the general manager. So he came there, and he became infatuated with me. He just loved the idea that I was 19, and by the way, I had a beard, and,

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

and programming the big NBC Clear Channel station in Chicago. And it was all because we talked about giving people a chance. Charlie Warner was willing to take a chance on a 20-year-old kid to replace the 47-year-old programmer who was there to program this station. And I think today, you know, if somebody came to me, me and said, we're going to hire this 20-year-old guy. We're going to give him our biggest station. I go, no, we're not. Are you crazy? That's insane. How he managed to pull it off, I don't know, probably part of it was it was a day of not great information. So he probably had a lot of choices

he could make in Chicago that nobody at corporate knew about. Today, we know everything everybody's doing. But he made that decision. And then he went to WNBC together too. And it was just like, You know, there are a couple of people who've changed your life. And yes, I was capable, obviously, as it turns out. But you mentioned luck earlier. Yeah. But it's like luck. It's just like right place, right time.

So you went to WNBC in New York? They three, we had a big success with the AM in Chicago, changed it to country music, which I knew nothing about. But I was one of those guys who was beginning to do research. In college, I majored in social methods and sociology and research. And we began, there was a group of us, beginning, to say, hey, how do you do research in the 1980s? There's no internet yet. We did survey research, which no one had ever done. They used to call the record source, say, what's selling? And of course, the record comes and say, I'll give you 10 extra albums to say my record selling well. So it was,

by the way, I'm not sure if it was accurate about record sales. And as you know, record sales doesn't necessarily correlate to what people want to hear on the radio. So we started this thing where we call people. It's just random. Back in those days, you could call anybody you wanted to. We'd go to the phone book and just randomly call people and ask them to join. on a panel to talk about music each week. And we would play little hooks of songs down the line to people and say, have you ever heard of this song? If you've heard of it, is it your favorite? I like it, but not my favorite. I like it, but tired of hearing it. I'm sort of neutral. I dislike it, or I dislike it so much. I change the channel when it comes on. Good questions. So now we would,

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

the music director at MTV when I was there. And we were all saying, I'm learning this, I'm learning that, how are you doing this? How do you get the people on the call? How do you get it so quick? What system do you use? And so we were regularly talking. And we were sort of the new Turks, the new kids. Nobody liked us. We were ruining the music business, but they gave me an edge. And I did the FM station and beat the ABC FM, which at that time they were doing sort of album radio, album-oriented radio. Lee Abrams had been there. If you know, Lee, and that was where he made his mark. And we beat the ABC FM. We're the first ones to ever beat an ABC FM. So then they said, okay, could come to New York. And at age 23, I went there to program WNBC at Don Imus in the morning

and all these big names. And so that was my big shot to get there. Amazing. Also interesting to have those similar-minded people around the country who were sharing notes on the same things, In most industries, people look at those as competitors, even if they're not direct competitors, but there's that sense of competition. You don't talk to those people. They're your enemies. But you saw that it was like a revolution. It was a revolution.

The camaraderie always works. Every place I go, camaraderie is really important. I mean, even we started MTV, that original group of people, we went to dinner together every night. We went to vacation together. We shared summer houses together. We lived together. It was communal, and it was collegial. And, you know, I'm a believer. Nobody wins. Teams win. Yeah. Tell me about WNBC. Well, WNBC was the biggest radio station in New York. WABC was the biggest. ABC was the biggest. And WNBC was the ALTSA ran. And they couldn't quite get over the hump.

Part of the problem was what I would do at each station I'd gone to, I would do some survey research to people who are listening to like WABC. like about the station. What don't you like about it? Then we'd go in the air position. It would be whatever they said they liked. And we'd say, we don't have the whatever they said they didn't like. Yeah. And then we talk about their station on the air and taught them so much they begin to change stuff. I had it worked for me. So I sort of tried that and WABC was oblivious. They didn't change anything. By the way, the sound hadn't changed since the mid-196th. I was so out of date, so wrong. But, you know, I learned something which was people have habits. Yeah. Don't screw with it.

Like, you know, the people who take that magazine and go, I can make it look better. I'm going to do a magazine redesign. They kill the magazine. Yeah. Because good or bad, you're accustomed to it. That's what you know it as. And they wouldn't change.

And finally, I think it was WBLS or WKTU came on the air. By the way, we were running behind them. It couldn't quite get them. Was it disco at that time or past disco? I think it was disco that came on the air and they had a big rating. and WABC freaked out. They fired the programmer. They brought a guy in who made the station sound really new and modern, and the ratings

died. We surged ahead, and that's the way WNBC became number one. Amazing. And then how many years did you do that? I did that three years. And Herbschlaw... Were you on air as well or no? New York was the first place.

I wasn't regularly on the air, but I would do fill in. And if somebody went on vacation, I'd do a week shift. I was the guy that if Don Imus didn't come in in the morning, which, unfortunately happened. Some. I get a call about 530 and say, Don's not coming in. Okay, give me a minute. Stay on the air until I get there and we'd go do the shift. If you got that call, would you be bummed or would you be excited? Okay. I mean, you know, the problem was if I was out till midnight, I wasn't planning on getting up at 5 a.m. Yeah. So that was the bad part of it. But in general, it was fun to be on the air for you. Yeah, it was always fun.

I was never great on the air. I'm too controlled. I have that switch which says, oh, I shouldn't do that. The greatest people on the air, the people just let go. So tell me about the format of WNBC. It was top 40. I mean, CHR, played the hits, but heavy personality. We had IMS in the morning. When I got there, Dahn was like way off the reservation. We fired Don. Don couldn't get a job in New York, wound up in Cleveland where he'd come from. And about a year later, somebody said, Don's cleaned up his act. You ought to go here. So I actually, in those states, no internet or anything. fly to Cleveland. I sit at the airport, have a radio. I turn it on and listen to his show. And they're right. He's really good. He's back. He's back. Yeah. So I come back and we hire him back to

the morning show. And obviously, he was spectacular and talented. And right after I left, they hired Howard Stern to do the afternoon show. They had soupy sales at midday. That was right after my time. But, you know, it was about personalities. Again, I think back then, I had, sort of discovered that what radio really is, it's a companion to people. You know, as soon as you could get cassette recordings and, you know, eight tracks, et cetera, I no longer had to listen to radio for the music. If I just wanted music, I got to other places to go, no commercials, say exactly what I want. But you realize that companionship's critical. Today, probably more than ever, which is something... So you say that a playlist can't replace listening to radio for that

period of time? You know what? It's a different experience. Yeah. Actually, if you ask, people. Do you listen to a playlist and your music collection and radio? They agree with a statement. I listen to them both, but at different times for different reasons. And you know, you'll see always, if somebody had a CD on, you'd see them listening to it. And then for some reason, they'd just turn on the radio. Why'd they do that? It's in the middle of a song. Yeah. They can't be away from people. I mean, it's a different experience. On the radio, I know what's going on in the world. It's a camaraderie of people. It's a gang of people. We always make it sound like there a lot of people listening. We have people, listeners calling in, put them on the air.

Sense of community. Yes, sense of community. And they're listening for companionship. You know, it's interesting. The average person watches about 30 different TV networks in a month. The average person listens to two radio stations. Wow. I do work with Ryan Seacrest every morning. I have for 20 years. I'm going to listen to him until he's no longer there. He's my buddy. I know everything about him. I keep track of him. He's talking about stuff relevant to me. I'm not going to go in anywhere else. People say, oh, my commercials, come on.

Everybody leaves commercials, actually in radio. They don't like TV. They don't leave on the commercial break. They leave on a song they don't like. On the commercial break, you know, commercials are sort of talking about stuff you need for your life. The same thing, you know, what's Ryan talking about? He's talking about people and clothes and cars and food and movies and TV shows.

Same thing the commercials are talking about. So it is this sense of like, I'm with you. I'm going to hang out with you. But I learned that sort of way back there at WNBC, and I was doing really well there, loved it, and was preparing to go be a TV programmer because Herb Flusher said, you're in. I did the TV show after Saturday and I got sort of beginning to learn TV. And then Herb got kicked out, and they brought a guy named Fred Silverman in, and suddenly I was not special anymore. And there was a group of us that we were actually called for, you know, sexist in those days of work. Herb's boys. And it was a bunch of guys that Herb loved. And didn't matter what your boss said, you could call Herb and Herbert Overruling. Lord Michaels, who was doing Saturday Night Live, Dick Ebersoll was doing late night. I think Don O'Meer was doing sports. Brandon Tartikoff may have been there by then. And me. And so when he got kicked out, it's like all of Herb's boys were in trouble.

That's when Lorne left Saturday Night Live. Dick Ebersoll left. O'Meyer went to Bibisco. Everybody left. So I'm, like, open to the idea of like, well, I don't know what I'm going to do now. I was, had my life planned out. Everything was going to happen the right way. Yeah, like plans don't come true. And I got a call from these folks saying, you know, we're doing this cable programming company. We think the world's going to be narrow cast TV channels like I was describing to you. And, you know, you have radio experience.

So we think we'd like radio. I think you'd be good. Why don't you come over? And so, I mean, it was a long process to get hired because some of the people there going, how can you hire this kid? How can you hire this kid? How can you hire this kid? And in the end, they gave me a shot.

And originally did the movie channel and then TV. Yeah, movie channel worked, then MTV. And we took Nickelodeon, which had been a preschooler's channel, which the cable company had been using to get cable franchises. I said, hey, look at all the do good stuff we do. And changed it to a tween channel, which Nickelodeon took off and just roared. And it was the idea that there's this thing Disney and its own, thing and why don't we compete with Disney?

Yeah, we were like, we thought Disney was old-looking. It wasn't cool. And it was at that time. It was at that time. And so Nickelodeon was like cool and hip, irreverent, sassy. It sounded in tune. And we had the same on-air look. Got him Fred Seibert, did MTV.

I got Fred, we worked on and did the Nickelodeon on-air look with Jerry Layborn, who was the, who had been in programming it, Nickelodeon, and I gave her a shot to run the whole thing. and Fred and Jerry worked on this whole look. Again, so MTV was about mood and emotion. Very few TV networks at the time did anybody care about. They cared about the shows. So I'm watching whatever show. The networks that are going to go, I don't know.

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

I'm going to Nickelodeon. That the network became the object of desire. And that sort of changed how people did TV networks. And after us, other people had success with that as well. I remember also in the I Want My MTV campaign, you had huge rock stars doing commercials saying, I want my MTV, people who you could never hire to do a commercial for anything for any amount.

I know. It was crazy. I mean, John Sykes talks about the idea, we want to get the who. So he camps out at Bill Kerbushy's office in London, and he gets across the street. He's got a setup of a camera and all, and he's just waiting. And he sees Pete Townsend come. The Willis style. And he goes, hey, I need you to help with the MTV.

And he says, Pete looks a little befuddled, and he walks across the street with him and records, I want my MTV. Unbelievable. Didn't know what he was. And I think seven or eight months later, we do something with the Who, they're on the air or something. And Sykes sees him and goes up to him thinking, hey, I'm your buddy. And he looks and goes, you, you, you're the one. And felt like he'd been railroaded into it. But we had Mick Jagger, we had Madonna.

No, Madonna was a new act then. So David Bowie, et cetera, the police who were like a houseman. You think if not from TV, we would know who Madonna is today? Boy, that's a great point. I think the biggest impact MTV had on the music business is we turn performers into celebrities. One of the first things we heard

was people say, wow, I'm being stopped on the street and people saying, I saw you on MTV. They didn't stop many musicians back then because you didn't know what they look like. And many musicians had trouble making the flip. It was like when sound came in for actors, similar. Right. I mean, and there was someone fought it, didn't want it.

It took Bruce Springsteen a long time to do a video. And some people like Madonna just knew it. I mean, she was one of the first MTV artist. Michael Jackson just got it, understood it. Billy Idol, Prince. Oh, my God. It was just like, and they were lining up there. But they, I'm not sure, would have been the stars they were.

Were they not the MTV stars? And it was sort of interesting to watch. I mean, we're in the middle of that revolution as well. But you think about what happened to the music business after those people became celebrities. Suddenly, the touring business is bigger. Suddenly, endorsements are big. Suddenly, they have enormous sort of personal power as a celebrity.

They've changed a lot. Yeah. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy. Using one of Squarespace's best-in-class template. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs.

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There was like, couldn't believe this is happening. Well, you know, becoming profitable was there was a guy named Drew Lewis who had been Reagan's secretary of transportation. He had famously fired all the air traffic controllers, if you recall this. And I mean, tough, tough guy. And Warner Amex was two things. It was a programming company, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, which is where MTV was. And it's Warner MX cable. In the cable business, in the early 80s, they made all sorts of promises to cities to get the cable franchise, to build out the big cities.

The problem was, as usually happens, is people have made very un-economic. deals. And so it was crushing Warner Amex, these deals they had done. So they hired Drew Lewis to come in and fix it. Drew's just a tough, not knows nothing. Just bottom line. Bottom line. And Drew, it turns out, I had one of the meetings with him and I was talking about something we were doing with Rolling Stones. And one of the people that worked for Drew goes, Drew, do you know who the Rolling Stones are? And he goes, no. You ever heard of Mick Jagger? No. And I go, boy, I am in deep shit. Drew takes me to launch and says, okay, Bob, look, and it's a complicated drama, but they don't like your boss, Jack Schneider. They're going to fire Jack Schneider eventually, and I need you to get ready to be that.

And then he goes, but the first thing they need you do is MTV's got to be profitable, said, if you can't make it profitable by the end of the year, I'm going to shut it down. And the board of directors a couple of times that said, we're going to shut MTV down. Steve Ross had saved him. And now he's saying, we're going to shut down. This guy's got the power to do it. So I came back for that meeting and go, I can't tell everybody that works for me that we're at risk of being shut down. So I just have to sort of suck it up, but I have to do something rather dramatic. So we cut costs like crazy. I mean, if you hear people from the early days creep, I think they're going to say, oh, yeah, I remember working.

Bobby's so creative. They'll say Bob was the cheapest son of a bitch ever worked with in my life because mine was fine every penny I could everywhere. And you had to. survival, but I couldn't tell anybody because it would bum them all out. So, I mean, we're riding high. The press is writing about us. Everybody loves us. The cable operators were getting it for free. And we decided, you know what, we need them to pay us. If they don't pay us, we pencil out, we're never going to be profitable. So we go back and we do these fights with the cable company saying, I know he says, it's free, you've got to charge for it. And in that time, a couple of the

big cable operators trying to get leverage on us, convinced Ted Turner start to cable music channel to compete with MTV. And so they come out with the cable music channel. Remember I had learned on the movie channel when HBO came out with Cinemax. I learned what a fighting brand was. All I had to learn that one time. So when Turner came out with cable music channel, I started VH1. Instead of him being able to compete with cable music channel versus MTV,

I want it to be cable music channel versus VH1. And if it had to kill VH1, fine, who cares? It keeps MTV out of the fight. So Turner said, well, we're free to the cable industry. I go, VH1's free to. And then it goes, okay, well, we're going to sell spots cheaper to the advertisers. They're going to be $90 instead of the $300 you charge. They go, ours would be $80. So whatever they did, we just undercut. And after 34 days, he shuts down. Thirty-four days. He shuts down the cable music channel, VH1, which we just did. I mean, they cost us $5 million incremental.

That's the whole cost of doing VH1, it's $5 million. We literally had a closet where we had some VJs in a closet with a fixed focus camera and a three-quarter-inch machine, just cheap, cheap stuff. But we said, you know, look, let's keep it going. And as you know, VH1 continued on. For getting the cost of making the content for the channel, how hard was it to get access on a cable channel? How many channels are there? It was hard back then.

It was really hard. And we didn't get MTV on in Manhattan for about the first three years on Manhattan. Wow, that's a long time. It was a long time. And it was more rural America where everybody had cable sort of then drifting up to the big cities. Which is interesting also because it was a very cutting edge programming. Right, right. It was modern programming.

It was not Des Moines. Scared the cable operators. When VH1 came, I go, okay, I have no money. How am I going to get any distribution? I hire all the famous disc jockeys in New York, Scott Shannon, Don Imus, Frankie Crocker, all are on VH1. And I go, I'm going to get on in New York. Don Imus goes on the air. We were going to launch, I think it was January 1st.

He's on the air saying, well, Jack Gault, the guy who ran, Matt, and Cable's going to put us on, said, we're going to be right there of VH1. Jack Gault calls me and goes, what the hell are you doing? He said, we're not putting you on. And I go, do you want me to tell Don that? And he goes, no, no, don't tell him that. And we launched on Manhattan cable. Unbelievable. So it was not, I want my MTV, but it was another sort of pressure tactic to get these guys to carry us.

Amazing. And then how big did MTV grow? Well, you know MTV. And when did you leave? I left. We tried to do a management buyout. American Express decided they wanted to get out of the Warner MX adventure. and there was a shotgun buy-sell with Warner, so it was up for grabs.

So David Horowitz, who had been the president of Warner's, had come down to MTV to be the CEO when we went public because they said I was too young. Is it the first time you went public with something? It was. And how was that experience? It was great. I mean, I didn't know what I didn't know. Yeah.

And by the way, the day we were pricing the public offering. Yes. is today Ted Turner announced he was starting a competing service. So the stock goes, we almost didn't come out, but Shearson Lehman was taking us public, owned by American Express. They don't half of us. So we got out public. But we were under the cloud of, oh, my God, Ted Turner, he'll kill you. He's Mr. Cable. One of these kids know, how can they beat Ted Turner? But not 34 days. Yeah, right. They're going to kill him. So we got out public. And then obviously, after Turner went away, the stock goes up. And so David Horowitz, he could.

come down to be the CEO because they said I was too young to be the CEO of a public company. And they said, well, we'll let you be CEO in two years, but David's going to come down for two years. So David and I very close. He had been Steve's president of Warner's. And David and I set about to do a managed buyout. We interviewed a bunch of people with Forsman Little, who was very big at the time, Teddy Forsman, Nick Forsman, Brian Little. They'd come in. We put together an offer and Steve had decided that what he was going to do is sell half of everything to Viacom and that's the way he was going to buy out American Express he called me and said look I want you to go with this new thing and we're going to do the blah blah I said well Steve I'll do it but only if

you'll meet with Teddy Forsman first and hear us and it goes okay I'll do that and Teddy gave him a big pitch a lot of money for MTV more than he ever thought he could make and so he decides he'll sell it to us. And so we're going, my God, fat city, I'm going to own the company. We're going to be it. And Teddy was a tough character. Steve was a constant negotiator. We had an agreement, and Steve kept retrating and retrading and retrading. And finally, Teddy tells the investment banker, you can tell Steve, he can go fuck itself. And by the way, no investment banker should ever go tell the client, someone said that. And the investment banker told Steve that. And so Steve goes, oh, really? So he sends a word over to Viacom. Viacom comes in with

a competing offer. And they wound up buying MTV. This was 1985. I sort of lost my dream, but I had 1% of MTV. And that was more money. I didn't have any money. Suddenly I've got like millions of dollars. By today's standards, I got screwed. But so I was like, well, maybe not such a bad thing that we got it. I signed a new five-year deal with Biocom. But as things go on, obviously, people are now coming to me saying, hey, you want to come here or do whatever. And I just bothered me that somebody had my company. Yeah. I left in 87. I went to, MCA came to me with a deal. Lou and Sid came and offered me a deal that Irving actually set up, who was running the music company in MCA at the time, that they would finance a 50-50 joint venture. I could go do whatever I wanted to do. And I go,

Great. And so I left. And I made sure Freston, who was my deputy at the time and a good friend, got the shot to be the president. Do you think if MTV continued with its original format of showing videos and having VJs, it may still be relevant today? Which a great question. Probably, I mean, we did some shows as sort of spice and some other anchors, but I would, probably had never have done the narrative form on MTV. It felt like instead of being MTV, they were being regular television. But they were, had the youth audience, they had the attitude, and they wound up being wildly successful. For a window of time. For a period of time. And I, as I say, I wouldn't have had the guts to do it because I had a vision. And so I could not see the other thing.

And I think, you know, this happens with businesses, you know, the other group came in and said, okay, we'd still be music, slowly but surely it became more and more programs because it didn't start out instantly. It was, no, but there was a time when if you turned on MTV, you were not going to see music most of the time. Right. You know what's interesting, I think when Tom and Judy were really running it. Yeah. They kept their hand in music enough to hang on to all of that imagery and that audience and they brought enough music shows. I think when Tom left, Judy left, Philippe Desmond running it. I think they just turned it into it's just a network.

Yeah. And it lost its mojo. What made MTV so popular was the attitude. It just like, it was just cool. And we do shit to just make us seem cool. And it felt like counter-programming. It didn't feel like everything else. Right.

It really was. It was everything and there was MTV. The original name that we wanted for MTV, my concept was TV1. And we're going to do TV a different one. going to do TV a different way. And this is TV one. We couldn't clear TV one. So then we figured out we could clear TVM. So it's going to be TVM. And actually one of the Steve Casey was the driest, sort of most analytical guy in the bunch who was the music director, which the analytical job. In a meeting, it's very dry. He says, don't you think MTV sounds better than TVM?

Well, yeah, it does. Okay. In that second, it became MTV. Just like that. No study. No, you It was just like, yeah, okay, it's going to be MTV. Tell me more about Steve Ross. Steve Ross is an amazing guy. Steve was a guy who, I often talk about in business, it's math and magic, that you need. You have a podcast called Math and Magic. To me, it's always been my thing. By the way, Buzzy Bennett said that.

I thought it was the greatest programmer. Yeah. Said it's the analytics, but it's also you got to have the magic. I can do all this survey data and tell you what people want that to make it exciting. I now have to have the magic to make it exciting. And I believe that's true. every business, every project is the bad and magic. So Steve Ross had an interesting blend of that. He had unbelievable financial skills, just saw deals and numbers and understood it. But he also

really appreciated the magic. And although he may not have been able to create it, he loved the people who could. And supported it. And supported it. And worshipped it. And those were stars to have not people to be tolerated, but those were people to be worshipped. And I'd learned so much from Steve. Steve was the first guy I'd ever heard say something like this. He'd say, you know, Bob, you're never going to be fired here for making a mistake. You're going to be fired here for not making a mistake. Because if you're not making a mistake tells me you're not trying anything new and whatever we've given you to manage, you're going to wilt away under your management. And he didn't say this, but I've added to it, and I'm sure he implied it, is that mistakes

are the byproduct of innovation. If you're going to try new shit, at least half of it's not going to work. Absolutely. And when we get ready to try something, I go, guys, don't get too carried away. 50-50 chance. It works. Yeah. So let's just keep trying. Right. Nothing changes. The corollary that goes with that is you have to bias toward quick decision making. Because when it invariably is wrong, change it. Yeah. Change it quickly. But don't sit there and study. 34 days. Yeah. It's like quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, move. And I learned that. from Steve. And I learned to be bold. It's just like, who cares what people think? And Steve was an outsider. I mean, he was this group of guys sort of, you know, out of Brooklyn who were parking lot

business originally. Parking lot, you know, office management, cleaning services. And Steve had started with his father-in-law's two funeral homes and was a funeral director. And just had an entrepreneurial line. He goes, what are we doing with all these limousines at night? Nothing. Let's start renting them out. So they rented out the great limousine service. And then they go, well, where are we parking them? That parking garage. Why we buy the parking garage? And then that'll be better. And then he goes, wait a minute, we got a parking garage. And at this time, the rental car business was beginning to be developed. He said, let's start a rental car company. And they can park in any of the parking lots in New York for free. And that'll be our special thing. And you can rent

them at the parking lots. Amazing. And so he just kept seeing one thing after another. And then he did a study about what business he should be in. And the entertainment business came up high. So he said, we're going to get the entertainment business. He bought Ashley Famous, the talent agency, Ted Ashley, Spencer Harrison, and David Gaffin had been working there as the music guy. And then he had an opportunity by this bankrupt company called Warner 7 Arts. And they had to get rid of the talent agency because of the consent decrees about what the studios can own. And they wound up with Warners. And he bought it with the thought of the movie company, but they discovered that all the money was being made with the record companies. And they had a billion little independent

distributors. One of the great ideas was create WEA, one distribution organization, give them extra clout. And, you know, Ahmed was running Atlantic. Yeah. Moe was running Warner's. And Joe Smith was working with him as the president of Warner's. And I think David was running Electoral Asylum at the time. So that was off at when. But I just loved Steve because Steve would just encourage you to go take a big chance. Go. I love what you're doing. You know, it's not like, not critical. But he was a deal guy and just understood it. And if you weren't bothered by sort of the Brooklyn culture, like rough and tough, I mean, I was in a meeting and my then boss who had been at CBS, a very straight-laced guy and very sort of CBS property.

said something in a meeting, and Steve looked at him and goes, what do you have a death wish? Saying base, that's a stupid idea. He was so offended. He couldn't even finish the conversation. He took it as a threat. And Steve didn't mean it. It's just like the way they talk. Of course.

And so I sort of learned that way, that's okay. I mean, I'm sort of even keel, and it's fine. It's like everybody's bantering back and forth. And Steve always said in search of the breakthrough idea. Yeah. How much time do you get to spend with them? A lot. Tell me.

You know, I would do, Steve would call me a lot and say, hey, we got a meeting with so-and-so, come on up. He would call me at the end. For things that were not part of your- Nothing. He would call. There was, he had a deal guy named Ed Abooty, who he worked closely with. And he would call me in like four or five o'clock. I'd get a call for himself and say, hey, Mr. Ross was to see you.

And I go up and Steve said, I'm thinking about doing this. He was always like I'm thinking about some idea. And I'd start iterating. ideating with him. And he loved that. And then he'd say, get a booty. Call a booty. Get him in here. And, you know, this days before cell phones or anything. And I was supposed to have dinner with my wife. It's like eight o'clock. I like say, excuse me minutes. I'm not coming to dinner. And I'd be there to 11 o'clock with Steve brainstorming and thinking. And I sort of turned out to be sort of a sounding board for him. And when we sold the company to Viacom, he said, look, you've got to go with

the company. You know, you're part of the deal and blah, blah, blah. And when I left to go to MCA, he calls me, goes, what are you doing? Why didn't you come back here? And I go, well, I thought I was part of the deal. And he goes, ah, and so for two years, he kept trying to get me to come back. And finally, I bought my way out of the MCA deal and went back to Warner, went back to Steve. And we were just doing the time Warner merger. He hired me, didn't tell me merging with time.

I agree. I'm coming here. So, okay, I'm not going to tell you something. We're going to merge with time. And once you agreed to come back, then he tells you that. That's the plan. And he said, what I want you? What were your thoughts about that? I was sort of game for anything. And the way you pitch me was he goes, listen, Bob, I need a successor. I want you to come back and be my successor, which is like very handy stuff for now in my 30s. And what was he at the time, would you say? Steve must have been late 50s, early 60s. And I was like, wow, what are you being in? So then when we were going to merge the companies, well, I was going to come back to Warner and be in the office of the president. We were going to have three of us that were the office of the president under him, which I had.

pretty great because he never had one president and like three guys and i was going to be in that then he said okay so you would be part of everything right and so then it goes okay we're going to merge with time but we're going to keep it separate so we're still going to have an office of the president of warners and then the time assets and then he calls me and said okay we're not going to do that and so i go find him and so i wound up with being the head of basically new business time Warner enterprises and I had wanted to buy Six Flags theme parks, which was really sort of my burning desire when I came back. Why did you want to do that?

I, you know, I don't know. When I was at MCA and we could buy companies was the whole idea, we tried to buy an ad agency, tried to buy Jay Walter Thompson, wound up with about 5% of the equity of Jay Walter Thompson, and we were going to make a hostile bid, and then a guy, Martin Sorrell, shows up to also make a hostile bid. We briefly talk about doing something together. Martin knew they had Tokyo real estate. I didn't know that. It's worth about half the value of Jay Walter Thompson. Wow. And so he bid more than we were willing to bid. But the stock had gone up so much. I mean, a quick win. I mean, we bought 5% of the company and suddenly we had tripled our money and, you know,

the MCA guys go, hey, I like you. So I'm going out saying what other companies can we look at? And I found six flags. It was owned by Wes Ray Capital, sort of a busted LBO. Were they the original owners? No, they were, had bought it. They bought it. And how many were there? How many six flags were? There were only seven at the time, only in big cities, big, big parks.

And I go, the MCA guy said, I want to buy this. They go, we already have theme parks. I got about it. I thought my deal was, so I could buy anything. Yeah. And they go, but not that. And so I'm talking to Steve, who was calling me pretty regularly, saying, hey, well, you should come back and blah, blah, blah.

And I tell them about six flags. And he said, if you come back, I'll let you buy six flags. So this is sort of sort of the deal. So when we were sort of divvying up responsible, I said, look, let me buy six flags. I'll run that and I'll run all the other new business. We'll go find new businesses and put everything there. And which sounds pretty exciting to me. It's kind of like what you would have done at MCA if they let you do whatever you want, really.

Well, what's interesting, and this is again luck, as luck would turn out, you know this in companies back then that pay you great money, but you didn't get any equity. Yeah. So when we got ready to do the deal, in the time and Warner deal, they had to borrow. a lot of money, heavily loaded up on debt. And Steve goes, look, I can give you $50 million to buy it, but you got to go find somebody else with the other $100 million of equity. And oh, by the way, cap them so they can earn more than a 30% IRA. And we got to be able to buy them back. Like all these conditions. And I go, okay. And I wound up getting Blackstone. Steve Swarsman, the time Henry

Silverman was running, and Roger Altman was there. And I'd gone in through Roger, who I knew, and we were sort of the first corporate deal. And it was a guy named Jimmy Lee at Chemical Bank, I think. I'm not sure they were yet, Chase. And Jimmy was going to put up the financing. But Jimmy and Henry Silverman called the guys at Time Morning, and they go, everybody who runs our companies has to own equity. And they go, well, we know, our guys here, we pay them well.

And they go, nope, got to give them equity. So I wound up with 4% of 6 lakhs, which, you know, mind you, I made a lot of money. on MTV. I thought I'd made a lot of money for a kid, but as luck would have it, I wound up a 4% of six flags. We bought it for 600 million. We eventually sold 51% for about a billion, and then they've sold the rest of it and wound up with $2 billion out of the value of six flags. And so that was the first real money I made was that, and it just sort of luck. And I, again, I had a plan for... How long was the period that you...

Five years. Five years, and did you build more six flags in those five months? No, I think we bought one in San Antonio, the eighth one, just as I was leaving from USAA. But I had a whole plan about Six Flags. I had this idea that we were going to try and do sort of take what Hertz had done in Avis. We're number two, we try harder. Right now there's one theme park, Disney, and everybody else. So we wanted to become the sort of the worst in the category with Disney instead of the best in the category without Disney. All of our parks were really big.

They were actually bigger than Disneyland. So we had a line bigger than Disneyland closer to home. Great. Because we really weren't competing with. They're destination trips. Yeah. Ours were day trips. Yeah.

If someone said, Six Flags not as good as Disney, I won because they thought of me in the category. Yeah. If they said, you're bigger than doing a part. If you're in the conversation, you won. It's what Pepsi did. Pepsi did the Pepsi challenge not to compete with Coke, but to get away from all the other soft drinks. Yeah. And it became Coke Pepsi.

They won. Did the parks change it all or no? Yeah, we did a complete redo. And I'm a creative guy. They didn't have a designer. They just outsourced it to people draw stuff. I hired a designer. His office was next to mine.

And we said, we're going to turn these things back into theme parks. And by the way, when I do a ride, I'm not doing a roller coaster. I'm doing Batman the ride. I'm doing stuff that's all, you know, fantasy. And so we redid the parks. And attendance went from about, it had been stuck at about 17 million for years and years and years. And we got it up to about $25 million by the time we sold the company. Amazing.

And then we sold it. And then that company sold it to a small theme park company that put the Six Flags brand on lots of other small parks. But so it's nowhere near the same Six Flags. It was when I was running it. element electrolytes have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best add element electrolytes to your daily routine perform better and sleep deeper improve your cognitive function experience an increase in steady energy with fewer headaches and fewer muscle cramps. Element electrolytes. Drink it

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tell me about the difference between a local anything radio versus when it becomes either syndicated or goes national. What's different? Well, you know, it's interesting. I think ultimately everything is local and the more local you can make it the better. You know, with radio stations, what makes them so popular is it's very local. If you're listening to our station, it's your station. It's your station. And we're talking about stuff in L.A. We're talking about stuff in New York. We're talking about stuff in Memphis. We're talking about stuff in Minneapolis. relevant to you. It feels like your next door neighbor because we're talking about the same stuff your next door neighbor would be chatting with you if he's riding to work with you every

day. And so I think everything you can make local makes it so much better. And I think it's the secret of it all. Technology has allowed us to do so much more localization. Because in the past, if we wanted a station to sound local, we had to hire people and put them in that market so that they would know what was going on in the market, so they could talk about it. Well, you know how good they were at finding out what was going on the market? Not really good. They didn't know much. The Internet wasn't around.

When the Internet came, you go, wow, I had perfect knowledge of everything going on this town. But now, actually, I don't need you to live in the town anymore because it used to cost us tons of money to broadcast from another town. Nothing anymore. So, by the way, where do you want to live? Wherever you want to live, you can live. I just need you to be on the air in this town. and I need you to study this town of all the information, so you are really relevant. And it has made our stations smaller markets so much better.

Large markets, you know, we could already afford great talent, and they were there. But occasionally you have people who, you know, want to be in multiple places. Like we got, Ryan Seacrest is on 100 of our radio stations, Charlemagne the Gods on, you know, 100 radio stations. So we're able to project and use these sort of really, really superstar talent in markets. And they're able to go in and do local breaks. So they're doing stuff that's very relevant for the local. Sometimes they have a local person on their desk for that market that also does a lot of

local stuff as well. We're able to get high value talent and make it very, very local. When did you go to Clear Channel? I went in 2010. When I left after AOL Time Warner, I was trying to retire before we did. the time Warner merger because I had always told myself that I was going to quit work by the time I was 50 if I made enough money. And when I went to AOL, I originally thought I'd made enough money because of six flags. And then I did Century 21 real estate briefly for a year. I made a lot of

money off that one. And as part of Century 21, I went to AOL and said, I want to be your real estate section. Steve Case says, yes, yes. Why don't you be on my board? I go, well, that might be fun. Steve, we know, AOL was in a transition period, losing a lot of money, stock market wasn't great. And Steve said, why don't you come down and help me and originally run the AOL service, then became sort of the chief operating officer. We got rid of a couple of other businesses. But come down and help me run it.

I've been on the board, stay on the board. So Steve and I were the two guys on the board. And I go, well, that sounds like fun. And I've done a year at Century 21, which is all I promised Henry Sellerner is running the company I would do. And I'd fixed it up and we'd taken the profit up 10x. It's like, I did what I was supposed to do. And he, blessings, okay, go, you know, go do it. And for once, I didn't need money. So I said, just pay me where you're going to pay me. And I don't need a contract. And just give me whatever stock you can give me. And it was the least thought out thing I've

ever done. And obviously, you know, as things turn out, I made the most money there made by a long shop. So it sort of was this interesting moment of the world was opening up and I had a front row seat. So when I decided to leave, I mean, we were just been on a tear by the time, I think, 1999 comes around. We're the 10th most valuable company in America, where at that time, a lot of money, $250 billion. It's a big company back then. And Steve had an idea that he wanted to always wanted to merge with Time Warner. And I thought there was zero chance Jerry would ever do that. having come from Time Warner. She would already been at Time Warner, and now you're at AOL, and he wants to merge.

I've been at Warner, then Time Warner, and now he wants to merge. When I go, I don't think so. I mean, you know, it's like, good, knock yourself out, have all the conversations you want. Yeah. He came back from China. He was on some trip, spent some time with Jerry, and said, I think we merge. And I'm still very skeptical, think it was no way. And I'm working on a deal to buy eBay from Meg Whitman, and we're working heavily and making great progress.

And Steve goes, it's going to happen. We're going to do it. I go, really? And literally it's like the week. He's convinced us me it's really going to happen. Another one of these stories. And so we, that weekend, we get the boards together. They all approve it and we do it. But I said I was going to retire by then. I go, okay, Steve said, look, I need you stick around for this. And I go, okay, I'll stick around for this. And so it's exciting too. And so Steve became the chairman. Levann was the CEO, Parsons and I were co-C-O's and sort of split up in the operating groups. So we, we began to.

that and I kept thinking I'm got I got to have my moment to leave because I got a you know I work since I was 15 yeah and everybody else said man I was backpacked around Europe I didn't done any of that I mean a long vacation where for me it was all I did was from 15 all I did was work and I was a little bitter I was like a little mad 2002 I finally say dick I'm leaving and I leave thinking I'm going to do nothing I'm a pilot and I love the fly yeah and by then I have a pretty big airplane so I go I'm to see the world my plane and we're just going to do it and i got two young kids then in addition my older son i'm just going to load them up we're not going to go we're going to go for six seven weeks we'd even go to to asia for six or seven weeks i'd throw different kinds of clothes in

the back we'd live out of the plane but after about six months i'd actually done most of what i thought i wanted to do and i go now what so i did some investing i raised small private equity fund and wasn't really working full-time but if i was working i worked on that and 2008 came along, 2009 with that market crash, which scared the hell on me. I go, wait a minute, you can lose money in private equity. And I go, when I came out of it, we survived and were okay. I go, man, I'm never doing another fun. Lose my money is one thing, but lose my friend's money is just untenable. So I decided I'd just do some investing myself. Rich Bressler was at T.H. Lee at the time, and he said, hey, look, CEO of Clear Channel stepping down. I know you don't want to work again.

you said you'd ever be a CEO, yeah, but would you just take a look at it? And I looked at it and go, wait a minute, do you know what you guys have? I didn't realize how big radio still was. I didn't realize these guys reached everybody in America with the radio station. They read 90% reading. I would not have guessed that. I still wouldn't guess it. Oh, by the way, more people listen to the radio today than did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It's unbelievable. It is just like it is a part of people's lives, just a routine. It's like the power. Yeah. And so when I started looking at this, I go, man, you don't. know what you've got. And he goes, well, that's sort of why I want you to look at it. And so I made an

investment. And then they talked me into being the chairman of like the radio group and just, he said, not full time, not help. Yeah. And then realized they needed a digital product for the service so that people could get the stations other places. And I realized very quickly, I didn't know what they were doing. So I go, look, I came out, I know how to run this process and, you know, we'll figure this out. And so I sort of got hands on and took over, so we're going to build which being the iHeart radio app. And in the process, they go, you know, said you wouldn't be the CEO because you don't work too hard anymore. You're already working hard, aren't you be the CEO? And I go, you know what? Let me get this thing launched. And I had this whole plan that

we're going to do this, launch it with what I called live a, you know, like a festival in Vegas for two days, just highlight Iheart and that's going to be it. Did you change the name of the company from Clear Channel to I heart? Yeah, yeah. That was the game was I got there and then I said, look, let me get through it. We launched, and I said, okay, I'll be the CEO, thinking I'll do it for a couple of years, and here I'm 15 years later. Yeah. How many stations does it have? We had about 850 stations. Is that similar to what it had when you bought in? And we are the number one podcast publisher by a mile. We have the number one digital radio app. Obviously, our events, all of those tent poles are huge, whether it's jingle ball or festival or the award show

or the country festival or the alter ego show are all in their own right, major events. So we've really expanded what the company is. We've really gotten into data and, you know, began to use that, built out the ad tech. You know, ironically, the advertising that works the best by far is broadcast radio advertising. Really? What all the advertisers want is all the digital stuff, which is ironic since the digital reaches so much less. Yeah. I mean, you know, ad-supported Spotify or ad-supported Pandora reach about 20% of America.

We reach 90%. So no matter how good your message is, only 20% are hearing it. And so what makes radio work so well is, one, everybody takes us to work with them every day. They listen to us at work. They listen to us on the way home. They listen to us in the morning when they're getting dressed at home. And radio just clobbers it. But it's the hardest advertising to sell because all the agencies go, I want digital advertising.

I'm set up my whole company to be. buy digital advertising, you're out of the mainstream here. It's harder for me to buy it. And I go, well, shouldn't you want the best stuff? The answer's no. You should want the stuff that fits your process. So we re-engineered how you can sell broadcast radio. So it looks like digital. We have to get the data. We have to get the, you know, the same information available and the technology. So, you know, hands-on keyboards can buy instead of phone calls and faxes. Yeah. When do you follow data and when do you go against data? Research is not policymaking.

It just answers questions for you, and then you have to make a gut decision. So the only difference between looking at data and no data is I have, something has conditioned my thinking, my gut a little bit. I still have to make a gut decision. Research never tells you what to do, and I think that's a misconception about it. And I always look at research. I want to know everything I can know before I make a decision, and it's still going to be wrong a lot of time. Yeah. We did a study two years ago with Malcolm Gladwell, looking at Real America versus marketers, because my problem is marketers. Go, everybody listens to this day, you don't know what you're talking about. So we did a study, just to highlight it. And at that time, Succession was the big show on TV for all of our friends. 100% of marketers had heard of succession. Two-thirds of real Americans had never heard of succession. Two-thirds of Americans had never heard of an April Spritz. A third had never heard of a chakouterie board. The number one in two sports, participatory sports, are not pickleball and golf. It's cornhole and bowling. And by the way, hunting and fishings

in the top five. And it's just people are so out of touch with what real America's looking at. And by the way, there are two things that real America really is important to them that marketers are afraid of. The military and religion. 80% of Americans still are of faith. Go to church. Yeah. Maybe not all the time. 80%. But, you know, if I, in a meeting, and I say, well, let's show somebody in church or let's get the pastor. What are you crazy? You can't touch that. That's so controversial.

Actually, it turns out it's not real America. And we did the study not to say to market as your idiots, but to say, don't trust your instinct. Look at your data. Now make a gut decision, you know, math and magic. Look at the math. Now, put the magic in. And you've got to do something creative with it. And it's usually not the obvious thing.

The obvious thing is usually the worst thing to do. The most creative is sort of out of the book. blue. Yeah. But still is geared toward that. You said your dad was a minister. Yeah. Tell me what it's like growing up with a minister dad. It's interesting. My dad was, I'd say he's minister and people conjure up these ideas of fire and brimstone, but he actually was really well educated for Mississippi. Went to graduate school at Emory in Atlanta, which is a very liberal school at the time to divinity school at a college degree. My mom had a college degree, which was, I think, My brother told me two percent of households in Mississippi had two parents that were both

college graduates, much less grad school. And my dad was a real thinker about stuff. Like when I was a kid and everybody's misbehaving, my dad was said, look, I can't tell you what to do. You're going to make your own decisions. So the only thing I'm going to ask you to do is just listen to me before you make your decision. And then I trust you'll make the right decision.

So when I was later in life, you know, somebody's doing something bad. I say, what are you thinking of that, dad? He said, I believe in the redemptive power of love about forgiveness, love, and no anger, no hate. In my household, the dirty word was hate. We couldn't say hate. My mother would say, honey, we don't hate anybody. We don't hate. And if somebody was just a despicable human being, my mother would say, I wonder why they want to be that way.

So that was the household I grew up in. And my brother and I talk about how lucky we were to have that. kind of household where there was just enormous amount of unconditional love, a lot of support. And in the church was, for me, I'm not a regular churchgoer, but I'm, I would say I have certainly faith or spirituality. You know, when you grow up in the household, you hear your dad to have too many conversations about so-and-so in the congregations wants it named after them, or they want that pew for them, or they got to, you know, and just go, oh, the politics. But what came through was really the power of service to others. I always love the hard rock cafe, had that slogan.

What was it? Love all, serve all. And I go, you know, I like that. Love all, serve all. Yeah. It's like, why wouldn't I help people? Mo Austin was, I just love Mo. Me too. And Moe was one of those guys that, I don't want to contrast him to Walter Yetnikoff. Walter Yachtnikov, when something was going on, Walter would figure out how he had an angle to get you. Yes. When something was going, they weren't great, Mo would call you up and say, what can I do to help? Yeah. And you know who got the most benefit from that? Mo, because, you know, when Walter tried to screw me or get something, you know, you say, I'm not going to get that guy anything or any power. I don't have to. Mo, you go, I want to do everything for Mo. Look at Moe's always helping me. And he did favors for people every time he could do it, only because he could do the favor. Yeah. Not because he expected anything in return. No. And I love people in business like that. And I think some of that probably came from my dad, my mom, and my childhood, and where and how I grew up.

Would you see your dad speak in church? Oh, yeah. What was that like? Tell me about that. It was just the preacher. But, you know, it was funny in those days. I guess still now the sermon was always trying to be relevant. Yeah.

Like what's going on in the news? Woody Allen movie or, you know, the TV show or something to make these values relevant. Because what is the sermon about is how do we get through life? You know, how do we cope? What should we do? How many people would be in church? In those days, it was a lot of people, but maybe 250. 50. It's a lot. Yeah. Would you be proud of them when you'd see them? Yeah, I don't think you'd do.

You know, kids and parents, you don't sort of have that emotion. Later in life, I'm very proud of it. Yeah. But at the time, that's just what my dad did. I see. And I was sort of the kid, preacher's kids came in two colors. One that looked like preachers and the other that looked like, who's that kid? My brother was the first. I was the latter. Yeah. And probably spent too much time trying to prove I wasn't a preacher, but my dad knew what was going on. It's interesting one. My oldest son was having some teenage problems and I must have been bitching about it. And my dad says, you know what, there's nothing he does that's so bad that's worth losing your line of communication of her. And I thought, my dad knew a lot more about what I was doing

than he let on. He just, they just revealed the secret. And I've repeated that to other people who get kids going through it and go, nothing is worth losing your line. a communication over. Don't make too big a deal about it. Wow. They'll get through it. That's beautiful. Do you pray? You know, I think I pray. I pray in a different way. I'm not sure who I'm praying to or what, but I feel absolutely connected to other consciousness. And I think it's ridiculous to think that there's not something else going on here. I've had sort of an interesting relationship with my mom who my mother always wanted a girl in the family. There haven't been a girl since the 1890s in the Pittman family.

And my daughter was finally born, Lucy Pittman, my mother was alive. This was like the greatest thing in the world, the daughter. I talked to my mother on a Sunday night, and I was down in Mexico. I said, I'll see you in a couple of weeks and we'll fly through Jackson's see you. The nanny comes down. It was up with the kids. She comes down and says, well, Lucy woke up in the night and was screaming and screaming for me. Tell me, come.

And she said, I walked toward the room in the room. was a light on the room. I had to leave a light on the room. And I said, Lucy, and the light went off. And she said, I went in the room and I go, Lucy, what's going on? She said, there's somebody in the room. And she says, she looks right. I go, so there's no one in the room. It's okay. And she said, I talked to her and going back to sleep. And she finally went back to sleep. An hour later, my brother called and said, mom died in her sleep last night. And I go, wow, this is on her way out. She comes to see Lucy. That is wild. So all of us in the family talk to my mom. And my daughter, who, you know, barely remembers my mother, praise to her.

It's like, help me. Yes. Beautiful story. It's amazing. The mystical experiences that we can have. If we're open and pay attention, there really is magic in the world. I'm completely convinced that you, you know, we're all connected there. And, you know, I sat with my dad when he died and held his hand, my brother and I, and sort of talked him through it.

He was sort of struggling. We go, Dad, it's okay. You know, you're great, you can go. Yeah. And he left, but he was still breathing. The body was still breathing. The heart was still breathing. And my brother and I both looked at each other.

He just left. Yeah. He left this body. And the body goes on for a little while, and then a couple hours later, stops breathing and the heart stops. And my mother, I talked to her about stuff. And I think if I'm making this up,

am I just like, am I putting words up there and just, and I go, why would I be thinking that? I mean, where did it come from? And I do think we have that capability to connect. One of the awful things we do is we try and talk people out of intuition of just that feeling. And when I was a young kid in 2021, I went my girlfriend to the scene called Silver Mind Control. And what they basically teach you is go down the level, like you're meditating, go in a room, put a screen up, and put up stuff you need the answers to or that you want to visualize to see happen. And at the last day, you go around the room, they're like 300 people in a ballroom somewhere.

I don't know any of them. And they say, go to 10 different people and they tell you someone's name and you tell them what's wrong with the person. And I hit 10 on 10. But when I hit them, I would say, I don't, I'm not sure anything. I have cancer. And they go, right. And what they're teaching you is, why did you say cancer instead of diabetes? That's actually an answer.

You don't trust it because it didn't like, it's like, but it just came to it. you, just say what comes to you. Yeah, it's subtle, but it's in us. And by the way, all of us who've done creative work, it is like the stuff that just comes to you is usually the right answer. Yeah. You know, this whole thing of, don't overthink it. And usually, it's not our idea. Right. Do you know what I'm saying? It's not like you can't really take credit for it, even though it does come through you. Right, right. It's just there. It's just there. It's just there. You just see it that way. And by the way, and the stuff I have done that, really great. It's stuff like a meteor hit me in the head. It wasn't planned out. It wasn't

worked out. It's just like it's the epiphanies. And I, you know, at work, I preach to people that what really makes the difference in our business are the two or three epiphanies you have. Not the day-to-day process. That just sort of keeps the train running. What makes the difference are those epiphanies where you go, I got it. Wait a minute. And we all have times of the day we do that. Mine is, I wake up in the night with them sometimes. And I do it and I take a nice, shower in the morning sort of meditative shower, and the answers come to me. If I just got a block, I can't write something, suddenly I got it all in my head. In the shower. I just, I'm rush out and write down a speech, a promo, a spot, or something that I've been struggling with. It just comes

to me. And if you don't write it down, it might go away. It goes away. And it's interesting, because I've, you know, talk to people about this creative process. You know, it seems the one I believe works is when we load ourselves up with all the facts and then forget about it. Yeah. And then one day, in the most unexpected places, the answer comes to you. Yeah, you're not thinking about it at all. It just flows. I got it. Now, somebody like David Eagleman, who's the great neuroscientist from Stanford, will say your subconscious is working on it.

He calls the conscious mind the broom closet in the mansion of your mind, that most of us is the unconscious, the subconscious. And he said, the subconscious is working all the time. And when it's got something ready, it just hands it to you. I don't know whether it's that or whether it's the cosmic, we're all tied together, or maybe a little of both, right. All good. And he uses this example. He said, you know, you are sitting in a busy restaurant and yours might say your name.

Well, they said my name. And he goes, how did you hear that? So actually, you're subconscious and listening to everything that hit your eardrums. It only makes you aware of something when it's relevant. Yeah. And it explains a lot. You've talked about making decisions very quickly and moving things fast. are there times not to move fast?

Yeah, when you have a crisis, you got to take a beat because your first reaction is going to be hysteria. I see. And I just think, you know, you take a beat. Just try and detach yourself a little bit and do it. But it's almost the opposite of what most people would do. Most people would take time ruminating over something where there's no time pressure associated.

And then in an emergency, they deal in the moment. Yeah. And then in an emergency, say, okay, when do I have? have to have a decision. Well, we got to make an announcement by tomorrow morning. Okay. Then we have until tomorrow morning. Yeah. Let's let's think about it. Yeah, yeah. Let's sort of go through it and then ideate a bit. Are all businesses the same? On one level, yes. You know, and if you love business, which I love, I can be as excited about Six Flags theme parks and Century 21 real estate as I'm out of America online or I heart. Business is an ultimate game.

And with my kids, you know, you're trying to explain them why am I working so hard. And I think the best answer I ever had, someone told me this. I forgot who told me, but it poised it right, said, don't tell your kids that you don't like work and you're sorry you're working because then they go, well, why the hell are you leaving me if you don't like it? Tell them you love it. And so I tell my kids, you know, work for me is like a video game for you. I can't wait to get up in the morning and start playing.

At the end of the day, I don't want to put it away. And I just love thinking about stuff. love the sort of the chess pieces that move around. Like, oh, we can move this over here or this over here. By the time I go to bed, I'm working on this stuff and thinking about it. Think about it in the night. It wake up sometimes. I have to make a couple of notes. But it just occupies my mind and keeps me stimulated. So on that level, all businesses say I could get excited about whether it's a business doing, you know, $100,000 a year or a business doing, you know, $40 billion in revenue. It's just the same. Problem solving, really? I think it's problem solves.

it's also the creative. It's the math and the magic. And I'm pretty good at math. I've got sort of a math mind. And I get really excited about the magic part. And I just love other people who have the magic part. I love the debates. By the way, I love the math people too. I do long debates with research people all the time. Well, I don't think it's showing us that. I think it's showing us that. How are we going to interpret that? And it's that, again, that camaraderie that comes from a process. And I think, look, you talked earlier about community. You threw it in a couple of I think it's about we love our community. And business is my community. And the company I'm with is my community, my people, my team. And there's nothing I can't do for them. It's just like we're in it together. How much of your particular skill set do you think you learned in school? None. No. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit. But I went to probably the worst public school in America, Brakeva, Mississippi. There were a couple of teachers who were really great. sadly, in that era, if you were a woman, you didn't have many opportunities for jobs. So there were some brilliant women that were teachers that today would be investment

bankers or lawyers or doctors or physicists or scientist or something. But back then, they were teachers. And I got a lot from them. Sort of, I was a good learner. I mean, I had really good grades. And I did really well on the standardized test. But I was always just looking for something that interests me. I think some of my success is I'm not well-educated, smart, but not well-educated.

Yeah. So I never learned the wrong way to do stuff. When I was 30, I went back to when I was at MTV and they were preparing me to be the CEO because I was too young. They were apoplectic that I was in college graduate. I'd only done three years of college, never done my senior year. And so they put me in this advanced management program at the Harvard Business School, 13 weeks. and people who are sort of going to CEO next, go do the this. And so I went, and my first observation was,

ah, now I know why people are asking me the wrong questions about my business. They learned it in school. Yeah. That wasn't coming out of their head. They were just repeating something. Yeah. And I think not knowing allowed me to see things differently than others. I mean, we did MTV.

I didn't know I was doing anything different. I was just doing what seemed like the logical thing to do. And so other people maybe say, oh, my God, we're being disruptive. I did a lot of disruptive things in my career. I never once thought I was being disruptive. Yeah. I thought I was just... Yeah, you didn't know what you were disrupting.

I was just like doing what seems to be... Oh, we didn't need this. Here's the way you do it. Yeah. I didn't know I was disrupting it. I'm sorry, guys. I didn't know I was disrupting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How do technical innovations change existing business models? You know what? I think they open up opportunities. In my business career, I think there's only one rule that I always follow. The consumer wants convenience. and if I can find something they like doing and make it easier, I'll have a winning product.

So I'm constantly in search of what makes this easier. And when people say, here's a new business. And they go, well, you got to go, two more steps. I go, that's not going to work. And they go, oh, and you just push a button, it all happens. I go, that's going to work. So I have these sort of prisms I put it through,

but put it through because I understand the consumer. And what I can't do a B2B business. I wouldn't know what to do. But I know consumer business as well, because the consumer is the same consumer. And they've always been your whole life. Whether I'm selling them a house at Century 21 or trying to get them to watch MTV or trying to get them to listen to wherever, it's the same consumer.

And so they behave in a very reliable way if you really study them and listen to them. What's the status of AM radio today? It's surprising. It's still there. It's still doing well. You know, it doesn't have the audience it once had. But what's interesting is in time of need, people go to the AM. There's a wildfire here.

You know where they're going to KFI? KFI and K&X out here. And the KFI is ours. And by the way, we are 24 hours. All the feeds during the virus came from KFI. People know AM is there and it's their safety. When a hurricane comes along, when a tornado comes, when something, this terrible disaster comes, they go to the AM station. AM stations also tend to be pretty battle-hearted.

So when the storms hit the Carolinas, remember that? Yeah. There were places where there was no cell service, there was no TV, there was nothing except a couple of AM stations. They got every bit of their information from the AM stations. You know, when things are really terrible, they may not have an AM radio in the house, they go into the car, which has a battery, they turn it on and listen to AM radio. And we know our job, by the way, is our job is to serve the community.

Normally, that's keep them entertained, keep them, you know, companionship. In a disaster, it changes. It is like, stop what you're doing, do nothing but give these people critical information they need. You know, if there's a flood in Houston, you'll hear people on the air calling in. I'm on top of my house. Where are you? We're going to send the boat for you. We're connecting boats to people and getting people out of these problems.

And that, to me, you know, you always want a bigger sense of purpose in what you do in life. and I think for all of us who work in radio, the bigger sense of purpose is we know we serve the community and those AM stations are an integral part of serving that community. Maybe we don't get as big an audience. Maybe we don't make so much money on them. But when you got to serve the community, give me my AM stations because they allow me to do something that the FMs can't do. Could you imagine any additional use for AM considering how robust it is and how it covers the country that's not happening now? You know, it doesn't have a lot. of spectrum with it. So you say, hey, I could repurpose. You can't do a lot with that amount of

spectrum. So I dial up modem kind of spectrum. But it is, I think the best thing we can do is you start to say, what's the service of radio? Keep people company. What higher purpose is to keep people company? I mean, you and I have plenty of friends who would probably make friends easily. A lot of people in America don't and they're lonely. Was it 50% of Americans talk about having bouts of loneliness and young kids? I just saw some study that was like, there was four statements which are predictor of depression. They were hanging in about the 20% range until about 2015 and then they took off up to about 50%. And you go, these people need somebody to hang out with. They need somebody who's not judgmental. They need somebody who just sounds friendly and nice and gives them the

information they're looking for and sounds interested in them. And I just think, you know, when you sort of think about higher purpose, I go back to my dad as the minister, what higher purpose than just to put your arm around somebody and say, it's going to be okay. Yeah, beautiful. Give you a hug. How has social media impacted the radio business? It's expanded it because before social media, Elvis Duran, Ryan Seagra, Charlemagne de God,

they would talk about things on the radio but would have no idea whether the listener responding unless they happen to call the request line. And you only had so many lines and they're probably not very scientific. Today, if you watch them, they're all watching social as the show's going on. Ryan probably is the master of this. What's catching on? And if it's catching on, is it catching on the way or is it going left or right? And they can now move. And so these shows stay extraordinarily relevant to people in real time. And what else is real time out there? and nothing has this audience. I mean, we reach more people in the month than Facebook does.

We reach more people in a month than Google does. And so when you've got this kind of reach, it's like, how do you stay relevant? And social allows us to stay in tune with that audience every minute. Coming about your media consumption habits. I probably live on social too much. I listen to radio a lot. Probably if I'm on TV, I'm just watching news. And then I'll watch the streaming services.

My partner is in the movie and TV business, so she's always got something we should see. So she sort of keeps me relevant and watching interesting stuff. And I read every newspaper online. I read probably about six of them in the morning and check them hourly or through the day. I'm sort of a news junkie. Are you as in love with flying as you've ever been? I have been, but I just stopped flying. I've gotten to the age where the insurance company basically is.

says, you know, Mr. Pittman will insure you, but not with the liability limits you've had. And I go, well, I can't fly. And the truth is, probably my reflexes are not what they were. I used to ride motorcycles a lot. In my early 60s, I go, my reflexes aren't quite as good, so I'm going to give up motorcycles. And so now I ride in the back. First time after 50 years. Yeah. I don't go to the cockpit. How's it feel? It feels a little weird. But in some ways, this is probably a statement about aging is a young guy. I used to love to learn to fly a new plane. I used to love to go to flight school every year.

And I used to love all that stuff. And as I got older, it was a chore to go like, I got to go to school again. I got to go again this year. And so sometimes when there's really a particularly rough night, the weather's bad, and I know what the guys are going through out there, I go, huh, sort of nice to be back here. Yeah.

I'm not sweating. They're sweating. I mean, look, I've flown with those guys, and I've flown the simulator with them, you know, and training with them in the past. So I know what they're going through and we know each other. So, you know, I have an appreciation of what goes on.

But I still love airplanes and I flew helicopters and airplanes and just sort of stopped both. You know, if I weren't working, I would probably do the extra time to go, okay, let me go work with the insurance company and try and compense them and do. But I go, you know, 50 years, that's good.

How did the technology of planes change over your life? Look, when I started, I flew very small airplanes and piston engines and, you know, those got a little more sophisticated, but at a certain point, I could afford to fly a turbop. And then did that, and then I finally afford to fly. What's different about a turbo prop? A turbo prop's got a jet engine spinning a propeller.

I see. And a turbine. And then, you know, when you go to jets, you've got a turbine that, you know, you don't have the propeller on it, although you got a turbo fan, which is a hidden way propeller. Yeah, so that changed. And we learned a lot more about sort of the mechanics of it, and that was great.

But what really has changed is the aviation. the navigation, the radios, et cetera. And if you think about what changes on an airplane, it makes an airplane dated, it's usually the avionics. And on my plane, I've had the one I have now for 10 or 12 years. I have ripped out twice the avionics and put it all this stuff because it's just... It's all computerized, I imagine. And the technology has just changed so much.

It's so much better. But it's not the engines or the wings or that stuff don't change. much what do you attribute the interest in country music in our culture lately you know i think country music has always been an interesting country music and it sort of goes up and down and it goes in cycles you know remember urban cowboy and you know that moment oh there's rhinestone cowboy yeah there's there moments when it comes along and i did this country music station back in 1974 in chicago knew nothing about country and it used to be howdy partner and what was different about our station was I made it sound like it was top 40.

And I hired a lot of old top 40 disc jockeys from the top 40 station in town, WLS. And we did giveaways, we sounded cosmopolitan. Except we were playing country music. Now, people in country thought I was the devil because I was, like, changing it. But we didn't play to type. Yeah.

We just played like it said, we're normal people playing country music. And I think we're seeing the same thing here. And I think, you know, the more people who sort of touch country, it helps. There was a story a couple of months. months ago about the MTV News Library being erased. Did you hear that story? Yeah. Why would... Why would you erase anything? Why would you erase a library that you own? What's happening?

I don't know. It is. Is there any answer you can come up with why it could possibly happen? Well, because somebody says, oh, you know how much money it costs us to store that stuff? And we have to have an archivist and we get rid of that job. It's the only possible reason I can think of. I once did a show called The Morton Downey Jr. And when we finished the show, it was a great show, by the way. He broke all of them. It was a great show.

He was a crazy guy. In the end, it was still a show where the producer cancels their own show. But it was, he did so many breakthroughs in that show. But we finished with it, and then we've got all these tapes and we say, what are we going to do with them? And people say, well, no, but stormoyed.

And I go, well, we can't throw it. To this day, I pay Iron Mountain to store those tapes. They're probably sawdust by now or dust the dust, but I can't bring myself to be the one to say, I'm going to erase anything that's ever existed. I'm glad you're not erasing them. It is crazy, huh? Yeah. Well, it's like all those Tonight Show shows that were erased way back when.

That was like, why? Wow. How much money could you possibly be saving? And by the way, if you look at the history, every time you have something, you always make money on it in the future. There's another window. There's another use. Yeah. It's unbelievable.

It's crazy. Tell me about the podcast. Tell me about meth and magic. When we first started getting in the podcasting and began to be a pretty major publisher, I go, you know, I'd like to do one, but just for like marketers because I talk to advertisers all the time. And I can do a podcast, not for the general public, but for them. And I want to start off with people I know pretty well because I know a lot of stories about them all those stuff. But I'm trying to drag out of them that are those lessons that you could use insights.

And so it's fun to do. And I really surprisingly enjoyed it, although I get lazy. And we'll go, maybe I'm going to be vacation time six months before I do another season. We do great research and that people help. But I do, I write the whole thing. And the hardest thing is to go, what's an angle I can talk about on this person that others don't know? Or what do I know about this person? Or what do I see here?

And, you know, once I've got that, you know, writing the questions all gets pretty easy. but it's trying to get that construct right. But I love it. And it's a great way for me to stay current. You know, even though I know people, even though friends, I do the research, and I go, I didn't know that. But it's also, you know, it's a great way for me with friends to bring up stories, too, about, you know, what contributions like Fred Seiber to MTV, you know.

Fred's the guy, did the on-air look. And, you know, it's great to sort of give him the kudos and to put it down in an archive that, you know, he did it. So many people want to tell the story. of things I've done who weren't even in the room. I don't even know them. How could they possibly know? Yeah.

And so it's interesting. I mean, the people did these documentaries on MTV and I, they go, who are they talking to? And actually, I did a math and magic. I've interviewed all the people who founded MTV with me. And I edited it together the real story of MTV. Great. And just took the pieces and just go, let's just tell, let's tell them tell the story. Because we were all in the room.

Yeah. And it's the only way you'll ever really know. Yeah. It's an archive. I think there's a value in half. I mean, some of the podcast I love doing for people is I want them to have a record of what they did. Yes. And so what I'm trying to do in 45 minutes is give the story of who this person is. And it's like Walter Isaac. I said Walter. And when I sent Walter from time down to be the CEO of CNN. And when we had 9-11 happened and all the news was about 9-11, you couldn't get any other news. So Walter had this idea to put the scroll at the bottom that every news channel does today. He did it so he could put the other news there, even though they were covering 9-11. That's when it started. And that was Walter who did that.

Wow. And I know one had ever given Walter the credit for it. So, you know, my podcast is great. Say, okay, Walter, you know, we're putting it on the record. You know, you're the guy that did that. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

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