The insane true story behind MTV

my mtv hit list mtv mtv mtv mtv mtv who grew the company from zero to billions in revenue yeah we were a high margin money machine it was sort of a height of the cable tv revolution which she began to deteriorate nearly two thousands with the digital revolution you helped create south park chap show stephen colbert we had jimmy kim on and you gotta start there bill mar got a tv start on comedy central you're recruited by steve jobs same with ge who was one the most successful media business guys there ever is you i think made an offer to buy facebook is that right yeah we were the first people we went back and forth and we put a bit on the table and they turned us down a big what was it it was like one point seven million billion excuse me when you're were like trying to spot winning people or creative was there like a common theme yeah well i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less try was trying to think of the way that i could introduce you tom helped found mtv which was one of the most important networks when i was raised like going home and watching t r at like the three thirty was like the greatest thing ever but and then you also owned v one comedy central which meant you helped create south park chap show john stewart daily show the daily show stephen colbert we had jimmy kim on i mean you gotta start there bill mar got his tv start on comedy central yeah it goes on and on and on and then also this is a business podcast you grew the company from zero to billions in revenue yeah how big billions we gotta to feel like eight or nine billion dollars that includes consumer products which became a big thing for us because we would own the ip of all the nick too sponge yeah you had you know nick nickelodeon so rented it was the biggest business with nickelodeon was yeah by far i wanna talk about that business but i just like wanted to like show like the traction not only from a cultural like you had your impact on culture but also the business side which those two aren't always correlated yeah it was a wonderful business i mean we were a high margin money machine it was sort of a height of the cable tv revolution which you know began to deteriorated in nearly two thousands with the and with the with the digital revolution so yeah we had amazing business model i mean because we had we had three revenue streams we had subscribers which is like one third to forty percent you know from cable operators or satellite operators advertising and then consumer products movies and other things that we would do how old are you when you started it i was the oldest guy when we started mtv the development team was seven or eight people and i was thirty three and i had front of business in india in afghanistan we used to design and make clothes and sell them to better stores here in in canada in a couple of other countries and i knew nothing about that business but i wanted to live in india were you like a hippie and you just like one over there i wasn't a hip i was just i have been working in an ad agency in the york and they assigned me to charm and toilet paper and that was like the last straw for me a line i couldn't cross and a girlfriend ex girlfriend called me from paris said oh man you can you can't sell toilet paper i'm going cross this sahara desert once you you should just come with me quit your job don't do this i was on a plane like you know ten days later which is weird i think i read that you graduated number one in your class from getting your em nba at nyu i did that yes i went to business school primarily if i originally to stay out of the draft because of vietnam war was raging and then in business school i encountered people like peter dr and professors i was really entrance and turned on by business and then when i got out of there i basically just decided i'd do men jobs and bart my way around for a year and sort of take what people would call now a gap year so i worked like an aspen in the caribbean and you know there was well rounded experience i'd recommend for anybody to do i was sort of the king of the road kinda of phase for me then i came back and got a job in an ad agency which was interesting on another level working a big organization a creative organization at its heart and then i quit and went traveling crossed us the sahara desert we split up i kept going ended up in indian afghanistan dan and i because i had met another woman in greece she said oh you should go to india that's like the holy grail it's the greatest show on earth in the seventies it was you know sixty percent of people were under the poverty line it was really way before you know the ninety economic reforms in india that really transformed a place and so i decided i wanted to live there then i said well what am i gonna do how can i support myself because he couldn't get a job there in those days and she had she had told me this woman in greece she had lived in cat man do and she would make in designer around clothes she was a former clothing designer who was sort of dropped out from new york city and she would lived in cat man do like a queen she would make and design these clothes and then take them overland and sell them on beach resorts in the mediterranean in the summertime she had her own sort of you know vertically integrated conglomerate it and i said well what if i scale that up and i could do better stuff than the commodity imports and fund partners and build businesses and factories and our peak revenue at the time was probably eight million dollars but that was then what you was at this was nineteen seventy two that could be like forty million today right it was good i mean i i was a i was i had my first million in my twenties you're how old are you twenty five twenty so i was probably no twenty six twenty seven did you make a million did you take home anything well yeah i made it but it was but you've probably noticed it was on paper oh yeah it was on paper because it was all tied up in inventory it was tied up in receivables you know you felt i had to pay for goods in advance it was fun when you wound it down i think you're what like thirty a thirty three i i wound down i mean i really got yank out of the business because in afghanistan there had been a communist coup that kinda drove me out of there and then i doubled down on my business in india and then of all people having endured strikes and blackouts and dust storms and all these delays and i'm gonna to pay hustle jimmy carter put us out of business because he put an embargo not a tariff but an embargo on clothing imports from india so did you walk me with anything no i i i ended up smuggling three tons of clothes over the saint lawrence river to meet a delivery dated bloom dale we we were doing a big they called the the india that was called a into fantasy india and i shipped close to canada and then brought them in you know the crime put it dent in my debts but i ended up broke bankrupt and deep in debt you know just like had my whole business yank out from under me it was the hardest work i'd ever done or would ever do everyone really quick if you're enjoying this episode on ceo stuff so del having hard conversations with your team hiring then i've got something for you so the team at hubspot they actually went and put together a bunch of best practices that sean and i use in our own companies and they put it together and something that's really easy to read and understand and so if you wanna just save yourself ten years of headache and heartache then you should check it out i wish we had this long time ago would help me a lock but there should be a qr code on your screen that you can scan or a link of the description so check it out it's totally free and totally awesome you're thirty three and broke yeah broke and i'm going coming back to new york and all my friends who they've grown up they've got married they have mortgages or whatever so i said i gotta change careers or i need a new line of business why i heard that you read a book yes i bought a book the only self help book i ever bought is called and it was the first edition what color is your parachute you're the second successful person i've talked to you in the last month that said that book changed their life that book so changed my life and it a simple premise you have a series of skills that you know come out of your personality and you you've built them and they're transferable for one industry and another you can change careers you can do different things but at the heart of it there's a few things used to think about you you basically wanna do something that you love and you're attracted to i mean that's that's an no brainer it would be great to get a business you'd go to work in a business that's just also not only that you love but it's ascend so it looks like there's some forces that are making this business rise and then they gave you all these exercises to determine what skills you have and how you match them up so i i sat around my kitchen and did them all and i said well i wanna go in the music business now my brother was in the music business i used to watch him i say well i could do that but i i had an encyclopedia knowledge of like rock and roll music okay i got hired at i'm at the company that would become mtv and mtv networks in march of nineteen eighty when they started the company when you guys all started the company it was eighty of you trying to figure it out i think i read that you got like thirty five grand a year that was their first year salary and that was i got more than anybody everyone else was getting thirty what'd you get i got thirty five what was the seed money to start it we had when it i finally got approved we were the child of american express and warner communications it was a joint venture why would american express wanna it be in the tv business good question they got into warner cable in in the seventies had developed this interactive thing called cube it was gonna be interactive television if you can imagine such a thing q u e and it was a test they had in columbus ohio and american express thought this would be a great way for them to get into the interactive television business which is the first you know iteration of it so they formed a company and they said we're gonna we're gonna bid on and get franchises in in big metropolitan areas because no one had cable it only really existed in rural areas so then they said well we're gonna have to feed the system we need to feed it with some channels of programming so they started a second smaller company warner am satellite entertainment company or a mouthful was act and they've started the movie the movie channel which was sort of like hbo is twenty four hours of movies just movies is it h hp is that the peak precursor survey hbo no hbo was had been around since seventy four it was doing uncut movies and that was a big innovation and it was using a satellite which is our other innovation we would we would not use broadcast towers so we would bounce off a geo sync satellite twenty three thousand miles up there this just sound like outer space stuff and the this little satellite company we'd had nickelodeon and then we were gonna launch a whole you know portfolio of channels mtv was one of them it was it was called the we're gonna do a music channel of some kind and it would be instead of being a broadcast network these things would be what we call then narrow cast we're only gonna a program one genre and we're gonna do it to one segment of an audience you know because before it was like abc b there's only like four channels and it was like we gotta do everything for everyone yeah every and so basically you no was like we're gonna be a niche network we're gonna be a niche network do one thing all the time do it really well build a bill up a relationship with our viewers and you know so we were sort of existing on the side of the highway and that was a you know a wonderful place to be because the the major networks would liver dye on their shows people knew the knew the shows they didn't weren't really that conscious whether it was nbc or abc b or whatever we were gonna be places not show so you're gonna watch mtv you're gonna watch nickelodeon was that a new idea yeah the people who ran this company came out of the radio business the media business have been so boring and unchanged for so long the big innovation in the seventies was fm radio that would kinda take over the am am dial and they would have instead of these general interest stations they would be like they would have genres like soft rock or you know free freeform rock and roll music so they've kinda gradually sliced away the big am am radio stations and that was the model they they saw happening in television to niche programming what was your seed twenty five million dollars that's a shit load yeah it was a shit load of money but then again you know we almost ran down to zero before we really had a business what did you spend if i okay so it was eight eight of y'all and make it thirty five grand so nothing but you have twenty five million dollars well it was eight people who developed it and we when we launched by the time we launched it we had hired other people because we had a you know run a network we were running a twenty four hour network seven days a week which was insane because one of my heroes ted turner he had the idea of cnn and that must have been a little bit before well the few months before so cnn espn usa network we were all starting at the same time it was really the beginning of the modern but kin cable network business we were kinda of pals yeah we were we were all trying to break down the broadcast monopoly that had like a ninety percent ninety five percent market share who all thought we were idiots which is funny because like is it's you you've been around long enough that i i'm wanna ask you about it later like you've seen cycles of like the innovator then gets disrupted and etcetera it becomes like you know the main guy and gets disrupted i just think i read that by your five or your seven you were doing like seventy million in revenue is that right yes so that's like a pretty fast ramp i mean twenty five million a lot for twenty five million was the cost i mean we started with no i mean the twenty five million was was how much we had to you know invest in this company before we went broke you know so show me a business we're we gonna give you a pot of seventy twenty five million dollars let's see if you can get your business plan which i think originally was four years to break let's see what you can do and we we we we were stalled and we had to you know figure out a hail mary pass to kinda save us because the cable operators who really had to carry us and they were mono minneapolis at the time they didn't wanna pay ten cents a month for mtv what was the business model the business model was multiple revenue streams we're gonna have this narrow cast kind programming strategy and we're gonna get into all these cable systems but what really had to happen was the cable guy had to come and wire america and so we were also waiting for what we thought was the of cable tv coming to every household in a number get ten cents we would get for for mtv we would ask ten cents a month so a dollar twenty a year and then that was only to be like one third of the revenue the rest was to come from advertisers how many subscribers did you have we have in year three or four when we were running out of money we had only like two and a half million subs we were really behind schedule so only two that'd be three or four million dollars year in subscriber revenue did you have any other revenue we barely barely we have some advertiser revenue but we didn't really have big enough numbers to attract advertisers any significance so we were running low and the the the roadblock we had was that the cable operators are going no way we don't by the way we don't even like this music and this is like something from the devil you know there's is a rock and roll and these guys were more like elvis presley fans or bible t the guys who control the cable industry way back then which is funny because they experienced the same thing with elvis yeah exactly but then so we we needed an mad camp pain we said we have to really go for broke eye knew because i was a marketing guy i would go to these sounds like tulsa which actually had mtv from day one at a hundred thousand homes so you had a little micro chasm where you could see what would happen if mtv was in a community and people went crazy for it what what did they like about it they just like that it it was twenty four hours of music videos people have never seen music videos before so this is a network that look like where the hell did this come from we just it just a one day it showed up on their tv said and there was all these groups they never heard of with all this fast cutting this whole new visual style and it was funny and a revere and looked like some underground thing and here it was on my cable tv i didn't have to order it or anything so if you were a music fan you're going wow this is fantastic which is interesting because like mtv doesn't do music videos anymore but i watch music videos all day on youtube so i have to like the you the music videos are still relevant i think they make more music videos now than ever that's what i thought like what about that behavior the idea of a music video i guess if you pitch it to me in the seventy late seventies i would sorta of react in the same way that i would react if when tiktok like you're telling me i'm just gonna watch people dance on on the internet or i'm gonna watch like people play video games on the internet that sounds silly but then i actually find myself doing it all the time was there like a conversation where it was like someone just gonna like pretend that they're singing and play music and that's what we're gonna be into well the birth of the music video was basically in europe television had not been der regulated so there was or radio so the radio stations didn't even play music if you can remember or your read history there were the these pirate radio stations that existed on boats off the uk that would that could play like radio like american style radio where they would be playing records all day so they said since we can't get on the radio because there's no radios playing music we need to get on one of these television shows like in the uk there was a show called top of the pops yeah and people would make music videos to use on that show or hey why not put them in record stores that's where i saw them i was living in berlin and i used to go to this record store and they had a little tiny tv and i'd see music videos for the first time and it was kind of like playful and lok key and lo ph and it was another way to reach the consumer to promote the sales of lps the cds hadn't even arrived yet so this new business came out of a need just to how do we find some exposure for our product which was the album so then you know but america didn't really have any exposure to the music videos because we had radio stations that played music all day long they didn't have such a need here so when we started mtv we only had a hundred and sixty videos and they were largely from the uk or europe largely from the uk from independent acts and then when people saw these could really help sell records we could sell a lot of records and you know gradually the bruce springs and his easy tops started making them a new artists like madonna would come on the scene who found video to be a really great image for themselves and they could use it very effectively and smartly and gradually this business developed making these things which you know still exist today even though mtv you know for a whole bunch of reasons just sort of gave up on them which you know i think was a mistake obviously a mistake you were able to like find and employ all these amazing creative people so like steve i forget steve's last name the guy started a sponge about square pants steve hi no and then mike judge who was king of the hill da beat by head and then most recently silicon valley the tv show and then matt trey from south park like all these amazing people when you're talking to a young una accomplished person because i think steve the sponge square pants guy i think he was a marine biologist when you were like trying to spot winning people not even ideas was there like a common theme yeah well oh first of all i really consciously wanted to make the company like it was an accenture we were not a traditional media company we were like this eccentric place like we would thrive on sort of off beat leading edge talent whether that be musical or comedian or whatnot and we would try gradually bring them into the mainstream so we kept our you know pop culture kinda moves up from the street so i wanted to have a really young employee base that was pretty loose and you know casual i think i said that your i think i read that your dress code was no frontal nudity that was it yes we had the worst stress group of people going in and out of any manhattan office building which would be a tie for today because no one seems to have a dress code but in those days everyone had the word suits and ties and it was really kinda straight laced but i wanted it to be a fun place and i wanted all the employees to know that our main attitude was creativity and taking risks so i would put creative people in charge of these networks and i wanted to send a signal to the employees that creativity and finding people and nurturing them and having these relationships was absolutely core to our business because i and people wouldn't stay and lay a long time people would come and work a few years and leave but i wanted there always to be like a long line of creative people who wanted to get a job at our company we were like a talent magnet anyway and very good at spotting things we would look for people who were sort of immersed and lived on the popular culture of the day it wouldn't be unlike say record companies have an and r people who go out and try and spot young bands and they would you know hire those bands and you know hopefully have some hits with them but we would have people who you know when we started for example y mtv wraps we really put hip hop on the stage for america we were the first people really it it came from two interns whether there was an intern in a production assistant who lived downtown new york who were part of the original hip hop scene in a way as fans and and they would be champions for that within the company and they would bring this cast to characters that they knew to us but did you get it like when you saw someone rap for the first time you're like oh i get how this could be big or was it like i'm good at hiring people or just letting them do whatever i i was good at it i guess a hiring people who were good at attracting people and had good instincts and good taste i was on you know you need someone who had a was well versed in the popular culture who had good instincts who had diplomatic skills was able to spot talent and build relationships with these people it wasn't like everybody we hired or got behind was a success but we were you know we would find people like mike judge at animation fest of folks she would go to places then where a lot of this young talent who had ideas in their head and they were animators but they didn't wanna go to hollywood and get immersed in the factory animation scene i didn't meet him the first thing i saw was a was a short called frog baseball vi and bud it wasn't even called be butter it was it was be and butt head and it was like a maybe a five minute thing that this guy who worked with his named abby t cool he was an animation freak i mean he we he would go to all the festivals but he saw this in in austin texas and it was beaver and butt head and they would have a frog and they would one beaver would throw a frog and butt head would hit it with a bat you know it sounds kinda grim and gruesome up but just their attitude and sen in the way they laughed and the way they were dressed well this is so the whole green lighting process if you will was like you know a minute well that's been that's the hilarious these guys how do we get this guy mike judge inside the tent and how can we make it easy for him to kind of develop a series with this that we well how do we do that so we made a deal with mike judge and we started cranking out you know how well well they can sit on a couch and and rate music videos and talk about music videos which is like like how we imagine some people in our audience would be doing and make it funny madden trey when they came to us with south park the head of programming at mtv at the time brian grade he had commissioned a christmas card to send to like three thousand people and it was a six minute thing with these foul mouth kids who became the south park guide it wasn't it was and i think even at the time wasn't there like still a talking turd like was it and that was again i was a case of wood green light that we needed to hit desperately on comedy central that took like a minute okay let's do that were you like these these guys are gonna be special or are you like they're were just one of many no these guys are gonna be special by the way this is the most original thing we have seen for a while it's soft beat there's nothing else like it it's it's pushes the edge it's funny it's irr and it's gonna get attention and they we made six episodes with them first one was cart getting an an an alien up his ass he's like an anal probe said they have they like the anal probe yeah i know it's funny because this last season where they really go to town on the trump people has been their most successful in terms of ratings and buzz and everything i mean they're really they're great guys i'm friends with matt you know to this day and you know their success has been just great to watch i mean they did the book of mormon on top of that they're talented guys they're generative let's take a quick break and i got a question for you when a buyer asks ai for a solution like yours does your business come up most companies have no idea by the time they found out they've already lost the deal to another company that did hubspot has ae which helps you show up in the moments when ride buyers are looking for a company like yours before the first click before they fill in the form that is the moment hubspot ae is built for check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses so i hire creative and i'm trying to get basically like i i hired content people and the best ones are oftentimes the biggest pains in the asses and also i love it it's so it's kind of like a love hate thing but i'm always looking for ways to increase my batting average of like finding young talented people and giving them a shot and increase the likelihood of a hit rate from i don't know what your hit rate was but like let's say it's like thirty percent to try to get to sixty percent yeah well it's exactly the the same challenge we would have because they are a pain in the ass i mean that's the beauty about it them they're difficult they really had a point of view and know it it's hard to move them from it or they had no point of view they didn't wanna do something and they didn't wanna be told they wanted you know they kinda follow their own north stars and we would generally hire people who if they were gonna be on the air they they basically had a project under their belt when came to us it was they they they were selling something people would come you know we were they wanna sell because they'd wanna get on one of our networks but finding the employees who would basically be the talent picker or people who have to work with talent that was a whole other skill you know these were people who didn't necessarily you know make things but they would power creators i would hire someone who would be basically the talent picker if you want if you get what i mean because i realized at some point i i don't have necessarily the instincts to do it myself because i was a little bit older and away from the action which always seemed to focus on what's going on with twenty year olds what did twenty year olds want so the best thing is how can you best connect with those people i mean i i wasn't like an an idiot but i i would find like a woman like judy mcgrath and she would always i say what we have to do is hire abe people because it's gonna be abi people who are a pain in the ass but they're gonna bring us the most success what what's that word mean i've never heard that they are trouble and they're like they're not mainstream people they were people may be sitting in the back of the class when they were going to school and they they don't have a lot of respect for the system they're on an individual agenda you know there's small things that companies do in their culture that have big big shifts and shape the culture for example one of my favorite companies to read about is this company called ra it's like ebay or amazon of japan and they don't have cleaners in their offices even though it's like a you know a ten thousand person company or whatever because every day at four pm the employees are expected to spend thirty minutes cleaning their area and tidying their area and then like they have like assign jobs like this person take out the trash whatever and like the idea being is like we wanna sweat the details there was anything that you did that you found other companies should implement in order to get their people to do more things that could get them fired at another company but at your company could give you like a ten x outcome buddy he we would have parties that were kinda you know i wanted the place to have a bit of a wild vibe to it yeah i heard at one of your parties i think it was sean stewart he was like maybe he was thinking about signing with you guys to host the daily show or he had just signed and he goes to the holiday party and he sees you on the ground in the street because you are on someone's shoulders chicken fighting and you like fell over or something like that and he was like he and he was like these guys are drunk idiots i'm in the perfect place we had a lot of that we have you know we used to have these girls he couldn't do a lot of this stuff these days but we just have these girls in like you know short pants with band filled with shock glasses and h that had tequila bottles in them and so we would have what basically were like wild parties and get together and social things at my company we don't do like that many because i got kids and so like i i go home but like i do think that like intentionally hosting parties it sounds so obvious and silly but i actually do think that like shifts culture a little bit yeah and if you have a party it's not a plus one party i mean people aren't bringing their husbands or wives or boyfriends or girlfriends it's it's the it's the people who work together so to try and build the bond up with them so i want the sales people to get to know some of the people in the animation department you you're you're a salesperson you're also you know we gotta sell we have to sell this creatively because we're we are just small guys still and we're up against these big networks so how do we take this creative ethos we think really powers our business and apply it to accounting and sales and other things like that and let's have these people socialize together and become friends people love working there i you say when when we had the pandemic and the office culture disappeared for a few years and hasn't isn't fully back yet we saw people who slept in their offices they would be there twenty four seven they couldn't wait to come in it was like the center of their social life was the average age do you think twenties where a lot of people sleeping around with each other yes was that good or bad well you know a lot of them married they're still they're still married mean but i would tell my coworkers is i'm like this only ends well if it ends it marriage yeah there there were there was that problem but you know you have a lot of young people they're working really hard they're you know sixteen eighteen hours a day they're consumed with their work twelve hours a day i mean the only place they're meeting people is at work so you know people start having relationships we would also you know show people what we're making and what we're doing and when when when i would speak to the employees we would have like these town halls where they could ask me anything they want i would always lead with all the creative successes that we have and talk about the risks that we've taken and which risks have paid off and maybe which risks haven't and then show programming and talk about who was behind it and have some of the creators come out and how we revered and say john stewart to stephen colbert or john oliver and so the stable of talent we were able to grow there to have be there some interaction with that and the staff rather than focusing on our financial results when i was speaking to a company as a whole i almost never spoke about our financial results i never spoke about our relationship to via which was our parent company which in many cases was a sin because the parent company i always wanted synergy between the various divisions the other divisions might have been you know simon and sc or whatever and but we're no one came to work there to work for you know via comp by was this abstract public company we don't even know what it does they came to work at mtv or nickelodeon and then i had to knit together had a people at nickelodeon who were largely better dressed than maybe came from a school teacher sen ability good for kids more socially socially conscious than the mtv or v one people how do they all kinda fit together and think they're on the same team you talk me about the nickelodeon business you said that was the biggest business yeah i lived down the street from sesame street you call it you lived on the street sesame street is sixty third yeah my laws live on sesame street because that way run now by it was been running a long time with nickelodeon alumni i've always been interested in that business because i think they're independent sell right the jim henson company yes there's a jim hansen company and and in sesame street workshop and i'm not sure the exact jim henson company is kinda separate from sesame street workshop but it's still a multi billion dollar independent company yeah and it runs on public broadcasting they license the public broadcasting what does it take to create a show or a piece of content that becomes legacy and do you think can last for two or three decades well but you never know in advance you're always hoping you're gonna do that that's the home run so not that it only lasts for decades but you're able to also spin it off into you know consumer products that's where the real money is or motion pictures that's what we would do you know and historically these characters would be chosen by in in sort of the factory world the commodity children's space but they would try and pick something and say does it have the word they had was toy ability employ ability that means like just the can the character become a toy what can't become a toy you know that we had a show called angry beaver i mean you know i watched that one as a kid yeah there wasn't anything there but our our criteria for green lighting is show going in and producing it had nothing to do with toy ability it was were we in love with these characters and did we think it could be a good show and and get good numbers and resonate with the audience in spite of the fact that maybe it it isn't gonna be a consumer products bona so we were really thinking because it goes back to the creator the creator who had these characters in his head probably wasn't thinking about to ability either he had more a more crystallize simple ideas to what could happen here rather than what would be the eventual spin offs and maybe he didn't wanna interfere with that he wasn't that interested in in toys so we would do things that we we were in love with and a lot of them turned out to have you know with sponge bob and rug rats and so many there was a lot of consumer products that we could crank out and feature films because when we got linked up with paramount we set up film labels there on the lot you know for mtv and b one and and comedy central and nickelodeon that to develop films that would use the ip that we had generated and made famous on the television network i have a feeling that a podcast must have one of the following three things in order to be good you need to have a unique perspective so for example that could be lebron james talking about basketball it doesn't matter if he talks on the worst microphone ever people are gonna love that because lebron james is one of one the second thing is really high end or unique production for example if you get the best voice actors and it has the best sound effects you're like okay i like this because it's like a total immersive experience or the third one is world class delivery meaning a comedian a lot of comedian that i listen to on podcast podcasts they can talk about anything but they're so funny and good at delivering it that i'm into it and so when i think of podcasting i'm like okay those are like three attributes can i lean in on one of them did you think of attributes for some of your shows for like it if it hits one or more of these attributes this is a winner yeah we used have the thing we called filters which is sort of like that does it pass through these filters that we would have nickelodeon the nickelodeon people were very cautious about having some kind of pros social appeal off the top of my head i mean used to think we have basic values like non violence pro kid things kids like it was fun was funny it was a revere and also does it have sort of a modern presentation we were trying to position ourselves as the sort of i hate to use this word was sort of the the hip or children's network the cooler children's network were versus disney which was the powerhouse children's operation we wanted to be sort of the the the modern version of the disney thing so those would be some of the filters we draw we would withdraw through i can't you have to go back and remember what they might have been for mtv or v i i usually had a lot to do with like it's appeal to the very specific core audience we were going after did you a name for that person the ultimate person with a twenty four year old that's who we would program to twenty two to twenty four year olds in that teenagers we would never talk about anyone younger than that or have them appear on the air because the minute people twenty four or older saw teenager they were gonna say goodbye they didn't wanna be part of some teeny pop network even though teenagers were maybe one third of our audience they were never showcased on the air but we would also get you know people who were older watching but the core audience was on mtv was eighteen to twenty four year olds then we would really move it to like twenty two to twenty four year olds i was reading about i was reading about you and i think when i i think that you said in the book you were fired because you didn't buy myspace and rupert murdoch bought it and you were fired by governor reds stone yes some reds stone who was a mo it seems like a real jackass though and then you were recruited immediately i think by rupert murdoch and a few other people to join you know whatever they had going on but i think you took i you recruited by bon i also think you're were recruited by steve jobs or you and you had some affiliation with him same with ge who is one of the most successful media business guys there ever is you knew bowie ja or all these guys you said you bought andy war old house you i think made an offer to buy facebook is that right yeah we were the first people we we we offered like eight hundred million dollars cash with like a nine hundred million dollar earn out if you can imagine tell me mark zuckerberg story well this guy called me up one day kevin wall who i knew new from the music business said hey i got this guy you you know we we we were aware of social media was coming out we were aware this is a big paradigm ship what year this would have been nineteen this is two thousand and five so how how old is facebook facebook was still only programming to college kids or was it like three years old i guess so two three years old and they their revenue was like seven or eight million dollars a year and mark zuckerberg had just moved to california and the business thing they were wrestling with he came in to see us in times square and i always remember he was like wearing in a hoodie and flip flops it was february and i had him meet us at the mtv offices because i figured it'd be younger and a b and think he wanted to see what that was like and he's only twenty one yeah and their big their big challenge was do we wanna expand this to high school kids because it's just college kids that could really be on facebook the facebook could we is it gonna be a mistake to expand our target audience to high school kids the revenue was eight million dollars a year i remember this but we saw that you know social media was gonna be a big force in the business and was gonna grow because people now could you know come could connect directly to each other the gatekeeper era was gonna begin to fade but we didn't have the capabilities or skill set to really create our own social network somebody we buy somebody else's and bring it in house so he came to see us but they must have felt something good because discussions ensued with the his team there was a fellow named o van ad who i believe was he or first cfo and we went back and forth and we put a bit on the table and they turned us down oh i'll what was it it was like one point seven million billion excuse me one point seven what how much cash eight hundred and nine hundred million on tri it was eight hundred and nine hundred million in cash the rest was an earn out okay so is zuckerberg did not want his mtv eventually we got turned down because the the the negotiations happened at a lower level than me but i do remember at one point he was going back to do ferry new york for thanksgiving and this guy michael wolff who was kinda heading the negotiations from mtv network he said you know i could offer mark zuckerberg a ride on the plane and he basically peaked like a captive audience for five hours or so and you know maybe we can make some headway and the negotiation obviously it didn't work didn't work out you got on the plane now he got on the plane as parents picked him up at the airport yeah so this is really way back in the in folk lord why didn't you invest in it that's a good question we did we weren't thinking of that we were thinking like buying and owning something we had we had been a company that sort of grew organically and we had never bought anything and we weren't really like a venture we weren't really set up as a venture firm and our company was always the parent company was always sort of operating on a shoe string in terms of how much money we can really invest in our own businesses or buy other ones i don't think we were thinking of doing an investment that might have been a clever way to go but he they turned us down and they turned everybody else showed up at the door you know was microsoft yahoo everybody wanted to buy facebook at higher and higher i think about that all time to be twenty one or twenty two and being offered to be a billionaire and just the gall that he had and i find that to be fascinating it's refreshing you know people would start a company and they their purpose wasn't well one day i'm gonna sell this at a google or facebook or somebody else they wanted to start a company and have it work you know and growing and grow to the tree of the guy it was the same thing with steve jobs and and bill gates and paul allen and phil knight they all started companies because they thought that was interesting fun they saw something in the culture where they thought they could slide in with an innovation and make a business but those people always end up richer yes not always their owners they didn't check out that's not to say you can't sell your business and do something else or sell your business or maybe stay with it but these guys were true believers did you know steve jobs well we went up once to see him at this is before the we went up to see him and we wanted to talk about maybe doing a joint venture with mtv and apple this is before itunes there's a guy who worked with me who had a digital named jason hers and he made the cases to steve jobs that itunes wasn't the way to go the way to go is to put together basically a music streaming service which would have been like spotify and steve jobs was adamant about no that's not the way we're gonna do it we're gonna we're gonna do we add the itunes model and you know he gave us a nice tour of the pixar studios and you know we had a fine relationship but he was someone we of course really idol this an icon for us a guy who could lead lead creatively he was also by the way a a pi room from india oh yeah yeah not to compare myself to him but i mean he he had a he didn't have a straight ahead business mindset yeah he made for his pill gates who's was like bill you need you need to do some asset right which other icons did i i read a ton of biographies and i'm always like trying to find like who i can learn something from which icons did you meet that you are like this person needs to be studied well there's rupert what do you think about him well you know he's a bold buck ear kind of old school classic media mo i can't say i agree with the results of some of his political programming but you've gotta give him credit for a guy who take big risks when he he like well he i got to know him fair amount because his wife wendy dang was good friends with my my wife kathy so we would go on trips together and so forth but you know he's quite you know he could be fun was the alcoholic i think so yeah i mean anybody he traveled yeah the difference between him and my boss who was some to reds stone they were about the same in terms of age rupert was a little younger but they were both big mo who took bets sum was always focused in almost entirely on people who might be screwing him so he could sue from an antitrust perspective he was a former antitrust lawyer or the stock price whereas rupert murdoch would fly around the world endlessly in his seven twenty seven and he would really understand the mach imaginations of how the operations all work i there's not a very many good bug on rupert so i've been able to piece together a few but there's a cool documentary about him a little bit on hbo right now and there's stories about him being the company being huge billions in revenue and he was still calling editors for certain headlines i mean like you should change it to this this and this and people will buy more magazines or newspapers because of that he knew the business whereas i mean he really knew how business work as something like that he can make a contribution to and they'd say oh you know it's the boss he wants to do this it's like it's not just the boss who wants to do this but he may well have a point he had credibility with his under underlying i heard he made huge bets just over one little conversation like i think it was they bought my myspace right he bought on a weekend yeah i heard bought no due diligence how much did you pay for five hundred and sixty million dollar and it obviously was shit it was the wrong bet at the time that was you know you got remember in two thousand we had the time warner aol merger that was a disaster that was the real first linking of a new media and an old media legendary or legacy media company and that kinda of blew up so everyone was paranoid about making big bet on digital media after that so that was like five years later he just lays out on a weekend with no due diligence buying this social media site that we we have been looking at and we're aware of in santa monica just bought over the weekend and he became because of that purchase he became like oh he's the new media he's like this old dude but he also gets this because he's buying this hot up and coming media company which of course or new media company which of course didn't work out but this really aggravated my boss some the reds stone who really had never heard of my myspace until he heard that rupert bought it and he fired you just because well i think there might have been other reasons but every reason like he told charlie rose was that you know i i had the prize and i let it go and i let it go to murdoch and my myspace was the prize yeah which ended up the dissolving and being sold to justin timberlake for thirty five million dollars years later so it wasn't much of a prize were you able to make money on this as you went personally yeah yes we had you know we started like i told you we were everyone's like in thirty thirty five grand a year there was no stock options people wouldn't even know when a stock option was in nineteen eighty it wasn't like part of the normal nomenclature you know we we just can't believe we have a job here we're on a crusade this is the greatest thing it's gonna be the greatest thing we're gonna sweep the nation with this thing so they were like crusaders but then we decided we in nineteen ninety five warner ceramics needed money and they made one third of the company public and everybody got like a little bit of stock option so we saw started seeing that the one we were this hot company were mtv networks mtv was the first name was a really hot commodity so you get a you know everybody had a little taste and then we got bought when we were sold so all those stock options vested and paid out but you know in today's no one was becoming a billionaire or even a millionaire i wanna ask about riding rooms this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue because around this point when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but just do a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i've out outgrown my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find and if you can find them it's hard to have this explicit time this explicit place where you sit down where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors the biggest risk is not failing you have a company in its working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew in business and in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works whether you work with hampton or you get your own group on your own but having a group like this of group of people you meet within in real life once a month it can change your life it changed mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com i was listening to you and john stewart talk about that and the idea of a writing room is foreign to me because a when i'm creative i'm by myself i prefer just to like you know my old company i used to have to write a a bunch of articles a week and i was like i just need to go into a room by myself and not talk to anyone what did a writers room look like and what you think made a writers room successful in order to get the best outcome from a group of people well i get this in my booking a bit we didn't really have writers for a lot of what we did at mtv there was stuff was really written individually we didn't have a writer's room per s at one point rupert murdoch and barry dill launched the fox network which was gonna be not just the broadcast network like it but it was gonna focus on younger people and they were putting on soap opera like mel rose place and and the beverly hills nine zero two one zero so i said well our creative people are always trying to do something a little more ambitious why don't we do a soap opera so we developed one and it was developed with this company and boone murray really successful folks great people they were young at the time and it came to me and it had a budget and in that budget was a big line item for writers and i said you know we don't really have that kind of money to hire riders we probably gonna make stuff for a hundred thousand dollars an episode or something like that but we wanted to do it regularly and it we we had a lot of other financial needs for the money so they went back and came back to me with okay we're eliminating the writers what we're gonna do is find seven eight people and stick them in a loft down on broadway and prince street we found this loft and we're gonna put hidden cameras and we're gonna tape them and then we're gonna use what our real skill set was at the time was in post production and editing we will edit all this action from these kids and all this interchange into these episodes and that became the real world which really launched the modern version of reality television that was nineteen ninety two but you know that was the birth of the real world and then you know the for the first season the people who were in it they had no idea that become reality stars because such a thing hadn't existed yet now when they cast people to be in these various reality shows which are everywhere everybody knows they have to have sort of an outs sized personality and you know be controversial and whatnot but the success of the real world was just exploded because we found out young people wanted to see other young people on television they wanted see they get a lot of social clue cues and whatnot the real world we were doing a thing with oz os born and sharon os osborne born and sharon os osborne was driving around in the back of a car with our head of programming brian great and she says oh you know this day is crazy if there was a crew following me around you know it'll be an amazing reality show so brian done that was it that became the os which was the first celebrity reality show now there's like fifty cat of reality show there's a whole industry around them what was the conversation like where you said we're not doing this rider stuff was there a unanimous agreement in the yes yes everybody said everyone wanted to do let's do something you know we gotta get the show on the air and let's this this is a good idea we could actually make this better than ever or make it real or was was it well boone and murray had the idea there was a fellow who was a champion ford internally named doug her who eventually would go on and become to hit a comedy central and i'm sure there's some other people's names involved that i'm forgetting right now did you were you on the board of own oprah well is that own i wasn't on the board but i was hired by oprah to be a consultant when i got fired from via i went to bur which i had known from my travels agent which was the like the crazy uncle southeast asia run by a military dictatorship there's no media there i just wanted to disappear with my wife and just kinda rethink and see if i could get some epiphany about what i was gonna do next and i got back to this place we were up in the jungle and i got back to a hotel on a boat you had to go by everywhere by i boat and there's a message and there's a message for you in the office they didn't have cell phones there nothing oprah winfrey called where you stars shook yeah i go i oprah win winfrey i don't even know oprah winfrey why she called why she calling me so i got back in new york and i called her and she said yeah i called you i saw that you left and i saw you got a big cheer which i write about in the book when i left the company there was like all these people in the lobby send me off and since i i'd love to meet with you and talk with you and why don't she come up to monte and well make your breakfast which i did and we become good friends she helped me promote my book recently i did an interview with her and i love the oprah i mean there's no easier person in the world to speak to she's curious she knows a little bit about everything and she's she knows how to talk to people like you know nobody's business so i mean that's what she does for a living right she's always done that so she's being able to carve out and set up this whole like modern media business she was one of the first people like in the creator economy which she people would use that word today i'm mean here you have a creator who's she's at the center of a media enterprise you know her her ethos and everything you know does she still own is that still its own company own is owned by discovery it was originally called the discovery health network and so she did a joint venture with discovery david za much in the news he called open and he said look would like to change this discovery health network which is just sort of laying there and what if you came in and made at the oprah wind winfrey network and we could have something really original and noteworthy and so she hired me as a consultant and i did that for a couple of years it's just so crazy i wonder if if this stuff still exists like the way that i've been you know i've studied ted turner that's my hero the way that it seems is like because because cable was like the pipes if you get in the pipes the likelihood that you're gonna be as somebody was was a lot higher than a little bit than what it is now and that was the era of the mono culture in a way you know you you there there was a where things were controlled by editors and there was a barrier to get in now anybody can which is pros and cons yes con being if you were one of the if you were oprah like it was it was awesome yeah because you had a built in audience you had a head start over everybody but you know here you are you're scrambling you built a business basically on your own wits your personality but you're competing with like everything on about yeah everybody's their own broadcaster well do you have any advice to that like you've been on top of the game for like three generations now where do you think things are gonna go i know that i've heard you talk like where you're you seem a little frustrated with the rise of digital because that kinda made mtv less relevant because it kinda messed with the business model and mess with the margins which made it all possible do you have any predictions on where it's gonna go or tips on how to succeed right now well you know you see things emerging to me i mean i really don't look at everything but i look at stuff like in this so called creator economy and you can see there's stuff there's things now like pat or subs stack or everything where i always patreon yeah patreon rather what i would do if i was twenty five years old you know if i because i thinking of well the same things how could i align the things i like and care about and say you know if i can work for some type of enterprise and learn the business and enterprise that's really about powering creative people and getting them more famous and more relevant and how do you do it i mean it you you you have to sort of be a master of social media these days and you have to have an intrinsic quality that will allow you to stand above everybody else which is truly everybody else well you know what's funny is my company the hustle it was a daily newsletter which at the time was people kinda laughed at it but i was like i think this can get to a couple hundred million in revenue if we do it right and we sold before we got there but my competitors and like where the company that i sold now is like two hundred hundreds of millions in revenue was was was possible that was right but i was inspired by ted turner i biographies he's he's my hero and i knew all so i studied cable so i read about cable cowboys and liberty media media not like i i studied it like crazy i've studied you like crazy and at the time in two thousand and fourteen right around when i'm starting the company buzzfeed was popular and vice was popular but what was going on was their business models were going down because facebook was pulling back a reach so they would get less clicks and i was like well where's like the last bit of real estate that i could fully own and not rent and it was newsletter newsletters and you know who i got that idea from bob pitt oh really bob pitt had this thing called the pilot group i know i sat i had dinner with bob pip last night strange it may seem i mean this is a a sync and you're one of your c cofounder he's a c founder and he had the thing called the pilot group where he would fund newsletter companies one of them being daily candy which sold for hundred million dollars i heard about that story and i was like i'm just gonna copy that and do it with business dues and so that's how i started my first company which we ended up selling four years in they also involved ben lair i'm trying to remember the name is copied yep ben for thrill list yeah i was thrill yes yeah i was i'm just gonna do newsletter it was good i mean they the newsletters had an era digital media had an area still do because subs stack and patreon what you're talking about they created their company because they saw what i was doing and they're like yeah that's cool below we just created the technology for it which obviously is far more lucrative do you regret selling that company no because i was broke i didn't pay myself much money the business the year i sold it we sold it in february the trailing year we had done twelve million in revenue that moving forward a year that forward year we were gonna do like eighteen so i was growing like a weed it was doing great but i paid myself like the first two years like two grand a month and so i was broke the last couple years i started paying myself a little bit more money but a few things happened i sold in february of twenty one so the black lives matter protests were happening covid was happening and i felt the world was like gonna end and so the second that i had an opportunity to kinda cash out and have financial security for forever i was like i will do that in a harp pete so i don't regret it but i regret being in the position to sell it meaning i wish i could have owned it forever and still like had both outcomes obviously that's not possible here's a a different form of the innovators dilemma what is that the broke of scrambling with no money when you have a life to support well my biggest takeaway from the that era i should have paid myself more money but do you thank you for doing this i joy i've enjoyed the conversation very y'all all day it was you've been you were the man behind the scenes of the content that shaped my childhood well it's been great and it been you know i i i've summarized it all in this book which was a lot of fun to put together unplugged it was good i read it this past weekend and it was awesome we didn't even get to it because that's i've seen you talked to it in some of the podcast podcasts but like you got busted for having hundreds of pounds of pot on you and and what they used to say advice they said what are you doing we're we're doing a lot of stuff is really smart and a lot of stuff that's really stupid which is sort of another version of the high and low that's awesome i do that yeah well thank you alright we're off i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to on from all in it like a day he's all on a less travel never look at hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale a company up if you're a cro or head of sales just look at to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast