"Tom Freston"

Summary

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SmartLess Podcast: Tom Freston

Hosts: Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, Will Arnett
Guest: Tom Freston
Release Date: November 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode welcomes legendary media executive Tom Freston—former CEO of Viacom, co-creator of MTV, and current chair of the ONE Campaign to fight poverty. The hosts dive into Freston's wildly unconventional career, exploring how a wanderlust-fueled journey through India and Afghanistan evolved into culture-shifting innovations in music, comedy, and global media. This is a conversation rich with tales of risk, reinvention, and the power of curiosity—wrapped in the show’s trademark wit and camaraderie.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Tom Freston’s Early Wanderlust and Start in Business

• The Hippie Trail & Leaving Mainstream Life

  • Freston was disillusioned with corporate life in advertising, selling toilet paper and “war toys” (GI Joe).
  • At age 25, inspired by the urge for freedom and dissatisfaction with the mainstream, he began traveling extensively:

    “Everything looked appealing. And it looked really exciting because I wasn’t having any fun ... So if not now, when?” – Tom Freston [16:13]

• Clothing Company in India/Afghanistan

  • Founded a clothing design/export business in the 1970s, living like a local:

    “I had a house in Delhi ... I was living like a pasha. ... It became a big business.” – Tom Freston [11:35]

  • Unexpectedly forced out of business after US trade embargo; he smuggled goods from Canada into the US, drawing on his knowledge of smugglers and their methods.

2. Transition to Television: The Birth of MTV

• Landing the MTV Job

  • Returned to the US, pursued his music passion, got hired at Warner-Amex (later MTV) without prior TV experience:

    “They said, ‘We’re looking for people with no experience in television.’... So I got a job on this initial team that started MTV.” – Tom Freston [22:09]

• MTV’s Origins and Cultural Impact

  • Music videos were little known in the US—MTV adapted European models.

  • Iconic launch: Used NASA footage (“public domain”) and a $1,000 logo.

  • “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first music video aired.

    “We realized all this NASA footage was public domain so we could rip off NASA and Man’s greatest moment and kind of make it our own.” – Tom Freston [32:10]

  • The “I Want My MTV” campaign, with artists and fans demanding cable operators add MTV, broke through cable industry pushback.

    “...if we could get people ... to call their cable companies and demand MTV ... we could force these people to put us on. And that really worked.” – Tom Freston [29:38]

3. Revolutionizing Entertainment: Comedy Central & Beyond

• Creating Comedy Central

  • Reacted swiftly to HBO announcing a comedy channel by creating their own, despite having no plan in place.

    “Let’s announce we’re doing one, too, because then we’ll be in every article ... and we don’t even have a product yet.” – Jason Bateman [38:05]

  • Merged with HBO’s Comedy Channel to become Comedy Central.
  • Hired future comedic icons: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Bill Maher, Chappelle, Kimmel, Carell.

    “It was a good launching place for young talent.” – Tom Freston [41:08]

• The End of Classic MTV & the Changing Media Landscape

  • MTV eventually became reality shows; the heyday of music videos is over.

    “It needed to die a death because ... there’s no business there.” – Tom Freston [36:16]

  • Freston highlights user-driven platforms—YouTube, Vice Media—as the new frontier.

4. Corporate Leadership, MySpace, and Missed YouTube Moment

• CEO of Viacom — Working for Sumner Redstone

  • Acknowledges high executive turnover:

    “He fired every CEO, including me, including you.” – Tom Freston [43:05]

  • Missed buying MySpace—Redstone blamed him for not acting ahead of News Corp, though acquisition would have been a disaster.

• Recognizing the Promise of YouTube

  • Pushed Viacom to consider buying YouTube—board balked (copyright fears). Google bought it for $1.6B; it’s now worth $600B+:

    “Imagine how different the world would have looked had Viacom purchased ... It’s the deal of the century.” – Jason Bateman [47:12]

5. Return to Afghanistan & Philanthropic Work

• Building Media in Afghanistan

  • Founded a TV network in Afghanistan, focused on connecting people and empowering women.
  • When Taliban returned, pivoted to educational programming for girls—backed by major foundations.

• The ONE Campaign & “Giving Back”

  • Works closely with Bono on fighting poverty, health, and supporting women in Africa:

    “It gives me a chance to really explore Africa ... I find that very satisfying work.” – Tom Freston [56:08]

6. Philosophy on Life, Careers, and Curiosity

• Advice for Today’s Young People

  • Encourages travel, risk-taking, and delaying immediate career starts:

    “The world’s like the best educator out there, traveling around.” – Tom Freston [17:50]

• On the Value of Curiosity and Reinvention

  • His career fueled by pursuing what genuinely interested him, not following the standard path.

• On AI and the Next Pivot

  • Observes new media transformations through AI with cautious optimism, noting the opportunity—and unknowns.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

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• On pursuing a non-traditional path:

  “I decided early on I didn’t really want to have a mainstream kind of life.” – Tom Freston [14:32]

• Describing MTV’s Impact:

  “MTV really was revolutionary. It was a whole new visual language for people ... a groundbreaker.” – Tom Freston [34:00]

• Career Advice:

  “If you’re young, so if not now, when?” – Tom Freston [16:13]

• On Launching Comedy Central:

  “Let’s put our hat in the ring … so we had a big battle … and it became Comedy Central.” – Tom Freston [37:31]

• The Changing Media Landscape:

  “You look at these companies that are sort of stripped down and are forced to consolidate...It seems like a lot of the fun’s been taken out of it.” – Tom Freston [48:04]

• Wildest Travel Story:

  “We were winding our way through the sand dunes ... and he says, ‘I’m going to kill this motherfucker,’ because he is taking us ... to an Al Qaeda [camp]... Jimmy said, ‘Let the guy free, we just leave him in the desert.’” – Tom Freston, on near-kidnapping in Mali [65:12]

• On Satisfying Work:

  “I find that very satisfying work ... gives me a chance to really explore Africa ... I enjoy this kind of work and I like being an observer of what’s going on in the media and entertainment business.” – Tom Freston [56:08]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Intro to Tom Freston & travel backstory – [06:38–14:30]
• Afghanistan/India clothing venture & smuggling goods – [10:37–13:56]
• Landing at MTV & launching the channel – [20:25–23:15]
• MTV’s cultural tipping points: Michael Jackson, Live Aid – [33:05–33:25]
• Comedy Central’s origins & hiring Jon Stewart – [36:53–41:08]
• Working for Sumner Redstone & missing out on YouTube – [42:32–47:15]
• Return to Afghanistan/building TV/media for social good – [57:05–59:50]
• Surviving potential Al Qaeda kidnapping with Jimmy Buffett – [64:08–65:44]
• Advice on careers, curiosity, and adapting to AI – [51:42–54:55]

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Final Takeaways:

• Tom Freston’s story is a testament to reinvention, risk-taking, and the importance of following genuine interests over conventional wisdom.
• He helped shape global pop culture, launched platforms for creative talent, and now devotes his energies to meaningful change.
• Through stories of smuggling, corporate intrigue, and near-miss travel disasters, Freston embodies a cross-section of wild curiosity and thoughtful giving.

For more, check out Tom’s new memoir:
Unplugged: Adventures From MTV to Timbuktu (Published Nov 18, 2025)

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“Get out in the world.” – Tom Freston & the SmartLess crew

Transcript

[Sean Hayes]

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[Will Arnett]

The family that vacations together stays together. At least that was the plan. Except now the dastardly desk clerk is saying he can't confirm your connecting rooms. Wait, what?

[Sean Hayes]

That's right, ma'.

[Tom Freston]

Am.

[Jason Bateman]

You have rooms 201 and 709.

[Will Arnett]

No, we cannot be five floors away from our kids.

[Jason Bateman]

Eh, the doors have double locks. They'll be fine.

[Will Arnett]

When you want connecting rooms confirmed before you arrive, it matters where you stay. Welcome to Hilton. I see your connecting rooms are already confirmed. Hilton for the stay.

[Jason Bateman]

It's so good to be here with you guys today.

[Sean Hayes]

It's so blessed to be here.

[Jason Bateman]

It feels like it's been a while. No, it feels like it's been a while since I've said it's really good to be with you.

[Sean Hayes]

It's really good to be with you guys. How are your headphones? Are they. Do they fit okay? Are they tight?

[Jason Bateman]

My. My headphones?

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

For the record, today, minor scene feels pretty good. Wait, wait. You've got new headphones on, don't you, Seanie?

[Sean Hayes]

I do, yeah. They're. They're new. I might wear them out. I might wear them out.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Why? Because you want to look like Princess Leia?

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah, I think they look cool.

[Jason Bateman]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This whole thing was a setup because you wanted compliments for your new headphones?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, did you want to mention the.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Company or something like that?

[Tom Freston]

Is that what you're angle?

[Sean Hayes]

No idea what the company is.

[Jason Bateman]

Oh, wait, I just got a text. Welcome. It's an new smart list. Smart, smart, smart.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

How about I fixed myself?

[Jason Bateman]

No way.

[Sean Hayes]

Guys, it's about time.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

I know how to fix myself.

[Jason Bateman]

I saw you looking. I saw you looking and then doing stuff and I. I actually saw you do the class. You literally went like this.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah, tap the lips. That's how the brain works.

[Jason Bateman]

Audibly went.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

It's a button on the lips.

[Jason Bateman]

By the way, jb, you have ruined forever. I noticed it yesterday again. Somebody commented on it getting out of the car. I Went.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

It tightens the core to make a little.

[Jason Bateman]

Sean, do you do it now, too?

[Sean Hayes]

I do it when I get in the car, too.

[Jason Bateman]

I realize I've been doing it since I was 35 because of you.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

We're all getting that.

[Will Arnett]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

So. Well, this is. What. What number episode is this for us? Are we north? We're north of.

[Tom Freston]

Right.

[Sean Hayes]

Anybody over 250?

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah, we're in the two eighties now.

[Tom Freston]

I can.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

No, really, I can. Now I'm basically my own tech support now. I can. I know how to find the little.

[Jason Bateman]

We don't. We don't need to tell you 290.

[Tom Freston]

Times.

[Jason Bateman]

You know, that's the good news.

[Sean Hayes]

It is true. Out of the three of us, who has the most technical problems?

[Jason Bateman]

Who gets. Do we get to vote, or do you have to.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

I think I'm. I think I'm. All right. I'll bet. I'll bet, Sean, you're. You're worse because you're able to. Because Scotty can catch you every time.

[Sean Hayes]

This is true. I scream my head off if I'm like, I can't log on my computer.

[Jason Bateman]

Who has. Who has the least.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

The least. Least problems?

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. Technical problems. Not problems. Not world problems.

[Sean Hayes]

No, it's always you. Why is that? Because that's what you do for a living.

[Jason Bateman]

Well, more probably used to the setup of the mic.

[Will Arnett]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Isn't that n. And you also. You started. Weren't you original, one of the original Geek Squad guys?

[Jason Bateman]

I did. Do I still own the name?

[Sean Hayes]

What is it?

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah, I still. I did all the art.

[Sean Hayes]

I went to a Dodgers game with Jason a couple weeks ago. And then.

[Tom Freston]

You sure did.

[Sean Hayes]

And then we went to the USC football game.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah, you did. And you had a decent. We had a decent quarter there.

[Sean Hayes]

Well, yeah, that was crazy. We. Jason and I. I had all the concessions that Jason. Oh, I was holding them.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

This guy looked like he was at a state fair.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, it did.

[Sean Hayes]

It looked like I had, like, old Bessie. Two armfuls, and it had, like, a soft pretzel. And Jason has his hot dog in his phone, and I had all the drinks in the pretzel.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Cheese dipping.

[Jason Bateman]

I want to describe you. I once described you as a soft pretzel. That's funny.

[Sean Hayes]

Just in knots all over.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah, but it sounds like you're really living your best life, though. You know what?

[Sean Hayes]

But that was so embarrassing. That was so fun. But it was so embarrassing because we. Somebody was in our seats, and then I felt like the whole stadium was looking at us as we were just standing yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

So you know when you show up a little bit late and people spread out, they get in your seats, and then you have to, like. You have to. You show up at the aisle and you're kind of in a half squat because you don't want to, like, block.

[Jason Bateman]

These big dickhead actors. All our grocery actors. Yeah. Right. And it was like, oh, you're going to kick these people out.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

I know, but you have to, like, show proof of your tickets. And you remember used to. Used to pass your ticket down the aisle. Yes. But now the tickets are on your phone. Tickets are on your phone. You got to, like, pass your phone down the aisle. People are touching your phone. You know, I don't like that, Willie.

[Jason Bateman]

Right.

[Tom Freston]

And.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And these guys. Guess what? Here's. Here's the news.

[Sean Hayes]

He's eating his hot dog.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah. They wouldn't move. Yeah, no, they're like, yeah, I see. This is your ticket. But they told us to sit here. I'm like, who told you to sit? The usher. I said, well, I don't see the usher now. Well, you got to get them and tell them to move us.

[Sean Hayes]

That's right. And then I'm.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

So we had to sit on the stairs with our groceries and wait. I mean. Oh, God, it was the worst. It took like 10 minutes.

[Jason Bateman]

And then they finally got them out.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And then they finally got out.

[Jason Bateman]

Did it come to blows?

[Tom Freston]

Did it all?

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Family of four were relocated and now just us two sat down. And now we got two extra seats next to us. And we looked like super assholes.

[Sean Hayes]

I ate my pretzel on this on the stairs, and my cheese went everywhere.

[Jason Bateman]

Oh, no. You mean actual cheese?

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah, it wasn't.

[Jason Bateman]

It wasn't a result of eating the pretzel. Made your cheese go everywhere. You created cheese. No. Okay, we'll save that for Smartless After Dark, which we still haven't gotten off the ground.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

No, still working on the logo, which.

[Jason Bateman]

Is funny because our guest today. I said smartless. He often refers to it as shameless. And I know he's joking in his tongue in cheek because I love him.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

He's pretty shameless.

[Jason Bateman]

It is. And this is a guy who's really. You wanna talk about? Live the life. This guy's really lived the life. Okay.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Oh, boy.

[Jason Bateman]

He starts out he's the pride of Connecticut, sort of. He started out running a clothing company out of Afghanistan and India, no joke. Back in, like, the early 70s when nobody was over there. He just. I mean, he's the kind of guy you'd find him on a Nightboat to Tangier. That's the kind of dude he is out of Nowher. He comes back after running, literally trying to avoid tariffs and running clothing illegally across the St. Louis into upstate New York. He then decides he's going to change everything. And he goes and he starts to create. He creates this thing that literally changed the way that we saw music, fashion, culture. Everything went global everywhere. Andy Warren runs a bunch of little networks that you might have heard heard of called Nickelodeon, VH1, Company Central.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Mr. Tom Freston.

[Jason Bateman]

He becomes CEO of Viacom and now he's the chair of the One Campaign Fighting Poverty. He's done it all. He's the coolest guy. And I'm happy to call my friend you guys. It's Mr. Tom Freston.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Cannot wait. Oh, Mr. Hey guys. Can't wait to hear all about this fella.

[Tom Freston]

It's an honor to be here. Thank you.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Here on Shameless. You've seen all 10 seasons on Showtime for us.

[Jason Bateman]

Shameless.

[Tom Freston]

Shameless.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Welcome to the show.

[Sean Hayes]

Wait, how do you and will know each other? Tom?

[Tom Freston]

Just for hanging around in New York, out on Long Island.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Sean Hayes]

Oh, yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

We originally met through our mutual friend many years ago through Jimmy Buffett back. Jimmy and Jane Buffett introduced us back in the day. Tom's good friend, may he rest in peace.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah. I'm sorry about your loss.

[Jason Bateman]

The great Jimmy Buffett. And who was Jimmy? One of the things he did was he brought a lot of people together and introduced a lot of people. Am I right about that, Tom?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, he sure did.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. He was just.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

How did you. Tom, how'd you meet Jimmy?

[Tom Freston]

I met Jimmy in the basement of a bar called JP's in Manhattan in the 70s. It was like, you know, at 5am you'd open up one of those Bilco doors or 8am and walk out in the sunlight like a vampire. But he would hang out there. It was like sort of a music industry hangout. So I met him there in 1977.

[Will Arnett]

Wow.

[Tom Freston]

And we just would hang out and trips. I would travel with him a lot. He liked to go, he liked to travel and that was especially good. Especially after he bought a jet.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Was he flying planes back then?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, he. He could fly all kinds of planes. The Jimmy jets. Yeah. He would. Was very serious about it. He could fly seaplanes, you know, all kinds of big fancy ones as well.

[Jason Bateman]

Tom. He had a few. Jimmy. Jimmy also crashed a few planes. Did he? Back in.

[Tom Freston]

He landed in Nantucket and sort of flipped it over and that was. And there was Other instances of malfeasance.

[Jason Bateman]

One time when we were. I told that story when they did that. That show at the Hollywood bowl in honor of Jimmy. And I told the story about he was gonna do takeoff and landings on this little island. And he said, what are you. I said, what are you doing this morning? He goes, I gotta go get certified. I'm doing takeoffs and landings. Do you wanna go? And I go, yeah. And then he left the room. And Jane turned to me and she goes, dude, he's crashed, like, three planes. You're not getting out of it.

[Tom Freston]

Oh, my God.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

The key word there is training.

[Tom Freston]

Do you wanna.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

No.

[Jason Bateman]

So. So, Tom, I want to go. I want to go all the way back. By the way, Tom's. Tom's got a book that we're gonna get. We're gonna get into Tom's book in a second because I. I read it a while ago, and it's phenomenal. But I will. It's called Unplugged, which is fantastic. Which is, I think, out now. Right, Tom?

[Tom Freston]

It comes out November 18th.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. So. But, you know, again, we've. We've known each other a little bit over the years, but I read your book. So, Tom, walk us through. And I wasn't joking when I said you started. You started a clothing company in Afghanistan and India.

[Will Arnett]

Yeah.

[Sean Hayes]

I want to know how and why.

[Jason Bateman]

1970. How. How is one able to do that?

[Tom Freston]

Well, let's see. I was. I had been working in an ad agency in New York. I got assigned to Charman Toilet Paper.

[Jason Bateman]

Sure.

[Tom Freston]

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

[Sean Hayes]

And what year? Ish.

[Tom Freston]

This is 1972. So I stayed through 1979. I started a couple of businesses. We would design and make clothes. I mean, higher quality clothes. We'd sell to Bloomingdale's and so forth, and became a big business. I mean, I had a house in Delhi, and I Was able to travel everywhere. I was living like a pasha. It was wonderful. And then a bunch of bad things happened to me and not the least of which was Jimmy Carter put an embargo. It's sort of like what's going on today with the tariffs. There would be no more clothing imports from India. And I had all this stuff in production. Wow. And it was a nightmare working there in those days. So I, I actually ended up smuggling 3 tons of stuff in from Canada.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, Tom, take us through that. So, so you get, by the way, this is like. So this before, obviously before the Internet and all that stuff. So you guys are. This is all sort of phone calls and everything takes a little bit longer. And now you've got goods that you're sitting on and you gotta get it into the States. And so you decide what.

[Tom Freston]

Well, I had met in my years there all these smugglers, you know, sort of rife with drug smugglers. And they would always say how easy it was to smuggle stuff into the United States.

[Will Arnett]

Wow.

[Sean Hayes]

Just by putting it on a plane and just nobody checking.

[Tom Freston]

Well, no, they had, they would, they would send stuff in shipments, they would take stuff across borders. But in this case, I was allowed to bring stuff legally into Canada. And, you know, I figured, you know, these long haired goofballs could do it, I could do it. And I felt like I wasn't really committing a crime. It was really foolish, I admit. I mean, but I just want. I figured get some money back. I felt I had really been ripped off by the government with no prior announcement or anything. So that was the end of my business. And I also had my business in Afghanistan kind of vaporized because there had been a communist coup there.

[Jason Bateman]

Right.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

But Tom, can you. Can you. For a real soft Hollywood idiot like me who any. This whole thing sounds just so foreign from anything I would ever imagine, let alone pursue.

[Jason Bateman]

He won't go east of La Brea. Put it that way.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Okay, just forget it. Or south of the airport. What was your life like at that age, at that time that gave you either the courage to have this wanderlust or maybe the opposite of courage. There was just stuff happening in your life. It was like, fuck all this. I just want to go to the end of the earth for something completely new, something completely different. Because this ain't working. Was it one of the two?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, it was more the latter. I mean, I was. Yeah, it was the 60s, so, you know, there was a lot of alienation around. Freedom sounded like a good option. I decided early on, I didn't want to really have a mainstream kind of life. I had taken a year off and sort of bartended around. That worked.

[Jason Bateman]

But you had gotten your mba, right?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, I had an mba. I did that. That was a way to stay out of the draft in those days.

[Jason Bateman]

Right.

[Tom Freston]

And then so it was. I just wanted to sort of leave out of the mainstream life. And it sounded very exotic and interesting to be living in a place so foreign.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

What was it about the mainstream life that just didn't feel something that you were attracted to, especially given the fact that you had gone down this road of mainstream. You got an MBA and like, you're set, you're ready. You put a huge time and financial investment into the mainstream. And then you said, yeah, no, let's flip it. Let's go 180 this way.

[Tom Freston]

It wasn't fun. Have you ever tried selling toilet paper?

[Jason Bateman]

I actually have.

[Tom Freston]

And before that, I was on the GI Joe account, which was like the war toy of the military industrial complex. It was a very alienated time. A lot of people were quitting jobs and sort of trying to go off and do their own thing.

[Sean Hayes]

So everything looked appealing.

[Tom Freston]

Everything looked appealing. And it looked really exciting because I wasn't having any fun. I felt like I needed to stretch out. I'd been in school for like 18 years or something, so I was ready to go. And then I. I fell in love with this very foreign place. And in those days, it was really foreign.

[Sean Hayes]

You know, also age, because if you're young, you. You like, well, I might as well try it.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, I was 25, 26, you know, I mean, a young. So if not now, when?

[Sean Hayes]

That's.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah, yeah, I remember you. You sort of describe in the book when you first get to Morocco, when you were still with your. Traveling with your. Your. Your friend, your girlfriend, and just like meeting these people and they're on the beach, like way. And you were like, look at this life. Everybody's. Nobody's. Kind of. Everybody's just kind of doing whatever they want a little bit, right? And it kind of. That opened your eyes to it and then.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

So good, right? Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

There was a bit of a phenomenon. They call it the hippie trail. I mean, no one self identified as a hippie, but like in California, New York, people were. In those days, if you wanted to drop out, you sort of went to a commune in a cold place in Northern California or somewhere upstate in New York, but in Europe, people would head south, you know, to Morocco or India or Lebanon and, you know, Kind of like see how long they could travel. I meet people who travel for years.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

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

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, you know, I think the world could use a little bit more of that today. You see these kids, they're so anxious and they go to school and they're having panic attacks and they're gonna get.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Out, and you gotta immediately start providing and accomplishing.

[Tom Freston]

I meet these kids, they say, I'm graduating from college. I'm starting work on Monday.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Right.

[Tom Freston]

Starting my career on Monday. So we'll take a. Take a break. The world's like the best educator out there, traveling around.

[Jason Bateman]

Out of curiosity, Tom, did you impart that on your own so ones just, you know, as much as you're comfortable with talking?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, I do. I encourage them to. They become. Both of them have become good travelers and they're very comfortable, you know, going anywhere, making their own plans, and really proud of them in that regard.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Did you notice a big change when they came back?

[Tom Freston]

Well, they didn't go like. I mean, I traveled for a couple of years. They really, you know, would take. Actually, my oldest son, he kind of went to work almost right away, but then they. None of them really made extensive trips like I had. They're more caught up in this time.

[Sean Hayes]

Go back to the. To the Canada. So did you end up bringing those clothes and all those goods into the US or. No.

[Tom Freston]

It was so easy.

[Sean Hayes]

You just.

[Jason Bateman]

You did it yourself, though, Tom.

[Tom Freston]

Well, I enlisted a guy I knew in Canada whose father used to be like a rum runner, and he was ready for another trail, another trick. Wow.

[Sean Hayes]

It's like smoking.

[Jason Bateman]

You came on the boat with the stuff yourself, though?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you go through the Thousand Islands, there's all these islands, and, you know, then no one knows where the border is really, so. And there's boats floating around, no one knows who's who, and ice wasn't around.

[Sean Hayes]

Right, right, right.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Did you end up learning any of the languages over there?

[Tom Freston]

You know, in India you get pretty spoiled because people speak English a lot. But, I mean, I could move my way around in Hindi, but in Afghanistan, I picked up a fair amount of Farsi, which is the language. I mean, dari, they Could. It's a dialect of Farsi. I can get myself around the bazaars and, you know, order food and take taxis.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And do you retain it now?

[Tom Freston]

Not so much.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. Wait, so. So, Tom. So actually this is a good.

[Tom Freston]

You, you.

[Jason Bateman]

You go out there because you've got this, as Jason called, this wanderluster, this desire to get out in the world. And we talk, but there's not enough of that. But you kind of bring a little bit. You leave on. On the sort of. Cause you've come. You don't have a great corporate experience in that you're working on Charman and GI Joe and you're like, fuck all this. You go out into the world and you come back and you kind. Bit of that rebel attitude with you as you. Because you re. Enter into a corporate environment a little bit. But you bring a little bit of that sort of that rebellious nature into what you do. You start to work on pretty immediately on mtv and can you talk to us how. I mean, it was like a perfect. You're the perfect guy for that because you. You were bringing that rebel spirit into the corporate world.

[Tom Freston]

Well, you know, I really love traveling and being over there. And when I came back, I was sort of wiped out of that life. What else do I really love? Well, I was really. I was a major fanatic about music and rock and roll and good time for it. I caught an article in Billboard magazine. I started studying. Where could I get a job? And there was a guy who said, you know, we're going to start a video music channel. That's going to be the cable. The TV revolution is starting. And they had already started Nickelodeon and they had a thing called the Movie Channel. So I got an interview. My brother knew a guy who had just gone to work there. So I got an interview and I made this case. And finally there was a guy named Bob Pittman.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

Who I was in like 32 at the time.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And the interview was with what company.

[Tom Freston]

This is called then? It was called Warner Amic Satellite Entertainment Company. Doesn't roll off the town. It was a joint venture of Warner and American Express. Yeah.

[Sean Hayes]

Wow.

[Tom Freston]

This guy Bob Pittman, who was 26, never bothered going to college. He was a big star. They call him the long haired, one eyed hippie. And he programmed these radio stations like with Don Imus.

[Sean Hayes]

He would have got along with my mom. My mom had one.

[Tom Freston]

Anyway, I interviewed him. I said, I'm your guy. They said, well, first thing, we're looking for people with no experience in television. Those were almost like the magic words. I said, well, sure. They didn't even have television where I've been living the last day, eight years. So. And I'm a music fanatic and you're looking for entrepreneurs and I know business and blah, blah, blah. And then he goes, you were a hashy smuggler, weren't you? I go, not really. And he goes, not really. That means you were.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

So you're hired. So I got a job on this initial team that started mtv.

[Jason Bateman]

And who was that team? It was you and Bob Pittman.

[Tom Freston]

And you me and Bob Pittman. There was a guy named John Sykes.

[Jason Bateman]

Sure.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Oh, boy.

[Tom Freston]

John Sykes, Steve Casey. Who else was there? Carolyn Baker, Sue Steinberg. And there was about six or seven of us, Fred Seibert, who was like, really sort of the creative genius of the group. And, you know, we were said, you know, get this thing on the air by August 1st. We had like eight months to put this whole channel together, so. Wow.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And we will be right back.

[Sean Hayes]

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[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And now back to the show.

[Sean Hayes]

Did music videos? Were they already kind of happening on other Platforms or somewhere. And that's why you knew it would work or.

[Tom Freston]

No, There was really very little awareness about music videos in the States. They. They existed in Europe.

[Jason Bateman]

Right.

[Tom Freston]

Because the radio stations there were still really regulated, didn't play any music. So the record companies there make these videos. And you could see them, like, in record stores, where they would put them on Tops of Top of the Pops on the. You know, on the BBC. So. But America. And one summer, I had a girlfriend in Berlin. I remember just going to her. She would work. I'd go to a record store and just watch music videos all day. It's one of those kind of days. And I was like, thinking, this is like a video wonderland. So I said, this is, you know, people are gonna, like this.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Sort of build it and they will come kind of thing. You guys were the egg, and then the chicken came along or vice ver. And like, those early videos. What was the early one? Like, Remember, like, Radio Star was the first one. Frankie Goes to Hollywood. And I feel like Dire Straits had one of the early ones.

[Tom Freston]

Dire Straits had a bunch of early ones called Skate Away.

[Jason Bateman]

Well, I was gonna get into Dire Straits. Cause it's actually in. It's a big part of the book. Jay, that's a really good point. First of all, Video Killed the Radio Star was the first video you guys aired right when you first launched. Is that true?

[Tom Freston]

True. Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

And. Yeah. And. And you guys also. You started this thing. But I. I've heard stories from you and from Sykes that, like, you guys had, like, a. Basically, like a One, like a closet with, like, a phone with, like, call waiting on it. Right. You guys. It wasn't a big operation.

[Tom Freston]

That's called that. The cheapskates. Second line.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. So then you guys started this. And then you. But then Dire Streets had. They gave you guys the gift of all gifts. Because it was Mark Knopfler, from what I understand and what I've read, wrote that as a sort of. Almost like a rebuttal to the sort of, you know, music video and the corporatization of music and all that. Is that right?

[Tom Freston]

And then money for nothing. Yeah. It was all about our vapidity. That we were vapid.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. And yet the line in that that really sold you guys, was, I want my mtv.

[Tom Freston]

He had Sting sing it. And in those days, you know, those kind of bands could be worldwide, you know, could have worldwide hits.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

And wherever I would go. Cause we took MTV around the world. People would know about us through that song.

[Sean Hayes]

Wow.

[Tom Freston]

MTV had been preceded by that, by money for nothing. So Mark Knopfler gave us the greatest of gifts.

[Jason Bateman]

It was unreal, like that idea that like he did this thing as a. And then. But it became like the, almost the rallying cry. And you guys also got that, that very line. You, you guys, I mean you and your whole team at various points got different artists to scream out, I want my MTV on camera. And that was your.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah. Because the, the cable companies didn't like us and didn't want to put us on. And they, they, these were older guys, they didn't get it and they didn't want to pay. We were just somebody who was in a cut into their margins. So we knew that wherever we were and for the first couple of years we were only like in these towns in the Midwest, like Tulsa, people loved us, they couldn't believe it. But no one in New York or LA had it and never even seen it. So we knew if we could get people, these people to call their cable companies and to man their MTV could eventually force these people to put us on. And that really worked.

[Sean Hayes]

That's cool.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

With videos now having kind of cycled. I mean they still sort of exist, but my God, you guys, you birthed it and it cycled into like just such a phenomenon, the whole, the addition of videos to the whole music industry. And now it's sort of settled into a place of sort of a sidecar kind of thing. What do you, what do you feel that the music video has. What positive of it has remained in the music industry? Has it been additive?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, you know, music videos are still popular. They don't exist on mtv. That's become sort of a reality show channel. And Mute. They make as many music videos today as they used to. A lot of them are made more economically, but you know, they don't. You can get them all on the Internet on, on YouTube or on vivo and you get them on demand so you don't have to sit around watching some channel to wait to see Nirvana. You can just click on it and watch it right away. So that sort of killed the MTV linear network model.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

You guys would. At the end of every video you, you put the name of the song, the album, the band and the director.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And it. You guys launched a bunch of really incredible directors into the film industry.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, you know, the whole. There was a whole bunch of them and there was a whole issue after, after a couple of years a director said, hey, how come our names aren't on there? We want to get some credit.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Hayes]

And yeah, David Fincher, too.

[Tom Freston]

David Fincher was a great. Russell Mulcahy. There was a Spike Jones. I mean, lots of people came up that way.

[Sean Hayes]

We'll talk about MTV ending in just a minute. But the initial, like the launch, the logo of the rocket taking off, that was the first image ever, right?

[Tom Freston]

Yes.

[Sean Hayes]

Of mtv. And was that just what it is? Which is like we're launching a new show.

[Tom Freston]

Well, we didn't have any money and we realized that all this NASA footage was public domain so we could rip off NASA and Man's greatest moment and kind of make it our own.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Freston]

So we got it for free.

[Sean Hayes]

Oh, that's great.

[Tom Freston]

And the logo that everybody loved and became iconic, we got that for $1,000 from some guys town.

[Sean Hayes]

Wow.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And it was sort of kind of. You guys, I'm sure we're kind of tongue in cheek. How grandiose this whole thing is gonna. We're putting our flag on the moon and. Yeah, here comes Saturn.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, that was it, right? We're gonna rip off man's greatest moment and put our flag there.

[Sean Hayes]

That's amazing.

[Jason Bateman]

Tom, what was the moment that you guys realized that you had really broken through? I mean, there were so many. I remember as a kid, you know, there were like. When the Thriller video hit, it was just everywhere. It was like top of the hour, every hour. Was there a moment for you where you went like, holy shit, we really got something here. We're shifting culture.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

It was a slow build. You know, it took us a while to get to New York and LA where people could see us and then they could talk about us in the media. But then. And I mean, two things. One was Thriller, Michael Jackson, Beat it. You know, and people say, oh, big artists are making videos and with big production budgets and they're earring.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

John Landis directing that.

[Tom Freston]

And the second thing was Live Aid.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

Oh, yeah. Live A.

[Tom Freston]

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

[Jason Bateman]

Wow.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah. There was nowhere else to see your favorite artist, really, unless you bought a ticket to a concert. It was the only channel that you could see these people.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And the VJs were cool too, remember, Like Mark Goodman and Martha Quinn.

[Tom Freston]

Martha.

[Jason Bateman]

Martha Quinn.

[Tom Freston]

You know, people forget, but, you know, for its Day. It wasn't like a flying car stuff or anything, but MTV really was revolutionary. It was a whole new visual language for people. Of course, we've gone so far past that now, but it was sort of a groundbreaker in that way.

[Jason Bateman]

Did you guys end up having all these. You got to know a lot of artists too, through this. Through this. I mean, at first you guys were trying to launch and get them to do stuff, and then. Then there must have been the tipping point where they're just coming at you and all the artists are wining and dining you guys. Right. Sending you Rolexes and stuff.

[Tom Freston]

Stuff. I didn't get any Rolexes. Yeah, I got a Timex. No, but I mean, it was true. We used to get like four or five videos a week. Then we were getting 50 or 60. And so there was record companies set up, whole departments just to service mtv.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah, I'll bet. I'll bet you guys were a real bell of the ball. All these record label heads were probably working, you guys, like they used to work radio stations, right, where they would ask for certain placement of certain videos at certain days and times maybe.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, yeah, it was. We were the biggest radio station in the nation. And it didn't always bring out the best in some of the people at mtv. You know, when you had that kind of.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Sure.

[Sean Hayes]

Power and. And what did you think or feel when just recently they announced it's no longer right?

[Tom Freston]

Well, they announced that in the UK for a bunch of channels that just play music videos and the MTV channel, it just plays reality shows, which really bugs me. But whatever. That's still there. But it needed to die a death because it can't exist really, and be a business when you're competing with all these videos on the Internet and it's not like you have exclusive videos that the people. That the Internet doesn't have. I mean, there's no business there. It's not going to grow. I do think that the new the Ellisons and Paramount have a chance to really reimagine what MTV could be digitally and figure out. Because. Figure out a way to put together something more interesting than is out there now, which is a lot of sort of siloed, algorithm driven.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah, well, those fast channels, if you, if you, if you want a fast channel, you could just pick your favorite artists like Taylor Swift and just click on her and just watch all her.

[Jason Bateman]

Videos one stop shopping. So, speaking of which, so you're at MTV and then you guys decide to. Then you have a bunch of other things that I mentioned in The Intro, Nickelodeon, VH1 and Comedy Central. And this is great. So Comedy Central ends up becoming this huge thing, but it, the way it started was kind of in response to what somebody else was doing. I love this story. Walk us through that a little bit. How, how Comedy Central came to be.

[Tom Freston]

Okay. I was having a staff meeting one day and someone slips me a piece of paper to say that HBO's just announced they're going to do a comedy channel. They're going to call it the Comedy Channel. And we went, oh, wow, they're getting into our business. They were the pay TV people. We were like the little low rent, basic people. We said, well, that means they're going to get in our business. They have a lot of money. They have all these. You do all these big standup shows with Robin Williams and everything. What are we going to do? I said, well, we're going to announce our own comedy channel the same day let's announce we're doing one too, because then we'll be in every article that's ever written about that their competitor is also doing a comedy channel.

[Jason Bateman]

And you had no idea, you didn't.

[Tom Freston]

Have a name or anything, but we had this thing called Nick at night. And we would take like old TV shows and repurpose them and repackage them and everything. And so at the worst comes the worst. We can do like a version of that. But let's, let's put our hat in the ring. And so we had a big battle with them for a couple of years and finally we emerged and it became Comedy Central. But. And they, they. Because I thought if this worked for them, then they'd launch a movie channel, a music channel and a kids channel as well and be head to head competitors with a lot more money than us.

[Jason Bateman]

So, so you basically started. You hear our competitors are starting a comedy channel. And in that moment you go, let's announce it. So. So anytime they get mentioned, we get mentioned and we don't even have a product yet, right? And you said, and you were like. And I remember reading in the book, you were like, you said to Frank Biondi, right, Who you worked with over there, and you said to him, you're like, look, it'll buy us a couple days. And then by the time we have to make the actual announcement, we'll have time to come up with a name and what we're gonna do. Is that true?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, he was. Well, I put him on the speakerphone to my staff and he says, yeah, because he had been and he had Left hbo and he did not have a great relationship with Michael Fuchs, who said he was like the king of. This was his baby. So Frank was all in fighting like tooth and nail against. We were like a guerrilla operation fighting against hbo. And I think HBO couldn't believe that we did as well as we did. It was all in smoke and mirrors.

[Sean Hayes]

And so when did you come up with the name? How did you, you come up with programming and the whole thing for the channel?

[Tom Freston]

Well, initially we called it like the two days later was we called it ha, the TV Comedy Channel. It was high with an exclamation point.

[Jason Bateman]

Sure, sure.

[Tom Freston]

You know, and we had a great logo and it was TV comedy because what they were doing was just, they were in a ripped like funny scenes out of, you know, TV shows and movies and some stand up comedy guys in front of brick walls and just put them together and they'd have like their equivalent of VJs. It would be like an MTV model. But you know, we didn't think that would work. We actually had tried that once. So we, we thought, well, we'll just run comedy shows. So I, I did things to create headlines. I hired Fred Silverman, who programmed all the big networks at one time. We did deals with like Brian Grazer and you know, we licensed stuff from Norman Learning and we just would continue to throw out announcements. So we got Saturday Night live, the original five years of that, you know, 75 to 80. And we built up a, you know, a decent show. And then when we merged, you know, we had to come up with the name us and HBO and Comedy Central was the name.

[Jason Bateman]

And then the turning point for Comedy Central in your book that you describe is what really set you guys off was when you hired Jon Stewart. Is that right? Right.

[Tom Freston]

We had hired John Stewart before he had been. We, he was on MTV in the late 80s, early 90s. He had a show called the John Stewart Show.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah, I remember that.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, it ran for a while. So John was sort of in the stable. We never found him. And we actually had a guy named Craig Clairborne on the Daily show first who was different type of guy. And then we replaced him with Jon Stewart. And John's vision was, look, let's, let's, let's just not do pop culture stuff. Why don't we take a crack at the news? I'll be a fake newsman.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

And he got his voice doing that and just got better and better. I mean I just watched, you know, he's on every Monday night again still. He's so brilliant.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

He should run for president.

[Tom Freston]

Perfect. But we had. What came out of that was we had Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee. Bill Maher was on our channel first. Dave Chappelle. I mean, it was a good launching place for young talent. Jimmy Kimmel had the Man Show. You may remember that.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah, I remember that.

[Jason Bateman]

I mean, Tom, you think about. You name these people, all these people, musical artists, comedic voices, brilliant voices who came up under sort of the umbrella of stuff that you did. Do you ever. Do you get a little satisfaction when you watch people now all these years later, like, yeah, I was right about all of this.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

And in truth, I wasn't the person who, like, picked everybody. But we had a great team there, and we were always looking for edgy new talent that was coming up and get them young. And then they'd leave us. Like, Bill Maher was on Politically Incorrect, and then ABC hired him and then they fired him and he ended up at hbo and his show now is Spectacular. And so you see now the front line of people who were sort of like the resistance almost politically. It's all these comedians and they all. So many of them had their roots with us, although they've been in other places for a while. Colbert, Kimmel, Marr, and so on.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And Steve Carell, too.

[Jason Bateman]

And Carell.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

So then. Yeah, go ahead.

[Tom Freston]

No, go ahead.

[Jason Bateman]

Well, I was going to say so then because I want to get into all the one stuff, you know. God, we don't have enough time for everything, Tom. Your life is too full. So you, you, while you're at Viacom, you become CEO of Viacom, ultimately. And you work for a guy called Sumner Redstone, which was. He was a difficult boss to serve. Is that a good way to put it?

[Tom Freston]

That's very fair. Yes. He fired. He fired every CEO, including me, including you.

[Jason Bateman]

And so you knew. So he hires you as CEO, and that means what? That means your days are numbered, basically.

[Tom Freston]

How long till I get fired? But the thing is, he always liked to fire people on holiday weekends. So, like, he fired Frank Biondi on the 4th of July. He fired Mel Karmazin, like, on Memorial Day, and I got it on Labor Day. So if you could make it through the summer season, pretty much you had another year of good times ahead.

[Sean Hayes]

Oh, wow.

[Jason Bateman]

And one of the reasons. One of the. One of the things that. I know there are a lot of issues and you talk about it in the book, but you and I have talked about this before. It's widely known. There was a thing called one of the first social media sites out there was a thing called MySpace and it was up for grabs and he wanted it.

[Sean Hayes]

He's still on it.

[Jason Bateman]

I'm still on it. Right. Sean's still on. It's his main source of communication. So he wanted MySpace and so did News Corp. Right. Is that fair?

[Tom Freston]

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

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

And he bought it for $560 million. I'll just say ultimately, Rupert sold it for $30 million.

[Sean Hayes]

Wow.

[Tom Freston]

I'm still waiting for a thank you note. That was a reason he, one of the reasons he cited for five firing me and.

[Jason Bateman]

Right. One of the reasons, which is you did him such a favor. And the other thing was you early on saw the power, the potential maybe of YouTube. Is that true?

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, YouTube kind of took away all of MTV's mojo ultimately. I mean, who could have imagined what YouTube's become today? If you check out like YouTube TV and everything, it's amazing.

[Sean Hayes]

And it's been around forever and they still say it's the quote future, but it's been around forever.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

If an alien landed on the earth and you trying to explain what YouTube is or was one in its, in its, in its inception, how would you describe it? Is it, is it, is it just a free sort of destination for user generated videos? You just kind of upload anything you want and it's just a gathering place for all that. Is that what YouTube really at its core is?

[Tom Freston]

That's what it was initially and that was like 2005, they launched it and it was initially you could, anybody could upload anything and kids could comment on it, you could send stuff. It was a form of social media.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Right.

[Tom Freston]

Person to person. And that was, that was a whole new idea. And then like SNL would put up like some stuff like with Andy Samberg. I'm trying to think some of. They, they would, you, they media companies would use it as sort of a promotional vehicle. So they started to get more promotional content on there and then they've just.

[Jason Bateman]

And did you want to do, you wanted to buy it?

[Tom Freston]

Did you saw, we thought this is a whole new thing and the world is going in this. You know, we had the TV revolution, now we got this digital revolution and this Digital revolution, this social media thing where people can communicate directly with each other and people like us aren't gatekeepers anymore. You know, we thought, how do we get in on this? You know, you got to own a platform. And we made a. I wanted to make a bid on it. It. But it was difficult for a company like us. I mean, ultimately, Google bought it for 1.6 billion. The Viacom board thought it was a copyright infringement machine. It would make us liable for lots of lawsuits. And ultimately, after I left, they sued him for a billion dollars and lost 10 years later. But no one could have imagined what YouTube was able to morph into.

[Sean Hayes]

Right.

[Tom Freston]

You know, which is.

[Jason Bateman]

But you did see. You did see that there was the potential, even though you didn't know exactly what it would become. Imagine how different the world would have looked had Viacom purchased. I mean, for 1.6 billion is the right now the deal of the century.

[Tom Freston]

They're worth almost $600 billion here, too.

[Sean Hayes]

Wow. That's unbelievable.

[Tom Freston]

I mean, I could buy all the media companies a couple times over.

[Sean Hayes]

Wow.

[Jason Bateman]

And then $600 billion on the side of that. You also helped these guys start Vice Media as well, right? Were instrumental in getting.

[Tom Freston]

I worked with Vice for a bunch of years. Yeah. Yeah. That was a wild ride.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah, that's another fun.

[Tom Freston]

That was a lot of fun too, though.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Freston]

And it was crashed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was.

[Sean Hayes]

It's still around, though, isn't it?

[Tom Freston]

No, it's barely around. They have a little studio operation. You know, they kind of imploded a bit. You know, they had a great run when they had that HBO series on that really kind of made them famous. They had a whole suite of YouTube, YouTube channels.

[Sean Hayes]

And does any. After. After all of these successes, does any part of you still want to be involved in media?

[Tom Freston]

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

[Jason Bateman]

Barely, Tom. Barely.

[Sean Hayes]

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[Jason Bateman]

Really?

[Tom Freston]

Anything?

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[Chris Diamantopoulos]

It does seem like though, that we are at a bit of an inflection point that's not too dissimilar from sort of the launch of something like a YouTube where were it not for the invention of the Internet and Then the personal communication device, you know, those two things together were the necessary components that make up a YouTube. Now we've got something similar perhaps in AI and its ability to be transformative and create these new platforms or entertainment options or what we have no idea about. Some ideas are scary, some ideas are interesting. But like maybe we're at another kind of launch moment. I'm sure you've done, I'm sure you read very interesting books and niche articles and periodicals and things like that. Does it not hold some kind of interest to you, this sort of, this moment of pioneering and the whole AI.

[Tom Freston]

Thing is sort of daunting. On one hand you've got people saying this is going to create these machines, they're going to kill us all. And on the other hand it's going to open up this great new world and it's going to, and someone else say, yeah, it's gonna get, put 20% unemployment on.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

But it seems like the big brains like you are really the only people that are uniquely qualified to really kind of cut through all that and say, yeah, it could be this, it could be that, but it also can be steered and can only be really properly steered by somebody that has a combination of your creative acumen and your business acumen and your time in the industry. So are you not interested or excited to kind of GR some of that in there?

[Tom Freston]

I'm sort of following it all. It's not that there's not a lot of smart people involved. You know, these AI guys from, you know, you always say, well they're from up north and you can see the, the battle in Hollywood.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

They need the media savvy too though.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, they're not this media savvy but you know they're going to create new media. I, yeah, I'm curious and I'm watching and it's, they're just the amount of money that's being invested is just mind boggling.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

But they need someone like you to steer it though. You got, you know, I might have.

[Tom Freston]

To come off the bench.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Come on, get in there.

[Jason Bateman]

Wait, Tom, Tom, speaking of coming off the bench, if you were 26 and you 26 year old Tom Freston today and you were just coming back from doing your being off the grid for a couple years and you were gonna start in this world today, what would you launch?

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good question.

[Tom Freston]

Well, you know, I'd want to do something that I really liked, so I'd probably find my way somehow to the entertainment media business. You, I'm probably there and say, well, now, I mean, to your point, it is sort of in an inflection point and you'd want to align yourself with someone who's smart. That's a business that's ascendant. So if you get in it and you choose the right place and they got the right plan, you're likely to be able to move up. And I don't know which place that is, but that's probably where I would gravitate. And I feel confident that they're going to figure this out somehow.

[Will Arnett]

Now.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, in a way that, that doesn't put everybody out of work in the entertainment business because. But I just heard something today. It's a. They have a. Channel 4 in the UK has these newscasters that are AI generated that sound exactly, exactly like. Really exactly. Like it could be one of you guys talking.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Well, it, it's. Well, yeah, Sean's got wires coming out of him. Well, it sounds like you are satisfied for sure with your accomplishments, as well you should be. And so have you given yourself a chance to sit back and look at that guy who went off to India and Afghanistan and started in advertising and got his MBA and all that stuff? And have you, have you, have you landed at a spot that, that is satisfying to. To you, given where you started your frustrations early on? And it seems like you, you managed to create a space for yourself that, that combined all the things that you loved and that you were good at.

[Tom Freston]

Well, I kind of went full circle. I mean, if I look at my life in chapters, the chapter now, I'm doing a lot of not for profit work for like 18 years. I've been working with Bono as the board chair of the Sing to One campaign that really focuses on extreme poverty, infectious disease in Africa. And I find that very satisfying work. You know, we have red. You're probably familiar with some red stuff with Apple and everything. And that's interesting. Keeps your arm into the private sector, but, you know, and it gives me a chance to really explore Africa a bit more, which I also enjoy. But so I'm sort of in that phase of life, I guess you could say, you know, it's not like giving back, but I enjoy this kind of work and I like being an observer of what's going on in the media and entertainment business.

[Jason Bateman]

Well, you also, it is giving back. And you did start, you know, you started a media company in Afghanistan which still exists today.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, I did that. I went back to Afghanistan for 10 years until the Taliban arrived and built up a TV network there, which was.

[Jason Bateman]

Fascinating and not, not the not for profit, but meaning like you did that as. It's not like that was going to be a huge windfall. It was sort of giving back to a place that you really loved. And you described the people, especially early on in the 70s when you first got there and what a wonderful place Afghanistan was. And now you've got these people who are there sort of holding the line, still doing it. Right. Still broadcasting. And in that time, I remember you would take young people who were there who were working for the company and send them over here and do semesters working at USC media school and stuff and give them and educate them and I mean that was a real thing that you did for a long time.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, I mean, I never escaped my fascination with Afghanistan and it gets a bad rap these days, admittedly, but they're wonderful people. And I was lured back there to start this TV net station which became very powerful and in terms, I thought it was a way to, you know, change, help change society, connect Afghans to each other, to the outside world for the first time for, you know, women, liberate women. It just seeing a man and a woman newscaster side by side sends a huge signal.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Wow.

[Tom Freston]

We brought music back after the, you know, the Taliban had outlawed everything, so we brought back music with the arts.

[Sean Hayes]

And, and it's still running that the, the network.

[Tom Freston]

Well, it's been, you know, it's been. We've now had, we had like 250 advertised. It was. Now we're down to one.

[Jason Bateman]

Wow.

[Tom Freston]

Energy drinks, like Red Bull kind of stuff. That's what they have there because there's no alcohol. But we've now switched into doing programming for school for women. So we're doing educational programming and instead of advertisers, we're funded by people like Gates and other foundations, Malalo foundation. And we are making these episodes in Afghanistan in expansion. We have a diaspora group of Afghan educators that help develop the curriculum. And so it's just kind of keeping people employed in this very difficult time.

[Sean Hayes]

But these programs for educating women are now allowed.

[Tom Freston]

Yes, because we've picked sort of non ideological subjects like mathematics, physics, things like that.

[Sean Hayes]

Got it.

[Tom Freston]

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

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

Wow.

[Sean Hayes]

Just awesome.

[Tom Freston]

So women who used to be able. In that 20 year interval were when we were there, in which we blew. But, you know, people went to school, became parliamentarians, became lawyers, became, you know, now they're just extremely depressed and at home.

[Jason Bateman]

Man, Tom, you really. What a life. I know what a life, dude. And you've done it all. I mean, you do this kind of stuff and you help start MTV and you have a clothing company from the. And you're. And you're smuggling clothes across the thick network, huh? And you talk in the book, you take, you take 7 of Redstone to a sex club right? In Thailand, which you talk about in the book, which is crazy. Just a crazy. I implore you to read this book. Is that true?

[Tom Freston]

Yes.

[Jason Bateman]

Yes, that's crazy. Just give us a little taste of. Not too much of a taste.

[Tom Freston]

You don't want the full taste. But we, I kept telling him, you got to come to Asia. We've got MTV in India, we've got it in China and Taiwan, we've got in Indonesia. It's like the great market. We were still really positive about how we could do in Asia. And he had never really been. And then he called me up to his office one day and he says, I've made up my mind. I'd like to finally come to Asia with you. Where do you want to go? He goes, I want to go to Bangkok. I go, we don't really have any business in Bangkok. That's one place that. There's a company that there that's going to lay cable, but they haven't started yet. But he wanted to go to Bangkok. And then he told me quietly he'd like to go to some sex clubs.

[Sean Hayes]

Oh my God.

[Tom Freston]

I, you know, I had to go do some advanced work, you know, to get him in a sex club. I wasn't really. I'd been to Bangkok before a bunch of times. But I, I was not an expert on the sex club front, which is quite, quite a scene there. One of the most interesting things is that, you know, it's become, because of the Vietnam War, it's become like the commercial sex capital of the world. And they have plane loads of Japanese and German men that come in to run wild in the various red light districts. And I'm thinking, wait, those were the two Axis powers, right? And now, and now they're invading Bangkok. But I took Sumner to a. I did my job as a loyal employee and shepherd him around.

[Jason Bateman]

You had to take your boss. You describe, and you guys go into a room, and this couple are lowered on a motorcycle, having actual sex on the motorcycle. And you're there with your boss, and then he looks at you kind of like, we're good now. And you just let yourself out, right?

[Tom Freston]

Well, no, I had to take him to another club after that. But the interesting thing about that club was it was just filled with. With, like, regular people, Thai people and everything. And the mo. You hear this roar, and a motorcycle slowly comes down the small Harley, and there's this couple on there, and they're naked, and they're all greased up, and they're doing it. And the guy's revving the engine.

[Sean Hayes]

Oh, my God.

[Tom Freston]

And after a while. After a while, the people in the bar, the locals, they're not even looking. You know, it's like people are fornicating on a motorcycle two feet over your head. Yeah, we got it. Would you like another beer?

[Jason Bateman]

I said that.

[Tom Freston]

Pulled back up into the ceiling.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

And then you've got. I mean, you did everything you talk about. I mean, you literally. People go, like, from here to Timbuktu. You literally went to Timbuktu. I want to end on you. The time you went to the music festival, I remember when you and Jimmy were gonna go, you were talking about it, and you guys. You and Jimmy Buffett went to this music festival, Right?

[Tom Freston]

It's a festival in the desert, out in the middle of the Sahara.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah. So how did Burning man, or, like, talk about your journey?

[Tom Freston]

Burning man with people on camels. It was like the local Tuareg people would come. It would be like, we love West African music. So I got a few other people. Chris Blackwell.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

My friend Bill Flanagan. We flew to Bamako, the capital of Mali, and then we got a plane. We took the Jimmy jet, we flew to Timbuktu, and we land in the Timbuktu airport.

[Jason Bateman]

People, People.

[Tom Freston]

There's nothing there. There's no planes there. People are just running at our plane, trying to sell us daggers, you know, it was like you're in the middle of nowhere. It's like a town in the desert. And we had to drive a bunch of hours from there to get to the festival.

[Jason Bateman]

And you had your own security with you and a driver. Talk about that.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, we had one security guy from Bamako, and then we had another guy. And then we. When we got to Timbuktu, said we got to find a guy who knows how to get that. Get there. So we need a local guy. Who can find his way to the festival. So we hire this guy and we set out one morning to go to the festival. And we're winding our way through the sand dunes and going and going and going. After about four or five hours, the security guy goes, stop, stop. And he gabs the local guide and gets him out. And they start screaming at each other. We don't know what's going on. Then he puts the guy in a headlight, takes a Out a gun, sticks it to his head. He says, I'm going to kill this motherfucker, because he is taking us. We're going in the wrong direction. And he was taking us to an Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was kidnapping tourists in that area. And like, there was just over the border in Mauritania there. There was a Germans that had been holding for a year. And we were on our way there and he said, I'm going to. And I'm a little bit buzzed, and I'm looking at this. I'm going, jesus Christ, man. I mean, I just came out in the desert to hear some music and. And now I'm gonna witness a murder and I got a turban on my head.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Jesus.

[Tom Freston]

So we. Jimmy said, let the guy free. We just leave him in the desert. And we picked up like, a guy who was a hitchhiker. He had a cell phone with a Bob Marley ringtone, and that was enough. He said he knew how to get to the festival. So we put him on board and off we went.

[Sean Hayes]

You know, you could just watch mtv. You don't have to go all the way across there.

[Jason Bateman]

It's unbelievable.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

What a lot life.

[Tom Freston]

It sounded like a good idea.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah, well, good news for if you're like me or you finished listening to this guy talk and you're envious that you have not lived a life even halfway as interesting as him. The good news is we've got a book to read about it.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

So thank you for writing that.

[Jason Bateman]

Unplugged Adventures From MTV to Timbuktu. On sale as of November 18th from the Great Tom Fressen. Proof that there's a big world out there. Get out into it, which is I. I say all the time. And, boy, did you do that. Yeah.

[Tom Freston]

You.

[Jason Bateman]

You are. You are an inspiration to a lot of people, including me. You always have been. You're a great dude. And. And honestly, I read this book. Just. I devoured it. It's so good. So, Tom, thank you, man, for taking. This has been a long time coming. I'm so psyched that you came On.

[Tom Freston]

Thank you, Will. Thank all of you. It's great to, Great to chat with you guys. I'm a regular, I'm a regular fan.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Sean Hayes]

Nice to you meet, meeting you.

[Jason Bateman]

Time.

[Tom Freston]

Love the podcast.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us.

[Jason Bateman]

Thank you. The great Tom Freston. You guys take care.

[Tom Freston]

Bye, guys.

[Jason Bateman]

Bye, Tom. Bye.

[Tom Freston]

Thank you. Bye. Bye.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Bye, pal. Oh, boy. I, I, I'm, I'm uplifted and also depressed at the same time.

[Sean Hayes]

Exactly, exactly how I feel.

[Jason Bateman]

I know.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

I'm like, wow. You know, there was a, there was a time when, like, I think I've probably told this boring story before, but, you know, when my career was, you know, in a real, A real dry place and I no talk about that. I thought about going down to the Tom Bradley terminal here in lax, the international terminal, and just picking a destination up on the board and just, I love that.

[Sean Hayes]

Just going, you can still starting over do that.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Well, I got the wife and the kids and, you know, it's, it's a little awkward now.

[Sean Hayes]

No, but you can just get up.

[Jason Bateman]

And go deserting your family now.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

But I was, I was like, you know, 23, 24. I was like, Tom's age, and I was like, let me just start over somewhere else where being on Entertainment Tonight isn't the end, all be all. So I'm certainly not. Boohoo. Your life turned out so shitty. No, I'm very, very grateful. But, man, you listen to that. I just don't know if I was gonna say, you can't have both, but he seems to have had both. Like, he went, he did that, he came back, and he was still a part of mainstream society.

[Jason Bateman]

And not only that, what's cool is he took all of that, that sort of, that wanderlust as you des took all and all those experiences, and he brought it into that environment, and that's what set him apart and still sets him apart. He's like, he has such a broad worldview.

[Sean Hayes]

Like, he said, 18 years of school. So then he was like, anything is. I just got to get out. You know, like, I've just been reading.

[Jason Bateman]

Books for 18 years, and it changes what you, what you use as your sort of baseline norms that you think that you can. And so you come back and you're affected by these experiences, and you're like, no, well, why don't we just do this? You know, if you think about it, like, he does all this stuff that maybe being out in the world, he might not have had, but then he's like, yeah, we're mtv. We're gonna start this. And we're gonna start this comedy. It's like a drug.

[Sean Hayes]

It's like, it changes your mind.

[Jason Bateman]

And like, oh, YouTube, let's buy that. And everybody's like, no, Tom, no.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

I wonder if, like, I wonder if that doing it at that. At that age, though, is much more meaningful and significant than doing it. Let's say, like, you know, maybe after Maple goes to college, you know, Amanda and I take off and we start doing all this traveling. Like, are we too set in our. Then at that age, at 60, going around and, like, can you really be affected?

[Sean Hayes]

Well, there's one way. There's one way to find out.

[Jason Bateman]

Just do it.

[Sean Hayes]

Just do it.

[Jason Bateman]

I think, honestly.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

But what if it turns out. Yeah, no, it was a waste of time. You're already stuck in your ways and now you're 70.

[Jason Bateman]

But at least it's worth going to try to find it. And I would say, like, you hear that? It makes me want to say to my own kids and to my younger self and to anybody, if you're under 30 or 40, whatever it is, whoever you are, are, put your phone down and get out in the world. You know, that's. That's kind of. It makes you just think, like, just get out there and don't put it down.

[Sean Hayes]

Don't put it down before you get.

[Jason Bateman]

No, no. Switch to Smartless Mobile and get a good plan.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

And then ten gigs for ten bucks.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah, right.

[Jason Bateman]

But then. But it is true.

[Tom Freston]

Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

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

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

And he's just, you know, I didn't even. Is he married?

[Jason Bateman]

He has a longtime partner, his Carrie, who's an. Who's amazing.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

Yeah.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Okay, so he's traced. He's not. He's not still going around solo, bopping around?

[Jason Bateman]

No, no, no. He's. No, but he's. She's a good friend, an awesome person in her own right. Just amazing. Yeah. And he's just. But he's always. He's. He's just interested.

[Chris Diamantopoulos]

Yeah, that's.

[Sean Hayes]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jason Bateman]

You know.

[Sean Hayes]

Well, that's the key. You got to stay curious and interested the whole time, right? And but it seems like everybody that was around everybody that was around had such fun and I I had fun today with all of you and I think a good time was had had by all.

[Jason Bateman]

Smart Smart Smartless is 100% organic and artisanally handcrafted by Bennett Barbico, Michael Grant, Terry and Rob Armjoy Smart Less.

[Will Arnett]

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