Speaker 1: You're listening to Math and Magic, a production. I heart radio.
Speaker 1: So we came up with this logo and they ran
Speaker 1: a trade campaign to full pages and they took a
Speaker 1: shot of me. It looked like I had shaved the
Speaker 1: logo into my head. So are we completely bald except
Speaker 1: for the exclamation point and the E and the captions that?
Speaker 1: Trust me, it'll catch on to this day, people mentioned
Speaker 1: that to me, it went viral. It went viralent, viral,
Speaker 1: before the days of things going viral. It was great fun,
Speaker 1: but I didn't actually shave my head. Welcome to Math
Speaker 1: and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing. I'm Bob Pittman,
Speaker 1: and on this episode we have someone who made his
Speaker 1: mark as a creative, but certainly as an expert on
Speaker 1: the math side as well. You're Almone, the CEO of MPR.
Speaker 1: He's an old old friend. Started out as a deal
Speaker 1: personality at age fifteen, by the way, with the unaired
Speaker 1: name of Lee Masters. He went on to become a
Speaker 1: successful air talent programmer, running radio stations and finally even
Speaker 1: owning radio stations. He was the operating head of v
Speaker 1: H one and MTV and It's Heyday. He started e
Speaker 1: Entertainment television television network. He was at CEO. He had
Speaker 1: a great success there and they went on to be
Speaker 1: the head of Liberty Investment, where he made smart bets
Speaker 1: on companies like Price Line and t VO. He became
Speaker 1: an investor for himself after that. Served on the boards
Speaker 1: of E W, scripts, C NET, XM Radio. He was
Speaker 1: on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Speaker 1: l A. He was the chair of the Southern California
Speaker 1: a c l U for fifteen years. He loves and
Speaker 1: collects art. He has a wonderful family. He's a nice guy.
Speaker 1: He's known for his huge heart and sharp mind. Welcome you, Almon,
Speaker 1: Thank you, Bob. So we're gonna start before we really
Speaker 1: get into the media questions. We want to get you
Speaker 1: in sixties, so I don't think too long to say.
Speaker 1: The first thing that comes to your mind will jump
Speaker 1: into it. Sure, do you prefer Twitter or Instagram? Instagram?
Speaker 1: El Paso or New York City? Oh that's a tough one.
Speaker 1: I'd have to say New York. But I did have
Speaker 1: a lot of fun in El Paso. Grateful Debt or
Speaker 1: Steve Miller band, Dead, MTV or E Entertainment. Oh Man
Speaker 1: I'd have to say, you know, MTV was so much fun.
Speaker 1: I would have to go with the MTV Okay, Sunrise
Speaker 1: or Sunsets, m Sunset Yo. MTV raps are the Weekend
Speaker 1: Rock Yo, MTV wraps, Boats or planes, Planes, Lee Masters
Speaker 1: are all mom, I'm not fond of either of them. Well,
Speaker 1: you have to pick one. I have to pick one.
Speaker 1: I'd have to pick you are it's about to get harder.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, secret talent. I don't know that I
Speaker 1: have any secret talent. Oh, cross road puzzles. Favorite city,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. Smartest person you know, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah, right,
Speaker 1: childhood hero, childhood hero, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah, Okay, we
Speaker 1: got excluding Bob Pittman. Favorite superhero, John Malone. Favorite piece
Speaker 1: of art in your collection James Terrell. Favorite TV show
Speaker 1: as a kid and now, Oh, favorite TV show as
Speaker 1: a kid. I loved American Bandstand. That was really formative
Speaker 1: for me. Today. Game of Thrones, historical Little Winston Churchill,
Speaker 1: proudest career achievement here working at Npure favorite podcast. Oh
Speaker 1: I can't answer that. I'd be a dead man. Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll give you a pass on that one quote to
Speaker 1: live by m back to Winston Churchill. Never give up,
Speaker 1: Never give up, Never give up. Who would play you
Speaker 1: in a movie? Brian Cranston? Do you just look like
Speaker 1: Brian Cranston? What would be the title of your memoir? WHOA?
Speaker 1: How did I get here? Okay, we're gonna end with
Speaker 1: this one, because it really goes all through your history. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: us Live concert Pink Floyd. What year? Probably seventy three,
Speaker 1: the year I met you, as a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: So let's jump into it. Sure, let's start with your childhood.
Speaker 1: You grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Tell me a
Speaker 1: little bit about your mom and dad and how you
Speaker 1: grew up. My father taught English literature and then he
Speaker 1: edited a small newspaper new Hope, Pennsylvania, a real emphasis
Speaker 1: on reading and literature. Didn't have a television in the
Speaker 1: house or radio. As a matter of fact, I contend
Speaker 1: that my entire career has been an active rebellion against
Speaker 1: the way I was raised. My mother was an artist,
Speaker 1: a graphic designer, so there was a real focus on
Speaker 1: creativity in our house. And where did you find out
Speaker 1: what was going on the radio or TV? If he
Speaker 1: didn't have one in the house at friends. I wasn't
Speaker 1: prohibited from watching or listening. I just wasn't allowed to
Speaker 1: have one in the house, so it was very exotic
Speaker 1: for me. So radio, how did you get started? I
Speaker 1: was probably like eleven or twelve is when I really
Speaker 1: glombed on the radio and loved it and loved listening
Speaker 1: to it. That's when I said I would be great
Speaker 1: playing records would be awesome. So I had a number
Speaker 1: of jobs after school, save money, got my engineer's license
Speaker 1: when I was fifteen because the little radio station in
Speaker 1: my hometown you had to have a first class radio license.
Speaker 1: So I saved up all my money and at the
Speaker 1: fifteen went to Radio Engineering Institute and Sarasota, Florida for
Speaker 1: a five week cram course so you can memorize the
Speaker 1: answers to the FCC test. And I got my license
Speaker 1: at fifteen and came back. They didn't want to hire
Speaker 1: me at all, but they needed somebody to run the
Speaker 1: religious tapes on Sunday and they didn't have anyone with
Speaker 1: the first class radio license, so they were kind of
Speaker 1: four stoff hire me, so an act of desperation on
Speaker 1: their part, and that's how we started. Do you still
Speaker 1: have the first class radio license. It's framed somewhere. I
Speaker 1: don't think the FCC even uses those anymore, but I
Speaker 1: have it somewhere. Those were the old days when the
Speaker 1: disc jockeys were also the engineers, right combo job from
Speaker 1: that period. You know, you've been a creative guy your
Speaker 1: whole career. You've invented a lot of things and built
Speaker 1: a lot of things. What did you learn that was
Speaker 1: helpful to you as a creative type or a marketer.
Speaker 1: Most of that learning and knowledge came over long periods
Speaker 1: of time and mostly trial and error. I was a
Speaker 1: fan and consumed a lot of media because I wasn't
Speaker 1: allowed to as a kid. Then when I got into
Speaker 1: the business, I think it was just a function of
Speaker 1: experimenting and learning from others. I won't use the word stealing,
Speaker 1: We'll use the art term appropriating things that I saw
Speaker 1: other people doing that seemed to work. So you would
Speaker 1: characterize your early career as being I'm gonna borrow other
Speaker 1: people's Yeah, talk a little bit about Lee Masters. When
Speaker 1: did that come about? When? What? When I decided I
Speaker 1: want to be a disc jockey and I thought at
Speaker 1: that time the name yr Moan as an air name
Speaker 1: to not easy to remember, it's not easy to spell,
Speaker 1: it's not easy to say, and of course this is
Speaker 1: pre NPR. Now it's the perfect NPR name, but at
Speaker 1: the time not what you would expect for this jockey.
Speaker 1: So in my fifteen year old brain, I wanted to
Speaker 1: come up with something that sounded big, and Lee Masters
Speaker 1: is what I created. Lee Masters for a long time,
Speaker 1: a long thirty five years. Somewhere in the back of
Speaker 1: my brain, you're still Lee Masters. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: the path you start out in this little radio station.
Speaker 1: How did it go from there? I always I always
Speaker 1: said that my career was always trying to find somebody
Speaker 1: that was more desperate than I was. I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that was helpful in my career because
Speaker 1: I was young, didn't have any really big needs, didn't
Speaker 1: have a family at the time, I could just pick
Speaker 1: up and move and like a lot of people we
Speaker 1: know into business, we moved around a lot and just
Speaker 1: looked for the next opportunity. And I was always looking
Speaker 1: for a station that was well programmed, because I knew
Speaker 1: if the station sounded really good, I would probably sound better.
Speaker 1: Louisville is where I met you, right, I was eighteen
Speaker 1: and you were twenty maybe yep. So how did you
Speaker 1: wind up in Louisville. I've been working in Indianapolis, and
Speaker 1: at the time, I think Louisville was actually and still
Speaker 1: is a smaller market. But the radio station there was
Speaker 1: really successful, w A k y wacky wacky, big personalities.
Speaker 1: I think it was owned by Lynn Broadcasting, and they
Speaker 1: owned w f i L in Philadelphia, which was a
Speaker 1: station I thought was the greatest top forty radio station
Speaker 1: on the planet. I wanted to work for them, so
Speaker 1: in my mind I had this plan. I'd go to
Speaker 1: work for them in Louisville, do a good job, and
Speaker 1: I'd find my way to Philadelphia. And when I was
Speaker 1: ultimately offered the job, it was midnight to six and
Speaker 1: the money wasn't that great, and I ended up not
Speaker 1: doing it. But that was a lot of my logic.
Speaker 1: You were on the first people I knew who was
Speaker 1: in the meditation. While we were all talking rock music,
Speaker 1: you were talking philosophy. So how did that happen? I
Speaker 1: was pretty high strung, and I found that over the
Speaker 1: years of doing it, I could never say with any
Speaker 1: certainty that any of the good things that were happening
Speaker 1: in my life were directly related to it. But at
Speaker 1: a certain point I said, I'm not going to risk it.
Speaker 1: I seems to be working. I'm gonna stick with it.
Speaker 1: I still meditate. It's been forty six, forty seven years.
Speaker 1: Do you think it enhances your creativity? I think probably.
Speaker 1: You know, David Lynch has written beautifully about creativity and meditation,
Speaker 1: and of all the things that he discusses about meditation,
Speaker 1: that's the one that kind of resonates the most, which
Speaker 1: is that when I meditate, I don't necessarily meditate to
Speaker 1: find a solution to a problem, but it helps me
Speaker 1: relax and get centered. So when I come out of
Speaker 1: the meditation, I tend to be able to solve some
Speaker 1: of the things I am having to deal with with
Speaker 1: a little more agility. I don't know that I can
Speaker 1: ever remember or having a moment of inspiration while I
Speaker 1: was meditating it, but afterwards. So you run through this
Speaker 1: radio career. You and I worked together in New York. Actually,
Speaker 1: you and I were on the TV together on a
Speaker 1: show called Album Tracks that ran after Saturday Night Live,
Speaker 1: which you can find. Don't tell anybody where they can
Speaker 1: if I don't tell anybody. Whether it's pretty bad, don't
Speaker 1: tell anybody. But with a lot of hair and a
Speaker 1: lot of mustaches, and you left to go be a
Speaker 1: station owner in El Paso. You've been a creative guy.
Speaker 1: You've had to come up with ideas. You probably I
Speaker 1: didn't really like sales because you were a creative type
Speaker 1: and those were those sales guys. How did all this
Speaker 1: change with ownership when you go to El Paso? And
Speaker 1: that's a great question and something I really had to
Speaker 1: deal with because I was on the creative side of
Speaker 1: the town and had been programming. I bought this a
Speaker 1: MFM in El Paso, Texas. I've been working for you
Speaker 1: at w NBC and I was twenty six. My friends
Speaker 1: were saying, you'd go anywhere for a dollar. I used
Speaker 1: to joke that I bought the number eighteen radio station
Speaker 1: in a seventeen station market, and people say, well, how
Speaker 1: did you do that? I said, well, there was a
Speaker 1: station in Warrez, Mexico that was actually beating us in
Speaker 1: al Paso. But I actually had a great time. It
Speaker 1: was just a great experience. But it was a bit
Speaker 1: frightening because I was approaching it as a programmer. We
Speaker 1: had an FM country station Country at the time it
Speaker 1: really started to take off with the urban cowboy phenomena
Speaker 1: and what was going on in Houston at Gillies. But
Speaker 1: within a year we had the number one station in
Speaker 1: the city playing FM country. So I figured this is
Speaker 1: gonna be great. I had taken on all this debt
Speaker 1: to buy the station. I'm just gonna go around to
Speaker 1: the retailers and the advertisers and the advertising agencies and
Speaker 1: they'll just put money on the station. And we had
Speaker 1: a very successful competitor and AM country station and a
Speaker 1: guy who owned it and ran it named Jim Phillips.
Speaker 1: And i would go around to advertisers and I'd never
Speaker 1: done this before, and I was intimidated by it, frightened
Speaker 1: by itt want to do it, but it was it
Speaker 1: was a matter of life or death. And I would
Speaker 1: go to these agencies and say, you know, we're the
Speaker 1: number one station in the city, and you know you
Speaker 1: should advertise on us. And I got the same reaction
Speaker 1: almost everywhere. And you know, I can't buy advertising on
Speaker 1: your station. I said, well why not. Jim Phillips is
Speaker 1: my best friend, were Jim Phillips is the godfather of
Speaker 1: my children? Or Jim Phillips is a relative, and I
Speaker 1: was like stunned. I couldn't believe it. We had the
Speaker 1: number one station and I couldn't get any advertising on
Speaker 1: it because this guy had developed these really strong relationships.
Speaker 1: And that is the moment when I realized how important
Speaker 1: relationships are in anything, and particularly in selling. He showed
Speaker 1: up for everything. He would go to everybody's birthday, parties, weddings,
Speaker 1: three events in an after he'd spend twenty minutes, a
Speaker 1: half hour, and then he'd go to something else. So
Speaker 1: I said, I'm going to have to replicate that, and
Speaker 1: I started doing that. And then I would say, look,
Speaker 1: even though we have the number one station of town,
Speaker 1: I'm not asking not to advertise on his station. Why
Speaker 1: don't you spend for your business. It would be good
Speaker 1: for you and only kate a little of your budget,
Speaker 1: give us ten percent of your budget, and then spend
Speaker 1: the rest of it with him. And very slowly we
Speaker 1: were able to get the revenue, but it took a
Speaker 1: lot longer, and it was all about the power of relationships.
Speaker 1: Years later, I went back to El Paso to do
Speaker 1: a speaking engagement, and part of the deal with the
Speaker 1: people that asked me to come in and I said,
Speaker 1: I'll do it. I have one thing you have to
Speaker 1: do for me. So what's that. I said, you got
Speaker 1: to set a meal for me and Jim Phillips, I
Speaker 1: want to sit down and say hi to him. So
Speaker 1: we met at the Steiner and he came in and
Speaker 1: he said, man, you really taught me programming. You kicked
Speaker 1: our ass. And I said, yeah, but you taught me
Speaker 1: sales and it was this great moment and those are
Speaker 1: lessons you still used today. Yeah. Absolutely, I still think
Speaker 1: in a world that's so data driven, it's all face
Speaker 1: to face and I know you do it with your company.
Speaker 1: There's nothing more powerful than face to face attack. By
Speaker 1: the way, I look at you on social and I
Speaker 1: see you in every city in the country at the
Speaker 1: NPR stations, then it's very impressive. And I suspect you
Speaker 1: found a lot of pretty interesting people around the country.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's a great fun. I've done two cross
Speaker 1: country trips. A friend of mine called me up when
Speaker 1: I took this job at NPR, and he said, why
Speaker 1: don't we fly across the country together and let's visit
Speaker 1: small NPR stations that no one from NPR has been to.
Speaker 1: And I said, it's a great idea. So we spent
Speaker 1: ten days flew across the country and visit a lot
Speaker 1: of radio stations. And then a couple of years later,
Speaker 1: I have never driven across the country. I decided to
Speaker 1: do that and I drove from the east coast to
Speaker 1: the west coast and visited stations. So we have two
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty three member stations and I've been in
Speaker 1: a hundred of them. Wow, and it was fun. But
Speaker 1: I ate a lot of Delhi sandwiches, and good for
Speaker 1: you're bad for you? The Delhi sandwich not so good
Speaker 1: takeaways Lessons for me. It's never worked out the way
Speaker 1: I expected it would. It's always longer, more difficult, more secuitous.
Speaker 1: Anyone that's an entrepreneur knows how difficult it is to
Speaker 1: build anything successful. I don't know if it's a naivitate
Speaker 1: or stupidity, but it's a great virtue because if I
Speaker 1: knew how difficult some of the things would be before
Speaker 1: I started, I probably wouldn't have done them. And it
Speaker 1: turned out. Okay, it worked out. Just hold on a second,
Speaker 1: because we've got so much more to talk about. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after a quick break. Welcome back the math
Speaker 1: and magic. We're here with y'r all moment. You have
Speaker 1: a great radio career, you jumped to TV. I've been
Speaker 1: trying to get you to come to join us a
Speaker 1: number of times, but finally talked to you out of
Speaker 1: radio to come to v H one. What did you
Speaker 1: find was different about TV from radio? Were the fundamentals
Speaker 1: that struck you at that moment? For me, it was
Speaker 1: a great transition from the radio world to the television
Speaker 1: world because there were so many similarities. If you had
Speaker 1: picked me up and tried to drop me into a
Speaker 1: broadcast network to do scripted filmed entertainment, I would have,
Speaker 1: I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately we all
Speaker 1: learned a lot of lessons about the fragility of this
Speaker 1: brand new thing, music videos. And that was something that
Speaker 1: we all kind of had to learn in real time
Speaker 1: because at first everything that I had learned as a
Speaker 1: programmer worked, and then I found that it started not working,
Speaker 1: and it was humbling, it was embarrassing, and it didn't
Speaker 1: There was so much heat around music videos at the time,
Speaker 1: and there were so many people watching and being really enthralled.
Speaker 1: But but I think ultimately it became less interesting it
Speaker 1: was television and we were using a lot I was,
Speaker 1: at least using a lot of radio rules for a
Speaker 1: different medium, and people were making four minute decisions of
Speaker 1: what they were going to watch and not thirty minute
Speaker 1: and sixty minute or ninety minute decisions, and ultimately had
Speaker 1: to switch strategy to go to content that people would
Speaker 1: watch for longer periods of time, long form, and that
Speaker 1: was very controversial at the time, but you know it worked.
Speaker 1: What were your first shows? This was one of the
Speaker 1: most wrenching strategic decisions because MTV had been, as you
Speaker 1: well know, is music television all the time, We're testing
Speaker 1: all sorts of ideas and people when we asked them
Speaker 1: about putting non music programming on, the answer was no,
Speaker 1: absolutely not. The ultimate thought was, well, what would be
Speaker 1: the obvious things that fit with music? And we started
Speaker 1: with the Weekend Rock and hiring Kurt Loader from Rolling
Speaker 1: Stone magazine and taking the MTV news segments and making
Speaker 1: it a half hour show that worked, and then rockumentaries
Speaker 1: specials as the second. The third was Club MTV let's
Speaker 1: do an American band stand for today, Let's play music
Speaker 1: videos and hired Downtown Julie Brown. That was a hit.
Speaker 1: Every show that went on did well. Then we're getting
Speaker 1: really cocky and think, man, we really know how to
Speaker 1: make hits. But I think it was more a reflection
Speaker 1: of the fact that music videos at the time had
Speaker 1: run their course. The most controversial one remote Control of
Speaker 1: the game show, and all the research came back said
Speaker 1: you can't do a game show. And I remember saying
Speaker 1: to our good friend Marshall Cohen. We worked with an
Speaker 1: MTV and still does work with both of us. Here
Speaker 1: research Google, Yes, I said, I think we're asking the
Speaker 1: wrong question. The question should be if we were to
Speaker 1: do a game show, what would it look like? And
Speaker 1: the answer came back, well, it should be your reverence
Speaker 1: be crazy. We used all the information and hired Ken
Speaker 1: Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler was a regular
Speaker 1: on the show and it was a monster. But the
Speaker 1: additional research the way we asked it indicated that it
Speaker 1: would have been a disaster. It worked out great for
Speaker 1: were you able yep? Oh yeah, yeah, and so you
Speaker 1: were on a great run. Here there's some management changes.
Speaker 1: Can I talk about this? There are two peers, one
Speaker 1: of them gets promoted above you. This is probably a
Speaker 1: situation a lot of people get into tell me about
Speaker 1: your decision and then what you think about it in hindsight. Well,
Speaker 1: and MTV, this was after you had left. There was
Speaker 1: a position open for the presidency and it was me
Speaker 1: and another guy, and it went on for a long
Speaker 1: period of time. I was really seen as the creative
Speaker 1: guy and the other guy was a business guy, and
Speaker 1: the decision was to go with the business guy. It
Speaker 1: was tough for me because I really thought I should
Speaker 1: have that job, and I was very unhappy. But I
Speaker 1: loved working there, I really did, and I made peace
Speaker 1: with it and I said I'm gonna attempt to make
Speaker 1: it work. I continued on for a period at the time,
Speaker 1: and then what happened was the guy that had got
Speaker 1: the promotion didn't like me being there, and ultimately I
Speaker 1: was pushed out I think maybe six eight months afterward.
Speaker 1: Shocked everybody. It shocked me. The traumatic thing was not
Speaker 1: not getting the promotion. The traumatic thing was losing my job.
Speaker 1: And there was a real personal lesson on this. So
Speaker 1: much of the way I saw myself and defined myself,
Speaker 1: I think, like many of us at MTV at the time,
Speaker 1: was through affinity with the company and with the brand.
Speaker 1: So I was devastated. I had never had anything like
Speaker 1: that happened to me. It was just wrenching. I really
Speaker 1: felt horrible. Now the good news is because of our
Speaker 1: successes there. Two days later, HBO called me and said,
Speaker 1: we got this cable network called Movie Time. We're looking
Speaker 1: for a CEO. Would you be interested. I had been
Speaker 1: approached by a recruiter I think four months before about
Speaker 1: the same job. I said, are you kidding me? I
Speaker 1: would never do that. That's awful. I would never do
Speaker 1: that job. So now, of course I'm out of work.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking maybe I should take a look at it.
Speaker 1: And was able to negotiate my first equity where I
Speaker 1: could own a piece of the company and get some
Speaker 1: value if I grew it. So I was out of
Speaker 1: work for basically. I was in negotiations forty eight hours
Speaker 1: after I was But it still didn't feel good. And
Speaker 1: years later, you know, I would talk to Tom Freston,
Speaker 1: who took over as chairman when you left the company,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know, it's the worst business decision
Speaker 1: I've ever made. And I said, Tom, don't fret. It
Speaker 1: turned out pretty good for me. For me, not for me.
Speaker 1: You went on to Movie Time and of course movie
Speaker 1: Tim who cares about that? You took that network and
Speaker 1: you turned it into E Entertainment Television, and boy were
Speaker 1: you on fire. I remember there was something about you
Speaker 1: shaving the logo in your head. Well, people thought I did.
Speaker 1: We had a trade ad. This is a great message
Speaker 1: of the power of terrific creative The ad agency that
Speaker 1: we used at the time, B B d OH had
Speaker 1: this campaign. At the time, it was unusual to have
Speaker 1: a one letter network, one letter and an exclamation point. Right.
Speaker 1: That's another one of those fascinating behind the scenes conversations.
Speaker 1: Because we were going to call it entertainment television. We
Speaker 1: knew that we had done all this research. Do we
Speaker 1: call it E N T Do we call it e
Speaker 1: t V? And playoff the MTV thing? Do we call
Speaker 1: it E N t V? What do we do? And
Speaker 1: we did all this research against the three names, and
Speaker 1: it came back it was E t V. We were
Speaker 1: just going to be E TV, spinning off of the
Speaker 1: the MTV. So we hire this creative team to go
Speaker 1: away and do the logo and this marketing package for us.
Speaker 1: They were coming up to my house in Connecticut and
Speaker 1: they're doing a big presentation about the new logo and
Speaker 1: they've got it hidden on one of these big poster
Speaker 1: boards covered with a cloth as they always do this
Speaker 1: big wind up pitch and then they do the big
Speaker 1: reveal and I look at this exclamation point and the
Speaker 1: e I said, where's the rest? They we decided not
Speaker 1: to do it. I said, what we we spent all
Speaker 1: this you did what? They said, No, no, no, we
Speaker 1: don't like a TV we wanted to be. I said,
Speaker 1: it is not what we hired you for. And they
Speaker 1: basically convinced me that it was different, it would break through,
Speaker 1: and we ended up doing it and it worked out.
Speaker 1: We launched the network. The ad agency, a different group
Speaker 1: from the design group. I had this idea. We were
Speaker 1: trying to get carriage on the cable systems across the country,
Speaker 1: so the network before was a dog total. So you
Speaker 1: had a big rebuild job to do getting carriage as
Speaker 1: well as getting users right. So it was tough because
Speaker 1: it already had a really tainted brand. The cable operators
Speaker 1: didn't want have anything to do with the advertisers didn't
Speaker 1: want everything to do with it. We had to completely
Speaker 1: reposition it. So we came up with this logo and
Speaker 1: they ran a trade campaign just for the cable operators.
Speaker 1: So it was in Multi Channel News and Cable Vision magazine.
Speaker 1: There were probably three or four magazines. Was like two
Speaker 1: full pages and they took a shot of me. It
Speaker 1: looked like I had shaved the logo into my head,
Speaker 1: so I was completely bald except for the exclamation point
Speaker 1: and the E and the captions that. Trust me, it'll
Speaker 1: catch on to this day, people mentioned that to me.
Speaker 1: I said it ran three times across four magazines, so
Speaker 1: total of twelve. It went viral. It went viralent viral,
Speaker 1: before the days of things going viral. I think this
Speaker 1: was people's zeroxyne and tearing it out and sending to someone.
Speaker 1: But it was great fun. But I didn't actually shave
Speaker 1: my head. It was it was disappointed. I thought it
Speaker 1: was you really shaped the head. So you're known for
Speaker 1: building strong teams at E you built a fantastic team.
Speaker 1: I mean, you've got to convince people to come to
Speaker 1: this terrible network that nobody wants to be associated with,
Speaker 1: that has one letter instead of three letters for a name.
Speaker 1: How did you build a team? And what lesson? See
Speaker 1: a takeaway that you use even today building teams. And
Speaker 1: we didn't have much money either, which really made it
Speaker 1: even more complicated, and so out of desperation came the strategy,
Speaker 1: which was, instead of me trying to go to look
Speaker 1: at other cable networks and hire the best possible person
Speaker 1: I could, I couldn't afford it. I didn't have the money.
Speaker 1: And I thought about myself having been in a number
Speaker 1: two spot and wanting to move to a number one spot.
Speaker 1: In almost every one of these organizations, there's somebody in
Speaker 1: the number two spots that's really excellent that's being blocked
Speaker 1: by somebody that's not going anywhere. So I said, maybe
Speaker 1: I can afford them, And that's kind of what the
Speaker 1: operating strategy was. So one by one we hired people.
Speaker 1: I needed a great head of distribution, so we looked
Speaker 1: at a lot of cable networks and found somebody that
Speaker 1: was in the number two slot. Did the same thing
Speaker 1: for sponsorship, for advertising sales. The guy who ran ad
Speaker 1: sales for me for years, Dave Cassaro. I hired him
Speaker 1: from Fox Broadcast Network. He was the number two guy
Speaker 1: in New York and his boss wasn't going anywhere. Was
Speaker 1: highly successful, so I was able to cut a deal
Speaker 1: with him. And again because he was a sales guy.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to give him a huge salary, but
Speaker 1: I wanted to give him a huge upside on performance,
Speaker 1: so I was able to snag him. It's a really
Speaker 1: funny story because we were so poor at the time.
Speaker 1: We couldn't even afford daily Nielsen ratings. You know, in
Speaker 1: the television business, every day you come in and overnights
Speaker 1: the overnight's first thing you have in the morning is
Speaker 1: you give your cup of coffee and you're looking at
Speaker 1: the ratings and you saw how you did yesterday for
Speaker 1: each fifteen minutes segment. We were so poor we bought
Speaker 1: the ratings once a week, and it wasn't even by
Speaker 1: hour or half hour fifteen minutes. It was by just
Speaker 1: broad day parts. The audience was so small it was unreportable.
Speaker 1: The sheet of paper would be a field of asterix,
Speaker 1: and it maybe midday Saturday, ten to three on Saturday,
Speaker 1: I'd get a point one, which was great writing today,
Speaker 1: which was that's funny. Yes, it was rounded up. Dave Cassaro,
Speaker 1: who ran advertising sales, would call me up every Monday.
Speaker 1: He was in New York. I would be in my
Speaker 1: office at nine o'clock in l A and he would go,
Speaker 1: I can't believe you talked me into leaving my great job.
Speaker 1: I can't believe it. And he would look at the
Speaker 1: ratings and he would just what are you going to
Speaker 1: do to get the ratings? So and this went on
Speaker 1: every Monday for months and months and months, and slowly.
Speaker 1: You know what we did was we focused on that
Speaker 1: one day part Saturday Middays where he had a barely
Speaker 1: a point one. What can we do to leverage that
Speaker 1: and just build that up and then move those viewers
Speaker 1: to another day part. And after a series of moves
Speaker 1: and one massive failure after another, we finally got there
Speaker 1: and we grew distribution and some of the hits you
Speaker 1: had from that era where the big one was Talk Soup,
Speaker 1: which is a great creative story. I love telling this
Speaker 1: one because I think there's a phenomenal lesson in it.
Speaker 1: We had given the programming department a budget. I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I want six thirty minute shows for prime time. That's
Speaker 1: all we could afford doing. That's three our block. We're
Speaker 1: going to run it from eight until eleven, and it
Speaker 1: will repeat it. That will be the West Coast feed.
Speaker 1: That's the philosophy. Come back with your lineup of six
Speaker 1: half hour shows. So they go away, they work on it,
Speaker 1: got the big presentation, same thing. The big poster board
Speaker 1: is up in the conference room. Now they've got a
Speaker 1: sheet over it. They do the reveal and I said,
Speaker 1: they're only five here. I said, am I missing something?
Speaker 1: Is there's something else? No? No, we ran out of money.
Speaker 1: We don't have money for six. I just said, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: We gotta have six. We can't do it two and
Speaker 1: a half hour block and repeat it. We have to
Speaker 1: do a three hour block. Well, we don't already money.
Speaker 1: I said, you gotta come up with something. So I'm
Speaker 1: running at the beach and run at the beach you
Speaker 1: every morning, and I'm thinking, what can I do for
Speaker 1: no money at all. It was at the period of time.
Speaker 1: Do you remember HARALDA. Rivera had the talk show and
Speaker 1: he had some skinheads on these, you know, white nationalists,
Speaker 1: and guy picks up a metal chair and hits Haraldo
Speaker 1: over the head with the chair and breaks his nose.
Speaker 1: Everybody was showing that clip, and I went, man, that's
Speaker 1: great television. There were all these talk shows at the time.
Speaker 1: Sally Jesse, Raphael Jenny Jones, went Morton and Jerry Springer.
Speaker 1: There were tons of them, and every one of them
Speaker 1: had that bizarre moment. I'm running at the beach and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, what can I do for free? We could
Speaker 1: lift that outrageous moment from every one of those talk
Speaker 1: shows if we promoted after the thing was done, was
Speaker 1: and tomorrow and Jerry Springer, it's going to be blah
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. Bay. So I come in to the
Speaker 1: programming meeting and I said, I've got an idea. I said,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a culterally great idea, but it's
Speaker 1: an idea, and it won't cost us. Anybody will shoot
Speaker 1: it in front of a blue screen. The set will
Speaker 1: be a stool, it will have a host, and that's it,
Speaker 1: and we'll run these clips and we'll get it for free.
Speaker 1: We'll produce it for nothing. There was dead suns. Then
Speaker 1: they finally started talking and said, we can't do that's
Speaker 1: a terrible idea. That's awful television. I go, well, I
Speaker 1: don't think it's a particularly great idea myself, but it's
Speaker 1: better than your idea. You have no idea. I have
Speaker 1: an idea. An idea is better than no idea. So
Speaker 1: I said I'll tell you what, if you have an
Speaker 1: idea that's even remotely close toine for the budget that
Speaker 1: mine is, we'll go with yours, and if you don't,
Speaker 1: we'll go with mine. Of course, they go away. Three
Speaker 1: weeks later they come back. They have nothing, so they
Speaker 1: cast Greg kinnear as the host. They said, he's a
Speaker 1: good looking guy, he can read a prompter. He doesn't
Speaker 1: have any personality. Go, no, no, he really does, he
Speaker 1: really does. We just let us do a test. So
Speaker 1: I said fine. So they showed me the tape and
Speaker 1: he was awesome. I said, why wasn't he like this
Speaker 1: on movie time? He's great. So they came up with
Speaker 1: the name Talk Soup. We launched six shows. Of those shows,
Speaker 1: there was one moderate hit, you know e News Daily,
Speaker 1: and there was one monster runaway hit which was talking.
Speaker 1: It was a monster and it was just pure desperation.
Speaker 1: By the way, the best ideas come out of desperation.
Speaker 1: I agree. So you're there, big success, you leave and
Speaker 1: you go join the legendary John Malone at Liberty tell
Speaker 1: us about that. It was the longest run I had anywhere.
Speaker 1: I was there for nine years, and then the company
Speaker 1: got sold Comcast after nine years, I was not creatively challenged.
Speaker 1: I had an idea. At the time, we built a
Speaker 1: great team. We had a great ad sales group, great
Speaker 1: distribution group, great marketing group, and you know, I thought
Speaker 1: what we could do was if we could get the
Speaker 1: owners to buy some of these independent, small, medium sized
Speaker 1: cable networks, we could consolidate and make a lot of money.
Speaker 1: But I just couldn't get them to do it. So
Speaker 1: I got frustrated. Liberty owned I think ten percent of
Speaker 1: us at the time, and Dobb Bennett was the CEO.
Speaker 1: They worked with John Malone. They knew I was getting Nancy,
Speaker 1: and so they kept bringing ideas to me. John said,
Speaker 1: we owned ten percent, we want and so ultimately he
Speaker 1: came to me with this idea of Liberty Digital, which
Speaker 1: was become an investment arm for Liberty Media. On the
Speaker 1: digital side, Malone had sold tc I cable system to
Speaker 1: a T and T, and one of the provisions in
Speaker 1: this deal is that they could have some bandwidth on
Speaker 1: all the systems even when they sold it. And they
Speaker 1: wanted to create twelve twenty four hour day, fully interactive
Speaker 1: e commerce channels, and so they wanted me as a
Speaker 1: programmer to create this business does a turn and out.
Speaker 1: Even today, that technology, the set top box technology is
Speaker 1: not there, but that was the intention of the company.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime they said, here, we'll put fifty
Speaker 1: million dollars in cash in and we'll put some other assets,
Speaker 1: and typical fashion, he gave me a bunch of dogs
Speaker 1: and said, fix those. I'll put them in your portfolio
Speaker 1: and make some investments. I'm not an investment professional. I
Speaker 1: wasn't then, so I put together a team of people
Speaker 1: that were from strategic consulting firms like McKenzie and ellie
Speaker 1: k and Bain that had a lot of experience and
Speaker 1: due diligence and doing deals that I didn't have, and
Speaker 1: we just started making investments. And the timing was pre bubble,
Speaker 1: so a lot of them were rocket ships. And that's
Speaker 1: how I got into the investment business, kind of by accident.
Speaker 1: You didn't seem to miss working. You sort of enjoyed
Speaker 1: your life. Oh yeah, very much. So although I was working,
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I think my line was got misquoted. I
Speaker 1: actually had said working full time time for other people
Speaker 1: is overrated, and everybody heard heard it as working is overrated.
Speaker 1: But it was just working full time well, yeah, maybe.
Speaker 1: So for thirteen years I just worked for myself. I
Speaker 1: was working, I just wasn't running a company. I was
Speaker 1: just doing investments and sitting on boards of companies I
Speaker 1: invested in. What motivated you to go back to running something?
Speaker 1: How'd that happened? Well? It was very different because I
Speaker 1: didn't want to go back to work. Um. In fact,
Speaker 1: I absolutely was opposed to it. I wanted to allocate
Speaker 1: about of my time to not for profits, which cheer
Speaker 1: for I think thirteen fourteen years of the a c
Speaker 1: l U Southern California, civil liberty is very important to me. UM.
Speaker 1: But I also got involved in public radio and KPCC
Speaker 1: in l A had just been started as a second
Speaker 1: NPR member station there. Really got deeply involved. It was
Speaker 1: really fun being back in radio, even though it was
Speaker 1: a different kind of radio. There had been a lot
Speaker 1: of turnover in the CEO position at NPR. I really
Speaker 1: love public radio. I really like the mission. I really
Speaker 1: love the service and the content, the journalism. And when
Speaker 1: the position came open, I was asked if I would
Speaker 1: even consider it. I said, you know, I don't want
Speaker 1: to work. I don't want to go to work. I've
Speaker 1: got a great life. That's the one thing, that's the
Speaker 1: one thing on the planet that I would do. So
Speaker 1: I made a commitment to spend five years here, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of how it came to be. I remember
Speaker 1: the conversation you were. You were wrestling with it, and
Speaker 1: I actually thought you were not going to do it,
Speaker 1: but obviously the passion got you. So you arrive at NPR,
Speaker 1: one of the great brands in audio, You look around,
Speaker 1: you meet everybody. What you think was the big opportunity, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, my take was that the mission and the
Speaker 1: primary focus of the organization, which is journalism and storytelling,
Speaker 1: was and has been from the beginning, very very good,
Speaker 1: and so I didn't see that as being what needed help.
Speaker 1: But the business side of the equation had not been
Speaker 1: particularly well tended to five or six years in a
Speaker 1: row of losses, and I saw a huge opportunity from
Speaker 1: a sponsorship standpoint, from a fundraising standpoint, better station relationships.
Speaker 1: A lot of people don't know this. We don't own
Speaker 1: the stations, we don't manage the stations. They're fully independent,
Speaker 1: and that's one of the beauties of the system because
Speaker 1: they provide local service, they're locally owned, locally managed locally operated,
Speaker 1: but I really saw an opportunity to kind of reduce
Speaker 1: the friction between the stations and the network, develop partnerships,
Speaker 1: help the stations, help us grow the revenue side of
Speaker 1: the business, and that's kind of what we focused on
Speaker 1: and rebuilding the management team to do that. When I
Speaker 1: go talk to advertisers, I'm in the audio business. Everybody
Speaker 1: wants to talk about two things, smart speakers and podcast
Speaker 1: So tell us the story about podcasting here. NPR has
Speaker 1: been in that business for a long time. A lot
Speaker 1: of it be in just as being able to listen
Speaker 1: to some of the programming that the network did on
Speaker 1: demand on your own whenever you wanted to, and so
Speaker 1: we had kind of a leg up. And also because
Speaker 1: we've been doing spoken word for forty eight years, we
Speaker 1: have that expertise and audio and storytelling, and so that
Speaker 1: gave us a real advantage in scale. When podcasting is
Speaker 1: a category took off with listeners and with advertisers, we
Speaker 1: really kind of had au phole position. It's been a
Speaker 1: real god's end. It's been great for the organization for
Speaker 1: many other reasons, not just the business side of it,
Speaker 1: in terms of reaching new people, expanding our mission bringing
Speaker 1: new people into public radio, particularly a younger audience that
Speaker 1: maybe doesn't have the affinity for the news service initially,
Speaker 1: but also in things like NPR Music and some of
Speaker 1: the other content targeting a younger audience or a more
Speaker 1: diverse audience. So it gives us a chance to really
Speaker 1: grow the brand, to get both into the NPR experience
Speaker 1: that comes to the network when news becomes something that's
Speaker 1: interesting or important to them. And it's also had another
Speaker 1: interesting effect, which is we put people that have been
Speaker 1: on the network for years, traditional journalists and correspondence in
Speaker 1: a podcast with let's say a younger group of talent.
Speaker 1: It really affects the sound of the network. We keep
Speaker 1: the journalistic standards high, but making it more accessible to people,
Speaker 1: more conversational, more informal, has really expanded the audience. Well,
Speaker 1: you guys have done a great job. As a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, we did the first I Heeart Podcast Awards
Speaker 1: this year and you guys won the award for really
Speaker 1: being a pioneer in this business. So thank you for that.
Speaker 1: We're really appreciative. You've announced you're stepping down to CEO
Speaker 1: when your contract expires, and you're gonna be the chief fundraiser.
Speaker 1: That's like the harder job, isn't it. You and your
Speaker 1: wife Pam, who's by the way, spectacular partner of years,
Speaker 1: and are kicking it off with a ten million all
Speaker 1: our donations. So not only fundraising. You're like saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: I put my money up. Now what are you going
Speaker 1: to do? What are your plans for that? I mean,
Speaker 1: what kind of goal do you have for MPR through
Speaker 1: that effort. Well, we have big aspirations. Will be our
Speaker 1: fiftieth anniversary, So we think it's a great opportunity to
Speaker 1: reach out to the people that are big believers in
Speaker 1: public service journalism what we've done at NPR, and to
Speaker 1: work with us and our member stations so we can
Speaker 1: raise money not just for us, but also try to
Speaker 1: be helpful to them. Back to the business side of it,
Speaker 1: major gifts, the fundraising piece has never been a big
Speaker 1: initiative at the organization, I think to the detriment of
Speaker 1: us at NPR into the stations, So we think there's
Speaker 1: a great opportunity. The personal number I have in my
Speaker 1: head for us here is million. That's what I'd like
Speaker 1: to do before. So I'm not gonna answer my phone
Speaker 1: until you get to Anton's I was just trying to
Speaker 1: get that on the table. You are a board member
Speaker 1: of the Museum of Contemporary Art in l A for
Speaker 1: quite a while, and art is a very important part
Speaker 1: of your life. You had a great collection and a
Speaker 1: lot of people come visit it. Where did that come from?
Speaker 1: Both of my parents had a real affinity for art.
Speaker 1: My mother was a graphic designer. My father loved art.
Speaker 1: We grew up outside Philadelphia. Never once took me to
Speaker 1: a museum, not once, but he would talk about art,
Speaker 1: and so I think that probably had an impact. And
Speaker 1: then ultimately, I think art can really open one's eyes
Speaker 1: to the world and get you to think about a
Speaker 1: different perspective. And so if you're in the business of
Speaker 1: trying to come up with creative solutions to anything, even
Speaker 1: if it's something mathematical, I just think it's an interesting
Speaker 1: stimulant for the brain. At some subconscious level. I think
Speaker 1: it is something that helps me with my own creativity
Speaker 1: and my own problem solving. So let's jump real quickly.
Speaker 1: Let's do some quick responses to looking at the future.
Speaker 1: Let's hit some of them. Future podcasting I think huge
Speaker 1: and it's exciting for many reasons. Audio documentaries. I think
Speaker 1: we're going to see a lot of expansion in other categories.
Speaker 1: Some of the work you're doing on comedic stuff. Can
Speaker 1: I plug Ron Burgundy? I think you know right now,
Speaker 1: what's the number? Twenty seven percent of the population listens
Speaker 1: to a podcast once a week. There's so much headroom
Speaker 1: for growth. I think it's going to grow in terms
Speaker 1: of the number of people that listen the number of
Speaker 1: podcasts they listen to. That's pretty formidable as it is.
Speaker 1: Seven I think is the average if you're listening to podcasts,
Speaker 1: and I think different forms, different lengths. So I am
Speaker 1: very bullish about it. I think it's an exciting opportunity.
Speaker 1: TV networks, Yeah yeah, I still think brands really matter.
Speaker 1: Is Netflix a TV network? I don't know. People treat
Speaker 1: it that way. It is a rand and they're doing
Speaker 1: a lot of great original content. It's fascinating because now
Speaker 1: you've got Hulu doing the same, Amazon doing the same,
Speaker 1: and it's making, you know, the people that had really
Speaker 1: been in the lead position before, like HBO and Showtime,
Speaker 1: really have to step up and compete. We've both made
Speaker 1: our careers working on brands. I think brands still will matter.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be much much harder to do.
Speaker 1: And the scale of the money that's being spent on
Speaker 1: this Amazon is a twelve billion, thirteen billion. It's more
Speaker 1: money than you spent on talks. Just buy a little
Speaker 1: bit ad agencies, ad agencies. Well, you know I've heard
Speaker 1: and you would know this better than I. I don't
Speaker 1: know that the for years the business separated. It used
Speaker 1: to be one stop. You'd had someone to do the
Speaker 1: buying and the planning for a campaign and also do
Speaker 1: the creative and then they kind of got split. You
Speaker 1: had creative shops and you had buying shops. And I'm
Speaker 1: hearing from people now what's going back to consolidation under
Speaker 1: one roof. I don't know enough about that business to know,
Speaker 1: but I do know that great creativity is I think
Speaker 1: going to be the thing that makes a difference because
Speaker 1: the data. I don't think you keep an edge for
Speaker 1: very long. I think with creativity you can math and
Speaker 1: magic there you go exactly find out what it is.
Speaker 1: We've got to excite people about it to get him
Speaker 1: to do some Privacy. The Times right now is running
Speaker 1: a whole series of articles on privacy. It's it's breathtaking
Speaker 1: what's happening. I think it will become the issue of
Speaker 1: the day as people become much more aware of it.
Speaker 1: A lot of young people don't seem to care. There
Speaker 1: is a I think a crossover point. My oldest daughter
Speaker 1: never really thought about it, didn't think much about it.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to get her a smart speaker. She says, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to have that microphone in my house.
Speaker 1: I go, this is important to my business. You must
Speaker 1: have a smart speaker. She has relented. She has one now,
Speaker 1: but it was interesting as a thirty four year old.
Speaker 1: Her notion and her concern about privacy is much different
Speaker 1: now than it was when she was twenty. We think
Speaker 1: about MTV, we think about e we think about all
Speaker 1: these exciting ideas. How do you think people find these
Speaker 1: new voices and come up with these new ideas today?
Speaker 1: And do you think people are doing it? I look
Speaker 1: back in the early days of the motion picture business
Speaker 1: and you look at somebody like Irving Thalberg, who was
Speaker 1: hired by Carl Lemley to run Universal. I think he
Speaker 1: was nineteen or twenty at the time, and then Louis B.
Speaker 1: Mayer hired him to be vice president of production for MGM,
Speaker 1: and he did all the classics, the great MGM films.
Speaker 1: I think he was twenty three at the time that
Speaker 1: he produced and oversaw all of those incredible films and
Speaker 1: Orson Welles. One of the things I love about Orson
Speaker 1: Wells is a lot of people don't notice his favorite
Speaker 1: medium was radio, and the reason was said, the listener
Speaker 1: has to fill in some of it. The listener has
Speaker 1: to participate to create the story. And so he did
Speaker 1: War of the World's when I think he was one,
Speaker 1: and he started working a Citizen King when he was
Speaker 1: twenty three. I was mentioning this somebody one time, and
Speaker 1: the response, which really helped inform my thinking, was really
Speaker 1: young minds come up with great creative ideas and are
Speaker 1: given the shot in new, really new businesses, but no
Speaker 1: one's going to take the chance on an established indassy
Speaker 1: throwing the keys. I think about you when you were
Speaker 1: w m a Q in Chicago at twenty Charlie Warner,
Speaker 1: who hired me, must have been out of his mind.
Speaker 1: Why would you hire a twenty year old kid to
Speaker 1: go to NBC's big am clear channel radio station in Chicago,
Speaker 1: And then why would they take me to New York
Speaker 1: at age's unbelievable, but they threw the keys. It's easy
Speaker 1: in theory, it's very hard in practice. I think the
Speaker 1: answer is you've got to find Bob Pittman, You've got
Speaker 1: to find Orson Wells, You've got to find Irving Felberg,
Speaker 1: because they're out there. I don't know who they are,
Speaker 1: what I have the courage to do it throw the
Speaker 1: keys to them? Probably not, but I think that's the
Speaker 1: an certain So this is about stories from the frontiers
Speaker 1: of marketing. You are young ones. What advice would you
Speaker 1: be looking for that you could give somebody. The biggest
Speaker 1: lesson for me, maybe there's something of value in this
Speaker 1: for somebody else. Is the power of great ideas, the
Speaker 1: power of great creative are hugely important, particularly in a
Speaker 1: world where data is pervasive. This is not disparaging that
Speaker 1: at all. You've gotta have that. Those are table stakes.
Speaker 1: Everybody's gonna have it. Some people are gonna be better
Speaker 1: at interpreting it than others, but everyone's gonna have access,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be an arms race, and that
Speaker 1: will always be something everybody has to have. The layer
Speaker 1: over that, which I think is very important, and it's
Speaker 1: the real value add whether talking about radio, television, networks,
Speaker 1: ad agencies, filmed entertainment is the creative piece. I don't
Speaker 1: hear as much conversation about the creative piece of the
Speaker 1: equation as I do about data. If I were a marketer,
Speaker 1: to differentiate myself from everybody else, I would focus on
Speaker 1: that this sort of insists in the right place. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about the mathew magical marketing, the analytical. We
Speaker 1: gotta measure it. And of course once you measure it,
Speaker 1: know everything. That doesn't cause anybody to do anything, you
Speaker 1: have to do something about it. That's the magic. So
Speaker 1: as you think about it, who's the greatest mathematician, you know,
Speaker 1: the greatest mathematician, the person who just got the data,
Speaker 1: understands it, has those insights. John Malone. Who's the greatest magician?
Speaker 1: M hm, wow, I don't know. I gotta think about that.
Speaker 1: In the greatest magician, I'm stumped. There's so many people
Speaker 1: that have done just really great work. I would have
Speaker 1: to Spielberg. We'll take it. Thanks Jarl, Thanks Leavings, Thanks
Speaker 1: to my great friend, Thank you, Bob. Here are some
Speaker 1: things I picked up for my old friend. Y're all
Speaker 1: moan one relationships or everything in business. You all picked
Speaker 1: that up from a salesman in El Paso who attended
Speaker 1: everybody's birthday and baptism, and it's a lesson he hasn't forgotten. Two.
Speaker 1: Desperate situations can be great for creativity. If you all
Speaker 1: have more money for programming, he might never have come
Speaker 1: up a talk suit. Three. The key to finding new
Speaker 1: voices and not letting your brand get lapped is to
Speaker 1: throw young people the keys and let them drive. It
Speaker 1: could be scary, but it's something both Yarl and I believe.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by
Speaker 1: Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and
Speaker 1: wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki
Speaker 1: Etre for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for
Speaker 1: their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course
Speaker 1: Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped
Speaker 1: bring this show to your ears. Until next time,