Know which rules to break, with MTV co-founder Tom Freston

**Jeff Berman** (0:01)
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**Tom Freston** (2:02)
This guy said, we're looking for people who have absolutely no experience in television.
Which I was like, wow. I said, they didn't even have television where I've been living. I mean, I'm walking around in flip-flops and pajamas for eight years. It was hard to believe now, but MTV was really revolutionary at the time. It was a sign of some kind of future that might be coming.

**Jeff Berman** (2:27)
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, the word legend gets thrown around a lot. In this case, we have a legend who is actually legendary. Tom Freston. Tom is a co-founder of MTV, former CEO Viacom, and his new memoir, Unplugged, is full of wild stories and deeply meaningful lessons from his life as an unconventional CEO. This is going to be a fun one.
Tom, welcome to Masters of Scale.

**Tom Freston** (2:58)
Nice to be here.

**Jeff Berman** (2:59)
Great to have you here. I was in an airport with a book that I wasn't really loving, so I popped into the airport bookstore. I saw your book. I figured I'll grab that. I'll start it on the plane. Fortunately, there was no Wi-Fi on the plane. By the time I landed on a cross-country flight, I'd nearly finished it. It is a rollicking read. One of the things that stood out for me in reading the book was the extent to which the early part of your career was shaped by breaking rules, making new rules.
As we look at what's happening in the world today, I'm curious what your take is on what the line is between what is acceptable rule breaking and what is really reckless and dangerous rule breaking.

**Tom Freston** (3:44)
First of all, I'm excited to hear that they were selling my book in a bookstore in the airport and I'm glad you liked it. Well, in terms of breaking rules, well, you don't want to break rules that are against the law, generally. You know, a lot of the rules that we broke, say with MTV, they were more in the cultural realm. And we broke rules on a business basis. Like we, at one point, couldn't get the cable operators who were, at that point in time, in the early 80s, this seems like ancient history, but they were local monopolists. We decided after a couple of years, and we only had a couple of million subscribers, we would just go over their heads. It was like, screw them.
And we cranked up the I want my MTV campaign, which to try and pull, you know, demand right through these distributors who were largely Elvis fans, who didn't like MTV, who didn't like the idea of paying us 10 cents a month. We were just somebody who cut into their profit margins. So that was a rule broken, which was like, it was sort of not a polite thing to do in the cable business back then.

**Jeff Berman** (4:50)
Well, and beyond that, let's go back to Hindu Kush, which, I mean, I think most people know you for MTV, such an iconic stretch of your career. But you started by building an apparel brand out of India, right, and Afghanistan.