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Fareed Zakaria

     On August 1st, 1981, MTV was launched.  The advent of the first 24-hour cable network dedicated exclusively to music videos came at a time when American culture—and American music, in particular—was one of the country's most significant soft-power exports. From Madonna to Prince to Michael Jackson, MTV broadcast the most popular American music, sometimes reaching more than 150 countries.

     Today, the media landscape is shifting. Forced to contend with social media and the Internet and streaming, by the end of the year, MTV will shutter most of its global channels.

     Tom Freston is a cofounder of MTV and the former CEO of Viacom. His new memoir, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, tells his extraordinary story. He joins me now.

     Tom, pleasure to have you on.

Tom Freston

     Pleasure to be here.

Zakaria

     The music video for you begins in 1969 in San Francisco, when you're high. Tell that story.

Freston

     Yes. It was my first day in California. I had been working in a bar in Aspen, and I went to California. My first night, it was Saint Patrick's Day," and a friend said, "Hey, I got tickets to go to The Fillmore, which was sort of the Garden of Psychedelic Eden at the time, and "Jefferson Airplane is coming," and "Why don't you come?" So I'm getting, like, the full-on San Francisco treatment, night one.

     And there was the Joshua Light Show. It was really powerful. When you have a great song and it's coupled with, sort of, really engaging imagery, the power of a song is really multiplied. That really stayed with me and planted a seed. It was exactly 10 years later, to the day, I entered the doors of the company that would become MTV.

Zakaria

     So you have that, you know, experience and that background, but then, you have another: the intervening 10 years, you're like a global itinerant, traveling all over India, Afghanistan. Why were you doing that?

Freston

     I had been working in an ad agency, and I got assigned to Charmin toilet paper. It was, sort of, a line I couldn't cross.
And this former girlfriend called me from Paris and said, "Hey, you can't sell toilet paper. I'm going to go across the Sahara Desert. Why don't you quit your job and come with me?" A week later, I was on a plane. We did that. I stayed with her for about two months, and I kept going for a year.
     And I ended up falling in love with Afghanistan and India. This was the tumultuous '70s. And I stayed for a year, started a business, which became very successful. And around 1979, a series of bad things began to happen, and I came back to the States, and that's when I fortuitously got a job at MTV.

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Zakaria

     How did you guys decide that American music was going to be so popular around the world? Did you know it from the start?

Freston

     Well, American music in film had a big cultural time. It was very culturally dominant in the '70s and the '80s, and there was a lot of reasons for that. One was English was ascendant; two, most other countries didn't have the money or ability to build independent studios or whatnot, and American companies had a lock on distribution and so forth. American culture was seen sort of as a symbol of the Free World during the Cold War years.

     But then, around 2000, it began to melt away with the Internet. Local cultures got the means of production, and now, you have K-pop out of Korea; you've had Afro-pop out of Nigeria; you've got this huge wave of...of Latino music led by Bad Bunny.

     So it isn't as if American music and, you know, popular culture—our soft power —has vaporized, but it has diminished, because other countries have gotten better at it themselves.

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Zakaria

     You've had such an extraordinary career, but it also seems so idiosyncratic, serendipitous. If there was a young person who said, "I want to be able to have wandered the world, run a major studio, then been working with Bono on all these aid projects," what advice would you give?

Freston

     I would say: "When you're really young, you can take a chance, step off the conveyor belt, and go out into the world.
You can see America and see the world from a different perspective, be in other people's shoes, and opportunities will come clearer to you. And I think when you come back, you're going to be a more desirable candidate for a lot of people in a lot of companies. If you've been in school for 16, 18 years, you don't really know what you want to do. Why not take a beat and go out and see the world? It's the best classroom you will ever find."