Revolutionizing Media with Bob Pittman, Co-founder of MTV and CEO of iHeartMedia

Welcome to Game Changers live from Miami, Florida. My name is Sergio Tehera. I'm your host. And each and every week we bring you someone who has been a game changer in their field and who's touched the lives of thousands to get their perspective on their journey, their mindset, their struggles and successes so that we can inspire you on your journey. So let's get started right now. And welcome back to Game Changers live. You can catch us each and every episode on your favorite platforms including, especially now, iHeartMedia uh because of my guest today is Mr. Bob Pittman. Hi Bob, how are you? Good, good. I'm glad you gave us a plug. Be sure you take

that iHeartRadio app, go to the podcast app, and you'll find every podcast you need right there. Of course, of course. Thank you so much everyone for being a loyal listener. We're now a top 2% podcast ranked globally by ListenNotes and we're coming to you live from our beautiful home studio at Florida International University's College of Communications, Architecture, and the Arts. So thank you so much for your support. Make sure to like and subscribe and share it with somebody who needs to hear it. So like I said, my guest today is Bob Pittman. He's the chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia Inc., the number one audio company in America with its over a quarter billion monthly listeners.

iHeartMedia has a greater reach than any other media company in the US. The company's leadership position in audio extends across multiple platforms including 850 broadcast stations. It's iHeartRadio digital radio service, influencers, social, branded iconic live music events, and number one commercial podcast publisher. So Bob is the co-founder and programmer who led the team that created the infamous MTV. He has led some well-known transformations in television, music, real estate, internet, and audio as CEO of MTV Networks, AOL Networks, Six Flags Theme Parks, Quantum Media, Century 21 Real Estate, and Time Warner Enterprises as COO of America Online Inc. and later AOL Time Warner. He's also been inducted into both the Advertising Hall of Fame and the

Broadcasting Hall of Fame uh as well. And he received Adweek's first Media Visionary Award. He was named one of Advertising Age's 50 pioneers and visionaries of TV and 10 marketers who changed the culture of America. Wow. Quite the resume, Mr. Mr. Pittman. Thank you so much for being on this That's why my beard is gray. Been around a long time. I can imagine. I can imagine. So, um you know, this this show is really about individuals who have been game-changers such as your such as yourself. Tell me a little bit about your childhood growing up. How did it influence your career path? Well, I grew up in uh in rural Mississippi in the 1950s and

1960s. And um that the climate in the country then was the South was very segregated. Um and the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning to begin to have the impact that it it eventually had in terms of changing the country. And so I lived through all of that. So as I sort of think about what's sort of the defining part of my childhood was probably the Civil Rights Movement, probably even more so than the Vietnam War, which was also going on in that that latter part of my my youth. Um I also as a kid I I I lost an eye at age six. So I was sort of a little bit on the outside

because I'm the kid who had the glass eye. And uh being a little detached from other people, I think you sort of say how do those things shape you? Probably made me much better marketing person. Uh certainly made me much more aware of other people and what they were saying, what they were doing, how they were doing and what motivated them. And uh so those are probably the two big influences. I have won the parent lottery. I had fantastic parents that were loving, supportive, unconditional love. In my house, you couldn't use the word hate. We didn't hate anything. And I I didn't realize how crazy this was until I left home, but I never saw

my parents fight. My parents, when they disagreed, would just have a civil conversation about the disagreement as opposed to a fight with a lot of drama and emotion. And that probably, in some ways, is bad cuz I don't know how to fight. I never had a parental model of how you get in and out of a fight. But those are probably the major influences on me. And and clearly, you know, what was going on in the country at that time with the space race and you know, nuclear threat, etc. all had some influence, I think, on any of us of my age. And so How did you then get into the world of media, of

radio? How did you figure out that, "Hey, wow, this could be something, a path for me for my career." Was it just innate? Did you love music? Did you stumble upon it? I didn't think about it that way. As a little kid, I was fascinated by airplanes. And you can get your student pilot's license at 16. So at 15, I told my parents, "I want to learn to fly." And they said, "You better get a job." And I tried to get a job in this little town in Mississippi. Tried to get a job at the men's clothing store where all the kids hung out after school. They said, "You're too young." Tried to get the

high-paying job in town, which is bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. That was the high-paying jobs. Oh, very high-paying. And I walked in a little radio station. And you know, there were two radio stations in town. I went to the smaller of the two. And met the owner and said, "Do you have any jobs?" And he said, "Do you get in trouble?" And I go, "Not really." And he goes, "Do you have good grades?" I said, "Pretty good grades." And he goes, "Okay, come here." And he put me in a little room. He tore off, in those days they had teletype machines that printed out the news constantly, tore off the wire copy, said, "Read

this." And came back in a minute and said, "Okay, that's good enough. You're hired." And that began my radio career. Uh and it wasn't until later that I really got totally into radio. For a while it was just a job. Uh and then suddenly the radio bug bit me and off I went. Wow. And so you started in you know you started in radio, you started moving up I I suppose in different areas, different roles. Um how did that then lead to the creation of MTV? I mean where where did you how did that happen? fairy tale career in radio. Um and I didn't realize it at the time as always happens, but I look

back now and say I was 15 years old in Brookhaven, Mississippi making a dollar 65 an hour as as a disc jockey and I had to sweep up the station as part of the deal. And 5 years later I was not only on the air, I was the program director. I mean I controlled all the content on the NBC station in Chicago. And 3 years beyond that they sent me to WMBC in New York to program the flagship station of NBC at age 23. And I look back and how on earth in 5 years could that have happened? I have no idea. I mean that is absolutely sort of the lucky draw. And And by

the way, and some ambition and my willingness to take chances and just go, "Yeah, sure I'll do that. Yeah, sure I'll try that." And uh and so I was in that position and and when the cable industry began to build the big cities, which was the late '70s, early '80s, uh that Warner Communications and American Express built a cable programming company called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Corporation and they recruited me to be the head of programming cuz I was the sort of superstar radio programmer and they said, "We think cable is going to be more like radio with special formats rather than like the broadcast networks where everything, news, sports, kids, everything exists on one network,

they'll be split up into different networks." So, they hired me to be the head of programming and initially I did a network called The Movie Channel, which later merged with Showtime. And uh and then we got ready to do the next network and I had done, when I was at NBC, I had a show that ran after Saturday Night Live called Album Tracks. I hosted it and produced it. And we played around with this newfangled thing called these video clips and we did music news and information. And so, I uh uh said, "You know, I I I think we can do a video radio station." Sort of the dream. Uh I had a boss who

loved the idea, really wanted to do music desperately, just loved music. So, I said, "Here's what we do. We do a video radio station." It was only 10 years earlier that FM came on the scene by providing superior audio. I said, "We'll do to FM what FM did to AM. We'll add video." And that was the pitch. And uh that's the way we got started. Wow. So, let me ask you going going back to your your rise, was there an attribute that you feel really demonstrated your potential? Was it grit? Was it ambition? Was it a vision that that people noticed it and said, "Hey, you know, he has something. Let's Let's keep bringing him

up." You know, both in dealing with my bosses and dealing with the people I worked with, I always had the ability to boil everything down to the story. What is it? Articulate it. And can I communicate it? And I think it helped me in building businesses at an early age, but it also helped me in explaining what we were doing and what the opportunity was. And uh and I was ambitious. I would do anything. I would work longer and harder than anyone else. I was a smart kid. I had been majoring in in college and sociology and in social methods about research and this was just the era when people were beginning to make data

informed choices instead of golden gut. Like, I'm the great programmer, I'll decide. We're really looking at audience segments and beginning to analyze it and I brought that skill set as well. And having been a creative person I understood intuitively sort of what the talent was going through and saw things from a talent perspective. Wow. And and I had a lot of luck. I had a wonderful mentor named Charlie Warner who met me in Pittsburgh and he had worked in CBS in New York, had gotten fired, come to Pittsburgh, had a success and then was hired at NBC in Chicago. And Charlie's the one who said at age 20, "Hey, kid, why don't you Now, he

didn't hire me in Pittsburgh, someone else did, but he sort of fell in love with me and he's called me and said, "You want to come to Chicago?" And I go, "Yes." Uh what do you pay? I don't care what you pay. I'm coming to Chicago. It's the big time. Right? And Charlie took a chance on me and I just to this day I I still think Charlie was out of his mind to hire a 20-year-old kid to do that job, but he did and it changed my life. And see, take you know, saying yes, figuring it out later, I think is one one aspect there. When you have opportunities presented to you, you need

to be, you know, bold and and trust in your in your ability to succeed and go after and say, "Hey, I could I can figure this out, right?" What was your biggest challenge when you launched MTV because this was absolutely revolutionary? Perhaps for you, you saw it as a natural, you know, the next step in in media. for a lot of people they were probably thinking music is meant to be listened to. Why are we watching something, you know, that was very very new and was there difficulty in in getting adaptation or did it just take off? Well, first no one believed there could be an ad-supported cable network. The only models we had for

cable networks were HBO and Showtime movie channel that were all pay services subscription like you know a Netflix today and no one had ever been able to sell advertising and everybody thought that was a fool's errand because we would have very small audiences and the broadcast networks had very big audiences and so that was probably the major hurdle. Then when you get the content the question is how's music work on TV and the basic thesis we have was that music had failed on TV because they kept trying to make music fit the TV form. We were going to make the TV form fit music. It was going to be about a mood attitude emotion. You

were going to tune in to watch the network not to watch a program. You were going to tune in to MTV to see what was going on. You were going to hang out with us. I mean to use the current day analogy we were the Tik Tok of that generation. You had nothing to do watch some MTV. And that was the approach that we took and and again it sort of took off immediately with the consumer but trying to get distribution through all the cable systems was an an arduous task. That's where we invented I want my MTV. We began to run ads that said call your cable company and say I want my MTV

and we had Sting say it. We had the we had Mick Jagger say it. We had the Who with Pete Townshend, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie and and and so that was not us trying to say hey I want my MTV. It was trying to solve a business problem which we needed cable companies to carry MTV. Um and that's the way we forced them because we flooded their phones with everybody saying, "Give me that Give me a cable and give me MTV." Wow. And so you're uh in one hand achieving something that operationally needed to happen, but on the other hand, it's a brilliant marketing slogan. That That became legendary. Well, to me always your

marketing slogan and your and your advertising it should be a solution to a problem. Um and you know, so often people do advertise cuz it sounds great. This is a great commercial. Looks great. What's it solving? What's your call to action? What are you trying to do? What are you trying How are you trying to affect your position? To me, it's all about brand and it's all about your the brand of your product and what it means to the consumer. And you know, when I was at America Online, we had a slogan, "So easy to use, no wonder it's number one." The rap on on AOL was, "Oh, it's the internet with training wheels." Oh,

that's not the real internet. That's not serious. And of course, you look at all the research and the vast majority of people said, "I'm not going online cuz it's too hard. I don't know anything about computers." So, if you remember our ads, we would have testimonials and we would have, you know, a kid saying, "It's so easy and even my dad can use it." Um it's none of that computer mumbo jumbo. AOL, so easy to use, no wonder it's number one. And we crushed everybody. In my days at AOL, we had half of the traffic of the internet came through AOL. Wow. Um and so it's again, the advertising and marketing plays to a need.

What did we need to do? We needed to convince people we were the service they needed and fight the naysayers. Oh, that's not really serious. That's not really the internet. You need something hard. You need something that really can do all this computer stuff. And you realize that's that's not That was not the opportunity. That's incredible. What What is one of your favorite stories that you can share about your interactions with some of these, you know, legendary artists like Sting and all the and Cyndi Lauper and you know, you had a chance to meet with these people, interact with them. Were you know, were there some some fun stories that really stick out, you know,

in your mind? You know, it look if I had really fun stories, I probably couldn't tell them here. Uh but, uh you know, for me it was always the relationship with them was very much about what are you trying to do with your career? What are you trying to do next? How can we help you? Um and it's sort of what we do at iHeart today. We we meet with the artists and their managers and we say, "Okay, well, I got a new album coming out, trying to reposition myself as this or I got a new song I want people to hear. What is the goal of it? And then how do we get you

there?" And uh you know, I don't know if you saw the uh iHeart Radio Music Awards last week on Fox, number one show on TV for teens. Uh very surprised because I thought oh, teens aren't interested in T- Yeah, they were. They were. Um and uh and you saw in that program some of the marketing of certain people that were on the award show that we selected to perform as part of sort of the okay, this is part of their plan to get out. Um and um and and when we play new songs, we do an on the verge feature on a radio station you'll hear which are brand new artist uh that we're trying

to say you should pay attention to this artist and we've had this incredible success rate with those artists turning out to be major stars. Um and way back at MTV, we started that and John Sykes who's at it runs the entertainment uh enterprises group at at iHeart was one of my partners in starting MTV and we spent an enormous amount of time with the music industry saying we're have a symbiotic relationship, strategic relationship. What do you need to do? The better more excited people are about music, the more excited they're going to be about MTV. Absolutely. And you you seem to be one that you can see things coming, right? And you know, the evolution

of the industry and so forth. How did you come up with the idea for iHeartMedia? And what was your vision for the for the company? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I I don't think I see the future. I think I watch consumers. And I'm watching trends and watching the things that to me it's all consumer-driven. And I think so few people in business truly pay attention to the consumer the way they should because the consumer basically tell you what you should be doing. And they'll give you the they'll give you the landscape and then you go, "Okay, I know what I got to do." Uh with iHeart, I made an investment in the predecessor company

called Clear Channel back in 2010. I was for after I left Time Warner, I was an investor. I thought that's what I do the rest of my life, not work too hard. Um and I saw this asset, began to look at it and go, "Holy smokes, this thing has this huge reach, reaches everybody in America. And yet they're sort of talking about it as all their radio stations instead of pulling it together as one platform." So, the idea was let's take this platform and let's think about it as a national reach platform that can also extend through all sorts of communities and local markets. Um let's build out a digital platform, which was the iHeartRadio

app, so the people cuz what I saw the consumers doing is the consumer's using all these other devices. So, our strategy began to be be where our consumers are with the products and services they expect from us. So, if my consumer's using a phone, we should be on the phone. If they're using a video game machine, we should be on the video game machine. You know, Alexa, number one use on Alexa is AM/FM radio. We were early, worked with them in developing it and uh saying, "Look, if they want to do Alexa, play, you know, Y100, then we should be there. Uh So, it was a We So, we built the app to do that.

And then we said, you know, we've got all these great relationships with artists. Uh we understand music very well. Uh we should build out all these events, uh which really bring our community together because what are we really doing in radio? We're keeping people company. That's right. Our mission statement is to give everybody in America a friend anywhere, anytime. So, you can turn on the radio station, it's going to be a human being that's going to be talking with you, and you're going to have that kind of relationship we all like to have with humans. But we also like to gather as a human as a human species. And so, these uh events were that.

So, we built out the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball Tour. We built out the iHeartRadio Music Festival. We just had the iHeartRadio Music Awards. We have the Country Festival. We have Fiesta Latina. Uh we have the Alter Ego. And we have these big events, as well as a lot of local events, too. Pool parties, et cetera, where people can gather. But we needed one brand for it. And again, iHeart was it. So, that's how we evolved into it, and we finally went into podcasting, which has turned out to be enormously successful for us. We're bigger than the next two podcast publishers combined. Uh why? Cuz we can advertise the podcast on the radio. What's your biggest problem

with podcasts? Finding something you want to listen to. Knowing what's there. Discovering something. So, we can solve that problem because we talk everybody every day. Uh so, we promote the new podcast, and we create these these hit podcasts, and support the podcast, and and then from a business perspective, we have 1,500 sellers uh around the country. So, that's the biggest sales force in audio by a lot. So, we can also monetize the podcast better than anyone else because we have all these sellers and relationships already with the major advertisers. That's incredible. You have a You have a tremendous system in place and again, it like you said, having a sense of community, having a sense

of of kind of relationship not only with others, but even with iHeart and it's a very simple intuitive app. You get in there, you got your favorite shows, you can pop in and like you said, it's just it it's a fantastic system you have in place. And so, if you if you look back at your entire career, what would you say was like the most rewarding experience of of your career so far? You know, I'm not sure there is one. It's for me, I love wherever I am at the moment. I try and be in the moment. I try not to live in my past. But I've had, you know, great experience with people and

it's always about building the teams. To me, the the pride is not in MTV, it's not in AOL, it's not in iHeart, it's in the team that builds these things. And the people I worked with in radio, the people I worked with at MTV, the people I worked with at AOL, Time Warner and iHeart are all very special to me and I'm very proud of what everybody's built and how they grow as humans and also grow as business people. Yeah. And if you would look back at your entrepreneurial ventures and so forth, what would you say was more important, having capital or having relationship capital? I think you need both. You also need to have

an understanding of what you're looking at. I think there's actually a ton of people with money. There's actually a ton of people with relationships. The problem is they have a hard time picking, you know, the the needle out of the haystack. And I think when you invest, the key is understanding what what it is you're investing in and what it could be, especially if you're doing venture investing. I was an early investor in company called Daily Candy, which we bought 80% of way back when and had a great return on it, but I was also an investor in other people's ideas like uh Zynga. When I saw Mark Pincus and it was basically a a

business plan. I invested that early. I was an early investor in Facebook. And I was an early investor in a lot of companies that didn't make it and went to zero. Uh so, my track record is hardly uh you know, batting a thousand. But I I think you have to you have to bet on the idea and on the people and on the moment. Uh but again, I go back to what's the consumer doing? When Danny Levy developed Daily Candy, the reason I I made the big investment in Daily Candy was because I looked at the consumer and said, "She didn't have a ton of them yet, but the ones she had loved Daily Candy."

Um so, I go, "That's really good thing. That's the hard thing to build. We'll figure out how to monetize it and how to scale it. But finding something consumers fall in love with is is hard. And if somebody can demonstrate they've done that, that's an opportunity." Absolutely. And like going back to all your ventures and investments and you know, and trials and tribulations, was there a time where you you you know, you face failure, right? I mean, you just you know, you fell on your face and you're How did you bounce back from it? And what was it that you know, what was the lesson there? And I Do you bounce back? You know, does

Do things just kind of roll off of you or do you kind of take things to heart when when you have failure? I think failures and successes are the same thing. They're just a stepping stone. You're just stepping on them and you're keeping you you keep moving. Um so, I think people get way obsessed in counting failures and successes. By the way, if I make 10 decisions, at least five of them are wrong. Uh but I have a bias toward quick decision-making. We keep trying till we get it right. But I am not obsessed with this idea of failure or success because even if something you call a failure, I learned something from it. Uh

I picked up something which is very important, so it wasn't a total failure. And by the way, on certain things that we consider successes, I had some failures in that. Um so, I think you just think about them as stepping stones. I'm doing this today, tomorrow I'm doing that. Based on this, I'm going to go either left or right. Uh by the way, if I went left and it didn't work, then I'll try right. If that didn't work, I'll go in the middle. Um and so, it's a matter of just trying to keep moving. I think the worst thing you can do in in running a business is to get paralyzed. Uh I'm I'm a

not a fan at all of study and review. I have so many people say, "Well, I'm I'm we're looking at it. As soon as I have all the information, we'll make a decision." I go, "What's a fool's errand? You're never going to have all the information. Make a decision as soon as you have enough information." And there times I'm meeting with even the folks I work closely with, and uh they'll say I say, "When you going to make the decision?" They say, "Well, next week." I go, "What are you going to know next week that you don't know right now?" Why don't you just make the decision right now? And the reason they're putting it

off is it's a hard decision. And every time we have a hard decision, we think somehow if we wait, it will get better. It never gets better. Never gets better. Sometimes it gets worse cuz we overthink it. So, it's just I'm a fan of just move. Don't count it. Geniuses don't even get it right 50% of the time. So, just don't don't count those. Don't think about failure and successes. Think about where you're going and the progress you're making along the journey there. And uh don't start trying to have a sack of failures and a sack of uh successes. That's right. You you you win or you learn. And so, it's just part of the

process, right? I guess when you fail, you're just that means you're just one step closer to the solution. Right. And so, you know, you try I'd love I'd love this story. John Kennedy, when he announced we're going to put a put a man on the moon, it was 1962 or 3. He said, "We're going to put a man on the moon. He had not told NASA. It was a completely political announcement cuz the Russians were ahead in the space race. He said, "We're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade." NASA went crazy. They heard it on the news. The NASA people heard it on the news. And that

that what happened next was pretty spectacular though. They go into the White House goes into NASA. They you know throwing a fit and they say, "Okay, why can't we put a man on the moon?" They go, "No rocket fuel, no navigation, blah blah blah." And they go a whole list. They go, "Anything else?" And NASA said, "Well, so what you're telling me is once we solve all these problems, we'll put a man on the moon?" The dissenters, the naysayers built the plan to put a man on the moon and they then built teams of experts on each one of those things. It's a new management model instead of the military model of generals to privates.

It was peers with one person as a team leader. They solved every one of the problems and put a man on the moon in 1969 end of the decade. So, I think often you want to listen to the naysayers, the people that tell you why you can't do it. And my question is that won't work, I go, "Why?" And I force people to tell me why they think it won't work cuz that's a useful piece of information. You saying you don't think it's going to work not useful. Tell me why. What's that hurdle we've got to get over in your mind to make it a success? And that's a great story. I I was not

aware of that, but that just goes to show you the value of putting out a bold vision where that attracts people. And when you focus on something where you focus on grows, right? And you know when when we we say, "Okay, maybe we don't have the solution, but a solution does exist." If we start off with that premise, that kind of gets us over the hurdle of the barriers that we put in our own mind as well. We can solve anything. That's fantastic. How you're in New York right now. You're incredibly busy. You have all these things you juggle. How do you balance, you know, your personal life and the demands of your career? How

do you do that? Yeah, I think it's uh three kids and so I go through what everybody else is going through. Um I think it's really I'm not sure it's work-life balance as much as it is work-life integration. Uh the truth is I work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and always have. But can I give attention to my family at the moments they need it? And when they don't, can I take a phone call? Can I do a text? Can I do an email? And how do you build it? I also think you know, you think about it as a lifetime experience, not as a daily experience. I think we'll all be

hard-pressed to say we have balanced life every day. Um I stopped working when I was 49 and just did some investing for about 8 years and spent a lot of time with my kids. Prior to that, I started working at age 15, probably had taken a 2-week vacation maybe two or three times in my life and and took basically three or four-day vacations. And so when I stopped working, I wanted to see the world. I'm a pilot. I did learn to fly. And I just loaded up the plane and I was in 75 countries in the next 10 years and I had my little kids in 50 countries. So I saw them the world, I

saw the world and so I look at my life and go, "Yeah, I've had a balanced life." Uh but I go through periods of enormous work and go through periods of enormous having fun. Um and sort of look back at it and go, "Hope when I'm on my deathbed, I'll say that was a good choice." And when you love what you do, it it doesn't feel like work. I mean, yeah, of course, there is like you said, the hard days, those hard decisions, but this is your baby, you know, and and it it brings a different level of energy and creativity and enjoyment and satisfaction as you see it come to fruition. And, you know,

talking about Well, I think, you know, to to that point I would just add I think you know, it's one of my advice to young people when they're thinking about what to do. I said, "You know what? You're going to spend more time at work than you are spending the money you make at work. So, find something you love doing and hopefully you'll make enough money that it'll pay the bills, but you find a job that you can't wait to get to work in the morning and at the end of the day you're sort of sad that you have to put it away. That it's that much fun and that much and it's invigorating. For

me work gets me going, it's stimulating, um, and it's exciting. It's it it is serves you know, sort of serves this need I have for to let my curiosity run wild. It's the platform for that. So, I think I I I agree with you. I think of work is about something that we really enjoy and it's an important part of my life, not my whole life, but it's an important part and I I and I'm sad without it. Absolutely and I think that COVID brought a lot a lot of people to that realization point where they say, "Hey, I'm doing something because I've just kind of fallen into it. I've been doing it for 15-20

years and it's not enjoyable. It's not, you know, adding value to my life in terms of excitement and curiosity and creativity and so forth and you know, many have said, "Hey, life is too short. I need to go do something that I really enjoy." For me personally, my biggest fear in life is not doing something I um, not trying something new, but it's, you know, looking back on my life and saying, "Man, I wish I would have tried that." I think it'll be interesting I it's a really good point and I would add something to it during COVID is I think it showed us the value of being on a mission. That when we were

all in the office, even if your task was small, every day you saw the big mission, you realized you were were realized we're going to put a man on the moon, that I'm part of this big big mission. When you went home to do your task, and you sat in your house and just did your task, you got detached from the mission. And I think a lot of people quit their jobs cuz I got a horrible job. All I do is this little mission. I'm on this little task. And I do it every day. When you're in the office, it doesn't feel that way. And I think that's what we miss the most in the

office is this integration into the mission, which gives us all higher purpose. None of us think our job is to answer emails every day. Uh we think we're doing something bigger than that. The farther we get away from the sense of that mission, the less rewarding the work is. And what I try and do with our company is remind people constantly of the big mission we're on. I you know, and it's like when the hurricanes come to Florida, our people are called upon to save lives. Uh when when we scrap all all the normal programming, we're talking about the storm. We're telling people where to go, how to evacuate. If the storm has hit, where

do they go for emergency supplies. We've had cases where even cell service is off the air. Radio is the only thing left. Um and so people are counting on us. And so we go from that extreme to just the normal day-to-day, I'm going to I'm going to help you get through your day, and I'm going to give you the information you need so you can talk to your friends and your coworkers. And uh but I think it's all about mission. All of us, let's go back to the space program. We're all motivated by a big mission. And the more you can feel that, the happier you'll be at work. Absolutely. I mean, you you have

the the privilege, honor, and responsibility of having the communication ability. You know, you have you know, your your fingers and your reach goes deep into America and across the country and the world even. And you have that unique resource at your fingertips and it's a you know, it's a big responsibility to leverage that when they need help. Absolutely. Yeah. We're there. So, what are the plans for iHeartMedia? What what does the future look like? What are you seeing that, you know, 5 10 years from now where iHeartMedia will be, where media in general is going? Well, I think um hard to say where media in general is going. I what I know about the consumers

is they want what they want when they want it. Uh they want convenience and uh and I think that what And it is and it's what drives consumer behavior more than anything else. And I think with iHeart, we have this unique position. And as the world gets more fragmented with social, people are all in the offices and they miss the camaraderie. Radio becomes even more important. That person on the radio, that friend on the radio uh is an essential part of it. So, we continue to drive that into people's lives. I mean, if you think about it, 20 years ago, probably 95% of people listen to NBC every month, 90% listen to iHeart. Today, 90%

listen to iHeart, 35% listen to watch NBC. Uh that the world has changed. That we're sort of the last of the mass media. Uh when we reach everybody, one, we have a great responsibility and obligation and honor, as you've said, to serve the consumers. We also have an opportunity and a need to serve small businesses, medium-sized businesses, even large businesses. They need that reach. That the the community is based on businesses succeeding, creating jobs, providing services for people. And so, the question is are we affordable enough? And can we reach everybody and can we have an impact on business? And we take that responsibility very seriously. And I think, you know, we have just reams

and reams of case studies of how people we've helped people revitalize their business, grow their business, find new opportunities in their business. You know, people tend to get caught up in the shiny new thing. Again, they don't watch the consumer, they watch headlines. And they rush off and run to new stuff. But at the end of the day, what every business needs is is a certain percentage of people who hear a message are going to buy the product. So, therefore, the more people who can hear your message, the more buyers you'll have. So, the question is, how can I reach the maximum number of people I can for the dollars I have to market with?

And to me, that's the basic formula and one we never forget. So, we're always driving our reach cuz it's probably the best thing we do for any business. I mean, if if you don't reach somebody, I don't care how great your commercial is, it's not going to affect the person who can't hear it or see it. And so, that's we spend a lot of time. We spend a lot of time building out our capabilities for data and attribution, for targeting, etc. So, the people can use this mass product for very specific needs. We're auto intenders. We're people who are looking to go to college. We're people who are, you know, just had a baby. Finding

those those audiences and being able to reach them efficiently and then be able to measure the impact you had is very important. And we're providing that. And so, that's where we're really going with the business is continue to serve the community and then find a way to also serve businesses with that audience, letting them in essence rent our audience at an affordable price and give them the tools they need to use them effectively. And this is all about also effective communication. And so, one of my, you know, final questions here is as we start to wrap up, you look back at your career, you've had some skills, talents, abilities that have really been pivotal in

in your success. In today's world, personal branding is very important because your life is on social media. Everything is on is everything is out there. Communication is is very important. Like you said, being able to distill complex subjects down to very simple, relatable messaging is important. What what are your thoughts, you know, if you had to kind of bring it down and boil it down to maybe one or two of the most most important skills or talents or abilities that young people, entrepreneurs, can work on for the future? What would you say those would be? Well, look, I think it's listen and listen hard. Listen well. Okay, somebody disagrees with you, those are the people

you want to lean into and listen to more than the people who agree with you. They agree with you, you already know your story. You want to know the other story. Right. And you want to unpack it. Instead of saying, "I disagree with you, and let's talk about our conclusions." You want to say, "Why do you believe that?" A lot of why, why, why, how, how, how. Uh unpack it to go with their assumptions because you may find they'll change your assumptions and change your conclusion as a result. Uh I think the second thing is being able to articulate very clearly what the issue is because you can't solve something until you identify what it

is. You know, the doctor can't start treating you until he's diagnosed the problem. And I think so few people spend enough time on diagnostics that that is sometimes boring and sometimes it's frustrating, but it's essential because once you understand what the problem is, then you can solve it. John Kennedy putting a man on the moon. Um and so I think those are probably two of the the best and then the ability to collaborate um because teams win, not people. Um and can you be an effective team and how can you build the team? What's your role in the team? How can you help others succeed in the team? I've worked with a a guy who

does some great stuff with us and he talks about we send them in the room as the senior manager saying he looks around the room and he goes, "You think your team are the people who work for you. You're wrong. This is the team. You have to support each other and that breaks down silos because in companies you tend to go I'm in this group, I'm in this and we compete with each other internally. No, no, no, no. This is the team that collaborates and then the people who work with us, we're the leader of that that group, but the team is this and that's where the responsibility lies. And that's a great point because

they say if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Right. I hadn't heard that, but that's great. Yeah. So Bob, thank you so much for sharing these nuggets of wisdom. Congratulations on on your career and all the successes you've had and thank you for imparting that wisdom from from from the other side of success of absolute success and we wish you all the best with iHeartMedia. I know that's going to continue to grow and expand and and continue to be number one. I'm very proud to be on on the platform as well. So thank you for having me. And and we'll talk to you again soon. Great.

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