Hello and welcome to Meet The Writers, I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today helped turn a scrappy cable experiment into a global cultural force,
then found himself unexpectedly fired from the top job and back out in the world again.
His new memoir, Unplugged, adventures from MTV to Timbuktu,
is part travelogue, part counter-cultural,
coming-of-age story, and part account of how modern media was built from the inside.
Tom Preston, welcome to Meet the Writers.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Now, what does unplugged refer to in the title?
What's the first scene in the book where that idea really takes shape?
Well, the first scene in the book is me getting fired from what was in Viacom,
which was the corporation that ran MTV and Nickelodeon and a whole spectrum of cable networks that I ran,
as well as running Viacom, the parent company.
And I got fired after having the CEO job of the parent company for eight months by a man named Sumner Redstone and on the way out
as I went down into the lobby of the building like a thousand people were there as a surprise to send me off.
I was trying to just to sneak out with my tail between my legs with a couple of photos and they were chanting my name and it was it was really quite a send-off that really really touched me.
Totally unexpected.
Yeah but from that you do become unplugged from this extraordinary corporate life that you'd had but what I want to do is go all the way back down the wire
if you like to the source.
So where did you grow up and what was it a normal weekday in your house say when you were 10 years old?