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

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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 a year. 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. This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Burman, 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

2:37 Legendary. Tom Preston. Tom is a co-founder of MTV, former CEO of iCom, and his new memoir, Unplugged, is full of wild stories and deeply meaningful lessons from his life as an unconventional CEO. This is gonna be a fun one. Tom. Welcome to Masters of Scale. Nice to be here. Great to have you here. I was in an airport. uh 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. And 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

3:27 Breaking rules. Making new roles. And 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. 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.

3:49 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

4:07 at one point couldn't get the cable operators. who were at that point in time in the early eighties, it 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

4:31 you know, demand right through these these distributors who were largely Elvis fans. who didn't like MTV, who didn't like the idea of paying us ten cents a month. We were just somebody 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. 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 you started by building an apparel brand out of India, right? And Afghanistan. Yeah, there were not a lot of rules. I w I wanted to live there. I w I had been traveling and I had developed this fascination with that part of the world. I figured how can I afford to live here?

5:17 I need to start a business'cause they couldn't get a job. So I started this business in the garment business, knowing nothing, never wanting to be in the garment business. But it took off like a rocket. And uh it was highly enjoyable for a bunch of years. And then at at the end there was an embargo that Jimmy Carter put down that ultimately put my company out of business. Yeah. No more imports from India and I send three tons of clothes to to Montreal. And we smuggled them over the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which was insane. I don't know what I was thinking, but uh I was kinda just looking for a little justice. You had a business that was growing, you were living the entrepreneur's dream in in really and the stories are so colorful and so vivid. And then all of a sudden you've got a change in geopolitics you've got a rise in tariffs this sounds very familiar. Yes. And we've pay attention to the news today.

6:12 Screwed. What did you learn from then that would be useful for those entrepreneurs today who are dealing with the similar turmoil? I've learned humility. Living in that part of the world, you learn humility and you also build up a great confidence in yourself and your ability to do things. You know, you c you know, as I always say it was like a sort of a bebop business lifestyle. You could you you would improvise, you would take chances, you would take risks, you would bet on unusual people, you would learn how to tolerate unusual people. All of this kind of came in place and it made sort of a perfect resume.

6:46 for someone who's gonna lead what what became a cutting edge eccentric media company. I think there there're so many ambitious twenty somethings who are Terrified. of stepping off of the the well worn path. They they're they're kind of going through a machine of well, it's the right college and maybe it's the right grad school or the job at the right company. And there's real fear about following something that's more of a passion or or that they feel in their body. It just might be something worth trying and

7:15 being a little bit more bebopy about their career. Um when when you're talking with young people who are in that mindset How are you helping them understand that there's another path? It's a tougher time for kids. You know, you're in your twenties these days, you want to start a career and the office culture thing has sort of collapsed and a lot of things that maybe we knew when we were that age are sort of gone. But you know, step off the conveyor belt and embrace some uncertainty. No one's gonna miss you if you're gone for a while. You can maybe travel all around the world like I did. But I would say that travel

7:50 Making that part of your post-college experiences is like the world's greatest classroom. You you learn a lot about empathy, you learn a lot about your country, you learn a lot about yourself. And when you come back, you're probably gonna be more attractive to someone who's a recruiter. than someone who just w went on the conveyor belt the whole time. Relax, for God's sake. When you came back, you ultimately

8:14 Answered an ad. that wanted people to work at a fledgling TV network who had no T V experience. I had come back, I had built this business, it was a multi-million dollar business. It was a big success, which I never expected, and I loved it. It crashed and burned. I'm deep in debt. I'm back in New York. All my friends, I'm now thirty three, all my friends have gone out and they got married. They have careers. And I said, What the hell am I gonna do? I bought this book, What Color Is Your Parachute? The only self help book I've ever bought. And I've recommended it to so many people. I mean, it said that you have transferable skills. You can do a lot of different things. And you by the way, you should do something that you love.

8:54 And what do you love? So they had all these little exercises where you could evaluate your skills. Look at what you like. And I came up with like music. I mean I was a music nut. So I saw this article in Billboard magazine by this guy John Lack. He was interviewed and he was talking about This was the start of cable TV. They had started the movie channel and Nickelodeon and they had plans to start a video music channel. I said, Oh God, that's a great idea. How do I get to meet this guy? So my brother who was in the record business knew a guy who had just gotten to work there. I got an interview and when I went in

9:29 This guy said, Well, 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. So everyone they hired had no experience. A lot of people came out of radio, came out of the music business and Nickelodeon, they were school teachers. And that turned out to be like the brightest move because we had to think of totally new ways to do things. And there's nothing like having no money to force people to innovate and if you're working with a group of people who are on a crusade like you are really passionate about something. You'll figure some good things out. 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. This T V revolution. Well it's such an interesting challenge, Tom, because you're you're launching a television network in a world where there are

10:22 rules and their own their norms, right? How did MTV thread the needle of taking the experience and expertise of people who knew how the system worked, but the insurgent challenger mindset of the outsiders who came in with the real passion for music and for the artists and the, you know, screw the rules. Let's let's n not let's not do illegal stuff necessarily, but let's do things really differently. It feels like that's a bit of a clash between mindset and culture. How how'd you guys navigate that? Well, we had to learn what the business was. And you know, the ultimately the business of cable programming wasn't that complicated. You gotta have to create a hundred and sixty eight hours of programming a week. You're gonna bounce it off a

11:05 satellite that's twenty five thousand miles in the sky, which seemed to me like wow, this is like outer space stuff. This is the future. Which gave you the ultimate scale of, you know, you put together this thing and then it's you know, it has a footprint all over the United States. We hired people who knew how to do video and We would reach out say to NASA, we would grab a lot of footage that was available in the public domain. And and utilize that like the rocket ship launches. And we got d this product from the the program staple at the beginning were these music videos which already had been produced. So sort of we were sort of like a radio station. Everybody was in their twenties but me. I was the oldest guy at thirty three. My boss

11:47 Bob Pittman. who's a incredible character. He was like twenty six. He never went to college. You know, very successful guy. I learned a lot from him. He was like a mentor to me. What's a great lesson you learned from Bob? The key to the business is the consumer. You have to deal with a lot of different

12:06 Groups, advertisers, in our case cable operators. artists, record companies, this and that, but If you could Make a connection with the consumer. and know what's going on inside that consumer's head and maybe build up a research enterprise.

12:23 That gives you a lot of insights into what's going on and get that bond and build up some loyalty. that will allow the other things that have to happen in your business, getting distribution, getting advertisers, convincing people to do things, that will allow them to fall into place. So it's consumer first, second, and third. Outside of a couple years at the NFL. I have spent the entirety of my career working for effectively challenger brands, insurgent brands or building I was, and I'm very keen to talk to you about that. Um but one of the challenges when you're scaling an organization that is a challenger brand and has that insurgents mindset is how you keep that culture while you grow.

13:07 it's really not hard when you're five or ten or even twenty or thirty people. You get to a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, and you start to have things literally called divisions, right? You're separating the company. How were you all able to maintain the culture at MTV through that scaling journey? Yeah, that was a huge challenge. particularly'cause we wanted to stay sort of on a on the on this cutting edge. So I always thought that having a creative, innovative corporate culture. I almost hate to use the word corporate, would be a big competitive advantage.

13:39 We needed to be diverse, which which was not something that happen right out of the box. I mean we started as a lot of like white guys. You know, diversity uh actually came our way and it was more challenging than I thought it would be, but we were able to pull that off. And you want a place where people think their opinions get heard, that politics aren't really important and organization is sort of flat. I would always go out and speak to them and try and reinforce the company values and You know, we're a creative organization. It's okay to take risk. We encourage you to take risks. We tolerate that. We want people to be collegial. And I wanted to have a fun vibe. You know, so we always had

14:19 parties and get togethers and socially a lot of these things don't happen anymore. I've watched sort of the disappearance of office culture in general. It's not that great with the pandemic. I mean, people lose opportunities to bump into each other, learn things by osmosis. Uh mentorship kinda has disappeared in a way. So I think it's sort of coming back. But I don't know if it's ever gonna be like it was with people working remotely in their underwear, like from some distant location. No, they should be working in the office in their underwear. We we we had the worst dress group of people, we probably did have people in their underwear.

14:56 We didn't have a dress code. That was only no frontal nudity was our rule. And at that point in time everybody had a dress code. But I said, Yeah, screw that. We're gonna be an untraditional company and I wanted the people in the Company. to look like the people I just saw in a subway car. The other thing is we wouldn't tolerate, you know, bad actors. If someone hires somebody who's substandard And they don't work out, that person is likely to hire other people who are along the same lines. So you're gradually eroding your company's vibe from the inside. Yeah. Yeah. B players hire C players and A players hire A players, and uh it's a pretty firm rule. By the way, I never really

15:38 Focused on money. Mm. the company at large. I would always talk about our sort of our creative risks and so forth and leave the money stuff aside. Well that was one thing when you were leading and helping lead MTV. It's another thing when you're leading and helping lead Viacom itself What was different for you going from overseeing one brand to a family of brands that have wildly different cultures? Well, we had a family of brands in the sense we became a big cable networking uh operation. We had Nickelodeon, we had Comedy Central, we had VH One, we had Noggin, we had

16:14 Nick Junior, we had T V Land, there's all country music television. So when I ascended to be the CEO, I I became the president of Viacom along with Les Moonvez. We were like a big entertainment conglomerate. And I became co president with Les. We got along well. You know, he had his fiefdom, I had my fiefdom. But then the digital revolution began to hit and break up this ecosystem. We survived on the fact that we had the central operation. We were like editors, we could manage because of scarcity. We didn't have to put out a lot of things. And now all of a sudden

16:52 We've got the internet. Still ahead, Tom Freston, on what it takes to break through today's fragmented media landscape. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity.

17:26 When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about

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18:31 I'm Rana El Chayubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel and

19:06 Check out the link in the show notes to subscribe to our newsletter. Vicom did not really make that digital leap. Um it struggled to. So given that talent that was there. What stopped you from getting there on the digital side? Well It's back to the innovators dilemma. I'm just taking the case of MTV. It wasn't like we didn't see what was coming. I mean you have to be an idiot not to see that. And we were the canary in the coal mine.

19:32 I mean,'cause it was kids, teens, young adults, they were the first people to really dive into the internet and and begin, you know, m moving some of their viewing time and attention over there. Now, you know, people can upload stuff, share stuff, comment on stuff. Everybody is almost their own little broadcaster. How do we get in on this business? We don't really have the DNA to do it. So all of a sudden now we're probably gonna have to buy something. We're gonna have to buy something and, you know, try and integrate that into our business. We bought a bunch of small websites that were of no great consequence, but then, you know, met with Mark Zuckerberg. I'll never forget that. Someone called me up and they said, uh, you know, we want you to meet this guy, Mark Zuckerberg. He's like twenty years old. He started a thing called The Facebook.

20:18 Their revenues nine million dollars. So Mark Zuckerberg came in and you know, we had seen Frenster, we've been watching MySpace, we thought social media, this is interesting. He came in and flip flops. And a hoodie. In February in Times Square. I remember that. There were offices. And they were debating whether to add

20:38 high school students to the platform. We offered to buy the Facebook for a mil billion and a half dollars, which was a lot for us. Well, especially with nine million revenue. Yeah, it was a lot for us and half of that would be an earnout. Mark Dunkberg wanted nothing to do with it. He did not want his M T V and now he's like uh He's done okay. He's done all right for himself. Yeah that young fellow. So then we looked at uh YouTube. YouTube was really like a wow.

21:06 We were the king of short form video and here they are doing this, but it was a whole different model where anybody could upload video, anybody could comment on it and share on it. And we said, This is fantastic. So The problem was because we were a big public company We were liable. They were people uploading, you know, episodes of our shows or Saturday Live, whatever, there'd be a lot of copyright stuff. And uh the Born at Viacom viewed it.

21:34 sort of as a copyright infringement machine. They ultimately after I left sued New Tube famously Trying to fight. the future. And no one ever could have imagined the ecosystem that YouTube was ultimately able to put together. I think it's worth almost six hundred billion dollars today. Yeah, it's a monster. We cast our eyes on you at MySpace. So let's see what's going on over there in Santa Monica. There's an alternate universe, Tom. You know, y you opened the book with the MySpace story and it sort of being the catalyst for leaving Viacom. Not long after you left

22:06 Oprah reached out and asked you to help her build her company. What's a lesson you learned from working with Oprah? That You haven't shared with the world before. She's the easiest person in the world to talk to, to be with, and she just radiates

22:22 goodwill and goodness and We all know that. We all know Oprah. So working with her was a pleasure. Oprah had a cadre of largely women who had surrounded her and worked on her syndicated show, which was this huge business. And they knew Oprah and they knew what they wanted and they they kinda came as outsiders to Hollywood. I held mostly on the business side. Can we get a deal with Comcast for distribution? How do we set up some of these departments? I would work on that kind of level. So I did that for a couple of years. Does what's happening with the consolidation of media and ironically then also the fragmentation of media also create lanes for innovation that's exciting that so I mean look I look at I'm always attracted to stuff around the edges sort of out of the mainstream. So I look at uh like yeah the movie business and television I look at A twenty four

23:10 They're independent. They're not owned by one of these public companies and they've opened up a uh a live venue space. They've sell merchandise. They have great instincts and great taste. And they continually seem to pick up and pick projects that are low cost and seem to do really well at the box office, and they're doing television and they're experimenting with shorter form programming that can go on the internet. I said, Well, they're putting together a whole new model and I I thought one of the most interesting things is is the uh the idea that they have a live entertainment venue where they can also test and, you know, sort of pilot things existing outside of the mainstream. With credibility now. So I think some of these little folks are the people to keep your eye on, some of these people that might jump off YouTube. The YouTube economy is in remarkable. I mean, one of the most remarkable things about YouTube is YouTube TV is an ad.

24:02 That's like everything we ever wanted. I mean, some of this is if you're if you're trying to build something like this, whether it's media or in other categories. What I'm what I'm taking from what you're saying is have a point of view. Have a point of view and then also build relationships with key Creative actors and talent. At the center of this All this change everything is is talent. And uh there's a lot of people today in the in the YouTube universe, in the TikTok universe that

24:29 you might be able to tap into being able to establish pretty amazing businesses. Speaking of relationships with talent, you've built some pretty incredible ones. What's the secret to building and maintaining relationships with creative talent. We have to be honest. You have to be someone that they respect and they need to think that you know what you're doing. John Stewart is a perfect example. We had this guy, Craig Kilborn, on the Daily Show. He was sort of a middle of the road, kind of a fraternity house guy, nice guy, but we gave the John Stewart the shot and he said, I want to do political satire.

25:02 We thought something more in the pop culture thing, but we let John do it and you know, he invented fake news and he turned it turned into this steamroller with full of Emmy's and he's hosting the Oscars and he hires Samantha B and he hires John Oliver and this whole galaxy of people. You said that it was harder to diversify MTV than you thought it would be. Why was it harder and what ultimately worked for you? It was harder because I thought you know, at one point M T V had received a lot of criticism for not airing a black axe, which, you know Fair enough in many ways. We kinda came around we

25:40 We kinda made up for that and we we were the first people to kinda give hip hop. put it in the living rooms of America. I mean we B E T or in radio wasn't even playing h hip hop, but We were uncomfortably white. We are uncomfortably male and uh try to change that. There's a great business case for diversity and really offended with this DEI thing that's going on now with the Trump administration. Like we don't want DEI. I mean, that's just nuts. There was a business case for why DEI is a healthy thing. If you if you're programming, for example, to a diverse audience, why wouldn't you want to represent them?

26:16 is and plus it's just healthier. Why why do we wanna just be a bunch of White guys. Don't make any sense to me. We did have ended up about fifty percent women managers.

26:28 But it was particularly with w African Americans and Hispanics, we could just hire them and have them come on staff and then, you know, we could say, Hey, we kinda look like that subway car that I always had in my mind we want it to look like. But if they didn't feel comfortable there. Then they end up leaving. So I'd see these num they show me these numbers of what we have hired and I go, Oh, this is really good. We're making improvement here. I would actually make this a goal. On people's bonus plans.

26:57 So after a couple of false starts, uh, we got better at it. Yeah. We got better at trying to make the place comfortable for everybody. And at the end of the when I had left the company we had achieved that. That was like in two thousand five, two thousand six. I get in the elevators and I look around and I go, Yeah. We didn't. I mean I think it's a a truism that Homogenous teams tend to stay homogenous and teams that start diverse stay diverse. Yeah. And then the corollary is you get what you measure and you get what you incentivise.

27:26 I very much share your concern about the attacks. DEI has become this like bad acronym. And it's not Clear to me. I don't mean to be obtuse, but Why? Like to your point, if we're serving diverse and and representative populations, shouldn't we have teams that reflect those populations? If for no other reason. And I think there are a lot of other reasons to do this than to build the best business possible. What am I missing? Why nothing.

27:53 Okay. So is this Is this racism and sexism or is it some it's racism without the dog whistle. There's implicit racism all over the place in this. As you look ahead as we're dealing with these challenges in our country. What gives you hope?

28:12 Well, I believe in the American people. I believe Th this is really a dark time. In many ways. I don't detect a sense of optimism anymore.

28:23 And I I can't believe that that's not going to be back. Despite everything that's going on in the world, many bad things, we still have probably the best system and we do have checks and balances that haven't been demolished. It's really demoralizing to see the level of grift and graft and how spineless certain politicians are to accede to this happening. get my head around and as someone who spends time with, you know, CEOs and not just you know high flying private companies, but of public companies. We depend on rule of law.

28:59 Rule of law is what allows business to thrive in America. When we make a contract, we know that contract is going to be enforced and we can go to court and get a neutral ruling, and the government's not going to come after one person or one company because they support the opposition party or the opposition candidate, right? They haven't kowtowed to the current president. And yet that's under attack right now. So when you're talking with business leaders Are they even thinking about this? Do they uh did they dismiss it? They think the threat is real.

29:30 They would say the threat is real, but a lot of people are afraid to raise their hand. It's a collective action problem. If you go out alone, you're gonna eat your head chopped off. Yeah. So how do we solve for that? They're afraid to stand up. They've seen what what has happened.

29:44 When you have Tim Cook coming into the oval office with a gold gift for Trump. This reminds me, I spent a lot of time in third world countries, a lot of time in Africa, which I detail in the book, and I receive this kind of cronyism and favoritism. I mean, it's just I mean it's appalling. But People Think this is what you have to do to get things done in this administration and this is what my shareholders are gonna need. So they do it. And they don't want to be singled out.

30:12 Uh and have their head chopped off by By Trump. Th this era of shareholder supremacy. in in running companies, this Milton Friedman concept that's not even sixty years old at this point really minimizes stakeholders. Uh whether that's

30:29 customers and clients, that's team members, that is society at large, our our nation at large. Do you see a path? to elevating stakeholder interests in how companies are led? Is there is there a way back to a world where corporations have responsibilities that are co equal with the shareholder responsibilities.

30:52 You're right, we have really pretty much boiled it down to the shareholder interest and you know It wasn't that long ago. When companies would do these purposeful things. And now they all got uh derided as oh this is woke stuff. I always charge these network presidents that come up with a c you know, save the music, you know, like

31:15 music libraries and music instructing kids how to play musical instruments. These are good things. It ties in with our image. And What it did was it make everybody in the company feel good. One of the things I do and I go through this in the book, I'm I'm the board chair of this thing called uh one campaign, and we what part of that is red. We would partner with companies making products and what we would find that the You you deal with Starbucks and others, they the the employees would feel good. knowing that the company that they work for, that they devote their life to

31:47 is doing socially positive things as well as just marketing a product in the best way possible. So I Hope it comes back. I hope we're just going through a phase.

32:00 It would seem to be a me to be a lost opportunity. I think more people would be doing it. if they weren't fearful that somehow it's gonna be lumped into this woke category that you're gonna be attacked for. Tom, I'm very much the MTV generation. I remember uh Dire Straits. I remember discovering the Beastie Boys and Biggie, and I remember remote control. I mean, MTV was such a culture shaper for my generation. We gained a lot in the fragmentation to cable, but we still had sort of a monoculture. Yeah. What is the world lost now that we're so hyper fragmented? I've um

32:36 Big sports events. Or say the last episode of the Steven Colbert show. There's not a lot of shared moments. What we used to call in the old days you remember the water cooler moments, where everybody shows up, Hey, did you see this thing last night on Friends or Did you see this uh unplugged on MTV with Bob Dylan? And uh everybody lives in these silos and everybody is being served up things by algorithms.

33:02 You do see a bit of rebellion against that now. You know, yes, start seeing vinyl coming up, vinyl sales coming up. People are buying flip phones instead of smartphones. I mean, this is maybe still just a niche thing. But does this mean there's sort of an aching and there's this great nostalgia for the nineties when life was simpler. I mean You know, you weren't delus with information that was followed by just a an avalanche of more information and then coming your way.

33:29 But I think the disappearance of MTV and a lot of those linear networks and the big broadcast shows just uh I'm not so sure it's a positive thing for the society. Well I really can't recommend your book Unplugged uh enough. It is uh not only full of actionable insights and lessons, but The stories are just great. I'm so grateful if you weren't gonna be my boss at MySpace, at least to have you on Masters of Scale. We got close. We got close. We got close. Thank you so much for being with us. It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation.

34:03 Thanks, Tom. Thanks again to Tom Feston for joining us. His story is a powerful reminder that truly disruptive companies cannot follow an existing playbook. For more fascinating takes from Tom's life, be sure to check out his memoir. It's called Unplugged. We'll put a link in the show notes. I'm Jeff Berman.

34:26 Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Senior Supervising Procer is Trisha Bobida. Associate producer is Masha Makatanina. Video editor is Noah Walstein. Senior town executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by the audio boys, Aaron Bastonelli and Brian Pew. Original music by the legendary Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Letal Malad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter. And

35:13 Be sure to check out her YouTube channel.

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