Ep. 97: Visionary, with iHeart Media’s Bob Pittman

“What we've done during COVID in many ways, we've taken 10 years of technology adoption and crammed it into three months. I'm certain we're getting ready to have a slew of new ideas that you and I haven't thought of, but that we're going to be delighted to support.”Bob Pittman was 15 when he started in radio – and he never looked back. The Mississippi native and current Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia has been hailed as a visionary and belongs to multiple broadcasting and advertising halls of fame. He pioneered and led MTV, and served as CEO for AOL Networks, Six Flags Theme Parks, Quantum Media, Century 21 Real Estate, and Time Warner Enterprises. More recently, he led a group of founding partners in launching the Black Information Network (BIN) in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. “When you hire for a job, you tend to look for experience,” he tells Mike. “If you look for experience, you're basically going to get what was, not what could be. So with BIN, we hired everybody for potential. … We need to unlock the career for everybody who doesn't look like the past, but we know looks like the present and the future. And how do we get there? BIN for us was just a great opportunity to unleash some of that.”