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Tom Freston has never been a typical media executive. He began with a countercultural spirit that shaped an adventurous career spanning from cofounding MTV to leading Viacom and Paramount Pictures. After spending 26 years at Paramount-now caught up in the $100 billion bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery -he remains a defining figure in the evolution of modern entertainment. The 80-year-old executive, who sounded remarkably youthful in a phone interview with Fortune, harkened back to the days in the 1960s and ’70s when “freedom was in the air.” The vibe was very different then: “It was like, I don’t want to work for ‘the man,’” he told Fortune, referencing a formative summer when he worked as a bellboy at Lake George in the Adirondack foothills of upstate New York. “I had sort of been on the traditional conveyor belt: Go to college, get out, get a job. And then I met all these sort of bohemian characters who-their idea was, you didn’t have a career. You kind of improvise your life. You know, the idea was to kind of maximize experience and do interesting things and take some risks.” Freston added that he was a big fan of both “beat” and libertarian literature, the former made famous by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and the latter by Ayn Rand. They both had common themes, he said: “Experience and being an individual were important.” As he writes in his new memoir, Unplugged , this improvisational journey took him to Afghanistan and India, a business career that was “wild and fulfilling and for a long time profitable.” But it was also “really hard work” and was “really humbling,” adding that “humility is not a thing you see a lot of in the entertainment business.” He didn’t comment directly on the major figures in the current bidding war for Warner Bros., but the example of its CEO, David Zaslav, moving into famed producer Robert Evans’s Hollywood mansion is a prime example of the neo-mogul mindset. Freston has long been semiretired, advising media brands such as Oprah Winfrey’s company and Vice while serving as chairman of the ONE Campaign, the anti-poverty effort in Africa led by U2’s Bono (a friend, Freston said). As Freston rolled back the years with Fortune and looked out on a much-changed media landscape, he briefly donned his antitrust hat to analyze the bidding war between Netflix and his old company Paramount for Warner Bros. Discovery and how things got to this point. “No matter which way it goes, there’s really nothing in it for the consumer,” Freston said with a sigh. How Netflix followed in MTV’s footsteps Freston observed that the media industry is now dominated by “monolith companies ... increasingly run by tech people, where data becomes more important than instinct.” He highlighted A24 and Neon as two companies that remind him of the old, almost artisanal MTV, where refreshing the creative instinct became core to success, because Viacom’s once-dominant basic cable lineup appealed to a transient youth culture....

Preview: ~500 words