Saad Mohseni

It spread, the news spread very quickly.

And all of a sudden I got a call that you have to show up in Kabul.

So I had to fly back immediately.

To meet the president?

Well, to meet everyone.

I mean, to get extra security.

And there were times actually I had to call people into the building and to explain to them

what the intention of the radio station was and why we had music and why music was important.

It was, it was actually to, to calm people down.

And, and really that was sort of a, it was a real eye opener in terms of people's reaction to anything new.

We call it the cockroach of the media business.

It never dies.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's – but it's funny because – and then, of course, we learned very, very quickly in terms of, you know, how media can be an agent of social change, how it can facilitate social change.

But along the way, you're always going to have people opposed to it for whatever reason.

um and um and you know we've gone you know not just afghanistan we had a very you know successful television network for iran by satellite we went to ethiopia we've done similar things in iraq and pakistan and india and along the way and you know we have this mutual friend tom fressen who is one of the co-founders of mtv and he had a similar experience

in the United States with MTV when he launched.

So you're always going to have the detractors, but it's part of what you do.

Well, you don't really think about it because it's, I usually quote my brother who used to say that, you know, I'll always bite more than you can chew and then chew like crazy.

So for us, the 20 odd years that we set up these businesses, we were always too busy to reflect.

It was only when I wrote the book that I had, you know, had the opportunity to reflect on what we did.