Q 6

PLAYBOY: Your young audience is remarkably blemish free. Have prescription drugs such as Differin and Accutane eliminated acne as a teenage rite of passage?

Carson Daly: Absolutely. Look at the kids today. Some of the girls are 15 and look like they're 30-year-old supermodels. Kids today have better medical care, a remedy for everything. And maybe something in the genes. Kids grow up so fast now. When I had acne, it wasn't that big of a deal, because everybody had it. My choices were Clearasil and tetracycline. If it was really bad you might get Retin-A. I think we should bring acne back, because it's a part of growing up. It builds character. You need to get picked on.

Q 7

PLAYBOY: One newspaper reporter referred to you as the "dreamy Carson Daly." Have you stopped to consider the adjectives they're teaching in journalism school nowadays?

Carson Daly: I think she meant that young girls think I'm cute or whatever. I consider it facetious, so I've stopped reading about myself.

Q 8

PLAYBOY: The music video: ultimate triumph of lip-synching or a firmly established art form?

Carson Daly: If you're an artist, you can fill a canvas with only so much paint. You come to a point where your work is done. What the music video has done is enable musicians to further their art. Videos provide another artistic outlet. I think it's very cool--it has married music and film. And now the directors of these videos are doing films and actors are doing videos. It has opened a million doors in the entertainment business.

Q 9

PLAYBOY: Madonna recently appeared on Total Request Live. Does she deserve her rep as a legend?

Carson Daly: What's cool about Madonna and why I think she's a legend is that she was on TRL. What we fight with most are artists who worry about their image and who say the show isn't cool because it's only the popular stuff. But Madonna is big today because she has the courage to come on a show that she might not like--she'd never seen TRL. But she knew an awful lot about our show and pop culture the day she came on.

Q 10

PLAYBOY: Is this MTV gig a whole lot better than a dot-com start-up for Carson Daly?

Carson Daly: We're not whoring out this project yet. I came into this to fulfill my own needs and my love for music. And I think it's contagious. We never set out to have the highest ratings of any MTV daily show. We never set out to be powerful enough to pull Madonna or to be called the epicenter of pop culture or to be compared to American Bandstand. It just happened.

Q 11

PLAYBOY: You sought out Dick Clark. Did he offer you advice on how to make a career last? Can we look forward to Carson Daly hosting quiz shows and New Year's Rockin' Eve?

Carson Daly: Yes. That's why I went to visit Dick Clark's house. I'm driving around LA, I'm thinking about my career and how I don't want to just do this MTV thing, and boom, I'm a has-been. How can I be smart and take full advantage of the opportunity? Dick Clark popped into my head. So I called him. The receptionist put me on hold for a moment and then told me to come in. I cruised over to the shack with my résumé in hand, because how would he know who I am? And Dick walks in and says, "You're the Carson Daly I'm hearing so much about." It was like seeing a shrink. We sat in two big chairs and I just said, "Here's where I'm at in my life and this is where I want to go." We talked about day-in-day-out decision making, coming to an understanding of why you want to do things. Being smart. Building from within. Moving slowly. Not caring about quick success. He said he'd worked his ass off, going to New York and shooting six $10,000 Pyramid shows a day. So I'm taking this in. And now when my days get packed and I start to think I should take some time off, I go back to what Dick told me in that meeting: Have a successful work ethic. I begged him to let me host the American Music Awards. And he said maybe next year.

Q 12

PLAYBOY: You've hosted a couple of beauty pageants in the past year. Do you prefer the swimsuit or evening gown competitions?

Carson Daly: I didn't even pay attention to the beauty contests or the evening gowns. I only did the beauty pageants to test my range as a host, to see if I was capable of hosting a two-hour, big-time network show. All I'd ever done was MTV. I was such a production whore. I'm trying to be a sponge right now and learn everything in the business. The scenery wasn't bad at all. Absolutely not. But the last person to hook up with one of the girls is the host. All eyes are on you. The contests were different. The Miss Teen USA girls were young and scared and happier to see 'N Sync, who performed on that telecast, than they were about winning. They were squealing and--oh my God--had lots of energy. I was like a big brother, telling them to relax and making them feel at home while we were on the air. The Miss USA girls? A whole different ball game. Those chicks are opportunists. They all want to make it. They worked the environment. They're like, "So who's your agent?"