The Rise & Fall of Cable TV – What’s Next for Media? | Larry Namer DSH #1224

Writers over 50 in Hollywood don't get work.

They're heavily discriminated against.

Really?

But I took 10 writers

and trained them in how you prompt.

So when the strikes finally got settled,

everybody was like, now, okay, there are rules for how you, you know, employ AI related.

So all of a sudden, the writers over 50 were the only ones who really knew how to use all the AI tools and stuff, and they found themselves working more than ever.

Nice.

Yeah, because AI can probably come up with some crazy scripts.

Yeah, at the end of the day, it's still storytelling.

You have to be a storyteller.

I mean, I don't care what platform you're producing for, you're telling a story.

And these guys were fabulous.

It's just they were, you know, they Oscars and Emmys and Golden Globes and stuff.

But yet, once you hit 30, 50 years old in Hollywood, they kind of put you out the pasture.

But now they're bringing them back because they know how to use the

tools that are now available.

Yeah.

All right, guys, got a legend here today.

We got Larry and just dropped a new book, right?

Yeah, I finally, after people bugging me to write it for a long time, I finally did it.

And it literally just came out on Amazon last week.

I love it.

And what was the core messaging of the book?

Well, it's kind of unusual because people have been asking me to do the book, and I've always refused because I said I'm not ready to write a last chapter yet.

But I've been a foodie literally all my life.

So if I didn't do television and stuff, I would would probably be a cook in a restaurant.

So, it's um, it's a combination of a bio and a and a cookbook.

So, it's the recipes that inspired me in different phases of my life, and then anecdotes of things that happened in my life.

Then, but it's a good book for entrepreneurs.

I love it.

It's kind of, you know, I was in school, I was the boy least likely, so oh, yeah, you got voted that?

Oh, God, yeah,

I got voted that too.

Most likely to fail.

No, I would, I was definitely that.

and uh were you really shy introverted um yeah i played sports um but yeah i mean pretty much yeah very shy introverted and stuff uh the family were immigrants and you know they the they kind of kept a close rein on the kids and stuff so interesting growing up which is ironic because you ended up making a living in the entertainment industry

yeah um and people ask they say was that something designed and no it wasn't it was just um

i i couldn't get get a job um in new york so i ended up getting a a temporary job in a cable company when nobody really knew what cable was and um it was kind of odd because i was working under the streets of new york putting the wires together and um i just kind of grew up in the cable business and then uh i came out to la to build the first 61 channel cable system ever built and um

the company that I worked for moved back to Toronto.

And, you know, you're a Brooklyn kid, you're here, you're in LA, everybody's going to parties and premieres and all of this stuff.

So, me and my friend Alan came up with an idea for a TV network called E,

you know, and the rest is history.

Yeah, reminds me of just timing, right?

Because, like, you didn't really have direction, but you were just right place, right time.

Yeah, well, we were right place and right time.

And

it was kind of interesting because when Alan and I started the company, the going rate to start a TV network was somewhere around $100 million.

Holy crap.

Yeah, TV networks are expensive.

And

after three and a half years and nobody giving us any money, we realized that we might have to settle for less.

So we actually found someone who was willing to put in two and a half million dollars.

And people look at E now and it's a monster.

It's in 142 countries.

And but he started with 11 employees and 31 interns.

Humble beginnings.

You've seen the decline in television numbers, right?

Yeah.

But not in viewing visual entertainment.

I mean, I'm not one that says that you got to watch television, but to me, it's all the same.

It's storytelling on a screen.

So

if you want to watch my stuff on a TV set, great.

And if you want to watch it on your iPhone, that's cool too.

Right.

Yeah, that's a good point because people aren't not watching stuff.

They're just transitioning to other platforms.

I mean, for me, it's always been simple.

And people used to hate when I say that, but you kind of can predict the fall of linear television.

I mean, it's real simple.

Do you want to watch what NBC wants you to watch when they want you to watch it?

Or do you want to watch what you want to watch on the device you want to watch it?

I mean, we all know the answer.

Other than sports and news, nothing has to be time-anchored.

Yeah.

Did streaming disrupt your industry a lot when Netflix started getting some traction?

It disrupted like the broadcast folks.

But for me as a producer, no.

I mean, the demand for storytellers was great.

And then I had international experience, a lot of it.

I mean, like I say, he's in 142 countries.

Right.

We really focused on building out, you know, the international markets.

And

so we found ourselves in incredible demand.

Yeah, the international markets.

I just had Chef Rush on.

He's like a big chef.

I don't know if you heard of him.

I've heard of his name.

Yeah, but he crushes in Korea.

Like he's got the top shows there.

So it's just fascinating that a lot of people focus on u.s markets but you could really dominate in other countries yeah and it's yeah it's one of the reasons why e grew as big as as it did and so as quickly as it did was when i first got involved in the in the business and if i would do a business plan and you get the financials i'd rate them 95 u.s and 5 other i mean because that's kind of where it was then 95 of all the revenue from media yeah was coming out of the u.s now if i do a business plan it's 30 u.s U.S.

and then there's China and then there's Russia and then there's Brazil and literally all the countries have names now because what's really happened is technology has changed the business so much.

It used to be you used to have to go to Hollywood to make visual entertainment because you needed big sound stages and equipment was really expensive.

Now I could go to Nigeria tomorrow with my iPhone and make a movie.

So you really began to find visual entertainment hasn't declined, but for the ability for it to be local to the communities that

it appears to is really bigger than ever, actually.

No, it is.

I mean, Beast Games just broke record numbers.

Yeah.

Highest cash prize giveaway and highest viewership, I believe.

Yeah.

You know, and technology changes.

I mean, we've been great proponents of AI from the very beginning of stuff.

I use literally AI all the time.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

Since

even before GBT.

No way.

And stuff.

Of course, it saves you so much time.

I mean, we all are here on this planet with a limited amount of time.

So the most valuable asset thing we have is time.

And I don't like to waste mine.

If somebody would ask me to do a

kind of a summary of a new TV series, it used to take me five days to do the research, write it up, whatever.

Now, I mean, I use GBT4 a lot.

It takes me 30 seconds.

Damn.

I edit it for an hour.

You got to clean it up.

It's never perfect.

So now in one hour, I'm getting done what I used to get done in five days.

I mean, how do you not love it?

Yeah, no, when you break it down like that, that's incredible.

Yeah, I think, yeah, it gets a lot of hate, especially in the entertainment industry, because people are fearful that it will take jobs away.

Yeah, well, it takes jobs away at one end, then it creates jobs on another.

There's a lot.

I did a lot of work with when the strikes were on.

Yeah.

The Writers Guild and SAG.

So I work with writers in

the writers over 50 in Hollywood don't get work.

They're heavily discriminated against.

Really?

But I took 10 writers

and trained them in how you prompt.

So when the strikes finally got settled,

everybody was like, now, okay, there are rules for how you

employ AI related.

So all of a sudden, the writers over 50 were the only ones who really knew how to use all the AI tools and stuff, and they found themselves working more than ever.

Nice.

Yeah, because AI can probably come up with some crazy scripts.

Yeah.

At the end of the day, it's still storytelling.

You have to be a storyteller.

I mean, I don't care what platform you're producing for, you're telling a story.

And these guys were fabulous.

It's just they were, you know, the Oscars and Emmys and Golden Globes and stuff.

But yet once you hit 30, 50 years old in Hollywood, they kind of put you out the pasture.

But now they're bringing them back because they know how to use

the tools that are now available.

Yeah.

What are the next trends you're seeing coming up out of Hollywood?

Do you think the live streaming thing is going to last?

Yeah, I think live streaming is good.

I think, you know, the international markets still have a lot of room to grow.

I mean, everything, you know, Netflix is now doing local stuff all over the world and

showing that the economics works.

So you're now seeing the other guys follow.

I'm a...

a big believer in AI being able to bring the prices down so that more talented people can get involved because the entry points are much cheaper to get in.

I'm also a big fan of holograms.

Holograms.

Yeah.

Using holograms, maybe not so much for entertainment, although there's some great applications in entertainment, but I think it's a huge opportunity for education to be able to take the best teacher of whatever subject in the world and beam them all over the world and combine it with AI so they can speak any language and stuff.

It kind of levels the field of playing of education all over.

Yeah, that's cool.

I didn't even think about it that way.

I've heard about potentially AI actors in the future.

Have you seen that?

Yeah, yeah.

People talk about AI being new and stuff.

We've been using

this kind of stuff for years.

Maybe not calling it generative AI, but

you know, backgrounds and stuff.

I mean, we've been using digital technology for a long time.

So for me, it's not really a big change.

You know, the problem that everybody goes through, they think that,

you know, you're going to take people's likeness and put them in other movies and stuff.

And that's not going to happen because there's a body of law that prevents it from happening.

And, you know, just like in anything, if there are consequences for doing bad things,

people tend not to do it.

And then there's a way to fix it if somebody does do it.

So, you know, you can't take a shooter movie with Tom Cruise and then put them in a porn movie next.

I mean,

there's, there's laws and contracts and stuff.

There's a body of work there that protects that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Have you seen the human attention span is dropping?

Yeah.

Shorter than a goldfish now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But if you're, if you're in the storytelling business and you pay attention to where the world is going and you get your ego out of the way, I mean, I don't think of myself as a filmmaker or a TV guy.

I'm a storyteller.

And if you want stories in 15-second chunks,

I'll do those.

I mean, I'm doing a lot of stuff.

I do a lot of stuff out of the country.

I do a lot of stuff in China.

And we've been doing movies that we break up into,

you know, a 90-minute movie, we break into 45 different two-minute segments.

Oh, wow.

And it's interesting because we give you the first 10 segments for free, but then you're hooked on the movie.

So then you pay like the equivalent of a dollar for that next 35

interesting stuff.

So the the economics are really good but how you tell those stories is interesting it we employ people who are very good at writing soap operas because soap operas are actually written in two-minute story arcs so it lends itself to that you you're going to see it huge here you've got new companies here called real shorts and stuff like that they're already doing it yeah it'll catch on most of my views are from shorts yeah yeah one-minute videos yeah i get way more there than my full episodes yeah it's just a new era right uh you know however people want to consume it, you know, I don't care.

It can make a difference to me.

What made you want to focus on China?

That's an interesting approach.

I was still at E, I started doing a lot of stuff in Russia.

And, you know, for me, it was, I was cracking up going, yeah, I'm in Russia doing TV, which is weird.

But I ended up starting

a concert series that we raised money for the children's hospital and the orphanage in St.

Petersburg.

and um

i would work with the vice mayor of st petersburg on putting these concerts together and uh the vice mayor is a guy named vladimir putin and uh

you know so when putin kind of went up the ladder um and ended up in the kremlin he asked me to work with his um minister of communications to rewrite regulatory policy for media uh saying western marketers are going to come in here and they're going to want stuff that looks a little bit familiar.

So I worked with the Russians on that.

And some years later, the Chinese realized that they needed to do media reform too.

They liked the Russian model.

They went to the Russians.

The Russians sent them to me.

So I started helping them with media reform.

Then they asked me to work with young TV executives.

I'll put quotes around this, teaching them the process of creativity for profit.

Because when you worked in the 100% communist system, if you knew the right guy in the party, you just did whatever you want.

So I started doing stuff there.

And we have a pretty robust company there in China now.

We do TV, film, internet content.

We do a lot of immersive stuff in China, which is great because

we get to try stuff in China that we then can apply to U.S.

markets.

Like we own in China, we've been doing, oh, excuse me, immersive Van Gogh and Klimp and 100 years of Disney animation.

That's cool.

Yeah, I think that could be the future.

Immersive content, like virtual reality.

Yeah.

It's all, it started in this country.

It really started, took off with Van Gogh and stuff, which was so out, you know, it's only four years ago, but it's so outdated.

Yeah.

The technology is shot by it.

Now, when you combine it with

live experiences, with AI,

it's gotten real sophisticated.

We just actually bought for China.

We're doing Shrek the Musical

And so we do the Harlem Global Charters there.

We do quite a lot there.

Oh, that's cool.

I didn't know Shrek was big out in China.

Yeah.

Well, a lot of American media,

it's very weird.

It's a very strange market.

People don't realize there are actually more people in China who speak English than speak English in the U.S.

Wow.

Because when they started, when they won the Olympics for 08,

they went on this real tear for like 10 years of teaching making it mandatory in school.

So now you have 400 million English speakers in China, which is more than the population in the U.S.

That's impressive.

Yeah, it's interesting to see like what trends stick and what don't.

I remember when 3D came out, people were excited, that kind of flop.

Same with 4D, right?

Yeah.

Well, people get they get enamored with technology and they overdo it.

Yeah.

There's a place for that sometimes.

But, you know, for the most part, it really falls back to storytelling.

Is the story going to hold people's interest over time?

You can dazzle them with special effects to a degree, but it wears off.

You still need good content at the end of the day.

Yeah.

That's why Squid Games crushes it, man.

I love Squid Games.

The storytelling is like, I don't even know what's going to happen next season.

No, Squid Games is one of my favorites and stuff.

And you just look at it.

I mean,

some of the stuff that's popped up there, yeah, I loved Wednesday.

That's a good one, too.

Yeah.

There's just so much good stuff out there

who's your favorite storyteller director of all time um

probably spielberg nice yeah it's hard to beat him right yeah it's hard to beat spielberg i just saw who was on rogan recently uh tarantino yeah yeah that was a great episode

it's good but he he's he's missed a few that i didn't really love but yeah

mainly tarantino is great i think when you're doing so many it's hard to deliver on all of them right yeah Because you're distracted.

I mean, how many films has he done at this point?

Probably like 40, 50?

No, he's done actually a lot less.

Oh, really?

Seems like he's done more, but no, it's a lot less.

And I think he said that he's done.

Oh, he's not doing it anymore.

Wow.

Because I just saw Kill Bill for the first time.

Oh, really?

That was his third one, right?

Yeah.

So I just assumed by now he'd be at 40 or something.

No, no, no, no.

He's down in the low teens, I think.

Oh, wow.

So he's very selective.

Yeah.

I actually like that, though.

Yeah.

You know, Because then you take pride in your work.

Yeah.

No, he's, he's really, I like him.

But I think just overall, if I, you know, I look at things like Shindler's list and stuff, and you know, I'm just like, you know, you go back to Jaws and stuff.

Spielberg was amazing.

Yeah.

What's your favorite era of movies?

Do you like the recent stuff or do you like the older stuff?

I think I like the recent stuff.

Okay.

And,

you know, there's my favorite film actually was something that in the early 80s.

And

the original Blade Runner.

I haven't seen the original one, I think.

I saw the new one.

Yeah, the new one was okay, but the original was just okay.

I gotta watch that then.

And

there's just a lot of good stuff happening.

I mean, I find stuff on TikTok that I think gives me as much enjoyment as watching a good movie.

Yeah.

I'm addicted to this one show now.

It's called The Traitors.

Oh, no, I'm not.

You haven't heard of that?

Oh, man.

Did you watch Survivor at all?

So it's like Boston Rob and a few other survivors.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it's reality.

Yeah.

You guys started reality TV, right?

Yeah.

How you got out there at first?

Yeah, we were the ones who started

E.

Hollywood True Story, Wild on E, Howard Stern.

Probably the one that really started the whole thing was Talk Soup.

Wow.

You know, which you go back to those shows and they really are examples of like necessity is the mother of invention.

We had no money.

So we had to be really creative and inventive.

I mean, Talk Soup was, you know, I had Greg Kinnear and it said, Greg, stand in front of the TV screen.

We're going to show you clips.

Make fun of them.

And, you know, people looking at me going, Larry, you want to do a TV show that makes fun of TV shows?

I'm like, yeah, exactly.

You know,

my thing has always been Hollywood is funny stuff.

Don't try and make believe it's rocket science.

Just have a good time.

Yeah.

I mean, look at the top shows like Tosh Pointo, Ridiculousness.

They're just reacting to videos.

Even all the late-night talk shows are just reacting to clips.

Yeah,

that's reactive to clip.

I got a late night talk show that I'm going to do.

It comes out in June.

I just have this thing that post-COVID,

I think the world wants some positive stories to go to bed with.

You watch the talk shows.

Number one, it's all guys.

All guys.

Except for Taylor Tomlinson.

Yeah.

Which they try to turn.

I love Taylor, but they've turned her into a guy.

It's the same show.

You know, sit behind behind a desk and whatever.

And they're all promotional.

So it's promotional and they get political.

Yeah.

It's kind of weird.

Oh, Tom Cruise, tell me about your next movie.

You know, I'm bored with that.

But I found this gal, she's from the UK.

Eight years ago, she was a single mom,

homeless in the UK.

You cut to eight years later, she's living in Bel Air.

She's life coaching Will I am and Steve Ayoki.

Wow.

Wait, is that Natasha?

Natasha.

Yeah, she's been on the show.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So I'm doing a talk show with Natasha.

She's got a great personality.

Yeah, she's one of a kind.

Most people don't realize what go into

doing a show ethic-wise.

They think just because their personality is good, they don't get that you're going to basically dedicate your life to right.

They treat it half-assed, yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we're doing a Natasha, and I shot a pilot with her.

And we shot a pilot actually in a nightclub in LA.

And, you know, we had, I had Batch on, you know, who's a big mind star.

Yeah, Yeah, King Batch.

Yeah.

Gigi Gorgeous, who's trans, and some people from selling Sunset.

So play, it's really cool.

Nice.

And it's more about, it's very Natasha.

It's more about

motivation, inspiration, and stuff.

She's not doing the tell me about your next movie stuff.

Yeah, I hate that stuff, dude.

There's no substance.

No, and it nobody watches it and they wonder why the ratings are down.

And, you know, I mean, I'm doing a podcast show now

that's all about women's empowerment.

Nice.

It's like women of four different generations that

they'll talk about a subject.

And you kind of could hear the difference between what their take is on different subjects.

But yet there's this underlying camaraderie and love among women that I don't think guys necessarily share.

We're not as emotional.

No.

And,

you know, it looks,

you know, it looks great.

I shoot it like a TV show,

shooting it for camera, 4K.

And actually, it's good lighting and good sound and stuff.

And when I talk to networks about doing stuff, they go, oh, women under 40 don't watch TV.

And I'm like, well, did you ever think maybe it's because you don't put anything on that they might want to watch?

And they just like look at me like, you know, like, what's wrong with you?

Yeah.

There's definitely a market, though.

I mean, Orange is the New Black crushed it.

That was probably a huge woman audience.

Wednesday was probably mostly woman.

Stranger Things had a big woman audience.

So there's shows that can cater towards that for sure.

Um, yeah, you must have witnessed a lot of discrimination in your industry, right?

Oh, yeah, especially towards women, yeah, especially towards women.

So, this one is actually interesting.

I've always been fascinated with this thing: you go out to dinner with a few couples, and one woman says, I got to go to the restroom, and they all get up and go.

And the guys are sitting there going, Where are they?

What are they doing in there?

But it's really a metaphor for that camaraderie among women.

So, we've got, you know, from a boomer down to a Gen Z soon to have to add an alpha.

And it's just interesting to hear the different take they have.

And it's getting

80% of the audience is women.

Yeah.

At least early stuff.

And

under 40, heavy under 40.

Well, shout out to Nikki Glazer because she's been crushing it.

I love Nikki.

With the award shows, she's bringing those back because no one watched those.

No one watched those.

No, but now she's like roasting everyone and it's hilarious.

Yeah, no, she, I, she's done good.

The Brady one was interesting.

I would have done Brady.

I thought they did it too traditional.

I mean, you had Nikki.

I mean, you could do so much cool stuff.

Yeah, they had to run by all their jokes beforehand and stuff.

But it was at least a start in the right direction.

Yeah, no, I love Nikki Glazer.

Yeah, I think she just did the Grammy.

She just did the NFL honors yesterday.

She's been on a tear.

Shout out to Nikki.

And then the other one,

you know, if they

if it wasn't run by all guys in the old traditional ways, I mean, Taylor Tomlinson is, if you ever seen a stand-up, she's brilliant.

She's solid.

But they're just like reining her in and letting her be Taylor.

Times are changing, man.

I think the Emmys were last week, or was it the Grammys?

One of those

Grammys.

And they actually invited a few streamers, and the streamers were getting more views on their live Twitch stream than their network was.

Crazy, right?

Yeah.

You know, it's

the world has changed and the way people view has changed.

And if you want to be a storyteller, you got to

go where the viewers are going and the the devices they want to watch stuff on.

Yeah.

And the markets like you're doing.

Because going international,

that's a very unique strategy.

Yeah.

In China, when we do shows in China,

it's

like 70% of the people who watch our stuff watch it on a cell phone.

So we actually shoot it different.

Wow.

Because

normally for televi if you're shooting for like television, you do your final edit on a 55-inch T V set.

We do our final edit on an iPhone.

Holy crap, that's crazy.

That's the way most people are going to watch it.

Yeah.

So you're doing a lot of,

you know, you're not doing a lot of long shots.

You're not doing twos and threes.

You're doing ones and twos.

Yeah.

TikTok's big over there, right?

Yeah, TikTok is huge there.

We do some consulting to Byte Dance.

We kind of help them with the whole storytelling strategy and how you monetize that.

I mean, we've been able to monetize stuff there so differently.

We actually bought the rights to Gossip Girl.

Oh, I used to love that show.

So we redid it instead of Spoiled Rich Girls in New York, Spoiled Rich Girls in Shanghai.

Oh, it's kind of like Crazy Rich Asians, that movie?

No, Crazy Rich Asians was really people, I got in trouble for saying that it'll never play well in China because

they were going, oh, it's all Asian caste and whatever.

First of all, it's Singaporean.

There's a huge, we think of like Asians.

There's a huge difference between Singaporeans and native, mainland Chinese people.

But

we were fascinated with that show because we never saw anything that was an entire Asian cast.

So people are saying, oh, it's going to do amazing in China.

And I'm like, no, it's not.

I said, they watch TV all day long, but that's all Asian.

All their movies are all Asian.

It's not going to be anything new to them.

And it flopped terribly.

Gossip Girl flopped?

No, crazy reports.

Oh, it did.

Wow.

Gossip Girl, again, the English version did really well because you have so many people that speak English.

So we redid it Spoiler's Girls in Shanghai.

But what we were able to do there, one of the girls wears great shoes.

So we go, oh, those are great shoes.

Where'd you get them?

I get them on sparkle.com.

A couple episodes later going, oh, another pair of great shoes.

So we actually owned sparkle.com.

And on the production budget, we had a shoe designer.

So we actually started shoe at a month club.

So if you signed up, we knew your size.

We knew your address.

We had your credit card.

So we'd send you an email going, here's next month's selection.

Here's the two alternatives.

Which one do you want?

Brilliant.

So we actually made more money selling shoes than we made on selling the TV show.

That's brilliant.

But that's the future, man.

I'm seeing these live shopping numbers.

I got a couple buddies making tens of millions with live shopping.

It's, you know, if you put it in the right context and stuff and you don't offend people by like throwing it in their face

and, you know, and you have experts.

Gossip Girl is the number one driver of fashion choices among women under 40 years old in China.

Holy crap.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of influence in these shows if kind of marketed in the right angle.

Yeah, people don't realize they don't really dig into stuff.

I mean, they have their propaganda.

We have our propaganda.

But I mean, I'll give you another silly statistic because I love silly.

In China, there are more people that are fans of Gossip Girl than there are members of the Communist Party.

Whoa.

Think about that one.

That's nuts.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of,

I guess, narrative around how China and the United States have beef.

Yeah.

But you're over there, so you're not really seeing that?

You see it at the government level once in a while.

It does curtail stuff.

But no, you know,

we're pretty non-political, not pretty non-political, totally not.

We're not there to change their government, to change their life.

We're there to make people smile and laugh and stuff.

So they've been very good with us.

We've had really no problems.

That's cool.

I'm half Chinese, so that's cool to cool to hear that, honestly.

Yeah, no, it's it's

and there's a great difference between people and government, right?

You got to separate the two because a lot of people lump them together, right?

Yeah, and you know, the our company in China, everybody,

well, I'm by far the oldest, they own, I'm the only non-Chinese person in the company there.

Wow, and um,

uh,

we picked the people the way we ended up building the company, and it was a great, it was a good thing we did.

We would get people out of colleges here,

but you had to be born in mainland China.

You had to want to return to China.

So, we give them intern jobs, then we give them regular jobs, but then they had to go back to China.

So, in our company in China, everybody has been educated in the West.

So, they're not just bilingual, bicultural, which really helps because they understand, you know, best practices and stuff.

So, we've been really successful there with a lot of shows.

Yeah, that's smart.

Do you do you speak Mandarin now?

I

try.

It's hard.

It's a Brooklyn accent.

It's like not, it's not a pretty language.

It's one of the toughest languages, apparently.

So hard because when I was in Russia, I learned to speak Russian because it kind of follows the rules of like Latin.

Yeah.

So there's like

letters make words, words make sentences, sentences make paragraphs.

In China, it's symbols.

And, you know, in simple

Mandarin, Mandarin, in simple, there's 4,000 symbols.

So, you know, once you're past like five years old, you're not learning 4,000 symbols.

Plus the words can have different meanings.

And then you have the tones.

Yeah.

So we always think Chinese sounds funny because it's very tonal.

It's almost like singing.

There are four tones for every symbol.

So that's 16,000.

you're 4,000 times four and stuff.

And no, I get it wrong a lot.

uh

um what keeps you going, man?

Because you could have retired a long ass time ago, yeah.

But you know, I people say that I go, but like, what would I do?

Um, I wake up every morning with 10 new ideas.

Uh, I'm pretty good at self-assessing.

By the time I go to sleep, I realize that probably all 10 would dopey.

Every once in a while, I'll have a good one.

So, you're like the visionary of the company?

Um, yeah, I like digging in, though.

I like, you know, doing stuff, but I'm smart enough to let the the people that are going to be closer to the audience have a big say.

I mean, like in the podcast, I totally am hands off.

It's 100% women who work there, and they run the whole thing.

I say what my role is these days now, it's like I'm a bodyguard.

Like I'll let them shoot themselves in the foot, but if they're going to shoot themselves in the head, I'll step in.

Got it.

More like an advisory position these days.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Are you optimistic about podcasts, the podcast space?

Yeah, I love the podcast space because it really does.

It lets you hone in on like niche audiences, but at a much smaller level.

I mean, even, you know, you had broadcasts there and you needed millions of people to make economic sense.

Then cable

was a few hundred thousand.

Now with podcasts, you don't need huge numbers.

So you could really focus on things that people are passionate about and really be authentic and true to that.

And I use the term super serve.

Yeah.

So that whatever the, you know, the love is or the passion is, you could really serve them.

I mean, like when we're doing stall talk, people are going, can't believe we're finally seeing that.

And the reason you're seeing it is because it's very inexpensive

to put a podcast up.

Yeah, it's only a few thousand, you know?

Yeah.

You could start on iPhones.

That's how I started.

Used iPhones.

refurbished iPhones.

We're down in the low thousands and stuff.

And you could just say, you know what?

This thing may only appeal to 10,000 people but the numbers still work which is fine i know shows that only get a couple hundred views but they're making a living because it's such a targeted niche that a couple hundred views can make six figures absolutely yeah so i think people need to stop obsessing over the numbers yeah no and i love it because there's no gatekeepers i mean for me it's always been weird because people well up until fairly recently people go like what's wrong with that guy he must be on drugs now i've kind of moved to the point where i'm a visionary i'm still the same person and stuff but

there's no gatekeepers here.

So I could do whatever I want.

I don't have to ask anybody for permission.

And if it works, great.

And if it doesn't work, you didn't lose a lot.

Yeah, because you dealt with gatekeepers your whole life in the entertainment industry.

I hear about these nightmare stories, right?

Yeah.

You got to give me this amount of money or you got to do me this favor.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, now I'm looking at doing something.

Some folks from the armed forces have asked me to create something for

a military suicide.

Wow.

um

for the people that are involved with people that have committed suicide or contemplating it um

and uh you know all the mental health issues are are just amazing and they won't tackle them because advertisers don't want to be next to them on on broadcast television yeah but on a podcast you can do it yeah and i know certain topics if you try to pitch them the networks they'll deny you yeah oh yeah you know yeah they don't want to do it because because they're they need a certain number of viewers in order to justify the production cost, right?

And then they got to get sponsors.

So if they don't think the sponsors are going to be happy rubbing up next to whatever the subject matter is, I mean, military suicide is not a happy subject.

Yeah, not at all.

And big pharma would drop out about it.

They wouldn't sponsor that.

So, yeah, but you know, do it as a podcast.

You can make a work.

At the end of the day,

things have to be financially sustainable.

Right.

Because we all have to eat and pay the rent and do that.

And if we can't sustain it economically, eventually we can't continue to do it.

I saw Netflix allegedly made a billion off Squid Game.

Did you see that?

Yeah.

That's crazy.

How does that work?

Because it gets a ton of views, but there's no ads if you have the Netflix premium.

Yeah, but it's been so well that if you just look at the way their subscriber level jumped.

So in those kind of services, you got two things.

It's how many new subscribers.

And then you also measure your drop-off.

You say, okay, there's a normal drop-off of X percent per button and stuff.

And if you could impact, it's really cheap to save someone.

It's much cheaper than having to find a new subscriber

and stuff.

So they love it.

I mean, when you started Squid Games, you could never think of like dropping Netflix.

Yeah.

Beast Games was brilliant too, because I heard they lost money on the front end, but because people are becoming Amazon Prime customers and they're they're buying stuff, they're going to make all of that back.

Yeah,

it's interesting.

The way that Netflix evaluates

or finds the value in something is different than Amazon.

I mean, Netflix really is more of a traditional, you know, as the audience and stuff.

Amazon is, is that the show going to drive people to stick with Amazon as a buying service and stuff?

So their measurement is different.

Yeah.

And you were saying how you're incorporating shopping now too.

So that might be where future shows go towards, right?

Absolutely.

You know, and again, if you don't stick it in people's base and it's relevant to what the content was,

it works.

People are not offended by it, they welcome it.

Yeah, I mean, I could see it.

So many people dressed up as like Squid Game for Halloween and stuff, bought merch.

Yeah, I got a Squid Games customer.

Oh, yeah, you do.

I love it, man.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a fun thing to be.

Larry, it's been really cool getting to know your world, man.

Where can people find your book and keep up with you?

The book's on Amazon.

It's called Off Script.

And

you can always find.

I actually answer all my own email.

I actually do my Facebook page as a food blog.

But LJN at LJN Media,

I have this thing that I never go to sleep without answering all my email.

Wow.

But if you call me on the cell phone, it may take days for me to call you back.

Old school.

Good old email, man.

Yeah.

All right.

We'll link your email below if anyone has any questions.

Is that cool?

Yeah.

No, that's great.

Awesome.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Check out his stuff, and I'll see you next time.