229 - Revolutionizing Creativity: The AI Impact on Entertainment with LJN Media's Larry Namer

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Larry Amer, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are— your company is called LGN Media, which can be found at lgnmedia.com. And what's really fascinating to me is that among all the many other successes you've had. You were the founder of the E! Entertainment television company that has been fabulously successful and the president and CEO of a company called Metta Global Entertainment Group, which is producing media for not just for English speakers, but for the Chinese market and other markets as well. Absolutely mind-blowing stuff. So this is going to be a great conversation. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to be with me.

Sure. Yeah. It's L-J-N, right? L as in, and then John. So, okay.

Ljnmedia.com.

Yeah, that's it.

So, so tell me about your backstory. How did you get into all of this stuff?

Uh, let's see. I grew up in, in Brooklyn, New York before it was trendy Brooklyn. Um, actually they, I grew up in Coney Island, which is still There's still a hood. Parents were recent immigrant stock and their aspiration for their children was to get a civil service job and retire at 65 with a pension and all of that. But for whatever reason, I didn't listen. And, but I graduated. I was the first kid in the family to go to college. I didn't get into Dartmouth, but I did get into Brooklyn College.

Oh, there you go.

And I graduated from there and with an economics degree, but unfortunately The city of New York was not hiring teachers. I thought I would become a teacher of economics or history. And so I took what I thought would be a temporary job with something called Sterling Manhattan Cable Television when nobody knew what cable television was and nobody was quite sure anybody would actually ever pay for television. There were only 3 networks at the time, ABC, NBC, CBS. And they gave me a job as a an assistant underground splicer for $90 a week. So I got to go under the streets of New York and put the wires together. And yeah, I just thought I would do it until I figured out what I do with the economics degree. But I, somebody noticed, they said, hey kid, how do you know how to use all the equipment so quick? It usually takes us 2 years to train someone and you're here 2 weeks and using all the equipment. And I said, it's real simple. I read the instruction booklet. So I rose through the ranks there from assistant splicer to installer to service tech, blah, blah, blah. And then the company got bought by Time Incorporated when Time was just still a publishing company, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, et cetera. And so I was in the union, I was in the electricians union, and they were negotiating their new contract. And they said, hey, you got good education, why don't you be on the negotiating committee. So I did. And after the negotiating of the contract, they actually made me the vice chairman of the cable TV workers division. I was all of 23 years old and I was a union leader. And but I got to interface a lot with all the, the Harvard and the Yalies and stuff like that. And then they kept saying, hey, you got to come into management. And I'm like, no, I'm not doing that. Until finally they wore me down. And I went into management and rose to being the head of— I was the director of operations. I think I was 25 and all the technical operations reported to me, even though I don't really have a tech background. And then I became the head of corporate development in charge of trying to figure out new uses of cable television other than just entertainment channels. This is all pre-internet. And we were doing remote medical diagnostics and moving data between computers in uptown Manhattan to downtown Manhattan. And then all of a sudden the, the big cities began to, to franchise cable television. Everybody realized they wanted it, but they wanted it to go underground. The only person in the country who knew how to build underground was me. At the ripe old age of 30, I got recruited to come out to California and, and build the first 61-channel two-way cable system. Ever built. And I got cornered into doing that. I wasn't thrilled with it at first, but when they asked me what I would want to do it, I named 4 times my salary and they told me I was crazy. But 3 weeks later they called back and said, how fast could you be here? So I came out, I built Valley Cable in Los Angeles, the first 61-channel two-way system. Forbes magazine named it the national model for cable programming in the country. Because we were doing a lot of innovative stuff. And here was my first opportunity. I got involved beyond just the technical. I got involved in the programming, the marketing, the finance, et cetera. And but as a Brooklyn kid, you come out to LA and everybody you know is in the entertainment business. They're going to the parties and the premieres and all of that. And so I called the studios and said, hey, put me on those lists. And they said, nah, you're like in the utility business. You're like the gas company. No. And then I said to him, I said, okay, look, the most valuable marketing tool you have are movie trailers. And the only time I ever see a movie trailer is when I'm in the movies. I said, isn't that kind of like backwards? Don't you want me to see it while I'm in my house to make me want to go to the movies? And they said, we really can't afford to buy 2 minutes of time on television. So I said, you know what? Give me the trailers. I'll put them on TV for free. And just put me on those lists. And they said, yeah, okay. But when we started doing market surveys, what, what's your favorite channel? People would say, oh, I love ESPN. I love CNN. I love that trailer channel. And the light bulb went off in my head and I went, wait a second. I get the best 2 minutes of a $50 million movie. Then they were only 50. And people say it's one of their favorite channels. So that kind of stuck with me, but then. The company that I worked for was actually from Toronto and they sold out and said, hey, okay, come back to Toronto with us. And I went, uh, I didn't go from New York to LA to go to Toronto. I said, I'm done with gold. And so a friend of mine, Alan Marovka, and I, we just started kicking around ideas. We said, let's come up with an idea to keep me in, in on the West Coast. And at that time we were still doing music videos. They had video jocks and stuff, and they would stand in front of a green screen again and say, hey, Madonna has a new video, and they'd point to the screen and there would be Madonna's video. And I said, wait a second, why can't we do, and Schwarzenegger has a new movie, and point to the green screen and show the trailer of Schwarzenegger's new movie. So we thought we had a brilliant idea. We wrote a business plan and that time nobody, no people, individuals have ever started TV channels. They wasn't then and still has— there's still only been one instance of it ever happening. And we wrote the plan and we thought it was brilliant. And we went around to people saying, eh, it's a good idea, but you're not Rupert Murdoch and you're not Ted Turner and you're not Time Warner and we're not giving you any money. At that time, the going rate was $60 to $100 million to start a TV network. After 3 and a half years, we realized nobody's giving us that money. So we ended up, somebody introduced us to a guy on Wall Street who, he worked for Bond House and they just started investment banking and they sent us in there. And when we went in, he had movie posters on his wall, uh, which we thought was odd. And we said, he said, oh, I love this. I used to be the entertainment reporter for my college newspaper and, and stuff. We said, great, do it. And he said, yeah, I says, I'm definitely gonna do it. He goes, but I'm only allowed to sign for $2.5 million. And we said, what do you mean? You can't start a TV network with 2.5. And he said, that's all I could sign for. Anyway, Alan and I just said, you know what? We're smart enough. We'll figure it out. We took the 2.5. I had a friend teaching radio, television, film in University of Texas in Austin. And I called him up and said, hey Brian, you got a bunch of kids who need intern jobs? And he said, yeah, we had trouble placing. I got a whole bunch. I said, send them all. We rented apartments and bought mattresses and he sent us 31 kids and E! started with 11 employees and 31 interns.

Wow.

So it's, it's quite, it's the, the VCs love us because we turned that company. I think it's now valued at $5 point something billion and stuff like that. But that's how E! started. Just shows when sometimes when you get pressed, you, you're forced to be innovative and come up with new good ideas and ways of doing things.

So how do you take the E! Entertainment company and make it so successful? What was, it was a combination, I'm sure it was some programming genius that you thought about. What differentiated you from everybody else?

Again, we had very limited resources. We realized that we were not gonna dazzle people with fancy production or anything like that. As a matter of fact, we couldn't even afford to buy broadcast equipment. We bought actually old corporate equipment and used that. And, but it, it was interesting because it looked very pirate and the audience that would watch it were going, Hey, we feel like we're the fly on the wall watching something we're not supposed to. And so it had that very pirate feel. And again, necessity, because we didn't have a lot of money. We said, what's— what could we bring that would be of most value here? And everybody says to us, they go, oh, you're so lucky you had all those great hosts at the beginning. We weren't lucky. We realized that's the only thing we had to spend. The only money we had to spend. To get the first 5 hosts, we actually interviewed almost 10,000 people and we put 7,000 on tape. Back then we used tape, not— we're not digital, it was pre-digital. But yeah, we realized that was gonna be the thing that we had that we do. So love 'em or hate 'em, we pick hosts that people just felt something for. You watched them and you did it. And then most, they were all pretty lovable and some great hosts there. And so, you know, we started with that and people loved the hosts. And again, these were not hosts that were known television personalities. We picked people, you know, in a very odd way. And, but then the first breakthrough show was a simple one. And we came up with this idea. We had Greg Kinnear, you know, went on to winning Oscars and stuff like that. And this was Greg's first job. And we stood him in front of a TV monitor and We said, okay, Greg, we're gonna show you TV shows, the talk shows that were on at that time, and we're gonna do commentary on what's on the other TV shows. And everybody said, Larry, that's like a crazy idea. You can't do a TV show that makes fun of TV shows. And I'm going, I don't understand why we can't do that. And we did it and people laughed and they told us it was a really dumb idea, but the show ran 26 years, so it wasn't such a bad idea. That was the first breakthrough. But what we did, which really helped us grow in many ways, is we wouldn't sell the advertising within that show. It was a very popular show. People just loved it. And we would use that show to put the ads in to promote the other things on the network. So we drove them into the funnel that way and then said, hey, look at all this other cool stuff you can watch. And so it was basically free advertising for us. So if you look at the original formula, it's funny to think back, we were getting the best 2 minutes of a $50 million movie for free. We were standing someone in front of a green screen. We would capture the audience data saying, okay, look how popular this stuff is. Then we would actually go to the advertising department in the studios and we would sell them advertising around the content that they gave us for free. It took them about 3 years to figure that out. But for a startup that only had $2.5 million when the going rate was $60 million, it got us revenue really early on because we had great numbers, but it was using their content that they gave us for free. And then they caught on and said, hey, wait a second, you can't keep doing that to us. And so we had to temper that down.

And today you've got this massive global media company that's into all kinds of things.

Yeah. E! is now in, I think it's 142 countries. Everybody talks about influencers. I think E! arguably is the greatest influencer in pop culture in the world. Clearly. I think if you took— somebody gave me this number and I never really checked it, but I think it's true that if you took the top 100 influencers of pop culture, And you add up the people they reach in any given day, they don't reach as many people as he does in any given day.

Are you still actively involved in E!

No, I consider myself a creative and the company grew so big so fast and I just said, hey, I'm gonna have somebody come in and run the day-to-day and I'm gonna go and start building the in— I was fascinated with international markets. I guess early on I started to see that the geography of the media business was changing dramatically. The geography and the technology, which kind of leads leads to where I am today. When Hollywood used to be a geographic place, you needed to make things in Hollywood. I said, you know what, it's not gonna— it's not that anymore, and it's not going to be that. There'll be less of that every day. That really Hollywood becomes a level of creativity, a measure of quality, and stuff like that. So it's more of a mindset than a geographic place, and I wanted to play in that world. So I went off and started doing international things in various places.

So here you are in 2024. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

I now have the luxury of being creative again. Again, with E!, it grew so big that I found myself doing budgets and board meetings and all of that stuff, which didn't fascinate me. But I wake up in the morning with 10 new ideas. I guess my real skill is I'm really good at self-assessing and I'm fairly egoless. By the time I go to sleep, I realize that probably the 10 were pretty dopey. Every once in a while I get a good one and stuff like that. But I think that's what differentiates me from a lot of entrepreneurs is I don't do the follow your passion thing because a lot of times people follow the passion and it goes on and on and doesn't result in anything. And they, What we all have is time. Time is finite. And I just realized that I got to spend my time on things that really have the possibility of becoming something and sustaining. That you can't just be creative. You got to create something that actually creates a revenue stream that will let you continue to do it. We all need to eat and pay the rent and do all of that stuff. So I'm not a follow your passion person.

So what is it that, I mean, you've alluded at this, but what do you think is unique about you that has made you so successful?

I choose to be an outlier. I stay out of the big media companies. I use this kind of as a joke, but I think of Rupert Murdoch as the devil. And whenever I come up with new ideas, and again, I mean that symbolically, I mean, he's not really the devil. I don't think, but I, but I just look at things and say, as an entrepreneur, what happens when the big companies or the big guys find out I'm doing it? Can they simply throw money at it and cover me? And basically I wasted a lot of time. So I really look at things and I say, how do I protect this so that by the time the big companies find out I'm doing it, that I have already taken the assets off the table.

E!

was a great example. When we did E!, I went to all the studios and said, "Hey, give me your movie trailers. I'll put them on TV." And they loved it. So I had all the studios signed up, but then I would go to the cable companies, the cable operators, and say, "Listen, I'm gonna promote the movies that are gonna end up on HBO and Showtime and therefore increase the viewership of those." which it's a proven fact that the more people consume pay TV, the more likely they tend to stay as cable subscribers. So then I signed all the cable companies up. So then when Ted Turner woke up and said, hey, I'm gonna start an entertainment news channel like that E! thing, and then the people who started Home Shopping Network. But by then I already had the studios on my side. I had the, the cable operators on my side. The game was over by the time they woke up. And I use that to continuously do it going, how do I— Rupert Murdoch, when he finds out I'm gonna do it, he could throw a lot more money at it than me. Can I protect the idea? And if I can't protect it, I don't do it. Right.

Interesting. One of the thoughts that popped in my head as I was listening to you is artificial intelligence. Where is that going in the entertainment business?

I'm a big artificial intelligence fan. I've been using it for quite a while on a daily basis when GPT came out, and still I use GPT-4 and Midjourney and all of those things. I, I'm a great believer that technology marches on whether you like it or not. I look at the music industry and said they, they fought digital music for 10 years, and by the time they realized that you can't fight it, you already had Spotify and iTunes and all these things that then they spent years trying to negotiate decent deals for themselves. If you go back, cavemen used to paint on the wall of caves with blood, and then somebody invented canvas and paint, and the cave guys weren't real happy with that. But you know what? Can't stop it. Horse ranchers weren't thrilled when somebody came out with cars. They wanted to still ride horses and buggies. But so it's going to happen. I think the The big issue with AI, there's no question that it, it could do amazingly good things. The big question is, when will our regulators and politicians really begin to understand it to the point where they can create some protections against people wanting to do bad things with it? An example, a 12-year-old kid who says, hey, I feel like driving, cannot just get in the car and drive. They gotta be 18 years old. They gotta take driver's education. They gotta take a test. They have to obey the rules of the road or they lose their right to drive. You're gonna need that for AI. There's so many positive things, but there's also the negative things, but there's no deterrence right now, right? That don't, that tell people you can't do bad things. It's, it, if, if I were to tell you, to do something bad. Hey, pick up that knife and stick the, your neighbor in the chest with it. You can't do it. Why? But I think we gotta examine why you can't do it. You gotta go back to, okay, you were born into a family, there were values instilled with you. You went to school. There are all these things that tell you, you can't just pick up a knife and stab your neighbor. AI avatars don't really come with any sense of morality. They don't really come with any sense of empathy. And stuff. So what do we need to do to take these AI models or these AI avatars and give them some sense of right or wrong? So at least they're, they, while they may do something bad, at least they gotta be aware that it would, if I do it, it's bad. So there's a lot of stuff that we need to inject into this model. I use AI. If somebody were to ask me to do a, can you write a scenario of a TV series about anything, it typically takes me 5 days, or it used to take me 5 days. Now, using GPT-4, it takes me 30 seconds, and I spend an hour cleaning it up. It's never 100%, but now in 1 hour, I'm doing what used to take me 5 days. I said, when I talk to people in the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild about this, I go, How do you not like this? I could either do more of it and make more money. I could spend more time with my grandkid. I could learn to speak Spanish. I could learn to cook Portuguese food. I, I, it helps me reclaim my time. And again, we're all living with this thing that we all have the same amount of time on this planet. So how do I maximize it to the point where I spend it on making me happy? And I think AI has a lot of that capability now. Again, you gotta figure out how to harness it. But if I could get paid the same amount for what used to take me 5 days and it takes me an hour, I love that.

I'm with you. Switching topics for a second, you mentioned the word empathy. How important in your career has empathy been? Empathy and the ability to listen to other people?

Incredibly important. I think everybody who, I mean, we just, had a great time at it. If you look at the people that have come out of there, we've created a dozen major hosts from Ryan Seacrest and Brooke Burke and, uh, then the Kardashians and stuff. So a lot of people did really well. People who worked there loved it because we just had this us against the world attitude there. Again, we had $2.5 million, not $100,000, and, uh, and we just bought the the powers that be and stuff. So there was this great communal effort and, and Alan and I, again, being regular people, not coming out of big corporations and stuff like that. Yeah. We, we just got along. We worked 12-hour days and we went out for drinks and we had a really good time. And it was really important for us to make sure that everybody worked there had a good time. 'Cause we couldn't pay 'em a lot, but we certainly could make 'em smile and laugh and stuff like that. But I think, you know, with COVID when I was doing a lot of stuff in Asia, I swore off doing stuff in the US for a while. And when COVID came, I said, I'm not going to go to China and quarantine because they want you to quarantine for 3 weeks in the Chinese hotel. So I started getting back into the US programming world and just about everything that I'm involved in really has a social good component to it. First one we did when coming back was financial wellness for millennials because kids don't really learn life skills in school and not just the how-to, it's the EQ and the IQ of financial stuff. And I know what tipped me at that, a woman came to us with that idea and at first I was like, ah, I don't know if that's, you know, if that's such a good idea. But then my daughter was getting married and came to me and said, hey dad, what's a prenup? And I'm like, how do you not know what a prenup is? Don't you know? Don't you learn anything in school? The fact is they don't. Sent her to the family lawyer and then she came back. She goes, okay, I understand what it is now, but how do I explain this to AJ, her soon-to-be husband, without him thinking that I'm not going into this marriage thinking it's forever? And I realized how much emotional stuff goes in there. And I think more than 50% of all the divorces in the US is some related to money somehow. So really, we were dealing with both. And then from there, we developed something called Conscious Parenting, which is all about trying to be a parent in today's complex world. Not that being a parent was ever simple, but it used to be a lot simpler when I was born. Of course, the saying then was children should be seen and not heard. Now it's like kids are people, you better treat 'em like that. But my mother took me home from the hospital and my grandmother lived upstairs. My aunt lived next door. So my mother had the proverbial village. Now these kids, they get married, they typically grow up, they don't know their grandparents. They go away to college, they get married. You have a baby in the morning, in the afternoon, and they hand it to you and they go, here you go. And you're like, what do I do with it? But then on the other end of that, you think, oh, I can't wait till they're 18 and they're out of the house and I'm done. Sad news. You're never done. You're the parent for the rest of your life. And now you have a school shooting, you have bullying, you have gender identity, ID issues. And this is the first generation of kids that realizes that most likely they're not gonna have a better life than their parents did. Um, when I grew up, it was a given. My parents were going to work 2 jobs, whatever, and they were going to give their kids a life that was better than theirs. It's not like that anymore. A lot of issues. So we did Conscious Parenting. We're doing something now. We're developing a series called Uncanceled, all about cancel culture, particularly in this country, which we, you know, without taking a position whether people are right or wrong, I think just We, the pendulum has swung too far. We're canceling things. And again, what did it— there's always one thing that kind of pushes me to say this is good. I grew up learning the music business by reading Rolling Stone magazine, John Wenner. And some months ago, 6 months ago, whatever, he said something racially insensitive and stupid. I looked at it and said, what, what's wrong with the guy? Even if he really believed it, why would you say that publicly? So he had to step down from media. But the other thing was they took him out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And I said, wait a second, this is America. People have the right to be stupid. You— how do you take him out of history? I don't ever have to buy his magazine again, read his magazine or anything he does. But he was part of the history of rock and roll. So we're doing something where basically it'll give people who have been canceled the opportunity to either tell their side of the story, maybe apologize for what they did, said, I didn't realize that, whatever, but they give them a platform, try and pull everything back a little more towards center. Yeah, these days are more about doing, doing stuff that has a social purpose.

I was gonna say that's the future for, for Larry Namer is doing social good and working. I've got a couple ideas. We'll, we'll talk after the show. I got some ideas. To throw at you.

Sure.

One more thing before I let you go. What's one thing about yourself, Larry, that we would never know about unless you reveal it?

Oh, if I didn't do this crazy TV stuff and film stuff and other entertainment, I would probably be a chef in a restaurant. I've been cooking since I'm 12. Both parents worked and the choice was learn how to cook or eat peanut butter and jelly for dinner every night. But literally since then, I've actually worked in the, in the Chinese restaurant. I've worked in an Italian restaurant because I could make more money than being a waiter. And literally I buy a cookbook every month and I, I cook the book. It's my replacement. It's, I don't, I've never done therapy because literally whenever I get stressed, I go in the kitchen and I cook. I could cook anything. And probably what people don't know, I actually had a TV show in China, a cooking show, which was loosely titled The White Boy Cooks Chinese Food.

Good for you, man. You are just a pleasure to talk with. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time.

Amazing.

Thank you for having me.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team.

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