Larry Namer - E! Founder | The Cable Splicer Who Launched Howard Stern & The Kardashians

We literally climbed over the fence. We snuck we're on the red carpet with our little beat up cameras. And when we started showing that, people would like, it looks like we were watching something we're not supposed to. And that's really what started the whole red carpet. Some people dream of building an empire while others actually do it. Larry Namer wasn't supposed to become a media mogul, a kid from Brooklyn who started as a cable repairman ended up creating one of the most influential entertainment brands in history. We had over a hundred rejections, one which even at the meeting, the guy literally threw the business plan on my head. At that time, starting a TV network was somewhere close to $100 million. The worst thing you could do is say to people, just imagine you've lost them. They can't imagine. This is Larry Namer, co-founder of E Entertainment Television, a pioneer who redefined how the world consumes media and a relentless entrepreneur who's never stopped building. This isn't just a story about television, it's about vision, resilience, and the courage to bet on yourself when no one else will. Once, Chad JBT became ubiquitous, now I'm getting done in one hour. What used to take me five days. As human beings, we all have a finite amount of time on this planet. The best thing we could do is use it efficiently or effectively. Find something you're good at, work your butt off, and become great at it. And then that will become your passion. So Larry, you went from splicing cables in Manhattan sewers for 90 bucks a week to building a $7 billion entertainment empire that spans 142 countries. You've had the number one TV show in Russia. You're the only American allowed to run media in China, and you created the Kardashian phenomenon. You've literally lived through the entire evolution of television. But what I found the most interesting, because I was listening to some of the shows that you've been on before, was that your real passion wasn't originally entertainment. So talk to me about this accidental discovery of entertainment and how you actually got into this game. Sure, I was the first kid in the family to ever go to college. I got a degree in economics. And I thought I would either become an economist or a teacher. And then I quickly found out that there weren't really jobs for either of those. So I had a friend whose dad was in the electrician's union is in New York City. And they said, oh, we just organized this thing. It's called cable TV. I'm not really sure what it is. But here's the name of the shop steward. Go see him, tell him the union sent you, and I'll give you some temporary job. So I did that and they gave me a job literally under the streets of Manhattan. So I was an assistant underground splicer for $90 a week. And so I thought I'd be there for a few months until I figured out what you'd do with this degree. But I started to like it and stuff. And very quickly, people were coming to me and saying, how did you learn how to use the equipment so quick? You know, usually takes people a year and you're doing it after a week. And it was very simple. I'm like, well, I read the instruction booklet. It wasn't rocket science. But I, you know, I went from assistant splicer to splicer. And then, you know, kind of moved up the ranks of the operation side. So being a construction guy, then an installer, then a service guy. And then what happened was time incorporated, which at that point was still a publishing company. They had made a decision that over 10 years, they were going to become a media company. This is pre-time Warner, way before time Warner. And so they bought Manhattan Cable. That was the company I worked for. So somebody in HR said, hey, you know, trying to figure out what it is these guys do. You know, they go on to the streets every day. They had all the Harvard and Yellies on one side. And then you had us on the other. And somebody in HR said, wait a second. There's a guy, you know, who does that, who's got an economics degree. Maybe. So I kind of became the translator between those two worlds, between that tech world building it and, you know, the Harvard and Yellies. And then after a while, guy that's a timing put it in his president, he got named Nick Nicholas, who later went on to become the chairman of time Warner after the merger. You know, he kept trying to get me to come into management. And then finally he convinced me. So I ended up, it was like really crazy. I was 25 years old. And I risen through the ranks of management becoming the director of operations of Manhattan Cable, which is because cable system in the country. And so I did that. And then kind of like 1980, all the big cities began to realize that cable was more than a more than the vehicle for good reception. And a lot of the big cities started issuing franchises to be built. And, but the one caveat that most of the big cities had was they didn't want the the wires to go on telephone poles because it was incredibly unsightly. They all wanted them to go underground. Well, you know, there's only one underground system built in the US then that was from Manhattan Cable. And I was the guy who was running operations. So I ended up getting recruited by a, it was actually a Canadian company, one the franchise for Los Angeles, to build the first 61 channel two way interactive cable system there was, but all on the ground. So I got recruited by that company. You know, they made me the proverbial offer you couldn't refuse literally paying me like four times what I was making in New York and rented me a house with a swimming pool and all of that stuff. And, you know, but you're, so we built that and I started. Now I had programming and marketing and finance reporting to me as long as all those other things. And, you know, you're a New York kid and all your neighbors in L.A. going to parties and premieres and hanging out with celebrities and stuff. And I'm like, hey, that looks really cool. I want to do that. And, you know, I called the studios and they go, no, no, no, you're a utility. You like the gas company and, you know, we're not putting you on the party list. So finally, I met a, somebody in marketing at one of the studios and I said, you know, I really don't understand this. The most effective marketing vehicle you have for a movie is the movie trailer. That two-minute thing that they always show before, you know, the movie. They said, but the only time I ever see the movie trailers when I'm already in the movies, I said, wouldn't you want me to see that while I'm at home to make me want to go to the movies? And they said, yeah, but, you know, it's too expensive to buy two minutes of TV time. So, you know, we don't do it. I said, great, you give me those trailers. I'll put them on TV for free and you put me on the list for, you know, all these movie screenings and stuff and they went, sure. So, you know, we did that and I hired a kid and literally we just looped them together for you. We did like an hour real of the movie trailers. But when we started doing market studies of the audience, you said, what's your favorite channel? And they go, oh, I love, you know, ESPN. I love CNN. I love that trailer channel. I'm going, wait a second. I'm getting the best two minutes of a $50 million movie. Then movies are only 50. And I get that for free and people telling me it's one of their favorite channels. And I kind of filed that in the back of my head. And then the company that I work for, the Canadian company, they had actually sold and they went back to Toronto. And they were like, okay, Larry, when are you coming up to Toronto? And I'm like, no, no, no. I said, I didn't go from New York to LA to go to Toronto. I said, I'm done with cold. I'm not doing that. So, a friend of mine, my friend Alan Marofka, who also from the East Coast, you know, we were talking and he was out there on, you know, project done. He had something to do with Francis Ford Coppola's studio. But he was more on the real estate side. And we said, you know, really like LA, let's think of something that will keep us out here. And he goes, yeah, I've been playing with this idea, you know, like entertainment tonight, 24 hours a day. And I went, wait a second. I said, you know, this is the time when MTV was actually showing music videos. And I said, you know, you have MTV puts a host in front of a green screen and they point to the screen and go and Madonna has a new video. I said, I could get all these movie trailers for free and people love it. And we'll send a host in front of a green screen and go in towards the mega has a new movie. So, we, you know, so basically we turned the idea to MTV of the movies. And, you know, we wrote a business plan. We thought we were really smart. And, you know, then it was before you actually did all this stuff digitally. So you actually had a business plan. It was like 200 pages and stuff. But we were a little naive at that point. Nobody, there's never been people, regular people that have actually ever started a TV network. You only big media companies do that. And that's kind of what we got. You know, people are going, you know what Larry, it's a good idea. But you're not Rupert Murdoch, you're not Time Warner and you're not Fox or Universal. You can't just start a TV network, you know. We weren't smart enough to listen. So we just kept going. But three and a half years later, we finally, we met this guy that was just took over investment banking for what was a bond house on Wall Street. And somebody we knew introduced us. Somebody of his time, we were beaten up. You know, we had over a hundred rejections. One was even at the meeting, the guy literally threw the business plan on my head and said, how dare you insult me with such a piece of junk. And we finally, we met this guy and we go in his office. And he's got movie posters on the wall. And he says, you know, he goes, I really love this. I want to do it. And I'm like, at that time, starting a TV network with somewhere close to a hundred million dollars, kind of low in with 60. But it's still very expensive. Yeah. And we, you know, because he had to rent satellites and all studio equipment was expensive. And we, he goes, I really want to do it. I said, well, great. Could you give us more like the hundred million. So we can do everything that we know we need to do. And he was like, no, no, no. He goes, I'm only a lot of sign for two and a half. And I'm like, what is that going to do? I said, you know, I can't even buy the cameras for two and a half million dollars. And he goes, well, let's all have my lot of sign for. And you know, Alan and I just said, you know what? Chances are nobody's hoping to give us 60 or a hundred million dollars. So we'll take the two and a half. And I had a, I had a friend who was teaching radio, television and film at a university of Texas in Austin. And I called him off and said, Brian, you know, do you have kids that need intern jobs? And he goes, yeah, we had a lot of trouble placing kids. And here I went, send them, send everyone you got. And, yeah, and people don't realize that, you know, because he is in 142 countries and valuation is, you know, crazy. Seven billion. And yeah, arguably he is now the number one influencer of pop culture in the world by far. And so we, so people assume that it's started with a big company. But it really started with me and Alan, 11 employees and including us. So nine employees plus me and Alan and 31 interns that University of Texas. As soon as we got on the air, everybody who came to us and said, oh my god, that's what you wanted to do. We were given you the money three years ago. And so, you know, we were an overnight success. And I think in the first year, we ended up expanding the 14 countries. And my friend Brian wanted to kill me because half of the kids, they started out as interns at the beginning of the summer. And by the end of the summer, half of them were vice presidents. We just grew so big, so quickly. And so it took off fast. It took off very fast when you got back to that. But it really taught me this lesson that when you're pitching something that people have never really seen or experienced or something to really compare it to, that the worst thing you could do is say to people, you know, you give them what's in your head by saying, well, just imagine, and that's it, you've lost them. They can't imagine. So it really gave us both really good lessons on learning how you pitch stuff and how you had to explain it because what we were thinking in our head clearly wasn't getting across to people until they saw it. So that was a good life lesson, actually. When you think about what made it so popular, what was the kind of programming that you figured out just hit that blew up, because I mean, like that, you blew up fast at the beginning, but then if you look at your other wins, I mean, talk soup, the Kardashians, Howard Stern. So you have an eye for this. I'm sure there's a lot that didn't work, but we can talk about the ones that did. What was the difference? Well, you know, we, well, first of all, the whole thing of celebrity reporting was incredibly stiff. It was things like entertainment tonight. So if you had a new movie, you would fight, forget 20 seconds on entertainment tonight. So it wasn't really in-depth coverage. And everything was done by big studios, the paramons and the Disney's and stuff. And it was very stiff and very corporate looking and very polished, because they could afford the $100 million. Or as because we didn't have a lot of money, we had to be very inventive. We didn't even have professional broadcast equipment we ended up finding some company that had like old equipment that they're using to make sales training tapes. So we bought that. But what happened was, and again, because Helen and I didn't come out of that Hollywood world. So we looked at a lot of stuff and go, well, Hollywood is funny stuff. Let's not make believe it's rocket science. So a lot of stuff looked very pirate, because again, we didn't have a lot of money. And you know, we didn't have the fancy cameras that he affects or the editing equipment and all that. And people would watch it and go, oh my god, I never thought I would see like a half-hour interview with my favorite director. Or now I learned about movie music, because we would do a, we would take these movie trailers and slice and dice them in like 20 different ways. So, you know, we would have movie music, we would have foreign film, we would have indie film. You know, we literally had every different kind of film and film-related person. And about again, it looked very pirate. But you know, one of the things that really I think broke us through was the first year we applied for credentials to go to the Academy Awards. And they rejected us. They basically said, well, you know, you're not really interesting to us. You're more like a utility. You like the gas company or the phone company. And they wouldn't give us credentials. And what happened was we literally, me and the crew, climbed over the fence. We snuck in, we were on the red carpet. And you know, then everybody was still doing the same old, so Mr. Cruz, tell us about your next movie. And you know, we were there like, we were like, well, we snuck in, we can't believe it. You know, hey, Tom, those are great shoes. Where'd you get those? So we were just asking the questions that really interested us. And, you know, and again, with our little beat-up cameras and stuff like that. And when we started showing that, people would like send us information, like letters and calls and go, wow, it looks like, you know, we were watching, we were flying the wall, watching something we're not supposed to. Well, the fact is they were, you know, we got caught and thrown out. But, you know, we had enough footage that we made good shows and people loved that. And that's really what started the whole red carpet, you know, thing. I mean, the way the carpet gets covered changed dramatically because of us. You know, and that led to things like Joan Rivers doing talk, you know, fashion police and stuff like that. And then we, you know, we kind of did that. And then when we started getting a little bit of traction and we started getting a little bit of money, we went from just showing movie trailers. And, but again, we didn't have a lot. So we had to be very creative and inventive. You know, the, you know, I went to the team and said, hey, I have this idea. I wanted to do a TV show that makes fun of TV shows. And they were like, lot, they go, that doesn't make any sense. Nobody else let you do that. You know, and that show was talk soup. And, you know, that was the first breakthrough, more traditional 30-minute TV show. And talk soup just, and Greg Keneer blew up. And you look at all those people that have followed on talk soup that have become famous from it. I think we counted 17 people who are talk soup hosts that ended up getting jobs on like, we call them real TV. And, you know, so that, that show, while it started out as people thinking, Alan and I were out of our mind, I think ran 26 years, you know, is something. And then the next one, you know, we met this tall guy in an elevator in New York and he was telling us about he's a radio host. And we were like, yeah, okay, great. You know, as a guy, if you haven't realized, radio has been dead for like 40 years. And he's going, no, you got to come and see the show. And we went and watched this radio show, you know, because I think we were living in the same building. And, you know, so we said, oh, we're going to run into this guy or be kind of rude if we didn't go and see a show. And, you know, then we just loved it. And we went back to the crew and said, hey, we want to put cameras in this guy's radio studio. And they were like, Larry, when you wanted to do, you know, talk soup, we thought you're out of your mind. They go, radio's dead. Why wouldn't anybody watch a radio show? And I said, you know what, you don't understand. They used to be a TV show, a sitcom called WKRP and Cincinnati. And it was about a radio crew and ensemble crew, but it was a comedy. I said, this is a reality TV version of that show. And, you know, because it was an ensemble comedy. I mean, now it wasn't just Howard. It was that old, on the entourage that he had, you know, and then Howard broke, you know, broke out and then that we grew in the first year, I think 14 countries and because we realized that a lot of people weren't paying attention that, you know, for US cable networks, if you're doing something like the weather channel, yeah, it's a great utility. You know, instead of having to watch TV at 1130 every day at night to find out what the weather would be tomorrow, you had a channel that would let you see the weather anytime you wanted. But that was very local. If you didn't live in that city, you know, or in that country, you couldn't care about what the weather is in London or anything like that. But we said celebrity and celebrity culture of popular all over the world. And that turned out to be very, very true. So, but you go back to the origins of the idea. At that time, we looked at cable and said, you know what, it's like an electronic newspaper. Yet CNN is the headlining ESPN as the sports and QVC is a home shopping network as the ads. But what was missing? So obvious to Alan and I was the second most red section of any Sunday newspaper, which was the entertainment pages. So, you know, we went from, you know, MTV of the movies to, you know, the entertainment pages of the Hollywood newspaper, you know, it's what America wants to know about Hollywood. NetSuite is a success story partner. Now, what does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers, bull market, bear market, interest rates are rising. They're falling. Honestly, at the end of the day, we just need a crystal ball. But until then, over 42,000 businesses have trusted and future-proofed themselves with NetSuite by Oracle. 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Indeed.com slash Clary terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need. You know, it's very interesting because you keep coming up with all these ideas that have never been done before. Everything in your life is doing things that really have never been done before. Not listening to everybody who's telling you that it can't be done and what I find really interesting. So I read your book and if anybody wants to get this called off script and your real passion is cooking. Now, I find that interesting because that means that you built your entire career and all of E on something that you're not actually that passionate about. You're not passionate about entertainment. Cooking was the passion. So when you're going up against the grain, when you're doing all these things that have never been done before, when you're not even inherently that passionate about the thing that you're doing, what is the advice to keep going when you get told no, when it's not working out, when you're doing something that is completely blue ocean never done before, because that's a skill set in and of itself. Yeah, well, you know, I was cooking since I'm 12, because both my parents worked and my choice was, you learn how to cook or eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner every night. And but, you know, I liked it and I was good at it. And I just kept reading cookbooks and learning more and more and diversifying. But what I say to people, you know, a lot of times people get confused between what their passion is and what their hobby is. And we all have the same realities of life. We got to make enough money so we could pay the rent and eat and educate our kids or pay our college loans or whatever it is. So what I tell people, I said, find something you're good at. In my case, you know, I obviously was pretty good at the television stuff. I said, then just work your butt off and become great at it. And then what happens is that becomes your passion and then you could use that to make enough money to be able to pursue your hobbies. And that's what cooking, you know, the whole cooking was for me is, you know, look, TV was obviously pretty lucrative. I was pretty good at it and I still am pretty good at it. And but it gives you the ability to, you know, then focus on your hobby whenever you feel like focusing on your hobby. Without knowing like, oh my God, I'm gonna be able to pay the rent next month. I think that's wise advice. I think, and I'm also very curious what you think about, all about new media and content creators and everyone trying to become their own media channel and media station. And I feel like a lot of it is just copying the other creator. You know, my podcast is probably a copy of, you know, 15 other podcasts and that TikTok channel's a copy. What would your advice be coming from an entertainment TV background for somebody that wants to create something unique? How do you look at the world? How do you create something that's never been done before the way you did it? Well, I mean, I embrace new technology. I mean, a lot of people like, like, oh my God, we're never gonna allow that AI stuff to happen. And you know, I say, look, look at the music industry when digital music came around. You know, I said, now they bitch and moan that, oh my God, iTunes has so much power. Spotify has so much power. I said, but you as an industry, music, spent 10 years fighting it. As opposed to embracing it, you would have owned it. You know, now you're complaining that, you know, somebody who's had the brain power and the wherewithal to go after it while you were rejecting it. The same thing with AI. There are certain things that, yeah, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with it. We need rules and regulations. And we need ways to keep it orderly. You know, right now there's no deterrence for bad people, you know, to do bad things with it. But the fact of the matter is it's a great tool. And it's gonna exist whether you like it or not, you know, screen actors, guild or writers guild and stuff like that. So, you know, you better learn how to prompt and learn how to do this stuff. Of course, it's not going away. And, but storytelling is an art and it's practiced really well only by humans and stuff. So, I've been using AI and stuff for the longest time from even before it became, you know, world known. If I have a new idea for a TV network or TV series and stuff and I want to write like do a little bit of market study and research and do budgets and stuff. But you should take me five days to come up with a basic idea. You know, once Chad JBT became ubiquitous, it takes me 30 seconds to plug it in. It takes me an hour to clean it up because it's never a hundred percent. So, but now I'm getting done in one hour. What used to take me five days. And, you know, I say to people, I go, how do you not love that? I mean, as human beings, we all have a finite amount of time on this planet. And, you know, the best thing we could do is use it efficiently or effectively. I said, so now in one hour I get done what you stack me five days. I could either do more of them and make more money or, you know, now I got a little grand baby. I can spend time with my little grand kid. I could learn how to speak Spanish. I could go on a cruise. And, I mean, I reclaimed the most valuable thing that all of us as human beings have. And that's our time. So, you gotta embrace it. You gotta make sure that, you know, again, you need rules and regulations. You can, and I always give the example of like driving a car. That 12 year old kid can't say, hey, give me the keys. I feel like driving. You know, you gotta be a certain age. You gotta take a class. You gotta take a test. And then there are rules of the road. And if you don't obey the rules of the road, there are penalties for that. With AI and stuff, there's a rules and regulations need to catch up. And that's kind of, you know, where that's at. But like I say, when you come up with something new and it's in your head, you gotta, I self-assess every night. I come up, I wake up in the morning. I have 10 new ideas, but time I go to sleep, I realize most of them would dopey. But I'm very honest with myself. I could, I'll sit down and go, okay, sounded like a good idea this morning, but no. You know, and again, I'm fricking the timeframe. But technology chains, people, taste changes, the economic environment changes. Just learn to be honest and go, you know what? Sound like a good idea, but now I realize it's not what's next. And just move quickly onto the next thing. Of course, again, we're back to that issue of maximizing the value of your time. I love it. And you're right, like with AI, you can, you can adopt new ideas quickly. You can brainstorm new stuff quickly. You can, you can realize it. It's a bad idea quickly and move on. But also to your point, everybody in any media, sort of legacy media, anyone in film TV, if they don't learn how to use AI, the people that work in those industries will also get replaced. So whether or not you're a content creator or you're working in those industries, you gotta adopt it. Yeah, it's an incredibly valuable tool. I mean, a good example, you know, after I got in those 20 years of people, you know, telling me I got to write a book, I got to write a book, I finally did it. And the book went best seller in four days. And people are going, what did you do, you cheated, you know, well, it's impossible. You're best seller in four different categories in four days. And the fact of the matter is, is I used, actually I was still in the chat, GBT days. I used GBT design a marketing plan for the book. And I followed the marketing plan. And, you know, the AI understood how to use the algorithms much better than my human brain could. And literally by following the plan done by AI, we became the best seller in four days. You know, when people are going, no, it usually takes months. How did you do it? Well, that's how I did it. I love it. Talk to me about, talk to me about the Kardashians because you built out, I mean, we spoke about talk soup, Howard Stern. Kardashians is a cultural phenomenon. How did you discover it? How did you know that it was going to be good? Or did you? Well, at the beginning though, we were, I, Alan and I were friends with Bruce and Chris. And it's a whole long story. And I think it's in the book. At one point, we were going to do another TV network called FXTV, Fitness and Exercise Television. And our partners were Bruce and Kris Jenner. And Kareem Abdul-Jabar, a bunch of other folks. But also one of our partners was OJ Simpson. And obviously that didn't turn out well. But, you know, so I was friendly with Bruce and Kris. And you know, Kris was always like, oh, we got to think of something to do with the girls. The girls are so good and whatever. And you know, Bruce and Kris, between them, I mean, they were like 10 kids. Yeah, because they all came from other marriages. And, but the kids were underage when we first met them. And, you know, again, we didn't have a lot of money, so we had to be really careful. So we couldn't afford to do the things that were needed to have young kids on the set. I mean, you needed to have tutors and you don't need to do a certain number of hours a day or a week. So we just said, you know, hey, the kids are great, but you got to wait till they turn, you know, adult age. So we don't have to deal with those restrictions. And, but, you know, look, he gave them the platform. But quite honestly, you know, and I say to people, the mom, Kris, she's the brains behind it all. She, those girls and guys just learn what they did from their mom who was a great driver and stuff like that. And then, you know, so yes, we did give them the platform and they probably couldn't have become what they became without that platform. But the real driver of that family was the mom, Kris. Like in 2025, are there any people or trends or ideas that you're excited about that could be as big as the Kardashians? Yeah, I think that kind of stuff is cyclical. I mean, look, the Kardashians have done amazingly well. But, you know, I get people all the time saying, I want a TV show, I want to be there, so I want to be else. I mean, you know, the one we haven't talked about is Ryan Seacrest, you know, which that's where Ryan got to start. But, you know, you and I actually have this mutual friend, Natasha Gratiano. And I must get a hundred people a year who come to me wanting to be a TV host. And you need several components. The main ones being, you need to have the personality. But then you have to have the work ethic. And a lot of times, I mean, people with personalities are great, but then you get to the issue of work ethic. And, you know, they go, okay, you want to be a TV host in daytime, so that means you're going to be up at three o'clock in the morning. You're going to go with the hair and makeup till five. You're going to shoot till 11, you're going to go home, you're going to have lunch, you're going to go to sleep, and you're going to do it 50 weeks a year. And they're like, oh, no, no, I spend the summers in the Bezo, or I spend the summers in the Hamptons. I can't do that. And so you realize they have one of the other, but very rarely be a fine part of people who have both of those traits. But then I met Natasha and several things. Number one, she's not from the U.S., which I thought was a plus. But, you know, she had this great backstory. You know, single mom living in London, literally homeless, you know, cut to now. Years later, she's living in Bel Air and life coaching will I am and Steve Ioki and all of that. But she's motivational, inspirational, as opposed to promotional. And for me, that was important. Because I said, you know, you got all these guys in late night TV here. We have no women in late night TV in America. And they all do the same show. It's a guy sitting behind a desk and he's got a couch and, you know, it's the same. So Mr. Cruz tell me about the next mission impossible. And I said, particularly after COVID, we need, I want to go to sleep with a smile on my face. I want to think the more is going to be better than today was. And so she's, you know, had the motivational, inspirational. But then I would test her, you know, I'd be like in China. And I would intentionally call her, knowing it's three o'clock in the morning, good time. And she would actually pick up the phone and stay on the phone with me for hours. And I said, okay, got the personality. She's the motivational and the work ethic clearly is there. So we created this talk show, late night talk show, which is going to go on this winter on national TV, called Natasha after dark. And, you know, and that, you know, that's just a great example of how you could take something. And again, we couldn't go and pitch it and explain it to people. So we had to shoot a pilot and cut a sizzle and then show them how different this show was from anything else that was on. I love it. And that's, I mean, if anybody's listening, like the traits that you just described that like make a successful talk show host anchor, just successful person in general, the work ethic, the personality, the showing up. I mean, if you just, I mean, like those traits in any industry, you're probably going to be pretty well off. I think that those traits are, those are the prerequisites to build anything meaningful, whether or not it's a career in TV or career in anything, really. One of my favorite ideas that you discuss is that you reinvent yourself every few years, every, I think when I listened to this, it was every seven years. A lot of people really struggled to reinvent themselves ever. And they're the same person at 70 as when they started their career when they were 25, 2025. Talk to me about reinvention. Why is it so important? Yeah, people go, why did you stop doing the running of your show? I stayed on the board, but quite honestly, I got bored. We became huge and it was this great thing. But when you get to the issue of it, and it's kind of like when somebody convinced me to write the book that I really began to focus on this, I said, you know what? I do have like all these kind of seven year periods where I'm a totally different person. Yeah, so I have my Brooklyn years and my Manhattan cable years and my Valley cable years and my E years, my Russia years, my Chinese years, my post-COVID years and stuff, where just entirely different and stuff. I got to admit, China does keep my interest because it's just so huge and there's so much different opportunity there. But it's basically saying fresh and stuff and saying up with new technology. I mean, I'm really keen on making sure that whatever the new technologies are that are coming down the road, that I'm there before the big companies get there because it takes them so much time to, you know, they study, they write plans, they have board meetings and you know, they get the stuff probably a year or two years later than they could or should. Chip station is a success story partner. You know what separates successful online businesses literally everyone else, it's not just having great products. It's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back. All of my friends that run the biggest e-commerce companies, they use Chip station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders. They save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts. 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What are the things that we could learn about how they do media? Because I think that you predicted linear TV's death a while back. I know that China's always sort of cutting edge in terms of media and social media and a lot of different things. So what's China doing? What gets you excited? What's stuff that we should maybe try and emulate? First of all, you know, two different things there. So there was no legacy media there, you know, to speak of, you know, everything was government controlled. So cellular and digital and stuff were all new there. So you didn't have to spend a lot of time taking away all the habits. You just had to spend them on creating the new habits and then much more open to stuff. And plus a very simple thing because here, big media is controlled by public companies. So they're very slow to adapt because it really means writing off old date. You got to write off the old before you could get to the new. I mean, I talk to like people at chairman of like TV networks and I'm going like, why are you still doing linear TV? I mean, it makes no sense. And they're like, well, you know, it would be like a $7 billion write off and I'm going to retire in two years and I'm not walking into a boardroom or, you know, share all this meeting, saying I'm writing that $7 billion. They go, I'll retire, let the next guy deal with that. So it has nothing to really do with what's right or what you should do or reality, but there are these other things in play that, you know, kind of restrict us. But in China, we do TV, film, internet content, we do immersive, we do all kinds of stuff there. And you, people who watch our TV shows, well, first of all, was successful in China because we make stuff in China, in Mandarin language, specifically for the audiences in China. So we don't take what we do on Australia and you go here, you know, well, subtitle in English for you and go with it. China's three or four times bigger than the United States. And people in China are very proud and happy to be Chinese. And, you know, what people have said to me early on, they go, look, if you don't really want to do something in here in our language for our people, you're in the wrong place. And I think Rubik Murdoch learned that pretty early on because he got bounced out pretty quickly. So, but you just take the TV shows we do there and 70%, 70, it's probably a little more now. I'm going back a year. And people who watch our shows, watch them on a five-inch screen, watch them on a cell phone. And so we've had to learn to adopt production and editing and stuff, noting that, you know, if we're going to shoot a wide shot, you know, which looks great on a 55-inch TV, it's going to look horrible when you put it on a cell phone. So a lot of stuff we shoot, you know, is a lot more close-ups and headshots and so do it. And which really, you know, that whole phenomenon led to the whole thing going on now with vertical. Vertical programming is now beginning to take care in short film, two-minute movies and things like that. We've been doing that stuff in China for years. So I think there's almost 800 million people in China with a smartphone now. So, you know, it's a pretty good base to experiment against. I think that, I think that, you know, I look at some of the other stuff coming out of China and there's like e-commerce trends that are coming out of China and the way people shop and the way people buy, the way people consume content for sure. I think that's going to be, I always think that a lot of the things that we see coming out of China in terms of just behaviors, they're going to make their way to the US eventually. So just a matter of time. Just a matter, so use it, 70 plus percent of people consume just on phones, not surprising. You are also doing something really interesting in China where you create movies broken down into two-minute segments and then audiences buy them piece by piece. I don't think that's made it to the US, but that's another form of like short content that I think you could see in the US too. So again, that's like short content, vertical, and this is something that creators should pay attention to, like, okay, what am I seeing in China? How can I adapt my content to that? Because that's what's going to be coming down the pipeline. Yeah, well, all you got to do is just go to the app store and you'll find that there are a bunch of things, you don't need a market, they need to catch up, but that has become, that's come over here already. And the interesting, most of them are actually owned by Chinese companies. But the theory, and again, we come at stuff from a different place, we look at whatever we create for as a media play, has to be financially sustainable. We don't do it because we think it's wild, we're so creative, or we love it. But if you can't sustain it financially, don't do it. Of course, eventually, you know, like I say, the reality is a life takeover. But with short films, you take or serialized film, you make a 90-minute movie. Yeah, most of them now are like rom-coms, very inexpensive, $300, $400,000 for a movie. But you use a folks who are really good at soap opera writing because soap opera writers learn to write in two-minute arcs because then if you watch the pattern of storytelling in a soap opera, they literally are broken down into two minutes and a little cliffhanger and a two minutes and a little cliffhanger. So you make a 90-minute movie, you divide it up into 45-2-minute segments, more or less, two minutes. You don't have to time them out. And you give people the first 10 episodes for free, but then episode 11 is like the equivalent of a dollar. Yeah, it's not a big deal. I like that it was good. I want to know what happened. You know, there's Janie Killham. You know, okay, if for a dollar, you'll find out if Janie Killham and, you know, then on and on and on. But you look at the financial model there. So you then have 35 segments that you're getting a dollar for. So on a 300 or 400 million, you know, a million movie, you're getting a $35 ticket price. Yet look at Marvel spending 200 million on a movie and getting a $19 ticket price. Who's got the better model? Do you think that, I mean, at one point, you had 142 plus country broadcasts. Now we have all these individual creators, these podcasters, these YouTube channels. Do you think we're moving towards infinite, like a fragmentation of media? Or do you think that we'll ever see, like unifying media sort of taking hold? Because I see all these individual podcasters is sort of like an media channels as the new age. Like the Joe Rogan's the, I mean, pick a, pick a YouTube channel, the Mr. Beast. It seems like infinite fragmentation of media. Yeah, you'll see, you know, whenever new media comes out, and I hate to say that I've been involved in probably new media seven or eight times in my 50 years. When it first comes out, people are very forgiving of quality and content. But over time, right now there's like some crazy number of podcasters. Everybody thinks I'd buy a camera for $40 and stick it on my laptop and I put a lamp over my head and I'm a TV star. Well, it doesn't exactly work like that. But then you get to the audience, and at the beginning of any new technology, people are very forgiving of poor quality. It is a great example. We forgave us for, you know, using industrial equipment. But over time, the eye and the brain begins to expect more and more and more. So we actually dove into the podcast world this year. Of course, in post-COVID, I started doing a lot more in the US again. And, you know, we just have, we know where it's going. We know that people are gonna want better and better quality out of their podcasts and their podcasters. So rather than start at the low end, we decided that our podcast got to start at the higher end. So we actually shoot. We do a lot of women empowerment related stuff. Of course, we thought that was a niche that really could be, you know, developed well. But we shoot our podcast in 4K. We shoot it with four cameras. We switch live, we edit. We audio engineer design the audio and lighting guide design that and stuff. So when you watch it, it really looks like television. I mean, the first one we did is called stall talk. And, you know, it looks like a younger hippocooler version of the view and stuff. So, you know, more and more, we love podcasting. Because there are no barriers to entry. There's no gatekeepers. But you got, at the end of the day, you gotta be good. And, you know, we think there'll be a huge shake out and, you know, a lot of the stuff that's going on now. I mean, for several reasons, you know, the economics are just not there. Big advertisers need masks. They can't afford to keep buying audiences of a few hundred people and stuff like that. So you gotta build them up and you gotta get sponsors to keep themselves sustainable and stuff like that. But it's not this or that. I mean, a lot of times I need stuff quick. Give it to me, I'm a big TikTok fan. I love TikTok, you know. But it's during the day, you know, I'm in the car. I'm in the bus or the train. And I just give it to me in two minute bites and I'm good or 40 second bites and I'm good. But then I come home and, you know, what I want to lump out on the couch and have a beer. And so I want those, I want those half hour shows. I want the Spielbergs of the world to tell me their stories because they do them better than, you know, my college roommate did. So it's not this or that. It's really both and they both fill in the unit at different times and people's daily routine or their life. Yeah. And so I think that, you know, really the answer is, maybe we're over-fragmented, but eventually we're gonna consolidate, like the best podcasts or the best TikTok channels or the best YouTube channels. That's what's gonna sort of be like the go-to's. And I think you're already starting to see it now. You're watching the big guys, you know, jump in and force the consolidation. I think serious radio just did a big deal with Tribune to, you know, to really push simple cast and stuff like that. And there, it'll be consolidation. We look at it, I mean, our podcast stuff. We're building this women's block because we said, okay, with one podcast, maybe we get 10,000, which means you could only go to what kind of local advertisers. But if I do five and I get the same demo, of course, five, I now have 50,000, I can now go to Lori Al or, you know, PNG with it. Larry, where do people connect with you? Where do people get your book? I'm assuming you can get your book wherever you get book. Amazon, what not. But what's the socials? What's the website you want to send people to? Well, you could go to the name of the book is called OffScript. And so you could either go to OffScript podcast or off scriptbook.com and find it or, you know, people eat my email that I actually get myself. And I do answer all my email. Myself is LJN at LJNmedia.com. But yeah, the book is available. Amazon, Barnes, Ingram, all the usual places. I'll link everything below. Last last questions just to pull out a couple final thoughts from you. You've had an incredible career. If you had to, you know, look at not what you've learned, but what you had to unlearn to be successful. The thing that you think held you back the most, what would that thing be? Well, you know, I grew up in I grew up in a very poor neighborhood. I grew up in Brooklyn, but before it was trendy Brooklyn. So I grew up in an area called Coney Island, which is still the hood. I mean, you go through there today and it's still a war zone, you know, burnt out buildings and stuff like that. It's beginning to gentrify. But you know, my parents came from, you know, immigrant mentality. And there, you know, wishes for their kids where get a civil service job and be able to retire at 65. And, you know, so I spent a lot of time having to listen to other people's design for my life as opposed to what was going to what I knew was going to make me happy. And so I guess the greatest thing I learned is just, you know, follow your heart, follow your gut. And again, so in second, you say to people, just imagine you've lost them. Just if it feels right to you and you got to be honest, you got to evaluate. I'd like to say, I come up with 10 new ideas every day. And by the time I go to sleep, I realize most of them would dope it. But I'm honest enough about myself to go out, oh, stupid ideal. I was thinking, what's next? Just don't waste your time on stuff. I love it. And if, but if you do believe in it, like you have to commit to it, you got it. Like I say, you know, find something you're, you're good at and work your butt off and become great at it. And then that will become your passion. The last thing that I wanted to ask you, you give it over a lot of wisdom. And you, and maybe just go with a level deeper on this thought because say you could only pass on one life lesson to your kids because it was the most important life lesson that you've ever learned. You've given over a few. But what would be those final words of wisdom that you'd pass over to your kids? Well, I think, you know, where we're all on this planet for finite amount of time. And I think our purpose here is we're here to leave this place better than we found it in every way from people to the planet to animals and stuff. And the, to me, the object in life, and I've always had this conversation with my mom when my daughter would be dating, my mother would say, well, is it serious? And you know, made me start to think, well, what does that mean? She goes, well, are they going to get married? And I'm going, you know what? My wish for my daughter and my all my kids is to be happy. The wish for myself is to be happy. It's not to be rich or whatever, but it, it really, that's, that's the object. It's find your happy place.