Three Decades in Hollywood Without Losing the Kid From Atlanta
There's a moment Jhamal Robinson describes that stopped me in my tracks. He's on a global town hall panel at Warner Bros. Discovery, thousands of employees watching on Zoom, and someone asks him point blank: Do you feel like you have to tailor yourself when you walk into a room? His answer comes immediately. Yes. He code-switches. He adjusts. He becomes a version of himself calibrated to make others comfortable. And then, almost in the same breath, he adds the part that carries the real weight: But not when he walks into the Oprah Winfrey Network room. Not there. Because in that room, the adjustment isn't necessary. That contrast, spoken aloud in a company-wide forum, is the kind of truth that doesn't show up on a résumé.
This episode of The Narrative Edge is a conversation between two people who met more than 30 years ago, long before either had a title worth mentioning. I sat down with Jhamal, who now serves as the head of US production for unscripted and scripted at Fremantle, and what unfolded was not an interview about career milestones. It was a conversation about what it costs to show up as yourself in rooms that weren't designed with you in mind, and what happens when you decide the cost of pretending is higher.
Jhamal's career reads like a map of Hollywood's most significant addresses. Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, A&E, NBC Universal, Yahoo. He's an Emmy winner. He's overseen productions from Stranger Things to The Price Is Right. But the thread that runs through all of it isn't the titles or the logos. It's the question he keeps asking himself, sometimes consciously and sometimes only in retrospect: Was I too much myself? That question haunts more people than will ever admit it. Not just Black executives navigating predominantly white spaces, though Jhamal speaks candidly and specifically about that experience. It haunts anyone who has ever walked out of a meeting wondering whether their full self was the reason the room went quiet.
We spend a lot of time in this conversation exploring what code-switching actually feels like from the inside, not as a sociological concept but as a daily tax on a person's energy and sense of self. Jhamal is six foot seven. He's aware that his physical presence can register as intimidating before he's said a single word. So he's spent decades learning how to, as he puts it, bring people into the conversation. That phrase kept coming back. Not "command the room." Not "own the narrative." Bring people in. It's a leadership posture that starts with lowering the barrier rather than raising the flag.
One of the most revealing stories he tells is about interviewing for his current role at Fremantle. He met with the CEO, Jen Mullen, for 20 minutes. Walked out convinced he'd bombed it. His mind immediately went to the familiar loop: Should I have code-switched? Should I have performed a different version of myself? Days later, the call came. He got the job. And the lesson landed not as a triumph but as a quiet reckoning. What if showing up as his full self was not the risk he'd always been taught it was, but the thing that actually worked? And what if he'd gotten the job by performing? Then he'd be trapped playing a character indefinitely.
We also talked about success and the strange discomfort of not knowing how to measure it. Jhamal describes being one of the first Black members of his college's board of trustees and not realizing it was a big deal. He describes returning to Netflix for a Black employee resource group event a year after leaving, walking in and feeling like a celebrity, not because of his title but because people remembered how he made them feel. Young Black executives approached him to say his LinkedIn posts had mattered, that watching his career gave them permission to imagine their own. He gets visibly moved telling this story, and I think that's the point. The impact that shakes you is almost never the one you planned.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Jhamal to take me back to the kitchen in Georgia where he grew up. His father cooking dinner. A young kid walking in and saying, Dad, I want to audition for the Mickey Mouse Club. His father doesn't stop stirring. Doesn't laugh. Just says, if that's what you want to do, I fully support you. Jhamal didn't make it on the Mickey Mouse Club. But that moment, that quiet permission to want something and say it out loud, is the origin of everything that followed. His father and mother told him, in their own ways, that his story was being written. It would just take a second.
We closed by talking about the responsibility storytellers carry right now, especially as AI reshapes what's possible in production. Jhamal isn't running from technology. He oversaw an AI studio at A&E and is deep into those conversations at Fremantle. But his instinct is grounded in something simple: accuracy matters, and so does feeling. If a story doesn't make you feel something, it doesn't matter how it was made. And in a world where content can be manufactured at scale, the people who understand the beauty and the mess of an unscripted life may be the ones best equipped to keep storytelling honest.
This is a conversation about what it means to build a durable career without losing yourself in the process. About the difference between showing people your trophies and showing them who you are. And about the quiet, compounding power of being the person who makes room for others when they walk in.
You've been listening to The Narrative Edge. You can get your copy of the book wherever books are sold, and remember that The Narrative Edge takes you around the world of storytelling, returning you to your story and the moments that define a life in motion. I want to thank my friends at Rig Productions and encourage you to check them out if you're looking to broadcast your ideas. Until next time, my friends, and remember that if you're not in control of your story, well. Who is.
Dr. Rod Berger is a keynote speaker, moderator, producer, author, and expert in strategic storytelling. Berger’s book, The Narrative Edge: Authentic Storytelling That Meets The Moment (Wiley), hits bookstores in late 2025. He draws on more than 4,000 interviews conducted worldwide for Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fair Observer, including a cover story about former Virgin Entertainment co-founder Jason Felts, for Los Angeles Magazine, as well as various podcasts. He has captured the narratives of investors, CEOs, renowned entrepreneurs, bestselling authors, scholars, and cultural icons such as NBA legends Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley, as well as United Nations officials and Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar, while also exploring the behind-the-scenes world of Formula 1.
Berger has met with the Crown Princess of Sweden, Pope Francis, United Nations officials, and NGO leaders, covering stories of water insecurity with WaterAid, the intergenerational refugee crisis faced by displaced Sudanese in Uganda, and the impacts of child marriage in Western Africa with the Le Korsa Foundation.
Berger served as a guest lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management for nearly two decades, focusing on the power of storytelling in business.
He has partnered with The Jim Henson Company to create a television show, The Ultimate GOAT, that combines his passion for distant lands and storytelling with culture, sports, and puppetry for family programming.
Berger conducts moderated keynote events that blend storytelling with live, on-stage narratives featuring cultural icons such as Opal Lee, the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and recognized as the “Grandmother” of Juneteenth. In 2023, Berger received the inaugural Pangea International Literacy Prize and delivered his TEDx Talk, “Story is Our Currency.” He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife and two children.
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