By Alex Low
Having known Rizal Kamal for the past couple of years, I have come to expect one thing whenever we meet: there is always something new to talk about. A new idea has taken hold, a technology has caught his attention, or another venture has begun occupying his thoughts.
Conversations with the founder and CEO of LOL Asia move quickly, often in directions you do not quite expect. It is a fitting quality for someone who has spent nearly two decades building things from scratch. Comedy may have been where the journey began, but today his interests span live entertainment, technology and wellness.
What connects them becomes clearer when Rizal talks about what he is really trying to create: experiences that make people feel something, connect with one another and, as he puts it, remind them that “it’s wonderful to be alive”.
Building From Scratch
That instinct to create goes back to 2009, when he started LOL Asia. At the time, there was barely a stand-up comedy audience in Malaysia. There were a few open-minded pioneers, including Harith Iskander, Douglas Lim and Joanne Kam, but the scene was still in its infancy. “We pretty much started fresh,” Rizal recalls. “And we had to build the audience.”
There was no established playbook, so he made one up along the way. It was also the early days of social media, and LOL Asia grew “show by show, post by post, year by year”. Rizal experimented constantly: international comedy shows, Bahasa, Cantonese, Tamil and English productions, a comedy festival, television series for Astro and three seasons of stand-up for Comedy Central. Over three years, he brought around 40 international comedians to the region.
“Over the years, the amount of things that I’ve tried is quite ridiculous,” he says. That experimentation taught him how to build an audience, but it also revealed what he enjoys most about entrepreneurship. “I love doing that. I love bringing something new. I love bringing new experiences to people.”
Seventeen years on, the formats may have changed, but his understanding of audiences has become more focused. “When you’re in business for this long, what you look for is not what has changed. You look for what is constant.”
What People Come For
For Rizal, that constant is connection. People want to connect with the artist and with those they have come with. They want an experience that gives them “that adrenaline or dopamine”, and they want to leave feeling inspired, with the sense that “my God, I am alive”.
There is identity in it, too. A comedy lover goes to a comedy show. A rock fan goes to a concert. A golfer follows golf. “When they attend and they experience it, it becomes part of their identity,” he says.
Tastes change, but the underlying desire does not. “We just have to adjust it to the current times. So, we evolve according to what people want. But essentially, it’s the same.” His preferred definition of LOL is “live out loud”, while the company’s motto is “be inspired, be entertained”. For Rizal, entertainment should leave something behind.
Comedy was an early example. It can open people’s minds, but it can also create a rare kind of shared experience. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re Malay, Chinese, Indian,” he says. “You can feel the same thing; you laugh at the same things. For that moment, you’re just a human being enjoying the same things.”
That fascination with how people connect also informs his interest in artificial intelligence. While much of the conversation around AI centres on what machines might replace, Rizal sees it differently. “AI is just a tool,” he says.
Humans prompt it, direct it and decide what they want it to create. Everything AI knows and draws upon comes from what humans have already created. “AI is more human than you think. It just does it in a really big and fast way.”
Yet he sees a paradox in that. As AI becomes better at producing creative work, genuinely human creativity may become more valuable. He points to the rising value of music catalogues created by human artists and, more broadly, to the distinction between artificially generated work and creation rooted in lived experience. “Life experiences also increase in value,” he says, “because they cannot be duplicated by AI.”
Exploring New Frontiers
That belief is central to ThriveFest, his venture into fitness, wellness and community, and perhaps the most personal of his recent projects. His father was sick for 14 years before he died, giving Rizal a very different perspective on healthspan and what he wants his own later years to look like.
He is increasingly conscious of how people approach ageing, particularly the tendency to see their 50s as a period of decline rather than another stage of possibility. “People in as early as their 50s are already sort of looking towards the end,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re Malay, Chinese, Indian. You can feel the same thing; you laugh at the same things. For that moment, you’re just a human being enjoying the same things” — Rizal Kamal
It is not something he wants for himself or those around him. His own energy seems to reflect that philosophy. Whether he is discussing a new technology, a business idea or some unexpected development he has stumbled across, there is an enthusiasm that suggests he is still discovering things for the first time.
“Always be curious,” he says. “I think that that is one of the secrets of staying young.” ThriveFest offers another perspective, centred not on expensive equipment or exotic treatments but on fundamentals: nutrition, exercise and movement, stress management and sleep.
“If you just open your eyes and look at certain principles that you can adapt in your life,” Rizal says, “it can really improve yourself in the later years.” In its own way, it is another experience designed to change what happens after people leave the room.
The Curiosity Continues
Perhaps that is the common thread in everything Rizal is involved in. Comedy, concerts, technology and wellness may look like very different pursuits, but each is ultimately about engaging people and leaving something behind.
His greatest reward, he says, would be to be remembered as someone who “did something great”, someone who “contributed positively to society”. His ambition is not necessarily global. It is human. Rizal describes himself as “a junkie for new stuff”.
AI, NFTs, emerging technologies in China, even the prospect of data centres being built in space — all of it excites him. His wife, meanwhile, provides a useful dose of reality. She is the sceptic in the relationship, and Rizal readily admits she was right about NFTs. AI, however, remains firmly in his camp.
“For me, I’m always looking at the good,” he says, acknowledging that he can sometimes be “blindsided by the bad”. Perhaps that relentless optimism is why, after 17 years, he is still building. The entertainment industry will change, technologies will come and go, and audiences will move on to whatever comes next. Rizal’s instinct is simply to stay curious, experiment and adapt.
Because beneath all the newness, what he is chasing remains remarkably timeless: the feeling of being there, experiencing something with other people, and walking away with a memory, a connection or a little inspiration to carry into the rest of your life. For Rizal, “it’s wonderful to be alive” is not just a philosophy. It is the experience he wants to keep creating.
