Will Spencer 00:00:47

My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to the renaissance of Men podcast.

Will Spencer 00:00:51

This is your weekly reminder that big things are coming soon for the show, including a new name, the Will Spencer podcast, and a wider variety of guests and topics.

Will Spencer 00:01:00

All you have to do is not be surprised when it happens.

Will Spencer 00:01:03

My guests this week are the founders of a new streaming platform that lets subscribers use their subscription to fund the movies and tv shows they want to see.

Will Spencer 00:01:12

Please welcome Marcus Pittman and Jason Farley from lore tv.

Will Spencer 00:01:18

YouTube are the renaissance do you like to watch streaming networks?

Will Spencer 00:01:24

I mean, ever since the COVID lockdowns, streaming services have exploded in popularity.

Will Spencer 00:01:30

Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Max, Disney Plus, Amazon prime and more.

Will Spencer 00:01:34

The idea behind them was that they were supposed to disrupt the big broadcasters.

Will Spencer 00:01:39

No longer would you be a servant to corporate overlords at the cable networks who told you what to watch.

Will Spencer 00:01:44

You could stream any show you wanted on demand.

Will Spencer 00:01:46

The power of a generations worth of video entertainment in the palm of your hand.

Will Spencer 00:01:51

Take that, illuminati lizard people.

Will Spencer 00:01:53

Theres just one problem.

Will Spencer 00:01:55

We all met the new boss who was the same as the old boss.

Will Spencer 00:01:58

Sure, you could choose whatever you wanted to watch, but if the limits of acceptable content were determined by the boardroom executives and the producers, directors and writers of the content were all on board with the message, then sure, you can watch anything you want, so long as its all the same thing.

Will Spencer 00:02:13

Deep down we all feel it.

Will Spencer 00:02:15

The tension of enjoying a show while having to be on guard for the next bit of woke propaganda, whether it be in the form of a diversity hire casting choice, messaging that sticks out like a sore thumb, or the overall thrust of the story suddenly being about lesbian girl bosses from outer space being the driving force behind everything that's ever happened in anything, ever.

Will Spencer 00:02:36

This has led to a vacuum in the media space as people who are old enough to remember these things called stories go looking for them and find little out there.

Will Spencer 00:02:46

Now im not a tv guy.

Will Spencer 00:02:47

Im a book guy.

Will Spencer 00:02:48

There are three things im not very good rock climbing, cold showers, and watching tv.

Will Spencer 00:02:54

However, I did enjoy shows like Breaking Bad and Walking Dead before I became a Christian.

Will Spencer 00:02:59

And perhaps I dont watch much tv because I know theres so little out there that will pass my new radical right wing extremist standards where I dont want to see wokeness, graphic and gratuitous violence, sex scenes, swearing or anything like that.

Will Spencer 00:03:12

Because frankly, I don't think they're necessary to telling good stories.

Will Spencer 00:03:15

But as far as the streaming networks are concerned, that makes me an outlier.

Will Spencer 00:03:19

So what if there was a streaming network where I could choose not only what I watch and when, but what's available on the platform to begin with?

Will Spencer 00:03:27

What if I could vote with my dollars and my time?

Will Spencer 00:03:29

What if I could truly disrupt the network giants who merely transformed into the streaming giants, leading me to switch off that whole world entirely?

Will Spencer 00:03:38

Well, I have good news, because it seems to me like that opportunity might just be out there.

Will Spencer 00:03:43

Which brings me to my guests this week, Marcus Pitman and Jason Farley from Lore TV.

Will Spencer 00:03:49

Lore is a new streaming network with a new model that works like I described.

Will Spencer 00:03:54

Not only can viewers choose the shows they want to watch, they can use their subscription money to fund the shows they want to see.

Will Spencer 00:04:01

So reptilian illuminatis in boardrooms aren't choosing the programming and farming it out to the DEI production teams.

Will Spencer 00:04:08

Instead, talented filmmakers and ambitious creators develop their ideas, pitch them to lore, and then you, the viewer, get to decide if you want to help fund it.

Will Spencer 00:04:17

You're not just a passive consumer, you're an active participant in the process.

Will Spencer 00:04:22

One of the cool things about this play is that Lore developed their own technology in order to make it possible.

Will Spencer 00:04:27

And from my time in the startup world, I know how hard and expensive that is.

Will Spencer 00:04:31

It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to build with off the shelf tech.

Will Spencer 00:04:36

But it doesn't last.

Will Spencer 00:04:37

Investing the time, energy, and vision to build something unique, and that does it exactly the way you want it to is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to technology, entrepreneurship.

Will Spencer 00:04:48

And that's what Marcus and Jason describe here in this interview.

Will Spencer 00:04:51

It's cool for me to hear about because it weaves together so many different themes of my life and reminds me of my exciting days in my own version of the startup garage.

Will Spencer 00:05:00

Heck, it might even make me start watching tv again.

Will Spencer 00:05:03

Now that would be a feat.

Will Spencer 00:05:05

In our conversation, we discussed how lore works versus Netflix, boomers spending attention rather than money, not outsourcing to developers in India, the origins of MTV and the Discovery Channel, how the christian film industry actually runs, the feminization of content and culture, and finally, christian culture competing in the free market.

Will Spencer 00:05:27

If you enjoy the renaissance of men podcast, thank you.

Will Spencer 00:05:30

Please leave us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Will Spencer 00:05:35

If this is your first time here, welcome.

Will Spencer 00:05:37

I release new episodes about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week.

Will Spencer 00:05:43

Just a reminder that many things about the podcast will be changing very soon.

Will Spencer 00:05:47

This will soon become the Will Spencer podcast.

Will Spencer 00:05:49

New brand new topics, new guests, same format you love.

Will Spencer 00:05:53

I hope you don't mind these regular reminders to make sure we all come along together.

Will Spencer 00:05:57

Also, just another quick reminder about the podcast.

Will Spencer 00:06:00

Naturally, I'll be posting free content on the site, but the biggest benefits will go to paid subscribers who'll get a number of perks, including early access to ad, free interviews, previews of my new book, and more.

Will Spencer 00:06:11

The new substack is available to subscribers for for as low as $10 per month, so visit willspence stack.com and be a part of it now.

Will Spencer 00:06:20

And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the founders of a new streaming service that lets you truly decide what you want to watch.

Will Spencer 00:06:27

Marcus Pittman and Jason Farley from Lore TV.

Will Spencer 00:06:35

Marcus, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Marcus Pittman 00:06:38

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Will Spencer 00:06:39

We connected on Twitter, I guess it would say like a month or two ago, and I got to check out what you're doing with Lore TV.

Will Spencer 00:06:46

And I just, I think it's fantastic because having come myself, having come from the secular world and being steeped in media and secular media, there's a real lack of solid christian media that we can watch and not have to be constantly fending off bad influences.

Will Spencer 00:07:01

So I just think it's great what you're introducing into the body right now.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:05

Yeah, it's been a fun four years.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:08

And we launched a year ago, officially just spent three years building out the tech and building out a network of artists and relationships and stuff like that.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:16

And it's been a slow but rewarding process.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:21

And we've done a lot.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:23

We funded 55 projects so far.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:28

We just, episode three of exposed just went on all over social media yesterday, which was a series that we helped to start before we launched.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:40

So a lot of stuff has just been happening as a result.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:43

And I think the other streamers are starting to take notice of what we're doing.

Marcus Pittman 00:07:47

So that's pretty exciting.

Will Spencer 00:07:49

Yeah, I bet you started four years ago is when you kind of have the idea and you've been building out the tech.

Will Spencer 00:07:55

Say more about that because so many companies, they just go with off the shelf kind of stuff instead of building their own tech.

Will Spencer 00:08:01

But real value in intellectual property is in the delivery system behind the scenes, right?

Marcus Pittman 00:08:07

Yeah, I think, like, there's a lot of discussion early on about what we could do with the WordPress plugins, and I was completely against that.

Marcus Pittman 00:08:17

Thankfully, my CTO was against that, too.

Marcus Pittman 00:08:20

He's built a company and exited from that successfully.

Marcus Pittman 00:08:24

He actually built the company that's responsible for the buy it now button on Amazon.

Marcus Pittman 00:08:28

Oh, so like, real deal tech was part of the discussion early on.

Marcus Pittman 00:08:34

And really the discussion was just like, you're not loving your neighbors if you use off the shelf stuff, meaning you're not loving your investors because you might get a product out quick, but you're going to have to raise money in the long run to change everything out and make it custom.

Marcus Pittman 00:08:54

So it's better.

Marcus Pittman 00:08:55

Just take your time and build the technology.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:00

You know, for us, there wasn't anything that allowed the premier of streaming once a project hit a certain funding goal.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:09

So there wasn't anything like that at all.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:11

And there certainly wasn't any technology that used video game microtransactions and that whole economy and stuff that we had to build out and the math behind that and the dollar to loot ratio.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:22

So there was just so much that just made sense, like, let's just build it out now, because even if we found little hacks along the way, we're going to have to spend more money in the future to do that.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:32

And so, yeah, we spent three years, I think two years ago we launched our beta, and then after the beta, we spent a year just fixing stuff up and getting all the bugs out from the beta.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:44

And then we officially launched with paid subscribers in June of last year.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:49

So a little more than a year ago now.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:53

And, yeah, it's been exciting.

Marcus Pittman 00:09:55

A lot of people say you haven't really done a lot in four years, and it's like, well, no, we've only been around one year, technically.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:02

We've just been talking about it publicly.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:05

Most startups and technology companies, they don't talk about their stuff.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:10

It's usually stealth, and then they don't ever talk about it publicly until they launch.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:14

But we knew that that wouldn't work because we had to build out the network and we had to talk about what we were doing so people could get excited about it.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:22

We could get filmmakers attention, investors attention, that sort of stuff.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:27

So we did it differently.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:29

But we also knew, too, that no one, whether it's a secular streaming space or the christian streaming space, had the kind of content to make that what we wanted.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:38

So we're really afraid of, we're not really afraid of that.

Marcus Pittman 00:10:43

And so it's just been a really fun experience.

Will Spencer 00:10:47

So the tech.

Will Spencer 00:10:48

So I don't watch a lot of streaming television, just myself.

Will Spencer 00:10:51

I've never been a big fan of Netflix when it comes to what am I going to do right now?

Will Spencer 00:10:56

I think I'll read a book or something like that is usually just where my head goes.

Will Spencer 00:11:01

So my tv isn't even plugged in at the moment.

Will Spencer 00:11:05

But I was checking out the lure site, and I was navigating my way around and checking out some of the.

Will Spencer 00:11:10

Some of the episodes that you.

Will Spencer 00:11:12

Some of the series that you have available and trying to understand, looking at it, and you pointed out something very interesting that I could see that there are funding bars as they fill up.

Will Spencer 00:11:23

When that finally fills up, it seems like you have a microtransactions where you get maybe, perhaps tokens.

Will Spencer 00:11:28

And as that fills up with the tokens, then whatever the series is goes live immediately.

Will Spencer 00:11:35

That's kind of the.

Marcus Pittman 00:11:36

That's kind of the model in some cases.

Marcus Pittman 00:11:38

So in most cases, I would say that's true.

Marcus Pittman 00:11:43

So the way it works is the monthly subscribe.

Marcus Pittman 00:11:47

Well, let's start with how every streaming subscription works.

Marcus Pittman 00:11:50

Every streaming subscription, they collectively pull together the subscribers dollars, and that goes towards Netflix.

Marcus Pittman 00:11:59

For example, your $20 a month goes to executives at Netflix who dictate how that money is spent.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:06

And about 60, maybe 50% to 60% varies goes towards actually funding content for the platform.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:16

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:17

So that's your inventory that you're selling.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:20

So about 50% goes to that.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:24

The problem is, you don't get a say in how your money is spent on content.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:32

You used to at the box office, you would go and you would buy a ticket, and you would say, I want to see this movie, and this money is for this movie and the people that made this movie.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:45

But with streaming, all of that, individual financial control got just eliminated.

Marcus Pittman 00:12:52

And so the result has been basically to use streaming as a means of political power and worldview transformations, because, hey, we can make a female version of Star wars called the acolyte.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:07

And whether people like it or not, we get to do it because that's what we want.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:12

You know, we're the elite, and we get to make those decisions.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:16

So I think, yeah, Jason wants a link, so let me.

Will Spencer 00:13:20

There he is.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:21

There we go.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:22

Hey, man.

Will Spencer 00:13:23

Hey, how's it going, Jason?

Will Spencer 00:13:24

Doing well.

Jason Farley 00:13:25

Sorry I'm late.

Will Spencer 00:13:26

No problem.

Will Spencer 00:13:27

Welcome to the.

Will Spencer 00:13:28

Welcome to the.

Will Spencer 00:13:29

Welcome.

Will Spencer 00:13:29

We were just talking about you.

Will Spencer 00:13:30

We just were just kidding.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:34

Jason is our chief content officer for lore, and he works directly with the artists and the scripts and gives any help with production and stuff that he can.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:44

But, Jason, what we were talking about was just really how all your money goes towards the streaming networks and executives and the individuals.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:51

The individual consumers don't get to vote on what content gets made or not.

Marcus Pittman 00:13:57

It's usually done based on what's called watch Time, which I think is not a valuable statistic, as it's made out to be, because an example of that is if you watch or you don't watch it, but if you heard about it, Velma, the Velma, HBO animated cartoon series where Velma as a lesbian.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:21

It's like an adult version of Scooby Doo without Scooby Doo.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:25

It was awful.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:27

The show was awful.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:28

It was terrible.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:28

But it got a lot of watch time because people wanted to see how bad it was.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:33

And so they just announced the season two.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:36

And I'm sure that's based off of.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:38

They're like, no, this is way more popular than the Internet said.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:41

But no, it was only popular because people were.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:43

So watch time isn't an actual practical example of, like, how people spend their money.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:50

The other issue with watch time is that it inflates stuff that the subscriber, the paying subscriber, doesn't care about.

Marcus Pittman 00:14:57

So preschool tv shows are the most watch of any streaming network, even ours.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:05

But we actually know that people actually don't spend money funding those preschool shows.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:12

They're just background noise that's on repeat for the kid to watch.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:18

But it's not something that's an economic benefit for the actual credit card holder that subscribes.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:26

So they don't care about it.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:28

They're spending their money funding content for adults.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:32

So I think that is a very key.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:36

So the watch time alone, which all the streamers are working off of, is not a helpful statistic.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:43

I think it's creating a lot of problems for them right now.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:46

Like, look at all the people watching the acolyte.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:47

Well, they're watching it because they think it's absolutely horrible, and they want to see if the memes are true.

Marcus Pittman 00:15:55

That's not the kind of viewership you want of your content.

Jason Farley 00:16:01

They're looking at it and saying, wait, there can't really be space fire, right?

Jason Farley 00:16:04

And then there's really space fire on the wing.

Will Spencer 00:16:08

Oh, my goodness.

Will Spencer 00:16:09

I've seen the memes.

Will Spencer 00:16:12

It makes total sense to me that they would just take everything into a space.

Will Spencer 00:16:16

Occult, witchcraft, divine feminine thing.

Will Spencer 00:16:19

That's where they're going to drive Star wars into the ditch and keep it there for as long as they can until they completely do whatever they can to subvert the mythos.

Will Spencer 00:16:27

But, yeah, it is that bad.

Jason Farley 00:16:29

Yeah, it's the antihero's journey.

Jason Farley 00:16:32

That's what they've, that's what they're diving into.

Jason Farley 00:16:35

In the Jungian Joseph Campbell, hero with a thousand faces.

Jason Farley 00:16:42

They're doing the anti heroes journey.

Jason Farley 00:16:45

And it's sad to watch, but it makes sense because they haven't been able to figure out what makes a good movie, because what they're doing is they're trying to take watch time and then back create everything according to the watch time because that's the statistic that they do have.

Jason Farley 00:17:07

And they think they've got a math problem on their hands.

Jason Farley 00:17:11

A good example of this is.

Will Spencer 00:17:14

Back.

Jason Farley 00:17:15

In 2019, Netflix, because of the popularity of the zombie shows of the Walking Dead, they said, ooh, zombie shows are really popular right now.

Jason Farley 00:17:30

And so they made four more zombie shows.

Jason Farley 00:17:34

And everybody was like, but I just watched these shows.

Jason Farley 00:17:37

I just watched this.

Jason Farley 00:17:38

I don't want more.

Jason Farley 00:17:40

But they were working off of the stat they had.

Jason Farley 00:17:42

Cause they think that they've got a math problem on their hands.

Jason Farley 00:17:46

But one of the principles of capitalism is that the only real measure of desire is the purchase.

Jason Farley 00:17:56

When somebody purchases something, that's the only real measure.

Jason Farley 00:17:59

That's a future facing question.

Jason Farley 00:18:03

And so you have to have other principles besides math to do well in capitalism, you have to have an understanding of the principles of storytelling, the understanding of what kind of creature am I serving?

Jason Farley 00:18:16

What kind of creature is man?

Jason Farley 00:18:18

So all of those things, you can't turn into a math problem.

Jason Farley 00:18:21

And so the streaming services end up.

Jason Farley 00:18:23

They just keep shooting themselves in the knees and wondering why they can't walk.

Will Spencer 00:18:28

Okay, so I have a bunch of questions about what you just said.

Will Spencer 00:18:31

The first.

Will Spencer 00:18:32

The first question I have is, are they not able to differentiate actual watch time from hate watching?

Will Spencer 00:18:40

Right.

Will Spencer 00:18:41

Like, can they not tell?

Will Spencer 00:18:42

Did they not try?

Will Spencer 00:18:42

They must be able.

Marcus Pittman 00:18:44

I don't think it matters to them.

Will Spencer 00:18:45

Okay, that was my next question because.

Marcus Pittman 00:18:47

The investors are asking questions about watch time.

Will Spencer 00:18:51

Oh, okay.

Marcus Pittman 00:18:52

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:18:53

So that is the statistic that's also used in stock market reports for their annual reporting, quarterly reporting.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:05

It's.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:05

Look how much watch time we got thanks to velma.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:08

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:11

So it's completely.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:13

The mechanism of streaming is not a capitalistic system, and so it is failing.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:21

It is not creating valuable ips in the same way that cable tv did with advertising and those sort of things or the movie theaters do with ticket purchases.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:38

So it's not capable of doing that.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:40

So it's this top down structure that basically says, well, we got the $20, so we can make whatever we want.

Marcus Pittman 00:19:48

And I think that, in the long run, is not going to be the solution, especially when you look at, like, Gen Z and Gen Alpha right now who support artists on Patreon or super chats or Twitch bits, Fortnite V bucks or Roblox creators.

Marcus Pittman 00:20:08

They're spending their money to fund individual artists they care about almost exclusively, not even going to the theaters anymore.

Marcus Pittman 00:20:17

So there's a massive change happening that I think everybody's not prepared for.

Marcus Pittman 00:20:24

And that's going to happen in the next ten years, probably, yeah.

Jason Farley 00:20:27

Boomers are used to spending their attention instead of their money, and the ones spending money in that economy are the ones buying ads.

Jason Farley 00:20:38

And that is the boomer and the Gen X mentality, really.

Jason Farley 00:20:44

It was created on the backs of boomers, though, and the new generations, they understand how valuable their attention is, but they would rather pay the artist directly.

Jason Farley 00:20:57

They're used to having a direct connection with an artist because they've grown up with that, so they don't want an executive in the way.

Will Spencer 00:21:07

This is really interesting because I was just thinking about this the other night.

Will Spencer 00:21:10

So years ago I was in San Francisco, this would have been 2000, 720, ten, somewhere in that realm.

Will Spencer 00:21:20

There were two companies in San Francisco at the time.

Will Spencer 00:21:24

I don't know if one of them made it out of San Francisco, because I don't even remember its name.

Will Spencer 00:21:28

And Spotify was one of them.

Will Spencer 00:21:30

It was three, actually.

Will Spencer 00:21:31

Spotify, Patreon, and some third company.

Will Spencer 00:21:35

So Patreon's model was, you just fund a guy and it still is this way.

Will Spencer 00:21:40

You fund a guy to be an artist.

Will Spencer 00:21:41

I was in the music industry, so I cared very much about how cd sales were being cannibalized by digital.

Will Spencer 00:21:47

Like, I was watching that happen in real time.

Will Spencer 00:21:50

In fact, I remember being an early user of Napster back in 1999.

Will Spencer 00:21:56

Me and my friends, we were all doing a startup and so we had access to high speed Internet.

Will Spencer 00:22:00

This was 99.

Will Spencer 00:22:01

And so we were just pulling down all of our favorite songs at the time.

Will Spencer 00:22:04

Cause we could limewire as well.

Will Spencer 00:22:06

And so that proceeded until about a decade.

Will Spencer 00:22:09

And then you have Spotify starting to come up, where you just pay a subscription fee and it gets farmed out with sort of micro bits, micro bits of fractions of pennies to the artist.

Will Spencer 00:22:18

But at the time there was another company, I can't remember its name, but the way that company worked was you would put all your money into a pot and you would get onto Spotify and then, or, sorry, Soundcloud or other platforms, and there was a little button, and when you clicked the button, some of your money would go to that artist directly, right?

Will Spencer 00:22:38

So you put it in an account and you click it, you see?

Will Spencer 00:22:40

Click you hard it or whatever it is, and it goes to that artist, and it bypasses both Patreon and Spotify.

Will Spencer 00:22:46

And I really liked that model because it meant that I could democratize my time and I could pay individually for a song.

Will Spencer 00:22:53

And my friends who were in tech at the time were like, no, Patreon and Spotify are going to be huge.

Will Spencer 00:22:57

You're so crazy.

Will Spencer 00:22:58

You're wrong.

Will Spencer 00:22:59

And I'm like, no, I don't want pay these companies.

Will Spencer 00:23:02

Like, I don't mind Patreon conceptually, but, like, I like that song and I want to give someone money who made that specific song, not give it to Spotify.

Will Spencer 00:23:11

So maybe Spotify is a better model in this example.

Marcus Pittman 00:23:14

Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting, I was just watching the documentary, I think it's on Paramount called how music got free, and it talks about the piracy of the nineties.

Marcus Pittman 00:23:25

And the guys in a little town in North Carolina who worked at the cd printing companies that were just taking the cds that fell on the factory floor and uploading them to the Internet before they were released, and they disrupted the entire music industry by doing that.

Marcus Pittman 00:23:46

But the point of it was they basically called these guys who were pirates and thieves for sure, but they called these guys heroes in the sense that they were just doing what Spotify and Netflix did.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:01

They just knew how to, they just saw it coming.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:04

And if it wasn't for what they did, Steve Jobs wouldn't have been able to convince the record companies to let him do iTunes.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:14

And so it was really, you know, there's a quote, it wasn't in this documentary, but I've remembered it for a long time.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:20

It says piracy is a distribution problem.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:25

And I think that's.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:26

I think that's true.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:28

There's a meme going around where the guy kicks Napster, the music.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:32

The RIAA kicks Napster, or they kid, they kick Napster out of the house, and then behind him is.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:38

Is Netflix and Disney.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:43

And then they kick Netflix and Disney out of the house.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:45

And then he goes back in, back to bittorrent or something like that.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:49

But, like, bittorrent keeps returning.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:51

Right?

Marcus Pittman 00:24:52

Because.

Marcus Pittman 00:24:53

Because now people have three or $400 streaming bills every month just to be able to watch everything.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:00

So now we're back to that distribution problem.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:03

And I think you're right.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:05

It's like the ability to pay one individual a lot of your money as opposed to just paying a little bit and hoping that you get something in return.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:17

It's almost like a slot machine with Netflix every month, right?

Will Spencer 00:25:20

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:20

Will there be something worth watching this month as opposed to just saying, no, I'd rather just spend $100 on this individual artist who represents my values and will make a story I can dress, which we've seen.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:32

I mean, in October of last year, our average monthly subscriber that contributed on our platform spent $160.

Will Spencer 00:25:39

Oh, wow.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:40

So Netflix and Disney can't get $160 for one customer?

Marcus Pittman 00:25:46

There was a venture capitalist that posted on Twitter last week, why doesn't Netflix just let people spend $2 on that?

Marcus Pittman 00:25:55

Movies and tv shows they want to make amazing.

Marcus Pittman 00:25:57

And we were like, that's us.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:00

Hello?

Marcus Pittman 00:26:01

And I have a long story.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:03

I went to his website to apply for his venture, and they wanted to know what gender and race identify with for inclusivity reasons.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:13

So I just backed out, and he never contacted me, even though we've already built it.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:17

So.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:18

So there is this thing where it's like, you know, there are worldviews at play here, both in the secular and the conservative faith based streaming space that you're actually competing.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:32

That's what you're actually competing with.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:34

And of course, there's a.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:38

The, on the venture front, you know, there's the, they, especially in the conservative and christian space.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:45

Christian space, more specifically.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:46

They're very, very attracted to the red carpet and wanting that box office lottery story.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:56

They want that box office.

Marcus Pittman 00:26:57

They want to show we can compete in the theaters just like everybody else.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:02

Well, of course you can.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:03

Just because nobody's winning in the theaters.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:05

Yeah, right.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:06

Like, no, like, nobody's winning in that model.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:08

And I'm sure, like, as theaters become a more and more rare thing.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:15

Yeah, christian films are going to have more wins, but it's not setting them up for success in the future.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:22

Like, it's, like, it's not a future play.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:24

It's just the last.

Jason Farley 00:27:26

That is what we do, though, because we're winning at radio right now.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:31

Yeah, we're.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:31

Yeah, right.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:32

Conservatives crush, crush it.

Jason Farley 00:27:34

Radio.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:36

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:36

We're always on that last end, you know, and then you go, well, why aren't christians spending billions of dollars investing in AI technology?

Marcus Pittman 00:27:46

I don't know.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:46

They think it's demon possessed.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:48

Right?

Marcus Pittman 00:27:49

Yeah, that's the initial.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:51

That's what people think.

Marcus Pittman 00:27:52

So, so there's, there, there's all this, you know, almost gnostic view of new technology and stuff that you have to overcome and also gnostic view storytelling where you go, oh, I didn't like that.

Marcus Pittman 00:28:05

That film had a bad word in it, and it was made by christian artists, so I'll never support him ever, ever again.

Marcus Pittman 00:28:12

You know, it's like that sort of stuff where it's like, that's not, that's, you don't treat Hollywood that way.

Will Spencer 00:28:17

Right, right, exactly.

Will Spencer 00:28:18

The permissiveness with secular media that so many christians have is like, what are you listening to?

Will Spencer 00:28:24

What are you watching?

Will Spencer 00:28:24

And then someone says the wrong thing in a christian film, you throw it out.

Will Spencer 00:28:28

Like, that's completely backwards.

Marcus Pittman 00:28:30

I'll never, yeah, or, you know, it's like, oh, that film was too baptist for my Presbyterianism.

Marcus Pittman 00:28:36

Or that movie used catholic imagery to show faith.

Marcus Pittman 00:28:41

You know what?

Marcus Pittman 00:28:41

You know?

Marcus Pittman 00:28:42

So it's just like all these different things.

Marcus Pittman 00:28:43

It's like we're so gnostic on that that we don't understand.

Marcus Pittman 00:28:49

We're very, very, very, very quick to just throw anything out just by watching a trailer, you know?

Marcus Pittman 00:28:58

And it's like, oh, yeah, that, that guy in that movie was gay, but he was the bad guy.

Marcus Pittman 00:29:03

Right?

Marcus Pittman 00:29:05

Like, we don't, we don't, we don't think that rationally and have those sort of, like, in depth conversations with arts and media and stuff that, that we need to have.

Marcus Pittman 00:29:16

And that's why I think our model is so important, because it allows people to invest in content, fund it with their own money, and then watch it, and then have to go, well, what did that guy mean by this or that?

Marcus Pittman 00:29:30

And will I give him more money to try again because I didn't like it?

Marcus Pittman 00:29:35

Or do I just think this guy's incapable of making content, but that's between the artist and the consumer and not the executives who are just forcing content upon you.

Will Spencer 00:29:48

So you guys provide the platform.

Will Spencer 00:29:53

That's how we started the conversation.

Will Spencer 00:29:55

You had to invent and construct the technology to build the platform in the way that you saw content being produced, in the way that you wanted to promote.

Will Spencer 00:30:03

That model didn't exist.

Will Spencer 00:30:04

The tech didn't exist.

Will Spencer 00:30:06

You had to build all that first before you just built the site to deliver the content on.

Jason Farley 00:30:12

Exactly.

Jason Farley 00:30:13

Yeah.

Will Spencer 00:30:13

Okay.

Will Spencer 00:30:14

Say more about that process, because from my time in the startup world, like during the.com era, 99 to 2001, I discovered we actual technology that we were working on.

Will Spencer 00:30:26

I discovered that there were a couple different kinds of companies that existed at the time.

Will Spencer 00:30:30

I was, like, 2021 years old.

Will Spencer 00:30:32

And so there were companies that were just, we might call them straight content plays.

Will Spencer 00:30:36

They use existing technologies, they leverage existing technologies to deliver some sort of service.

Will Spencer 00:30:43

And those are very quick to launch and very quick to fund and often very quick to fail, sometimes spectacularly.

Will Spencer 00:30:50

But then there were the guys who were laboring in, quote, unquote in the basement or in the garage or whatever, actually building something of real value.

Will Spencer 00:30:57

Less spectacular, less interesting, much less flashy, the Steve Wozniak to the Steve jobs sort of thing.

Will Spencer 00:31:04

But a lot of people were really hesitant to fund those plays for various reasons.

Will Spencer 00:31:09

And it sounds like that's where you guys are at.

Will Spencer 00:31:12

Not about, we're going to launch some sort of new network with great branding.

Will Spencer 00:31:15

It's like, no, we're actually going to build something unique and original.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:18

Yeah, that's very hard to convince people of that because a lot of investors aren't necessarily developers.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:32

A lot of them got their money from real estate or, or wherever they get their money from.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:38

So you say, no, no, no.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:39

Here's what we're going to do.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:40

We're actually not going to outsource to developers in India.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:44

I've had conversations with investors that's wondering why we just don't do that.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:49

But then you hear from other startups that did do that, and it was a complete disaster.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:55

They worked at 03:00 a.m.

Marcus Pittman 00:31:58

and you didn't get back to them until they were in bed and nothing could ever get changed.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:04

So they wound up actually spending more money in the long run working with these outsourced developers and stuff than just spending the money and hiring developers in America.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:18

And just like there are filmmakers in Hollywood that are looking for a way to get out, there's developers in Silicon Valley that are looking to get out.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:25

So you're loving your neighbor by hiring them and providing them the chance to be at the start of a new tech company.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:35

But for the most part, when I was doing this, the one thing that I wanted to do is I was like, christians need to build and own something new.

Will Spencer 00:32:45

Amen.

Will Spencer 00:32:45

Hallelujah.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:48

We always copy stuff.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:51

We have our pure flixes, which is just, this is the christian version of, of Netflix.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:56

Like, even in the name.

Marcus Pittman 00:32:58

Right?

Marcus Pittman 00:32:59

And so we have those things.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:01

And then, you know, when it comes to, you know, apps, you know, like apps and technology, we just have Bible apps that are the main tech of Christian owned, Christian owned companies.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:14

You know, even, you know, we can talk about the parallel economy.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:19

The problem with parallel economies is that they're parallel.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:23

They're over here.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:25

And that's fine.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:29

Initially, I think you have to have niches to build major brands, but I think that's not a long term solution.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:36

What we need is to create christian companies that become global brands.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:40

I think an example of that, two examples of that is chick fil a doesn't make christian sandwiches.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:48

Hobby Lobby doesn't have christian arts and crafts.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:51

It's just a good craft store.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:53

It's just a good fast food chain.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:55

In and out, same thing.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:56

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:33:57

So they don't cater to a typical audience.

Marcus Pittman 00:34:00

But because they do have that christian loyalty, they have a brand loyalty that's insanely strong.

Marcus Pittman 00:34:09

That just doesn't come from, you can't, you can't build that.

Marcus Pittman 00:34:14

That just comes from the fact that the owners are openly open about their faith.

Marcus Pittman 00:34:19

And so one of the things that was.

Jason Farley 00:34:23

So this was my first time in a tech company at all, and one of the things that was amazing early on is being able to sit down and say, what are we trying to do?

Jason Farley 00:34:34

Is there anyone that's done that or built that?

Jason Farley 00:34:37

And when the answer was no, we had the discussion, okay, so to do it right takes a lot longer than we have on ramp wise.

Jason Farley 00:34:52

Sure.

Jason Farley 00:34:54

We actually lost an early CEO because he didn't like the way we were willing to get to market slower by building it ourselves.

Jason Farley 00:35:07

Because there was this, we've got to get to market as quick as possible.

Jason Farley 00:35:11

We've got to get to market as quick as possible, which I understand that impulse, but when you're trying to disrupt and do something that hasn't been done, we had to consciously, as you know, we had to actually consciously make that decision, as the founders of the company, to say, it's going to take longer to get to market, but we're going to get to market in the shape that can actually disrupt versus get to market faster in a way that won't give us the ability to disrupt because we wouldn't have built it ourselves, had proprietary tech.

Jason Farley 00:35:50

All of the stuff that we do have now, we wouldn't have had.

Jason Farley 00:35:54

We thought primarily about getting to market as quick as possible.

Jason Farley 00:35:59

And for me, that was fascinating because it was my first time ever having that discussion.

Marcus Pittman 00:36:03

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:36:04

And seeing the value of that, too, in that when we did the beta and there were bugs, we knew exactly where the problem was and could fix it in seconds, as opposed to having to read other resources of plugins and all these other things and to try to figure out where the problem is on their end that we may or may not even be able to fix.

Marcus Pittman 00:36:27

So being able to fix those bugs immediately, because we knew our developers lived and breathe and created that code as an art, it was their art that helps you scale.

Marcus Pittman 00:36:41

The question is, what happens if this podcast we're on right now blows up and gets millions of views and suddenly lore has hundreds of thousands of subscribers overnight?

Marcus Pittman 00:36:54

Well, we've implemented our own system, so we can scale relatively quickly.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:00

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:00

So, but if we're, if the influx of subscribers breaks, you know, a WordPress blog, you're kind of dependent on WordPress to update that.

Will Spencer 00:37:12

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:12

You don't know if they are or, like, you're, you're stuck.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:16

Like, you're in a bad situation.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:18

And so doing that, and then I would also say, too, you can't build institutions and culture overnight, cultural institutions overnight.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:30

You know, if you look back on the history, me and Jason, like, we, like, we just live and breathe this.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:34

I just started a substack on pretty much television, like, in history.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:40

But, like, but when you look at, like, you know, some, let's say, like, I'm wearing teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shirt right now.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:47

Right?

Marcus Pittman 00:37:47

So they started by selling photocopies of the hand drawn comics out of the trunk of the car in New York City.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:55

Oh, wow.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:55

You know, and we just think, oh, yeah, it was this hit tv show, but it didn't start there.

Marcus Pittman 00:37:59

It's this long term process that gets that, you know, Marvel movies has 100 years almost of capital, cultural capital behind it that allowed for Disney to be able to do what they did.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:14

There's two or three generations of people that can watch a Marvel movie that, that doesn't happen overnight.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:22

And, you know, so those are the sort of things you look back and you go, well, you just don't build culture quickly.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:29

But, you know, same thing is true with MTV.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:34

I just wrote about this today.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:36

But MTV, when they started, nobody knew what a music video was.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:42

There wasn't Internet.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:44

Nobody could go and watch music.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:46

Think about it.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:47

Like, what is that?

Marcus Pittman 00:38:48

The only, they had 100 music videos when they started the network on, on day one.

Marcus Pittman 00:38:53

And those hundred music videos were mainly just like, promo videos used for distributed distributors of record labels and stuff like that.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:01

And then they were like, now we're going to build this whole thing, this whole network around this thing that doesn't exist.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:07

And as soon as they launched, they started to have bands that would just make music videos in their garage with their eight millimeter camera or whatever and then just send it in.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:18

And everyone in the offices of MTV would cheer when a new music video came in and they would play it because they didn't have anything else to play.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:26

And so you build up all these brands, and so you think, like, the long term of an institution is, it becomes a billion dollar company that creates billion dollar companies, right?

Marcus Pittman 00:39:40

Like, so, you know, you look at, like, cartoon network, right?

Marcus Pittman 00:39:46

Cartoon network started and all they had was reruns of old cartoons.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:52

But eventually they were able to start there.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:55

And over time, they built out new cartoons.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:58

Some failed, some didn't work.

Marcus Pittman 00:39:59

And then eventually, over time, you would get Powerpuff girls, you would get Dexter's laboratory, you'd get adult swim.

Marcus Pittman 00:40:07

And the billions of dollars that Rick and Morty is generating now, right?

Marcus Pittman 00:40:12

So you create moving making machines or cultural creating machines, and it takes a while to do, and it's not something that happens overnight.

Marcus Pittman 00:40:23

I cannot go to any investor right now and say, I want to start a nationwide fast food chain.

Will Spencer 00:40:30

Right?

Marcus Pittman 00:40:31

It doesn't work that way.

Will Spencer 00:40:32

No.

Marcus Pittman 00:40:32

It starts with one good restaurant, and then slowly that one restaurant is franchised locally, and then over the period of ten or 20 years, it becomes a national brand, but it doesn't have.

Marcus Pittman 00:40:43

There is no quick exit on those sort of things.

Marcus Pittman 00:40:46

And I think when you look at, like, oh, yeah, I can just flip this house in 90 days and then just get a return on the flip of the house.

Marcus Pittman 00:40:54

And that's a great investment, and in a lot of cases it is, but it doesn't work that way with a, like, you're not building culture by flipping a house.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:07

You're fixing something up and selling it and getting a quick exit.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:10

And the same is true with b two b SaaS, which a lot of conservative investors are pretty much exclusive.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:16

That's all they do.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:18

Like a b two b sash.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:19

You can build up real quickly.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:20

You can get 100 users that are businesses that are paying $1,000 a month, and suddenly you're bringing in one hundred k a month in revenue.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:32

And then you can sell that quickly and get out.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:36

But you're not really leaving your kids a business or culture with a result of that.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:45

That's what the left has done so well, is that they have ten or 20 year plans to be able to do what they do.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:54

And look what MTV did.

Marcus Pittman 00:41:55

There's literally, they call Gen X the MTV generation.

Will Spencer 00:41:59

Yep, that's me.

Marcus Pittman 00:42:01

You know, so that takes a lot of time and effort.

Marcus Pittman 00:42:09

But there's no question MTV is more valuable now than it was 40 years ago, although they just pulled the plug on the ship.

Jason Farley 00:42:22

So it's.

Marcus Pittman 00:42:23

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:42:24

You know, now you would paramount merging all these distinct, iconic, profitable brands into one unprofitable tv channel, everybody's lost their brand identity.

Marcus Pittman 00:42:41

There's no unique.

Marcus Pittman 00:42:42

There's no uniqueness.

Marcus Pittman 00:42:44

It's like you can watch this horrible cooking show on the same network that used to have HBO in front of it now, right?

Marcus Pittman 00:42:53

It's like, what you know what?

Marcus Pittman 00:42:55

What has happened?

Marcus Pittman 00:42:55

You've gone from curb your enthusiasm, the Sopranos, like, all these genre defying tv series, and right up next to, you know, some weird reality makeover show that nobody watches.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:09

It's just a fell space.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:11

And that, like, there is no HBO anymore.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:14

Like, it's gone, right?

Marcus Pittman 00:43:15

Like, how did that happen?

Marcus Pittman 00:43:17

They just.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:17

They just came off a Game of Thrones, which is probably one of the most successful financial tv shows of all time, to instantly not having.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:27

I'm not talking about the morality of the show.

Will Spencer 00:43:29

No, no, I'm just saying.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:30

Yeah, yeah, you have to warn you, christians do not watch.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:37

Yeah, but, but so you just have this giant, massive success, and then suddenly there's no HBO anymore to fought, like, why would you do that?

Marcus Pittman 00:43:50

How does that make any sense?

Marcus Pittman 00:43:51

And so now you don't have brand loyalty to those brands.

Marcus Pittman 00:43:55

You know, all these people who grew up watching HBO or paid for it on their cable subscription, and they were fans.

Marcus Pittman 00:44:03

When HBO announced a series, it meant a lot.

Marcus Pittman 00:44:06

And now it's like, wait, is that show on Max?

Marcus Pittman 00:44:10

Is that an HBO series?

Marcus Pittman 00:44:13

Is.

Marcus Pittman 00:44:13

Is the Conan travel show?

Marcus Pittman 00:44:15

Is that a HBO show or is that just a Mac show?

Marcus Pittman 00:44:18

Like, what's the difference between the two?

Marcus Pittman 00:44:21

You know?

Marcus Pittman 00:44:22

You know, and then you have to watch it to see that HBO fuzz.

Marcus Pittman 00:44:26

Tv fuzz and go, okay, I guess this, this.

Marcus Pittman 00:44:28

I guess this is the HBO show.

Marcus Pittman 00:44:30

But, but there's like, there's nothing that caused you to that, you know, Jason, you mentioned recently you watched the Bear and the Muppet show on the same app, and you were like, what is going on?

Jason Farley 00:44:43

It said, recently watched the Muppet show because I was watching the John Denver episode, which was brilliant, and then the bear was the next thing, and I was like, literally, those shouldn't be on the same app.

Jason Farley 00:44:57

Those are not the same.

Jason Farley 00:44:59

Beavis and Butt Head wasn't produced by MTV.

Jason Farley 00:45:01

It was produced by Paramount.

Jason Farley 00:45:03

And then MTV produced the new Oregon trail tv show.

Jason Farley 00:45:07

And you go, so the brands are gone because they just dole out.

Jason Farley 00:45:12

They dole because they are all now owned by a parent company who doles out each new show that the parent company signs to a sub, to the channel to produce.

Jason Farley 00:45:25

So Beavis and MTV didn't get Beavis and butthead.

Jason Farley 00:45:29

You think that just, that doesn't make sense from an advertising marketing brand.

Jason Farley 00:45:35

But they don't think that way anymore because they're in conglomeration mode.

Jason Farley 00:45:42

And the economy does this.

Jason Farley 00:45:44

It goes through phases where the people at the top start to conglomerate everything together into large companies, and it loses brand identity.

Jason Farley 00:45:54

And then that makes space for niche companies to come in and serve niches within the economy and build out a brand.

Jason Farley 00:46:03

So this is the normal economic story, the economic fluctuations.

Jason Farley 00:46:11

But I think christians often, we don't pay attention to the way God built the world.

Jason Farley 00:46:16

And so we're not prepped and ready.

Jason Farley 00:46:18

I mean, we don't study economics, for example.

Jason Farley 00:46:22

We don't study brand marketing.

Jason Farley 00:46:25

We don't study some of the really important aspects of business because we think in terms of cash, not in terms of wealth, as christian men, way too often.

Jason Farley 00:46:39

So we don't build out.

Jason Farley 00:46:40

We don't build ourselves out well, in terms of making sure that we're learning our industry, learning the way the world works, and then we don't think in terms of building out generational wealth.

Jason Farley 00:46:55

And so we get surpassed.

Jason Farley 00:46:57

I mean, there are guys doing it.

Jason Farley 00:46:58

Master P, he became a Christian, and then he was in Forbes magazine recently talking about the biblical concept of generational wealth.

Will Spencer 00:47:08

And I was like, Master P, the rapper.

Jason Farley 00:47:10

The rapper?

Jason Farley 00:47:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Farley 00:47:13

Serious.

Jason Farley 00:47:14

So really?

Jason Farley 00:47:18

So God is saying, like, somebody, my people are going to learn this.

Jason Farley 00:47:23

And so I'm going to send the master p.

Jason Farley 00:47:25

So no limit records.

Will Spencer 00:47:28

No way.

Will Spencer 00:47:29

No way.

Jason Farley 00:47:30

Totally.

Jason Farley 00:47:31

So it's not.

Jason Farley 00:47:32

So God is doing.

Jason Farley 00:47:33

God isn't going to let his people lose this knowledge.

Will Spencer 00:48:53

Okay.

Will Spencer 00:48:54

Okay.

Will Spencer 00:48:54

I'm going to.

Will Spencer 00:48:54

I'm going to put this.

Will Spencer 00:48:55

I'm going to put this on the screen.

Will Spencer 00:48:56

Screen share because you guys got to see this masterpiece and Romeo now making.

Will Spencer 00:49:01

I don't know who Romeo is, but I.

Will Spencer 00:49:03

Can you see that?

Will Spencer 00:49:04

Master P and Romeo now making christian content.

Will Spencer 00:49:07

I want my career to be about God.

Will Spencer 00:49:10

January 31, 2020.

Will Spencer 00:49:12

Okay, Percy Robert Miller.

Will Spencer 00:49:14

Master P.

Will Spencer 00:49:15

Percy Robert Miller and his son, Romeo Miller, where they told the Christian Post they veered away from their past hip hop messages to create content that reflects their christian faith.

Jason Farley 00:49:25

But look, he's doing it with his son, right?

Jason Farley 00:49:27

This is exactly what we need to be doing.

Jason Farley 00:49:29

We need multi generational understanding of wealth building, multi generational understanding of business.

Jason Farley 00:49:40

I've actually.

Jason Farley 00:49:41

This is.

Jason Farley 00:49:42

I've had this conversation a bunch of times with people that are complaining about LeBron's son coming into the NBA, and I'm like, what?

Jason Farley 00:49:48

That's a huge blessing.

Jason Farley 00:49:50

What are you talking about?

Jason Farley 00:49:51

He raised his son, right?

Jason Farley 00:49:54

Yeah, it's fantastic.

Jason Farley 00:49:56

So, yeah, so, yeah, I'm excited about what.

Jason Farley 00:49:58

What God's been doing through masterpiece.

Jason Farley 00:50:00

And what's really funny is hearing Snoop Dogg talk about what Master P has been teaching him about biblical generational wealth.

Jason Farley 00:50:09

Snoop Dogg's not a Christian.

Jason Farley 00:50:10

The Snoop Dogg is like, you know, Master T.

Jason Farley 00:50:13

Master P is over here teaching me how to be an adult.

Jason Farley 00:50:16

He's like, because I've got kids, he's teaching me how to build up wealth for my kids.

Will Spencer 00:50:21

Okay, I got another one to.

Will Spencer 00:50:23

Go ahead.

Will Spencer 00:50:23

I got another one to share with you guys while you guys are.

Will Spencer 00:50:25

Keep going.

Will Spencer 00:50:27

No.

Will Spencer 00:50:29

Here's on eew magazine.

Will Spencer 00:50:31

I don't know what that is, but masterpiece says, quote, I put my faith and trust in God as he grieves the loss of his daughter.

Marcus Pittman 00:50:37

Wow.

Will Spencer 00:50:38

He says in new Instagram post, the hip hop mogul, 52, thanked everyone for their love, prayers, and support and declared that despite the pain, quote, I put my faith and trust in God.

Will Spencer 00:50:48

According to Master P, Taytayana has been battling, quote, mental illness and substance abuse since 2015, what he calls, quote, a long and painful journey for our family.

Will Spencer 00:50:57

Yet he said, quote, we hope to turn this tragedy into a testimony.

Will Spencer 00:51:01

Wow, this is wild.

Will Spencer 00:51:05

Praise God.

Will Spencer 00:51:06

This feels authentic, too, because there are a lot of influencers right now who are saying christian things, and I have some questions about their sincerity.

Will Spencer 00:51:17

But this feels genuine compared to those, at least.

Jason Farley 00:51:20

Yeah.

Jason Farley 00:51:21

And it was before it was hip.

Will Spencer 00:51:26

Before it became cool.

Will Spencer 00:51:27

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Farley 00:51:27

2020.

Jason Farley 00:51:28

That's before it was hip.

Will Spencer 00:51:29

That's true.

Will Spencer 00:51:30

That's a good point.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:31

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:32

So, yeah, but I think, you know, you see it with hip hop, right?

Marcus Pittman 00:51:36

Like, hip hop, you know, started early on.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:39

It was done, you know, in New York and the west coast, and.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:43

And they were mixed.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:44

They were using records to make music and scratching and, like, you know, it just came from nothing.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:50

And then now it's, it's created billionaires.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:54

But that didn't happen.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:55

It didn't happen overnight.

Marcus Pittman 00:51:57

And so, like, you can't write a check and guarantee a cultural institution.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:04

Like, look at the sound of freedom.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:06

Sound of freedom did crazy good numbers last year in the box office.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:10

Nobody cares about it now anymore.

Will Spencer 00:52:12

Right, right.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:13

Like, it's forgotten about.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:14

Um, you know, they're doing another movie called the Sound of Hope, which is, they're trying to just capitalize off the, the first one.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:21

But, like, it's not building in, like, because.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:24

Because they're movies that are based off of past events, that, that's not new ip.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:29

So you, like, that's all conservatives really do.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:32

Like, all our movies are true stories.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:34

If they're, that's our way of, if we're really going to break the mold on christian entertainment, we're just going to retell a true story.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:43

But we don't think, hey, let's just create new ip.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:47

Let's just do that.

Marcus Pittman 00:52:49

And in order to do that, you have to have systems that allow for repeatable and scalable creation of content.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:01

So Saturday Night Live is a great example of this.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:04

I'm a big fan of what Lorne Michaels has created there.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:07

For the past 50 years, he's gotten improv comics out of Smokey comedy clubs, and he's put them on tv live where the network can't edit it.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:21

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:22

Like, it's live.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:23

It's, you know, they send notes beforehand and stuff, of course, but they fail live.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:30

If they do a bad sketch, it's live.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:33

They have to recover from that.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:34

They have to read the comments about that.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:37

And that has created everything from everything in comedy.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:41

Adam Sandler, will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, was it?

Marcus Pittman 00:53:49

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:49

Conan O'Brien.

Jason Farley 00:53:50

David.

Marcus Pittman 00:53:51

Mike Miles, David Spade.

Will Spencer 00:53:53

David Spade, Norm McDonald, Dennis Miller.

Will Spencer 00:53:56

In fact, I have a podcast coming out this week with Wade Stotts where we spend a significant amount of time talking about how an influential weekend update was on him.

Will Spencer 00:54:05

Like, you know, and which makes sense for where the Wade show is at right now.

Will Spencer 00:54:08

Like, yeah, that's, people don't understand what a cultural, look, I'm not happy with the direction that Saturday Night Live has gone in.

Will Spencer 00:54:15

It's gone super woke and ultra lib, and they managed to get five minutes of real comedy into 90, into a 90 minutes program now.

Will Spencer 00:54:21

And it's been that way for a while.

Will Spencer 00:54:22

However, it's launched countless careers.

Will Spencer 00:54:27

Like Will Ferrell is a household name almost around the world, and he came out of Saturday Night Live.

Will Spencer 00:54:32

In fact, the Cowbell sketch might be the greatest, might be the greatest Saturday Night Live sketch of all time.

Will Spencer 00:54:37

It's up there for sure.

Jason Farley 00:54:38

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:54:39

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:54:40

I think you're absolutely right.

Marcus Pittman 00:54:42

But I think Saturday Night Live has phases, and I think they are getting a lot of political pressure from the network now to be funny.

Marcus Pittman 00:54:51

They've always attacked comedians.

Marcus Pittman 00:54:54

I mean, presidents, they've always not attacked them, but they've always made fun of every president.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:00

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:01

Yes.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:01

And so, you know, I think every generation goes, hey, they're making fun of our president.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:08

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:09

But at the time.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:11

But they've always done that.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:12

Trump is very easy to make fun of.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:15

I think if you look at, I think Baldwin's Trump was mean, but it was also a very good impression.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:25

I think it was too spot on, which is why it wasn't funny, because there wasn't no caricature.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:32

It was just mean.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:34

When you compare that to who's the announcer now?

Marcus Pittman 00:55:38

But he was like, he was the impersonator for like 20 years and now he's in.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:44

He's the guy that did Bill Clinton.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:46

So his Trump is really funny.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:49

So I think we can make a case about Baldwin.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:53

But the George W.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:55

Bush impersonation was spot on.

Marcus Pittman 00:55:58

The Reagan impersonation, the Clinton impersonation.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:02

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:02

We didn't like Clinton, so that's okay.

Jason Farley 00:56:04

To make fun of Dana Carter, Bush senior.

Jason Farley 00:56:08

Yeah, brilliant.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:09

But the point is, they have these rebuilding times throughout Saturday night's history.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:14

They always have these rebuilding times.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:17

And out of those rebuilding times are the talent that makes it through.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:26

And then you look back and go, this is the greatest SNL sketch of all time.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:31

Every generation thinks their generation is the greatest SNL generation.

Will Spencer 00:56:35

What?

Jason Farley 00:56:35

Cause really it's Matt Foley, motivational speaker.

Will Spencer 00:56:38

I think that's pretty good.

Will Spencer 00:56:40

Van down by the river.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:43

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:44

I grew up with Fallon and Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and Ferrell.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:50

Right?

Marcus Pittman 00:56:51

So we all have those guys we look back on and say, oh, that was my favorite.

Marcus Pittman 00:56:58

But it's been around for 50 years.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:00

You can't do that with something that's been on for one season.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:05

And most importantly, going back to the scalable and repeatable, it doesn't cost them any more money to do one sketch over another sketch on Saturday night.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:15

It's all part of that same budget.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:17

So they can just throw out bad stuff one after the other.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:20

And eventually you're going to get a Wayne's world, right.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:25

And then that's going to become a movie.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:27

Right.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:27

And then, right.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:28

So they've created the system of just generating, putting comedians through like the most terrifying thing I could possibly imagine, just performing live in front of millions of people.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:42

And then from that, it sharpens them and strengthens them and I think makes them better.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:47

I personally believe it's my conspiracy theory.

Marcus Pittman 00:57:49

I can, I personally believe Lorne Michaels allows bad sketches to go on the air as a way to train the cast.

Marcus Pittman 00:58:03

So I think he, I think Lauren knows that one's not a good one, but I think the cast needs to bomb over and over and over again in order to give.

Marcus Pittman 00:58:13

Every comedian does every comedian has to go out there and fail?

Marcus Pittman 00:58:16

They do it in comedy clubs.

Marcus Pittman 00:58:18

You know, they, but they do it on Saturday Night Live, too.

Marcus Pittman 00:58:21

And so I think, I think, you know, I think that's a big part of it.

Marcus Pittman 00:58:25

But, yeah, but I think even, even announce a Saturday, Saturday Live, I think we're starting to see with with Michael Che and what's his name, the white.

Jason Farley 00:58:40

Guy that's married to the black Widow Johansson.

Marcus Pittman 00:58:45

Like, they're weak.

Jason Farley 00:58:46

He's Scarlett Johansson husband.

Marcus Pittman 00:58:48

Their weekend update where they swap jokes and the white guy has to do black jokes and they're insanely racist and they found a way to kind of make fun of the woke nonsense by, like, it's really brilliant.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:03

And so it's, that's starting to create a name for them.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:07

And I think we'll look back and go, man, those two guys on Saturday Night Live were the bet what were some of the best on weekend update.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:14

But it, but they weren't always that way.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:15

They started out, they were pretty, not dry.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:18

Good.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:19

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:20

And so, but now they've, they've kind of, so it just takes, but this was saying, like, it takes time.

Will Spencer 00:59:25

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:25

And so you have to have these institutions that let artists fail.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:31

And when you're spending $100 million on a tv series, you can't have a failure.

Will Spencer 00:59:36

No.

Marcus Pittman 00:59:38

And so that's why lore is so important, is because an artist can pitch an idea, get it funded at a micro budget or lower budget level, make it, and then they can either do really well or it can do really terribly, but they have an opportunity to build out that name and ip for themselves that you can't do on any other streaming platform now.

Marcus Pittman 01:00:00

So basically, we see ourselves as this underground art house.

Will Spencer 01:00:04

That's okay.

Will Spencer 01:00:05

That's great, because that's what I wanted to ask.

Will Spencer 01:00:07

By the way, when we started this conversation, I would not have thought we'd end up talking about Saturday Night Live and masterpiece, becoming a Christian.

Will Spencer 01:00:14

All this stuff you guys are putting together, it's so great to talk about this stuff because I grew up with MTV.

Will Spencer 01:00:21

I was a kid when MTV first started.

Will Spencer 01:00:23

I remember the first MTV Video music awards.

Will Spencer 01:00:26

I remember MTV News, Kurt Loder and all that.

Will Spencer 01:00:30

Yeah, right, exactly.

Will Spencer 01:00:32

And then being on the ground and being on the ground for the launch of Napster and all that stuff and the shift of the music industry and being in the tech world.

Will Spencer 01:00:40

And also, you guys remind me of the guys that I work with in the music industry who are passionate engineers about actually creating the product.

Will Spencer 01:00:47

It's not like we're the performers up on stage, the men behind the scenes that really drive things from a tech aspect, whether it be the guys coding pro tools or the guys behind the mixing desk.

Will Spencer 01:00:57

They're the real heart of the industry.

Will Spencer 01:00:58

And so this is really fantastic for helping me put together a lot of pieces.

Will Spencer 01:01:02

So let's bring it back to lore as well and say, like, so now with all this stuff on the table, how does it come together from a christian perspective or from the perspective of those who actually use lore?

Will Spencer 01:01:13

Like, I'm an artist or I'm an audience member?

Will Spencer 01:01:15

Like, what am I interacting with?

Will Spencer 01:01:17

How do all the pieces fit together to produce the product?

Marcus Pittman 01:01:22

Well, you talk about audience, you talk about the artist, Jason.

Marcus Pittman 01:01:25

I'll talk about the audience.

Jason Farley 01:01:26

So we find the artists that we can say, love God and make what you want.

Jason Farley 01:01:34

We know that we can give them the freedom and they're not going to try and sneak nudity into the background or something.

Jason Farley 01:01:41

They're actually trying to serve God with their art.

Jason Farley 01:01:44

So we find those artists and then help them put together the best pitch because sometimes they'll come with two or three ideas, and so I'll help them sort through the idea to find the one that is going to serve the audience that we've got gathered best.

Jason Farley 01:02:03

And then we help them put together a pitch for the audience that says, here's what the show is.

Jason Farley 01:02:10

So about half the time it's something that's already been made.

Jason Farley 01:02:13

You know, they've made a pilot or they've made, they've made an episode and about half the time they haven't.

Jason Farley 01:02:21

Although we've only ever funded one of those so far because we've only been doing it for a year.

Jason Farley 01:02:27

And then we try and help them introduce themselves to the audience because often that side is a different skill set than the making of the art itself, is the marketing yourself, marketing your project.

Jason Farley 01:02:45

So we help them put together marketing materials and that sort of thing, and then they pitch it to our audience.

Jason Farley 01:02:53

And Marcus can talk about that side, what the audience does.

Marcus Pittman 01:02:57

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:02:58

So the audience has two ways of spending their monthly subscription or funding content.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:05

The first is with every monthly subscription, you get what we call loot.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:09

And loot is basically video game microtransactions, I think like fortnite v bucks or something like that.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:15

Chuck E.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:15

Cheese tokens is a good example.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:18

Your monthly subscription converts to 1200 loot a week.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:22

And then every Tuesday morning you get an email that says you have new loot to spend and you can fund that on content.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:31

And so that's really helpful in that sense, that you can fund content that way.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:39

But they also have the ability to say, man, I really like that project and I want to give $100 to it.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:44

You can buy what we call gold loot.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:46

The gold loot doesn't expire.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:48

You can keep that for whatever project you want in the future or spend it all in one go.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:54

But your regular weekly loot expires every week.

Marcus Pittman 01:03:59

So if you don't use it, uh, it goes back to the platform, and we use that to help market and promote other, other content.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:07

So.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:07

So that way, we're not kind of just, like, stuck with this massive bank account of people who died and somehow their credit card is still gone.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:17

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:04:17

Like, so that's not the worst thing.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:19

We can't.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:19

We can't spend it like, it can't be used.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:22

So.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:23

So we have the expiration on the regular loot, and then you can buy the gold loot.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:26

That.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:26

That stays forever.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:30

But basically, yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:32

Our main idea is we want to be a niche brand.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:37

We don't want to just be this broad sort of Netflix or broadcast network that really, we're focused on what's content that's going to appeal to Gen Z, what's content that's going to appeal to young Mendez.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:53

There's no con.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:54

There's no christian content for men.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:56

Nope.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:57

Anymore.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:58

It's all.

Marcus Pittman 01:04:59

It was all made.

Marcus Pittman 01:05:01

All of christian entertainment was built around the distribution available through lifeway christian bookstores.

Marcus Pittman 01:05:07

So you had Caleb selling music to women at life, that shop at lifeway, and then you had the christian film industry selling dvd's to the women who shop at lifeway.

Marcus Pittman 01:05:17

And so we really turned christian entertainment into a hallmark sort of vibe from music to movies to books, all that sort of stuff.

Marcus Pittman 01:05:27

And there's never been a masculine need or a masculine motivation to create content.

Marcus Pittman 01:05:37

And so that's really where our core focus is, because nobody's doing that, and nobody has the guts to really do that in the way that it would need to be done.

Marcus Pittman 01:05:48

And so that's been really where our focus is.

Marcus Pittman 01:05:53

But, yeah, the main goal was just the more people that subscribe to the platform and think of this in the long term play.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:00

So we come in, our first subscribers, when they subscribe, there was no new content on the platform.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:07

I bet, like, none.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:08

And people are like, this is impossible.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:11

Investors are like, no way this will work.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:13

You got to have 10,000 hours, I think was the minimum data point.

Jason Farley 01:06:17

What we kept hearing.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:19

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:19

That people said, you have to have 10,000 hours of content.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:22

Again, they're measuring watch time.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:25

So that was their metric.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:29

And we started with, I think, two tv documentaries series that we funded during our beta that were still there.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:38

And so, yeah, so we, we, so we did that, and now we're up to 55 pieces of content on the platform.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:45

Wow.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:46

And maybe, maybe more.

Marcus Pittman 01:06:48

Now but, yeah, but if MTV would.

Jason Farley 01:06:52

Have said, there's less than 400 minutes of music videos that exist in the world, well, we'll start with something else.

Jason Farley 01:07:01

You wouldn't have gotten MTV.

Jason Farley 01:07:03

And.

Marcus Pittman 01:07:03

That's right.

Jason Farley 01:07:04

They had to just say, well, we're going to put those on loop.

Jason Farley 01:07:07

Or Discovery Channel, they didn't have enough content because they were trying to be just documentaries.

Jason Farley 01:07:15

And so they used to break into the russian satellite television and to have somebody that translated it live through it while it played because they didn't have enough time to fill the space.

Jason Farley 01:07:28

So they ended up getting in trouble because they were told, you can't actually just break into international satellites.

Jason Farley 01:07:36

But they did it long enough that they finally got around to where they had enough content.

Jason Farley 01:07:40

So.

Marcus Pittman 01:07:42

And Johnny Carson made jokes about the russian television on Discovery Channel, and that's how Discovery Channel blew up.

Marcus Pittman 01:07:48

So, so, like, even then, it, like, it didn't have, these networks didn't just gain a following.

Marcus Pittman 01:07:53

You know, MTV took years before it got its first advertisers years.

Marcus Pittman 01:07:58

Okay.

Marcus Pittman 01:07:59

And so, so, you know, we look at it as like, oh, yeah, this was overnight success, but none of them were.

Marcus Pittman 01:08:08

And so one other way they can.

Jason Farley 01:08:11

Find that can be funded, too, is what we, we have what's called blitz mode, where a company can sponsor a show and double, double people's loot or triple people's value of people's loot and have their, their name attached to the show.

Jason Farley 01:08:28

So, you know, they're blitz moding, breaking laws.

Jason Farley 01:08:33

And so everybody that spends a dollar's worth of loot, it comes in as $2, and that company makes up the difference.

Jason Farley 01:08:42

So blitz mode is the other thing that we've got now that we just implemented as a way for companies to be able to sponsor a show that they want to see made.

Marcus Pittman 01:08:51

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:08:52

And so that's a great system, too, because it, we're kind of hesitant on advertising on our platform because we don't want the advertisers to become who we bow down to in terms of the content that gets put on the platform.

Marcus Pittman 01:09:07

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:09:08

So you see, like, you know, you see, like, Netflix and Disney, they're all doing advertising models now, but that really means they're just bowing down to big pharma because they're the ones that spend, like, 75% of all advertising revenue.

Will Spencer 01:09:19

Yikes.

Marcus Pittman 01:09:20

In the country.

Marcus Pittman 01:09:21

Yikes.

Will Spencer 01:09:21

So wait, wait.

Will Spencer 01:09:23

You said big Pharma spend 75% of the advertising revenue in the country for television media.

Jason Farley 01:09:29

Advertising is big pharma.

Marcus Pittman 01:09:33

Yeah.

Will Spencer 01:09:33

So I remember there was a law.

Will Spencer 01:09:35

It was.

Will Spencer 01:09:35

I think it was during the Clinton era that they legalized advertising, like television advertising for pharmaceuticals.

Will Spencer 01:09:42

I remember when that was passed, like the supreme Court.

Will Spencer 01:09:45

And now suddenly, it makes a lot of sense.

Will Spencer 01:09:47

I mean, for many other reasons as well.

Marcus Pittman 01:09:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:09:51

So, so that's, that's why, you know, so, so now, you know, what if we wanted to do a documentary that was, you know, anti vaccine or something, or an artist did.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:02

Not us, but the artist wanted to do a documentary that was anti vaccine, and then suddenly we get a call from Pfizer that's like, we're gonna pull a million dollars in funding from you.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:12

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:13

Suddenly we're not, it's not the artists, it's not the consumers that are deciding what content they want anymore.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:19

So we didn't want to do that.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:20

So instead, we just allow the advertiser to pick the show they want to fund.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:24

Or, I think more, even better, they can just Blitz mode the entire platform, and then the artists are still free to, the consumers are still free to fund the content they want.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:36

And, you know, the advertiser can just say, why I blitz mode the entire platform.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:41

I didn't know that show was, you know, I didn't specifically fund that show.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:45

So, so there's, we're trying to think of ways in which the artists and consumers still work together in that.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:53

In that.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:54

But that's really been successful.

Marcus Pittman 01:10:56

We got our first advertiser with that, and then also any project that gets funded through Blitz Mode during that time, at the beginning of every episode, it'll do a five second little blitz by this company and then, and then go on to the show.

Marcus Pittman 01:11:12

So, so it's really valuable for the company, I think.

Marcus Pittman 01:11:16

And then we're also working with artists to make sure that if there's any product placements or stuff in their projects.

Marcus Pittman 01:11:22

And then we're also working with artists to get their content or pilot if they fund the pilot on our show, we're having conversations with other streamers to basically help the artists sell the rights to other streamers to get the whole season funded through the typical normal channels.

Marcus Pittman 01:11:42

Because we have the data that shows that people want to see it.

Marcus Pittman 01:11:46

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:11:47

Nobody has that.

Marcus Pittman 01:11:49

We have that because people spent their money on our platform to fund the pilot.

Marcus Pittman 01:11:53

So we know that that pilot has an audience that wants to see it, even if it's on a smaller scale now, it's still a pretty good focus group size.

Marcus Pittman 01:12:03

Bigger than the normal focus group size, for sure.

Marcus Pittman 01:12:07

So, yeah, lots of value in our platform for the broader streaming landscape especially within the christian conservative space.

Marcus Pittman 01:12:18

So, yeah, but again, all that data, all the watch time, the funding metrics, the analytics, all those sort of things was part of what we were able to incorporate in the backend because we took our time to build it out.

Will Spencer 01:12:33

Yes, that's what I was thinking, is that you didn't just go with off the shelf tech, you built your own stuff.

Will Spencer 01:12:38

You know how it works, you know how to add something to it which is way more flexible.

Will Spencer 01:12:43

Now that you can have an idea for how to modify your platform and you have access to the code, it's all just right there and you can update it and test it, as opposed to having to go to some other third party to try and work with the tools that they provided and find didn't work.

Will Spencer 01:12:58

In fact, I had the guys from Dominion dating on two, three months ago, something like that.

Will Spencer 01:13:03

They have built a dating platform for reformed christian singles.

Will Spencer 01:13:07

And so their first version of the site was based on WordPress.

Will Spencer 01:13:10

And they found that WordPress did not work great for a dating site.

Marcus Pittman 01:13:15

I think they might have talked to me and I tried to talk them out of that.

Will Spencer 01:13:18

WordPress.

Will Spencer 01:13:18

Yeah, yeah.

Will Spencer 01:13:20

And all kinds of problems.

Will Spencer 01:13:21

And so they rebuilt it from the ground up, which is a really cool story.

Will Spencer 01:13:25

And now it works way better.

Will Spencer 01:13:26

It does a whole bunch more, but they learned the hard way the lesson that you guys had an intuitive sense of like, no, we have to build this ourselves first.

Will Spencer 01:13:34

Now, naturally, building a dating site, it would seem that the demands are far lower than building a streaming site.

Will Spencer 01:13:41

If you're going to build a streaming site, obviously that has a much higher tech overhead with delivery of the content, high bandwidths and stuff, versus a dating site.

Will Spencer 01:13:48

And if you want to build something that really shifts culture, you have to own it.

Will Spencer 01:13:54

You can't just be taking someone else's.

Marcus Pittman 01:13:56

Stuff and repurposing it, they'll just cancel you.

Marcus Pittman 01:13:59

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:00

And then what do you do?

Marcus Pittman 01:14:01

What do you do then?

Marcus Pittman 01:14:01

Like, right, so every, everything has to be implemented.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:07

I wouldn't say that every key, every part of our website is custom.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:11

We still use Vimeo for CDN and stuff like that.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:15

But we've created the website so we can just swap it out to whatever we want.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:20

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:21

Or eventually build out our own, which is the goal of.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:23

But the other thing too, that's important is the flexibility and that what we've built isn't exclusive to one platform.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:34

So we can take the website, we've built the core site, and then part of our current round of investment that we're doing now is to build out the Roku and the Google TV apps and the mobile apps and stuff.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:47

But it's all because we have the core built.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:51

It's not as complex of a system.

Marcus Pittman 01:14:54

We're not having to redo everything so we can make an Android version or an iPhone version.

Marcus Pittman 01:15:01

It's all coming from the main system, the main stack.

Marcus Pittman 01:15:06

So that's really what is valuable too, because you never know what new platforms or stuff that is going to come up.

Marcus Pittman 01:15:14

You're going to have to make an app for in the future, and you want to be able to get it out there before WordPress updates and let you do it.

Marcus Pittman 01:15:26

So that's really important as well.

Will Spencer 01:15:30

Have you had trouble or not finding developers?

Will Spencer 01:15:34

Because I fully agree with not outsourcing to India.

Will Spencer 01:15:38

I use upwork and fiverr quite a bit for one off design projects and I'm very selective with the people that I work with and stuff like that precisely for that reason.

Will Spencer 01:15:50

To be able to have a bit more control to make sure that this person's here.

Will Spencer 01:15:53

Time zone is a huge part of it as well.

Will Spencer 01:15:55

Have you found with what you're doing, it's very technology intensive?

Will Spencer 01:16:00

Do you find?

Will Spencer 01:16:01

I would imagine people are fleeing not just Silicon Valley as a place to live, but as a mindset and a place to work and are looking for christian companies to belong to.

Marcus Pittman 01:16:10

We had a backlog of developers who are just waiting to hire full time, so we don't have a problem at all with that.

Marcus Pittman 01:16:16

Everybody's looking to get out of wherever they are at this point.

Marcus Pittman 01:16:22

But again, it's not loving your neighbor to pay them less than what anybody else would just because they're Christian.

Marcus Pittman 01:16:33

So that is, you know, important to us that, you know, we don't.

Marcus Pittman 01:16:39

We don't think our filmmakers should be paid less money because they're christian filmmakers, and that's not how you build.

Marcus Pittman 01:16:46

And you don't build a true escape from Hollywood unless you're able to match their prices.

Marcus Pittman 01:16:54

And so same thing with the filmmakers, same thing with the developers is we want to pay them what they're worth and the value that they bring to.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:02

And I can tell you right now that the developers that we have right now are worth a ton.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:08

They're geniuses.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:11

Our CTO is worth every penny.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:14

Just everybody is just so brilliant.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:19

And the way they speak their language of code and their intelligence and the way they've just created this technology out of their brain over the past four years has been just incredible to watch.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:35

In the same way that watching an artist start with a script and deliver a product.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:41

So, yeah, there is absolutely no problem finding the developer talent.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:48

And the hardest, most difficult part has just been finding investment in capital.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:55

That's been the roadblock.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:57

It's not on the subscriber side.

Marcus Pittman 01:17:59

It's not on whether, like, every data point subscribers have asked us to hit, we've hit, investors have asked us to hit.

Marcus Pittman 01:18:09

We've proven that it works, and now it's just about getting capital to really scale and throw gasoline on it.

Marcus Pittman 01:18:17

But when there's this flash, flashy idea of Amazon just spent $100 million on the Wonder project, and then Daily Wire just got $100 million for their bent, key thing, and we're saying, no, we're only raising 2 million because we don't have to buy content.

Marcus Pittman 01:18:40

I think people go, yeah, well, the rewards of that hundred million dollars is going to be better, which is not turning out that way on any front.

Marcus Pittman 01:18:48

Like, you know, Daily Wire hasn't created any iconic brands.

Marcus Pittman 01:18:53

Every show they have has Ben Shapiro in it as whether it's a cartoon character or some side character, you know, they haven't been able to take that money and use it well.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:03

And so again, like we said, like writing the check, the big check doesn't guarantee the big payoff, especially in entertainment.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:11

There's no guarantee of that at all.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:13

So convincing investors has just been a real challenge.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:16

It's like, no, what we're doing.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:17

And we, we think in terms, you know, you talk about business, you talk about finding your niche, but when you talk about entertainment, people just think there is no niche anymore.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:25

It's just massive box office success, massive Netflix success that reaches wide and broad.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:32

But that's just not how it works.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:33

It's not how it works.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:35

You know, people forget that Netflix started with niche.

Marcus Pittman 01:19:39

They started by just having mail in DVD's in certain cities, and they slowly grew after time and, and they catered to a very film loving, core film loving base where you could review the movies and the algorithm would serve you more content based on the content you loved.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:02

And now it's just like everything is, has to be for everybody, and that just doesn't work that way.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:11

So I think convincing investors, hey, this isn't a real estate play.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:15

This isn't a quick exit B two B SaaS.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:18

This is a goal of being one of the largest private media brands in the world.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:27

And that's just going to take time to get there.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:31

And the goal is that you're going to invest in something that you can pass down to your great grandchildren in the same way Disney did.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:40

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:41

And so that's a harder investment play, especially in a turbulent economy where everybody just wants to get their exit really quick and cash out before the banks collapse.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:54

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:56

But it is like, that is what you have to do.

Marcus Pittman 01:20:59

You have to invest in that long term media play.

Will Spencer 01:21:05

Jason, do you want to talk a little bit about the kind of filmmakers, like, I'm guessing get a lot of people exiting Hollywood?

Will Spencer 01:21:11

Like, please help us get out of here.

Jason Farley 01:21:14

Yeah.

Jason Farley 01:21:14

We focus on, on two spots.

Jason Farley 01:21:16

One, the people that are trying to get out of Hollywood because so they've already got the experience.

Jason Farley 01:21:21

They've made.

Jason Farley 01:21:22

They've made some things, and now they're, they're looking for a way to stay connected consistently to the audience that they're building.

Jason Farley 01:21:29

So that filmmaker is one that's a good fit for us.

Jason Farley 01:21:33

The other one is the new, young, up and coming filmmaker.

Jason Farley 01:21:38

So we've been trying to connect with the homeschool filmmaker that started making movies in their backyard at ten years old.

Jason Farley 01:21:44

And so they've got their 10,000 hours of expertise by the time they're 18.

Jason Farley 01:21:49

And Hollywood doesn't know how to take them seriously, but they also don't want to go to Hollywood and get diddled.

Will Spencer 01:21:59

We're there.

Jason Farley 01:22:00

Yeah, exactly right.

Jason Farley 01:22:02

So those homeschool filmmakers that are building up their expertise as storytellers, that are looking for a community of storytellers that care about the craft, that they can join and be a part of and start their career at the, at the beginning.

Jason Farley 01:22:21

So we had a great young filmmaker that homeschooled, and he had been, he was working on his second feature.

Jason Farley 01:22:28

He was 17 years old, and he contacted us, and it turned out one of our current filmmakers lived just a couple of miles from him, so they connected.

Jason Farley 01:22:39

And now he's been being discipled in the film industry by an expert, a guy that has been doing it since the early nineties.

Jason Farley 01:22:49

And now he's out of Hollywood.

Jason Farley 01:22:51

He's a Christian.

Jason Farley 01:22:52

And now we've got a young guy that is getting discipled by really one of the great christian filmmakers right now.

Jason Farley 01:23:01

And those sorts of connections, I think, are really valuable because you have to build a long term army of filmmakers that don't care about the red carpet, that don't care at all about the red carpet.

Jason Farley 01:23:17

They want to serve the Lord, and they want to serve their audience and make great stuff, love the art itself as a means of serving God and serving an audience.

Jason Farley 01:23:29

And that isn't because of the way the Christian, the, quote, unquote faith based market has been built.

Jason Farley 01:23:40

It doesn't attract that kind of person right now.

Jason Farley 01:23:43

And so there's a lot of young christian filmmakers that are really talented but have no place in the faith based market because they don't want to make.

Jason Farley 01:23:57

They don't want to add horse and a little girl with cancer to their story.

Jason Farley 01:24:02

They don't want a story about puppies, so there's no place for them.

Jason Farley 01:24:09

And so we're trying to really hoe that field so that they can come in and plant and harvest.

Marcus Pittman 01:24:19

Yeah, we were at a christian film festival, and there's this young guy, really talented filmmaker, made a movie with no budget, like, while he was in high school.

Marcus Pittman 01:24:30

But it was about drugs, right.

Marcus Pittman 01:24:32

And selling drugs and the consequences of that.

Marcus Pittman 01:24:35

And it didn't win or get nominated for any of the film festival awards.

Marcus Pittman 01:24:40

And, you know, you had one of these filmmakers go up as a keynote speaker, and he says, we have a seat at the table now.

Marcus Pittman 01:24:47

And I remember that that kid came up to me, and he goes, they keep talking about having a seat at the table in Hollywood, but I don't have a seat at the table here because he doesn't make feminine content.

Marcus Pittman 01:24:58

And that, that really stuck with me as a problem.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:02

Like, you know, like when Jason mentions, you know what?

Marcus Pittman 01:25:06

The movie doesn't have a horse or a dog.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:08

That's not a joke.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:10

They literally require that.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:12

We heard a story of one christian filmmaker who turned his script in, and they said, it needs a dog in it.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:18

So he put a dog in the beginning of the script and had it ran over by a car in the first five minutes, just.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:26

Just so he could get the deal like.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:28

And that works, huh?

Marcus Pittman 01:25:30

It worked well, the quality of the.

Jason Farley 01:25:32

Story, they could put a dog on the COVID That's what they needed.

Jason Farley 01:25:36

They, like, we need to be able to put a dog on the COVID Really?

Will Spencer 01:25:40

I was wondering about that.

Will Spencer 01:25:41

Okay.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:41

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:42

So.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:42

So the joke is, if you go to a christian film festival, they'll ask you where your horse, your little girl, or your dog is in your movie.

Will Spencer 01:25:49

Oh, that's christian films.

Will Spencer 01:25:50

Okay.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:51

Because that.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:52

Because what they do is, you know, there's not.

Marcus Pittman 01:25:57

The christian film industry is not run at the executive level by storytellers.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:02

They're run by mathematicians and data scientists.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:04

So what they look at is.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:07

Yes.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:07

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:09

I was.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:10

I worked advertising for pure flicks, and I was told, we're not an art company.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:14

We're a math company.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:15

And so what they do is they realize that their audience, this is their audience, which is 55 year old women.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:23

This is what they want in their movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:25

And, you know, this is what Hallmark and Lifetime does.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:28

And so we're going to copy that.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:30

And we know that if we put a dog on the movie cover, it gets more plays.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:35

Our dog movies are really popular.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:36

Our horse movies are really popular.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:39

So that's sort of, that's how they do it.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:42

And they realized that they don't have to pay a lot of money for those movies because it doesn't really matter the quality, because the majority of the people that are subscribing to these christian streaming platforms are doing so more out of charity and donating than they are, like, whether or not the quality is good.

Marcus Pittman 01:26:57

So they found out that there's a lot of churches that made movies with their youth groups or with their just on the side.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:08

And they found out they could just pay these churches $300 a year to license the movies and fill up their library pretty quickly.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:15

So that's the system we started by saying, you know, christian movies shouldn't suck.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:22

And we were never talking about the artists being bad artists.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:26

All artists are going to fail, and they're going to make movies that suck.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:29

That's fine, but they have to have the freedom to do that on their own.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:33

They shouldn't do that because the executives have decided that these are the things that need to be in the movie and that's going to make a terrible movie.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:40

And then they have monumental amounts of executive notes and final edits on the end, and then by the time they deliver their film, it's not the film they started with that.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:52

That is why christian movies shouldn't suck.

Marcus Pittman 01:27:54

But if you're talking about whether or not an independent artist is going to make a movie, and it just was bad, but that was the movie they made, and they wanted, go do something better, man.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:05

But you should have the freedom to do that.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:06

You should have the freedom to fail.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:09

And so that's really, you have to ask yourself, why is it that if christian movies have made all this money, pure Flix got bought by Sony, they have money.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:25

It's not a lack of money at any stage.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:32

The movies that have done well in the christian movies theaters have done really well.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:37

They're low budget, high return movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:40

So it's not a lack of money, it's a lack of risk and a lack of courage to really push out of the boundaries that you've done.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:51

And I think a lot of it also is there's not incubation systems to find new artists.

Marcus Pittman 01:28:57

All the movies are done by the same people, whether it's, I should say all the movies are done by the same brothers, whether it's the Harmon brothers, the Irwin brothers, or the Kendrick brothers.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:06

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:29:07

So it's like, so it is an incestuous kind of industry where people who know each other are the ones that get the gigs, but there's no new platforming of new artists.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:21

You know, you never see on a movie, christian movie introducing, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:29:25

Like, you know, first time director, you know, we don't ever see that.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:29

Hollywood does it all the time, but we don't ever see that.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:32

It's always the same writers, same directors.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:36

They know how to make money in return with what they're doing, and they keep doing that same thing.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:41

And that's gonna work until the people in the retirement homes that watch them die, and then it's not gonna work anymore because Gen Z is not watching Pureflix movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:51

No, like, they're not doing, like, they're not doing it.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:54

They are making TikToks making fun of them, though.

Marcus Pittman 01:29:58

And that should give us pause and concern because there's really massive TikTok channels that, of people that only make fun of christian movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:06

And that's really sad.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:10

And that's not a good look for us at all.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:13

Like, we're the ones that pioneered art during the reformation, and we built architecture and buildings that took 400 years to build.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:25

And now we're doing puppy movies about a dog during Christmas.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:31

Like, like, what's going on that is on purpose and it's continual.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:38

And, and I think a lot of it too is funded with a goal to sort of keep christians at bay.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:48

You know, that that's what happened.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:50

That did happen with country music.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:53

So country music and christian music were one in the same.

Marcus Pittman 01:30:57

And then, you know, there was this concern about, well, how our country music art is going to talk about beer and bars and trucks and stuff if the christian music is in the same.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:08

So what they did was they put a lot of money and they moved the christian music industry 30 miles outside of Nashville to Franklin, Tennessee.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:16

And that's where, you know, that's where daily wire rooted out.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:19

Like, you know, TBN's headquartered there.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:23

Everybody's moved.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:24

That's christian entertainment capital of the world.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:26

But it was started as a means to kind of isolate christians into their.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:30

So they could control, hey, this is what a country music song sounds like, and this is what a christian music song sounds like.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:36

This is what modern praise is.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:39

And then they separated those 230 miles apart.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:42

And that's absolutely true.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:44

And it's foolish to think that that's not being done with the christian film industry as well.

Marcus Pittman 01:31:50

And so that should give us a lot of pause and a reason to really invest in something that doesn't have those loyalties and connections.

Will Spencer 01:31:59

That's fascinating, because I think back to what country music used to be with Woody Guthrie.

Will Spencer 01:32:04

Woody Guthrie was.

Will Spencer 01:32:06

He was a socialist, but not in the way that we understand socialism today.

Will Spencer 01:32:10

You know what I mean?

Will Spencer 01:32:10

Like, George Orwell was a socialist as well, but he was genuinely interested in the working class, not world domination.

Will Spencer 01:32:16

So there's a principled form of socialism in the early 20th century.

Will Spencer 01:32:21

But I look, I listen to, like, Woody GUthrie's lyrics, which is so much about the people.

Will Spencer 01:32:25

It's like folk music celebrating the values of simple, humble folk people in their own wisdom.

Will Spencer 01:32:31

And then you look at country music today, and it is beer and trucks and stuff like that.

Will Spencer 01:32:36

It's like, when did country music lose its soul?

Will Spencer 01:32:39

When did it lose the soul of the people that it was designed to appeal to or whose songs it was?

Will Spencer 01:32:45

Songs it were.

Will Spencer 01:32:46

Songs it was.

Will Spencer 01:32:47

When did it lose that?

Will Spencer 01:32:48

And I can understand when christian music and country music were torn apart.

Will Spencer 01:32:53

When christian values are put over here and country music is put over here, you get them both lacking that, we might say, populist kind of appeal.

Will Spencer 01:33:02

And the faith that it's rooted in.

Will Spencer 01:33:03

And now that you pointed out, now I can see it in christian and christian media overall, when was the heart ripped out of it?

Will Spencer 01:33:11

And just put over here on the side.

Will Spencer 01:33:13

Okay.

Will Spencer 01:33:13

That makes a ton of sense.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:14

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:15

We've gone from Ben Hur to the horse movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:18

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:33:19

Like, how did that happen?

Marcus Pittman 01:33:21

And so, and the same thing I say, the same thing is true with christian country music or early christian music was amazing.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:28

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:33:29

Especially.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:29

I mean, even if you look at, like, hymns, like hymns of the day, like, you know, the classic hymns and stuff.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:34

And we've gone from that to Caleb constant reprises.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:39

And so, so there's.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:42

There has been this separation.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:44

I would say a lot of that is feminism and the appeal to women.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:47

I think it probably made a lot of that.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:49

You know, my pastor, Doug Wilson, talks about how, you know, you sing the psalms, because the psalms is a masculine form of worship.

Will Spencer 01:33:59

Amen.

Marcus Pittman 01:33:59

The enemies are real enemies.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:02

They're.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:03

They can destroy your nation, they can destroy your family.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:06

They can kill you.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:07

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:34:08

And then you compare that with modern worship music.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:11

And the enemy is all inward, emotional, or damage to relationships, which is most of the movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:18

You know, if you look at, like, even the movies made for men or made to whether.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:24

So if you look like fireproof and courageous are two movies about men that did really well, but they were made for women to take their men to the theater to fix them.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:35

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:35

So, so the, so there isn't any real enemies in those movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:39

For the most part, the real enemy is just themselves and, or the damaged relationship of the family, which are, which is bad.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:47

But that, that's as far as you go in those films.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:52

Compare that to a braveheart.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:54

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:54

Women are being raped.

Marcus Pittman 01:34:56

The country is at stake, and you're probably going to die.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:01

Mm hmm.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:02

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:03

So, so like, that, though, that's a, that's a psalms.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:07

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:07

And then, you know.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:09

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:09

And then you compare, you know, the puppy movie.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:12

That's the Caleb music.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:14

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:15

And so, so there, there's a massive problem.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:20

And it's, I mean, it's gonna take courage.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:22

Like, you know, like, I think me and Jason talk about all the time is like, we have to make sure that our artists aren't lured by the red carpet.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:33

You know, like, they can't, like, they, that can't be their goal.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:36

We need the artists who are more like, you know, Matt Parker and Trey Stone, who, when they got their Oscar nomination, went to the red carpet high on LSD.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:46

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:46

They didn't care.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:47

They didn't care.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:48

I'm not saying, I'm not saying the christian artists need to be that way, but what I'm saying is I think there is a reason why South park is still influential.

Will Spencer 01:35:57

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:35:58

Because they're not afraid of offending anybody.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:01

They don't care about.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:02

Like, they're not afraid.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:03

They're, they're not like, man, we're not going to get invited to that party if we do this episode on, on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:11

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:12

You know, they're not worried about that.

Jason Farley 01:36:14

And I think into the ditty party.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:17

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:18

I need to get in that diddy.

Will Spencer 01:36:20

So good.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:21

So I think, I think there's a lot of value there.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:24

I think there's a, you know, in terms of, like, looking at, like, what has made them successful over the past 30 years.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:31

You know, it's cartoon built on construction paper.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:34

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:34

Like, you know, and so, you know, and that built a billion dollar brand.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:41

They just sold for a billion dollars.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:43

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:44

So I think, you know, you look at those things and what Comedy Central gave South park was unparalleled freedom.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:53

They could do what they want.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:54

That's what built it.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:55

And so I think us in the christian film industry, we have to give artists freedom.

Marcus Pittman 01:36:59

We have to just say, here's the way to build an audience for yourself by failing over and over and over again until something hits.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:08

And you have to reduce risk on the technology and platform side and the financial side.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:14

And.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:15

But that's over the long term, 20 or 30 years from now, I think that you're going to see people, major filmmakers and artists who made something on lore, and people are going to go, man, they got their start on lore.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:32

That's amazing.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:33

I think that's what you're going to see.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:35

You see that right now, like with Tim Engle, a barely biblical, which is an animated show where teddy bears reenact the most violent Old Testament Bible story.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:45

He just finished episode two, which is about ehud.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:48

It's called left ahead.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:51

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:52

So, you know, that shows funding right now.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:54

You know, it's, it's, it's.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:56

He's doing it for 21,000 an episode.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:58

That's nothing.

Marcus Pittman 01:37:58

Nothing compared to Hollywood union prices.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:01

It's unheard of.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:02

And the show is amazing and it's funny.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:04

And I don't think I've had heard, and the only negative comments I heard was people complaining about references to circumcision.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:12

And we're like, you do know this is an Old Testament story, right?

Will Spencer 01:38:16

Like, that is pretty, pretty big in the Bible, right?

Jason Farley 01:38:21

Like, all the gentile bears have a full tag and all of the jewish bears have a clipped tag.

Will Spencer 01:38:26

It's really funny.

Will Spencer 01:38:27

No way.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:29

Yeah, but it's also, but it's also, we're not making content for people that are offended by that.

Will Spencer 01:38:35

Yes.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:36

We're making content for people that see the value in that and have not had content made for them.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:44

And so that's a challenge because you're building out a new audience.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:49

And it's hard, but it's relatively easy.

Marcus Pittman 01:38:53

I think when you solve those problems, the problems get less and less over time.

Marcus Pittman 01:40:19

Go ahead.

Will Spencer 01:40:20

Oh, no.

Will Spencer 01:40:21

So the question that I wanted to ask is the confrontation that I feel brewing around these two ways of doing Christianity.

Will Spencer 01:40:28

So, for example, just this morning, I was listening to a brand new interview from Tom Founders Ministries.

Will Spencer 01:40:35

He was interviewing a woman named Carrie Gress, who wrote a book called the End of Women that just came.

Will Spencer 01:40:40

It came out about a year ago, but it apparently didn't really catch fire.

Will Spencer 01:40:43

Tom Ascoll got a hold of it, read it, and had her on.

Will Spencer 01:40:46

And the interview literally came out this morning.

Will Spencer 01:40:48

I was listening to it as I was getting ready for this interview.

Will Spencer 01:40:51

And so in this interview, Tom Ascoll says, this is public.

Will Spencer 01:40:56

This is on YouTube.

Will Spencer 01:40:57

He's like, I guess I'm a recovering feminist, because he says those exact words, because he recognized in this book, which is about how even first wave feminism was a cult and origins.

Will Spencer 01:41:07

A lot of people have been talking about this.

Will Spencer 01:41:10

I've had Rachel Wilson on my podcast.

Will Spencer 01:41:12

She wrote a book literally called Occult Feminism, and that episode now has, like, 40,000 views.

Will Spencer 01:41:17

Like, it's blowing up.

Will Spencer 01:41:18

It's fun to watch.

Will Spencer 01:41:19

People are investigating the occult origins of first wave feminism.

Will Spencer 01:41:22

Now, Carrie Grass has done it with her book the end of women.

Will Spencer 01:41:25

And so Tom Ascoll is reading this book, and he's like, I just thought that first wave feminism was good.

Will Spencer 01:41:30

I never questioned any of that.

Will Spencer 01:41:32

And now he can actually see that feminism top to bottom.

Will Spencer 01:41:36

There never was a good version of feminism.

Will Spencer 01:41:38

So this is kind of emerging, and, like.

Will Spencer 01:41:41

And I hold Tom Ascoll in great esteem.

Will Spencer 01:41:44

Many men hold Tom Askell in great esteem.

Will Spencer 01:41:45

So this isn't about Tom per se.

Will Spencer 01:41:47

And he took accountability for it.

Will Spencer 01:41:49

Says, I didn't even question these things.

Will Spencer 01:41:51

And so now we're talking about producing masculine christian content for a massively feminized Christendom, where I think feminism has been quite content to hide for a very long time.

Will Spencer 01:42:03

And now this is going to come up in a really big way.

Will Spencer 01:42:06

I don't.

Will Spencer 01:42:07

I don't know how all that shakes out.

Will Spencer 01:42:08

I mean, you guys are.

Will Spencer 01:42:09

You're in Moscow.

Will Spencer 01:42:10

So Doug Wilson's like, yeah, I've been fighting that battle since.

Will Spencer 01:42:13

Since before you were born, kids.

Will Spencer 01:42:15

So speak into that.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:17

Yeah, well, I don't think you can fight feminism without stories.

Will Spencer 01:42:21

Okay.

Will Spencer 01:42:22

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:22

So, you know, we can sit there.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:24

We can go, oh, man.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:25

I mean, look, if all of our content is feminine, feminized, all of our worship music is feminized, all the entertainment that we're consuming on a christian scale, feminized.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:36

That boils down to the church, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:42:39

Because people are watching entertainment six days a week, and they're going to church once on Sunday.

Will Spencer 01:42:43

That's right.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:44

So if the entertainment they get is listening to Caleb over and over and over again, that's going to boil down to the church.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:53

But what we don't have is we don't.

Marcus Pittman 01:42:55

We're not getting it from the secular side, where we have female archetype heroes, you know, and Star.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:02

You know, they're saying that Star wars is a women's story, too.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:05

No, it's not.

Will Spencer 01:43:06

No, not.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:07

It's literally kill the dragon, get the girl.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:09

That was literally the premise of pure.

Will Spencer 01:43:11

Patriarchy, like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, fatherhood patriarch.

Will Spencer 01:43:16

That's.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:16

Yeah.

Will Spencer 01:43:17

Empire strikes back as the central pillar that's holding up that entire thing right now.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:21

And that.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:21

And that's why.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:22

And that's why the Mandalorian was so popular too, because it was father son adoption, covenant sin and repentance, baptism.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:29

All those narratives are in that.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:30

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:43:31

So.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:32

But it was all masculine.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:33

Then third season, they did this whole arc with Starbuck about this female and just completely forgot about the kid and, you know, the child and Mandalorian, what happened?

Marcus Pittman 01:43:45

No way.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:46

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:47

You know, because they had to recover from losing Gina Carano.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:49

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:50

So they had to spend a whole season to kind of bring this woman back into the picture, and nobody cared about it.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:56

So.

Marcus Pittman 01:43:57

So when all of our stories are female action heroes and daily wire is responsible for this too, they've put out four movies, I think, all with female action heroes.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:10

And so when this is all our stories, it makes it a lot.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:14

One, it disenfranchises men, and then it makes men not want to fight.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:21

Why do I have to fight?

Marcus Pittman 01:44:23

You know?

Marcus Pittman 01:44:24

And so we need masculine entertainment again, like teenage mutant turtles.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:32

Like, those are actual weapons.

Will Spencer 01:44:35

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:36

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:44:36

Like, when do you have a cartoon?

Marcus Pittman 01:44:38

When there's.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:39

They might have Sci-Fi weapons or, like, space guns or something, but you don't see people fighting with swords and nunchucks anymore.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:47

I was just thinking about why I think Cobra Kai so popular, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:44:53

Like, that is.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:54

That is actual.

Marcus Pittman 01:44:55

It's a show with actual fights and people fighting their bullies.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:00

And, like, that's, like, we don't have that anymore.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:02

Everyone's, like, so sensitive about bullies now.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:05

And here you have this show where it's like, no, just punch them in the face, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:45:08

Like, it's just like, we just don't.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:11

There's a longing for that content.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:13

And I think, like, on every top gun, right.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:16

Every major movie or tv show we've seen over the past, I would say, since COVID has been masculine in nature somehow.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:25

You know, I was watching.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:27

I was watching the new Ghostbusters movie, the first new Ghostbusters movie, second one.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:32

But they made a reference to something, and I was like, as soon as they said, I was like, oh, man.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:38

They completely eliminated the female ghostbusters from the canon when they said that.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:42

Oh, okay.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:43

Oh, well, the whole movie was based on the fact that there were no more ghostbusters, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:45:48

And it's like, you're like, wait a minute.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:49

Wasn't there this female Ghostbuster version?

Marcus Pittman 01:45:51

No, no, no.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:54

Never happened.

Jason Farley 01:45:55

I don't remember anything like that.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:57

I don't remember anything.

Marcus Pittman 01:45:58

Then I remembered all the articles of the women who starred in that who were really upset.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:02

Good by that movie.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:04

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:05

But that movie was a good movie.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:07

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:46:07

Like, that one was good.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:09

And so it was just, you know, I think it's demonstrable that male driven content is more popular.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:19

Women watch lifetime and men watch action movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:23

But women watch action movies with their husband.

Will Spencer 01:46:26

Yes, of course.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:27

Like, most of the time, you're not watching Hallmark movies with your wife.

Will Spencer 01:46:31

That's right.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:32

You might every now and then, especially around Christmas.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:34

That's fun.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:35

But, like, for the most part, you know, you're not going to go to a movie to see a rom.com.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:42

you're probably more likely to go see something you and the wife can enjoy together.

Will Spencer 01:46:47

Right.

Will Spencer 01:46:47

And women enjoy.

Marcus Pittman 01:46:48

It's the man that makes those entertainment decisions most of the time in the home.

Will Spencer 01:46:51

That's right.

Will Spencer 01:46:52

And men, women enjoy action movies.

Will Spencer 01:46:55

Women enjoy the Lord of the Rings, or they enjoy Braveheart, you know, because men don't enjoy Roman, men don't enjoy relational things quite so much.

Will Spencer 01:47:04

I guess it depends on the man.

Will Spencer 01:47:05

It depends on how authentically, like, like sleepless in Seattle.

Will Spencer 01:47:08

I mean, I haven't seen it in years, but that was a pretty good movie.

Will Spencer 01:47:10

I think a lot of people like that movie, but it's a very rare.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:13

Men like romance movies.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:14

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:15

When the men is.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:16

When the man is portrayed as man.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:18

Yes, but I think.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:21

I think, like, you know, you like, well, nobody watches the WNBA, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:47:25

No, like, nobody's watching, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:47:27

Nobody's watching WNBA.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:29

No way.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:29

You know, women's soccer, one of my favorite show.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:31

Welcome to Wrexham.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:32

You have this whole narrative about the female soccer team at Wrexham now.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:37

And it's like, I don't care.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:38

I just get past those scenes.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:39

It doesn't matter.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:40

But, but I think, like, women watch male sports and go, I want my husband to be that way.

Will Spencer 01:47:45

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:45

And men watch it and go, I want to be that guy for my wife.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:49

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:50

So there's this, there's this unite.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:52

Knighted.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:53

There's this ability.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:54

But most of the time when men watch, like, a hallmark rom.com, the man is like, I'm not that.

Marcus Pittman 01:47:58

I'm never going to be that guy.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:00

No, I can't be that guy.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:02

And I don't even want, like, even if I was that guy, I'd be embarrassed.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:05

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:48:05

Like, so it's like you write and so they only appeal to women and in women's fantasy, in women's own fantasy, whereas like, braveheart.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:16

Women are like, I want to be rescued by a man like that, and I want my husband to be that guy.

Will Spencer 01:48:21

Well, hold on.

Will Spencer 01:48:22

Yes.

Will Spencer 01:48:23

But I think a lot of women resent the notion inside themselves that they want to be rescued.

Will Spencer 01:48:28

That's the feminist programming.

Will Spencer 01:48:29

It's like, that's why they need more.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:31

Stories of them being rescued.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:33

They need to be in nun.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:34

They need.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:35

They just need to be consumed with stories of women needing to be rescued, because eventually that'll change the mentality of the culture and transition them into, this is, I am a woman, and I do actually like it when I'm rescued.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:54

Jason's working on a rom.com now.

Marcus Pittman 01:48:56

You could tell them about it, but it's on that same print prince called.

Jason Farley 01:49:00

The lesbian in the lumberjack.

Jason Farley 01:49:02

And I wonder what it's about.

Jason Farley 01:49:04

It's about a woman who thinks she's a lesbian, but it turns out she's just never met a real man.

Jason Farley 01:49:09

So she's on her way home to Portland after a funeral, and her car breaks down on the side of the road in rural Oregon, and a lumberjack pulls over to help her with her car.

Jason Farley 01:49:22

And she's like, I don't understand these feelings.

Will Spencer 01:49:26

Feminism leaving my body.

Will Spencer 01:49:28

Right.

Jason Farley 01:49:30

And romantic comedy ensues.

Jason Farley 01:49:32

So, yeah, it's a lot of fun to write.

Will Spencer 01:49:36

Now, I want to ask about this because I think a lot of people are hesitant when it comes to christian content because they worry that they'll be enjoying a really, a nice narrative of a story, and then, like, bam, out of nowhere, like, something will shift in terms of become, like, overtly gospel or, like, they'll.

Will Spencer 01:49:54

They'll take a really nice moment and they'll just insert something that doesn't.

Will Spencer 01:49:58

I don't want to say that it doesn't belong because, of course it belongs.

Will Spencer 01:50:01

But where, like, the illusion will be shattered or something like that.

Will Spencer 01:50:05

They'll turn it into a teachable moment, let's say.

Will Spencer 01:50:07

And people don't like that in the woke world.

Will Spencer 01:50:09

Like, and it seems like the christian space would be like, we don't like that either.

Will Spencer 01:50:14

So maybe.

Will Spencer 01:50:14

How do you navigate that?

Will Spencer 01:50:15

But it feels necessary.

Will Spencer 01:50:16

Like you didn't put enough gospel verses in that.

Will Spencer 01:50:18

Like, come on, can we just.

Will Spencer 01:50:19

Yeah.

Jason Farley 01:50:20

So you get that kind of feedback, and for what?

Jason Farley 01:50:23

I just ignore it because I'm not making a sermon illustration.

Jason Farley 01:50:26

That's not my job.

Jason Farley 01:50:27

My job.

Jason Farley 01:50:28

If it's a comedy, the job is to be funny.

Jason Farley 01:50:30

If it's an action movie, the job is to.

Jason Farley 01:50:33

To make people's adrenaline pump.

Jason Farley 01:50:35

It's a horror movie.

Jason Farley 01:50:36

The job is to scare them.

Jason Farley 01:50:38

Right?

Jason Farley 01:50:38

That, that's what, that's how it works.

Jason Farley 01:50:41

When you're serving an audience, you know what your job is as a Christian?

Jason Farley 01:50:47

Your Christianity should imbue everything in the movie because you're a good Christian, because you love what's good and true and beautiful.

Jason Farley 01:50:56

But your job is not to make a sermon illustration.

Jason Farley 01:50:58

When you're making a movie, your job is to make a movie.

Jason Farley 01:51:02

And I think that's what a lot of, a lot of people that look at christian movies and say, well, I want us, I want you to make a sermon illustration.

Jason Farley 01:51:12

I can bring my friends to, and I, so that they can become christians.

Jason Farley 01:51:16

I just say, well, no, just bring them to church.

Jason Farley 01:51:19

That's what you do with your friends.

Jason Farley 01:51:21

You want to hear them have a sermon, preach to them, bring them to church.

Jason Farley 01:51:24

If they can't bring them, if they don't trust you enough to bring them to church, you need to be a better friend.

Marcus Pittman 01:51:29

Non christians are not going to theater to see God's not dead.

Jason Farley 01:51:33

No, God's not dead.

Jason Farley 01:51:34

Seven.

Jason Farley 01:51:35

God's not dead on the moon.

Will Spencer 01:51:37

I don't even know what that is, but it sounds, but I think, too.

Marcus Pittman 01:51:41

Like, you know, if you want to be more exegetical about it, God created the heavens and the earth, and he gave us scripture.

Marcus Pittman 01:51:50

But the heavens and the earth are not scripture.

Marcus Pittman 01:51:53

They're general revelation.

Will Spencer 01:51:54

Okay.

Marcus Pittman 01:51:55

But they're some of his most beautiful, fantastic works of art, right?

Marcus Pittman 01:52:00

So heavens, earth, stars, the universes, the galaxies, all these sort of animals and plants are beautiful, amazing works of art.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:10

And they declare the glory of God, but it's not enough to save anybody.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:14

They're just amazing art that reflects who he is.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:17

And I think in the same way, christians have that freedom because God did it to just make art that just reflects who he is.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:26

But it doesn't have to be exposition of special revelation.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:29

That's an insane idea that, you know, you know that it just doesn't, it doesn't make sense.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:38

It's a trap we've fallen into because it's easy.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:41

It's easier to get one pastor to buy 300 tickets and pass them out for free than it is to make a good movie and have it compete in the free market.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:53

And we know that's the case.

Marcus Pittman 01:52:56

And then why they do that?

Marcus Pittman 01:52:57

Because we are friends with the guy that invented that system of marketing to pastors.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:02

Buy the digits, and he hates it.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:03

And he hates what he created.

Will Spencer 01:53:04

Oops.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:05

And he wishes he never did because it's ruined the entire christian film industry.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:08

So.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:09

So, you know, like, this is what exists.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:12

Like, this is the system that has been made, and it shouldn't exist anymore.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:17

I personally don't think it should exist anymore.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:19

I think.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:20

I think a christian movie needs to compete against a Marvel movie.

Will Spencer 01:53:23

It does.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:24

And if you can't keep up, then that.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:29

Then come up with something else.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:32

But don't try to just get mega church pastors to buy out a whole theater and to watch your bad movie, because it's an evangelistic opportunity.

Marcus Pittman 01:53:42

I think you're misusing the church tithe at that point, the church funds at that point, and I think you're just kind of trying to take what you can and not be dependent on the free market.

Marcus Pittman 01:54:00

This is a scam.

Will Spencer 01:54:01

Go ahead, Jason.

Jason Farley 01:54:02

Yeah, it was an idea that was popularized by the second great Awakening and then brought into the mainstream by early Billy Graham marketing guys.

Jason Farley 01:54:16

So it's something that really grew out of the terrible theology of the second great awakening.

Jason Farley 01:54:24

And, yeah, we need to get back to just using art as a service, letting art be a service industry to your neighbor and not an evangelistic ministry.

Will Spencer 01:54:36

This is really helpful for me because I run into this with some of the things that I do, some of the videos I want to make, some of the stuff that I want to write, like, is the expectation.

Will Spencer 01:54:44

And part of this is probably my own fault for reading and listening to so many pastors, then that's their job, is to bring it back to scripture.

Will Spencer 01:54:52

So I'm like, well, do I have to support everything that I say throughout the entire thing with scripture verses?

Will Spencer 01:54:59

I don't mean to say there's anything wrong with that.

Will Spencer 01:55:00

It's a glorious thing.

Will Spencer 01:55:02

However, it often feels like creating the content to fit the spec rather than putting the spec into the content.

Will Spencer 01:55:08

You know what I mean?

Will Spencer 01:55:09

Like that meaning the specification, not the spec in an eye kind of thing.

Will Spencer 01:55:12

And I can understand how many christian filmmakers or content creators or of any sort would be like, do I have to turn this into an evangelistic opportunity?

Will Spencer 01:55:21

Or can I just make something enjoyable and glorious for the glory of God?

Will Spencer 01:55:25

And that's a.

Will Spencer 01:55:26

I would imagine that's a confronting idea for many christians who have grown up in the world where it's like every song has to be scripture verses, everybody, every movie has to be evangelistic in nature, and it becomes fatiguing, I guess, because I don't mean to say to go be in the secular world, but it's like, can we make.

Will Spencer 01:55:44

Can we enjoy something for the sake of it, I think, is the question.

Marcus Pittman 01:55:47

You cannot, in the current christian film environment.

Will Spencer 01:55:49

Got it.

Will Spencer 01:55:50

Okay.

Will Spencer 01:55:50

Yes.

Marcus Pittman 01:55:50

You cannot get.

Jason Farley 01:55:52

You won't get money to fund.

Marcus Pittman 01:55:54

You won't get money to do it.

Marcus Pittman 01:55:55

And so, you know, there's a lot of people that are really successful in the christian film industry because they just put their head down and they make that stuff over and over and over again.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:05

But one of our, I think one of the keys to our success has been when we talk to an artiste and they pitch us an idea, you can tell immediately that idea is made to be sold in the christian film industry.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:19

And you say, what are the ideas you have?

Marcus Pittman 01:56:21

People said no to?

Marcus Pittman 01:56:23

That's what we want.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:24

What is that?

Marcus Pittman 01:56:26

And then they tell a much better story.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:28

They have much better ideas than the ones they're formulating.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:32

One guy pitched me an idea.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:35

His first idea didn't.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:36

Didn't get sold.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:37

And so he pitched me another idea a year later.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:40

He's like, yeah, I'm working on this now.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:42

And I looked at him and I said, dude, you're just making that because it's going to get picked up.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:46

Like, you don't really care about that story, do you?

Marcus Pittman 01:56:48

And he was like, no.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:50

And.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:51

Right.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:51

Like, it's.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:53

It's heartbreaking.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:54

Like, like, it's.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:56

It's.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:56

There's nowhere else to go.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:57

Like there.

Marcus Pittman 01:56:58

Without lore, there is no one else talking that has the guts to say, hey, this whole system is like the taxicab industry.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:05

It's terrible.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:06

It's dirty and filthy.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:09

And we need to be a way better, more efficient system.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:13

And Uber was not going to get the investment from the taxi mob in New York City.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:21

They had to go against them.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:23

They had to say, look, this is what we're doing, something completely different.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:26

We don't even call ourselves taxis.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:29

We're just going to actually, we're just going to ignore the laws and risk the fines because we know that people like this so much that we just got to get it out there.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:39

Like, that is the mentality christians and conservatives need to have when they build stuff where it's like, hey, the current system is completely messed up.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:46

It's run by unions.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:48

It's whatever that system is, we got to completely disrupt that.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:53

How do we disrupt that?

Marcus Pittman 01:57:55

Let's allow the subscribers to fund their own content.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:57

Let's do that.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:58

Let's try that.

Marcus Pittman 01:57:58

Right?

Marcus Pittman 01:58:01

And we've seen our model solves every problem the major streaming companies have had.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:07

Everyone.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:07

It reduces churn.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:08

It gets us higher subscriber value per dollar.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:14

It gives us data and feedback instantaneously all these problems that streamers can't get.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:22

We solve those problems insanely disruptive.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:25

And it's been attempted before by Hollywood leaders and each time it's been attempted Hollywood has sent the mob after them to threaten them and blacklist them and say they'll never get any directors or actors to work on this platform.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:41

So it's not a new idea.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:43

I think it's just, it hasn't been done by the people who don't care enough about Hollywood.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:48

And so that's why I think, like we really have the opportunity here to build something wholly unique that's never been done before.

Marcus Pittman 01:58:57

And I think all the economics point to it.

Marcus Pittman 01:59:00

And so the only thing remaining is just the accredited investors with the guts to really want to disrupt things.

Marcus Pittman 01:59:07

And that's hard to find in the christian and conservative space, although I have gotten interest from leftists in what we're doing.

Will Spencer 01:59:14

Interesting.

Marcus Pittman 01:59:15

And we've turned them down.

Marcus Pittman 01:59:16

So, which is really discouraging.

Marcus Pittman 01:59:19

It shouldn't even have to have that conversation because there should be so many other people that are willing to do it.

Marcus Pittman 01:59:28

But there is a worldview problem, I think, between christian investment and secular investment.

Will Spencer 01:59:35

Yeah, I mean, I definitely want to talk about that, but I think what I'm interested in also is your own hero's journey because I hope everyone listening can hear that again.

Will Spencer 01:59:46

This isn't like we're going to turn this around in six months and launch it.

Will Spencer 01:59:50

It was three years, three years of building the thing before you could even bring it to the public.

Will Spencer 01:59:56

So all the exciting stuff that we're talking about now with funding various content creators and filmmakers and different ideas and actually having an impact in culture and making something for the sake of enjoyment that comes on the tail end of a three year commitment to a vision which no one, which doesn't exist.

Will Spencer 02:00:16

Like until you have a minimum viable product, it's like if this thing, if the floor falls out, we have nothing.

Will Spencer 02:00:24

Besides, what if the real light learning was the good friends we made along the way?

Will Spencer 02:00:28

That's kind of what you've got, right?

Will Spencer 02:00:30

So I guess I'm curious about the commitment to the vision, like the idea and then that three year journey of we're going to work behind the scenes to build something that doesn't exist, that no one believes in, that no one's heard of, that disrupts everything and we're going to stay committed to it even though perhaps we feel crazy.

Will Spencer 02:00:51

Perhaps it's like, what are we doing?

Will Spencer 02:00:54

You go through all those things.

Will Spencer 02:00:55

I'm familiar with that.

Will Spencer 02:00:56

So maybe you can talk about this because this is the modern hero's journey.

Will Spencer 02:01:01

We're not saving the village anymore with the.

Will Spencer 02:01:04

Maybe in a few years if Biden gets elected, maybe.

Will Spencer 02:01:07

But for right now, you're setting out on a quest to accomplish something almost impossible.

Will Spencer 02:01:13

And this is what it looks like.

Marcus Pittman 02:01:15

Yeah, I think we started out, we got our 1st 500k very quickly and we built the product and we spent three years doing that and taking the time to do that.

Marcus Pittman 02:01:27

That's not bad.

Marcus Pittman 02:01:28

Then we raised another 350 and our 2nd, 2nd seed round.

Marcus Pittman 02:01:33

And currently we're trying to go after bigger czech investors because we really need the money to scale immediately and quickly at this point.

Marcus Pittman 02:01:43

So now you're at a different level where you're having conversations with people who have a lot more to lose, I think, than the regular, accredited investor who can put in a 25k check or whatever.

Marcus Pittman 02:01:57

When you're going after two hundred fifty k, five hundred k investments or more people, there's a lot more risk on the investor.

Marcus Pittman 02:02:05

Which is true.

Marcus Pittman 02:02:06

Which is true.

Marcus Pittman 02:02:08

But I don't think you can build things that matter without that risk.

Marcus Pittman 02:02:15

I just don't think that can happen when you have guys, I reference b two b and b two b and real estate a lot because that is a majority of a lot of these faith based investment trademark organizations where they're, you know, you go and talk to them, they, that's what they do.

Marcus Pittman 02:02:35

They do, they do lots of money in real estate investments and B, two B SaaS investments.

Marcus Pittman 02:02:43

And then you say, well, what about movies?

Marcus Pittman 02:02:45

What about christian movies?

Marcus Pittman 02:02:46

You invest in christian movies and they go, this is what they'll say.

Marcus Pittman 02:02:49

They'll say, no, but I've donated to some, right?

Marcus Pittman 02:02:53

So they don't even have the confidence that these movies are going to succeed and they shouldn't because they're not good.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:01

They know it's not good.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:02

So a lot of the christian conservative investment capital space, they've been burned a lot because they'll put this money into this movie and it'll lose money.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:16

They won't get a return.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:18

And then the filmmaker or producer will come back and say, I know it lost money, but here's the reports of people who got saved watching your movie.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:28

So it's all worth it.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:29

And they're kind of like, well, yeah, that's nice.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:33

But you did promise a return, right?

Marcus Pittman 02:03:36

Like, or at least right?

Marcus Pittman 02:03:37

So that was so, so there's this map.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:39

There's this map like this.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:41

This is why, you know, and then of course we're saying, hey, we're making christian movies.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:45

And people go, oh, no, not more.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:47

God's not dead.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:48

And we're not talking about that at all.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:49

We're just saying in general, it's christians making any movie, and that's never been done before.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:54

There's no category for that.

Marcus Pittman 02:03:56

That doesn't, what does that mean?

Marcus Pittman 02:03:57

What's the difference between secular movies and conservative movies?

Marcus Pittman 02:04:01

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:01

It's like, well, a good christian movie is.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:04

Any movie is a good christian movie.

Will Spencer 02:04:05

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:06

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:06

Like, any good movie is, sorry.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:07

Any good movie is a christian movie.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:11

Right?

Marcus Pittman 02:04:11

Braveheart's a christian movie.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:13

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:13

I think you can make that case because we're presuppositional and how we look at art and entertainment and image bearers making content.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:19

If an image bearer makes good content, it's, it's good content.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:22

It's objective and true.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:24

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:24

So, so, um, you know, so, so I think like, that.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:28

But, but, yeah, that would be my encouragement is, like, if there's any accredited investors out there that really are looking to be disruptive and have the backbone for that, to give us a call, like, you can email me.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:43

It's Marcus or tv.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:44

L o r t v m e r c u s o r t v.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:49

You just email me.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:50

I'd love to hop on a Zoom call.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:51

I can go over all the financials.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:52

I can send you the deck, whatever you want to know.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:57

We're pretty open about it.

Marcus Pittman 02:04:58

We've never hidden anything from anybody.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:01

And we'll tell you what we're going to do with the money and how.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:04

I believe no other streaming service, let me put it this way.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:10

We've raised $850,000.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:13

With that money, we've launched 55 pieces of content.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:16

Now, no one in Hollywood can make one piece of content for $850,000.

Will Spencer 02:05:21

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:23

Can't be done.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:25

We've built the technology, too.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:26

With that money, I think we have a really good opportunity to be the first major streaming platform that's also profitable.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:40

None of them really are now.

Will Spencer 02:05:42

That's right.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:43

And I think we can start giving profit dividends once we surpass 100,000 subscribers, which is a very tiny number.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:52

But we don't buy content in advance and hope that it works.

Marcus Pittman 02:05:55

So we don't have this massive content budget that we have to spend every month to keep putting content out.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:01

The consumers do that as they want to, and so we can be super low risk.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:08

We're technically cash flow positive now because everything's just running itself and it's funding itself and now every dollar that we get is going to go back into bringing in more revenue for the platform.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:21

That's a great place to be as an investor.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:24

And so especially since there's no cap on how much our users can spend every month, that's even better place to be for an investor.

Will Spencer 02:06:33

You own the tech and we own the tech.

Will Spencer 02:06:36

Unreal.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:37

Yeah, we own the tech.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:38

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:39

So it's a great system.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:42

And they're not saying no because of our model.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:45

It's because it's probably going to be relationships lost because of what we've done.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:51

And that's.

Will Spencer 02:06:52

What do you mean?

Will Spencer 02:06:53

What do you mean?

Will Spencer 02:06:53

Really?

Will Spencer 02:06:54

What do you mean relationships lost?

Marcus Pittman 02:06:55

Well, I mean.

Marcus Pittman 02:06:56

Well, I mean, there's a lot, you know, everything's built on, you know, everything nowadays is about being nice.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:04

And you can't make disruptive films and be nice.

Will Spencer 02:07:06

No.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:07

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:09

Lesbian.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:10

The lumberjack is going to offend a lot of people.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:13

Right?

Marcus Pittman 02:07:14

Please.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:15

Yeah, please look.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:16

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:16

And you know, you know what?

Marcus Pittman 02:07:19

You know, CB's has three, three shows that praise the FBI.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:24

Three FBI shows.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:25

Why does CB's need three shows about the FBI?

Marcus Pittman 02:07:28

I want to make three shows that show the FBI in a bad light.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:31

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:33

So, you know, the government might come after.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:36

Not like us.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:36

Right?

Marcus Pittman 02:07:37

Like there's a, like when you imagine, imagine the amount of effort.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:41

You could see this with the Biden Trump debate last week.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:46

Immediately media just changed the whole narrative.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:49

Just in one instance, we've been saying for four years Biden has a problem.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:54

And immediately overnight, it's been nothing but what that's only thing the news is talking about.

Marcus Pittman 02:07:59

Well, that was on purpose and strategic and top down instructions.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:04

It was coordinated and it was given by government officials.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:09

The newscasters said, I've been on the phone with Obama's people and political newscasters throughout this whole debate.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:16

I mean, political operatives.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:17

Why would they even say that term?

Marcus Pittman 02:08:18

It's such a dark term and they're just open about it.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:21

We've been talking with all these people.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:23

So if they're doing that with news, of course they're doing that with entertainment as well.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:32

Countless government officials work on entertainment.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:38

Openaiden just brought on an NSA advisor on their board.

Will Spencer 02:08:42

Amazing.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:43

So they're doing it in tech, they're doing it in cable news there.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:46

Of course they're doing it in Hollywood and stuff.

Marcus Pittman 02:08:49

Why hasn't there been a really positive movie of reenacting January 6 yet?

Marcus Pittman 02:08:55

Be awesome, right?

Marcus Pittman 02:09:01

That's a great question to ask.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:03

Is that allowed?

Jason Farley 02:09:04

I've been pitching it for three years and I haven't gotten any traction, no way.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:10

But that's the point.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:11

Like, there are systems in place.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:14

And I think when I say, you know, investing in lore and more, doing really well, you're going to lose relationships.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:19

I think that's a fair case to make, and I hope that to be true because you're not really changing or transforming anything if you're not offending people to some degree.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:32

And if you want to keep things the same, there's tons of ways you can invest your money.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:37

There's RegCF through Angel, there's all these sort of things.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:40

Like there's ways to keep things the same and you can make a return on it, and no one will care 20 years from now, no one will remember those things.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:50

But if you really want to change things for your grandchildren, you can't do it without storytelling.

Marcus Pittman 02:09:58

That's controversial and upsets all the right people.

Will Spencer 02:10:04

So what's really interesting about this is so back during my.com days, it was just meet a bunch of college students, and we stopped out and did the startup and we raised $20 million from Hewlett Packard.

Will Spencer 02:10:14

It's a story I haven't told very often.

Will Spencer 02:10:16

It was a big moment.

Will Spencer 02:10:17

Half of that was cash, half of that was hardware.

Will Spencer 02:10:21

I was in my early twenties.

Will Spencer 02:10:22

People started coming to me for advice on how to get their startup funded.

Will Spencer 02:10:26

And so I learned how to evaluate whether a company was worth investing.

Will Spencer 02:10:30

And I was, I myself was not an investor.

Will Spencer 02:10:32

I was just doing the thing, but people were coming to me anyway.

Will Spencer 02:10:35

And so I run, when I hear about companies, I run them through a series of filters.

Will Spencer 02:10:39

Like, does the product work?

Will Spencer 02:10:41

Yes, your product works.

Will Spencer 02:10:42

Like, does the product do what it is intended to do?

Will Spencer 02:10:46

Yes.

Will Spencer 02:10:46

Like, is it a known thing?

Will Spencer 02:10:48

Is it something that's available to the consumer?

Will Spencer 02:10:50

So how big is the potential income ceiling?

Will Spencer 02:10:52

Huge.

Will Spencer 02:10:53

And then I asked, do you have your own technology?

Will Spencer 02:10:55

Yes, you have your own technology.

Will Spencer 02:10:58

As I run you through the filters that I learned for evaluating different investment opportunities to help people with this, it checks all the boxes.

Will Spencer 02:11:07

But here's the big one.

Will Spencer 02:11:08

This is the thing that I learned from talking with VC's in that world.

Will Spencer 02:11:12

Venture capitalists, they say that they look at the numbers in the business plan, and I think they do.

Will Spencer 02:11:17

I think a lot of that.

Will Spencer 02:11:18

They just want to make sure that you did it and you thought it through.

Will Spencer 02:11:20

Right.

Will Spencer 02:11:20

But I don't think any business plan has ever actually been read.

Will Spencer 02:11:23

You know what I mean?

Will Spencer 02:11:24

They just see, yeah, they check that.

Will Spencer 02:11:26

You check all the boxes.

Will Spencer 02:11:27

But what I learned from, from the VC's that would talk to me about it is they said they don't actually evaluate businesses because no one actually knows what's going to be successful or not.

Will Spencer 02:11:36

Like you can, you can say whether something looks like it has all the pieces of success and then it can fall apart.

Will Spencer 02:11:42

Like how many people passed on Uber, how many people passed on Airbnb.

Will Spencer 02:11:45

And these are enormous companies, right?

Will Spencer 02:11:47

Not to mention Google, Facebook, all that stuff.

Will Spencer 02:11:49

So what the venture capitalist would tell me is that we don't invest in businesses, we invest in people.

Will Spencer 02:11:56

So we see, is the idea good?

Will Spencer 02:11:57

Does it all work?

Will Spencer 02:11:58

Do all the pieces fit?

Will Spencer 02:11:59

And do I think that these people are the guys to pull it off and that's what they ultimately make the decision on?

Will Spencer 02:12:06

So as I talk to you guys about this, you have all those pieces in place because clearly you guys are the guys to pull it off because you've done it for four years.

Will Spencer 02:12:15

Based on my experience, you did it right.

Will Spencer 02:12:17

And I also hear that youre going to have to find the right investor whos going to be on your side.

Will Spencer 02:12:23

Youre not just looking for dumb cash, youre looking for someone whos like, im willing to risk it all for a big return, an enormous culture producing return that cant just be measured in terms of money and oh yes, it can be measured and should be measured in that and we shouldn't be afraid of that.

Will Spencer 02:12:42

But to say, like we're going to swing for the fences against this corrupt and failing culture and do something truly powerful that can shift things permanently.

Will Spencer 02:12:51

Yeah, finding that guy or that, or that group.

Will Spencer 02:12:54

Like, because that's what you need.

Will Spencer 02:12:55

Like, you don't want venture capitalists to dump seven figures on you and then be monkeying with the formula.

Will Spencer 02:13:02

You know what I mean?

Will Spencer 02:13:02

Like you want someone to be like, I'm bought in.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:05

Well, the wonder, wonder project, right, which is Irwin brothers is new thing.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:10

They got $100 million from Amazon.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:12

What strings come attached to that?

Will Spencer 02:13:14

Yes, all of them.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:15

All of them.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:16

Exactly.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:16

A knitting factory, all that sort of stuff.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:20

So I've been very, very cautious about who invests in us, and that narrows your window a lot.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:29

But also I think the benefit for us is that we've done a lot with very little in comparison to everybody.

Will Spencer 02:13:36

Exactly.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:36

And I think that scares people in a good way.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:39

And I think, like, you know, if we were to ever just get a guy that's like, here's $10 million, that would be insane.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:46

Like it would change everything very quickly and it would cause a lot of scrambling.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:52

I think from a lot of other people, because my goal is for people to look at lore content and go, oh, man, if we're going to beat lore, we have to make content like them.

Marcus Pittman 02:13:59

And I go, yes, yes, please do.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:02

We win.

Jason Farley 02:14:03

We win.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:03

Like, that's when you winden right?

Marcus Pittman 02:14:05

So that's why competition is great and even if your business ultimately fails, but it pushes things forward.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:16

And I talk about general magic a lot with this.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:19

I don't know if you've heard of general magic.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:21

There's a documentary on it.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:22

But way back before the Internet existed, a group of people left Apple back when Steve Jobs was fired.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:30

And they said, we're going to make a smarteende phone, a smart cell phone before the Internet exists.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:35

It's crazy.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:36

They invented emojis.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:38

They had email on it.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:39

They spent hundreds of millions of dollars, did this massive deal with at and t singular.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:46

And then they hired two guys.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:49

One guy came in as a janitor just because he wanted to work there.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:53

And then that janitor worked his way up to being the head of engineering at this company.

Marcus Pittman 02:14:58

They launched it, the first smartphone, and it completely failed.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:02

People were like, what the heck is this?

Marcus Pittman 02:15:04

Because the Internet just so happened to come about right as they were at and t was investing all this tech in cell towers just for this one phone.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:14

And so it completely failed and the company went under and it bankrupted.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:19

But Steve Jobs returns to Apple and hires the head engineer, and he works to make the iPod and the iPhone.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:27

And then the other engineer company is the one that went off to make Android.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:31

Amazing, right?

Marcus Pittman 02:15:33

So the question is, even though General.

Jason Farley 02:15:35

Matt and then the other head developer went over and created eBay.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:41

That's right.

Will Spencer 02:15:42

I've heard of these things.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:44

So the question is, if you look at, like, at and t invested millions of dollars in this thing, did at and taideh and all these other companies lose money because general magic failed?

Marcus Pittman 02:15:57

Technically, yes.

Marcus Pittman 02:15:58

But if you look back now, every single one of those companies, especially at and T, because they had a five year exclusive with the iPhone when it came out, because of these relationships that were already formed, they all made money because the smartphone does now exist and it wouldn't happen.

Marcus Pittman 02:16:16

So you take long term General Magic succeeded because it did what it was supposed to do.

Marcus Pittman 02:16:24

And Steve Jobs invited the CEO of General magic to his keynote, where he announced the iPhone for the first time and used some of his language in that presentation as an homage to say, we couldn't do this.

Marcus Pittman 02:16:36

We couldn't have done this without you.

Will Spencer 02:16:38

Amazing.

Marcus Pittman 02:16:38

And now every one of those companies, whether it's at and T or Philips or Sony, who donated hardware, worked on the hardware, every one of those have made billions of dollars as a result of a smartphone, whether personally, because they've invested in new smartphone tech or their own smartphones, or because their company uses smartphones to be more productive.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:00

Right.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:01

So over the long term, that industry was created because investors took a risk on something that no one's ever heard of before.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:09

That's a great documentary, by the way.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:11

You just google it and find it.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:13

I think it's free on most places, but it's incredible.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:17

And so that's how we have to be looking at, like, okay, we have this really bad christian film industry right now.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:22

How do we just move everything in a completely different direction?

Marcus Pittman 02:17:27

And that requires capital and risk, and there's no amount of projections and financial things that you can do to basically predict the result of what happens to when christian entertainment starts surpassing Hollywood movies on a regular basis.

Marcus Pittman 02:17:47

And people remember the days that Hollywood existed, and it doesn't anymore because these christian companies came about, and that's like, how do you can't project that on a spreadsheet?

Marcus Pittman 02:17:58

You're absolutely right.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:00

But you have to believe that it's possible.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:02

And then we live in a world where God wants those things to happen, and that's just faith.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:07

At that point, it's like, here's my five stones.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:09

I'm going to slay this giant, but here's.

Will Spencer 02:18:12

Go ahead.

Will Spencer 02:18:13

Sorry.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:13

I know.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:14

Just real quick.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:14

Like, me and Jason always talk about when you see armies being defeated in the bible, it's always the armies that couldn't possibly do it.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:23

And so me and Jason always ask ourselves, is our army too big?

Marcus Pittman 02:18:29

We don't want our armies too big.

Will Spencer 02:18:31

Fire.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:33

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:34

If we just get this investor, if we go with this investor just to get a quick injection of cash, will that be like putting on the armor, David?

Marcus Pittman 02:18:43

Putting on the armor?

Marcus Pittman 02:18:44

What is that?

Marcus Pittman 02:18:46

And I think all the investors that we've gotten so far have been really amazing.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:50

But now what we need is that lead investor who's, like, not only going to invest in you, but I'm going to introduce you to other capital at least the same way I do.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:58

That's right.

Marcus Pittman 02:18:59

Because I don't see you guys as a donation or charity or, I hope this is true.

Marcus Pittman 02:19:04

I really think that there's a value in a business and a brand here, and those are a lot harder people to find, but they're out.

Marcus Pittman 02:19:11

They do exist.

Marcus Pittman 02:19:14

And I have faith that we're going to find them.

Marcus Pittman 02:19:17

But either way, are things operational and running and things are scaling.

Marcus Pittman 02:19:21

So either the subscribers are going to join en masse before the investors catch on or the investors are going to catch on.

Marcus Pittman 02:19:28

So it's just a matter of which one's going to come first now.

Marcus Pittman 02:19:30

And so it's a really exciting time, and it's the, the payoff has been great.

Will Spencer 02:19:34

And I think that, I think the big thing is, is that it's not necessarily christian content in the way that people think of christian content, right.

Will Spencer 02:19:41

And that's, and that's the trick is that, like, when people hear christian content, they think of whatever, like, God's not dead or I guess, left behind or something like that.

Will Spencer 02:19:49

I haven't consumed much of this stuff.

Will Spencer 02:19:50

It's just good movies.

Will Spencer 02:19:53

It's just good content.

Will Spencer 02:19:54

It's not woke.

Will Spencer 02:19:55

It's not, you know, it's not disgusting.

Will Spencer 02:19:58

You know, it's not, it's not base.

Will Spencer 02:20:00

Right.

Will Spencer 02:20:00

It's like, it's not anti woke.

Will Spencer 02:20:02

Yeah, exactly.

Will Spencer 02:20:02

It's not explicitly anti woke.

Will Spencer 02:20:04

Exactly.

Will Spencer 02:20:04

It's just, it's good, compelling, enjoyable stories, which is, I mean, we have the faith with the best story.

Will Spencer 02:20:11

We should be crushing it with stories, right?

Will Spencer 02:20:14

Just have the courage to tell them.

Will Spencer 02:20:16

And I think that's the thing is, like, people have this image in their mind of what a christian story is today.

Will Spencer 02:20:23

And that's probably the hardest thing is to get that out of people's heads and say, you know what?

Will Spencer 02:20:27

Braveheart is a christian story in its own way.

Will Spencer 02:20:30

Star wars has, I mean, I guess the force is not really christian at all, but, like, but you can see that.

Will Spencer 02:20:36

You can see the themes built in of fatherhood, right?

Will Spencer 02:20:39

And maybe, like, Christian isn't the right word to describe some of these things, but these very human stories.

Will Spencer 02:20:45

And what is human is truly christian in its own way.

Will Spencer 02:20:48

And to pitch that to people, right?

Will Spencer 02:20:51

And to say, like, look, we're just getting back to what storytelling used to be, you know, before, before it got absolutely subverted and corrupted by a corrupt Hollywood engine and all the diddy parties, right?

Will Spencer 02:21:03

That's, that's ultimately, that's ultimately what you're saying.

Will Spencer 02:21:07

And that's a, I mean, it's just scary because people will be going up against the woke mob, right?

Will Spencer 02:21:13

They'll be going up against, like, a culture, like a hundred years of, of leftist cultural values.

Will Spencer 02:21:19

But who wants to fight that battle?

Will Spencer 02:21:20

Who actually wants to sling the stone?

Will Spencer 02:21:22

Got to be someone out there, right?

Marcus Pittman 02:21:25

There's got to be.

Will Spencer 02:21:28

There'S got to be so for the listeners, perhaps there are some accredited investors of the sort that you're talking about.

Will Spencer 02:21:36

But assuming that most of them are, what can the listeners to this podcast do to help you guys in the mission right now?

Marcus Pittman 02:21:42

Yeah, like a lot of people ask, well, I only have, like, a, you know, I don't.

Marcus Pittman 02:21:46

I'm not an accredited investor.

Marcus Pittman 02:21:48

You know, I think it's stupid.

Marcus Pittman 02:21:49

The government requires that, by the way.

Marcus Pittman 02:21:51

I think it hurts poor people, that poor people can't take risky investments with as little as they have.

Marcus Pittman 02:21:56

But that's SEC regulations.

Marcus Pittman 02:21:58

But if you're not, what I would say is subscribe to lore, give it three months of your time.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:04

Just fund content and invite your friends to subscribe to lore.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:08

And then if you don't have a lot of money to invest, just buy $100 in gold loot and put it towards a project for an artist.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:21

If the artist is raising $20,000 for a show and loot, he's going to get all that $20,000.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:28

So buy loot and just know you're supporting the artist directly.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:35

Let's see if we can start a reformation and just show people and show a lot of people that they were wrong, that this is what people want and this is what people want to do.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:47

And that takes a lot of effort and having a strong core subscriber base that sticks with you and understands the value.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:53

But I believe that's out there, and I believe that's what people want.

Marcus Pittman 02:22:57

And I believe a lot of those people are people that listen to your podcast or listen to, might listen to Joe Rogan's podcast.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:04

I think that's the same core demographic, and it's just a matter of getting the word out there, right?

Marcus Pittman 02:23:10

Get the word out there.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:12

Something exists.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:13

Like when the guy on Twitter is saying, hey, you know, 2 million, why don't.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:18

Why doesn't Netflix let you fund movies and tv shows at two or $10 apiece?

Marcus Pittman 02:23:25

And the replies of that guy's thread is, watch Laura already does this.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:28

Watch Laura already does this.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:29

But, like, that's great.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:31

That's exactly.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:32

That's exactly what needs to happen.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:34

And also, just follow us on Twitter and social and share our stuff.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:38

Help us break through, like, this sort of, like, algorithmic sort of stagnation that all our socials are on because we're conservative.

Will Spencer 02:23:46

Sure.

Jason Farley 02:23:47

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 02:23:48

Social media just sucks right now, so just tell your friends, send them an email.

Will Spencer 02:23:52

Yeah.

Will Spencer 02:23:53

Yeah.

Will Spencer 02:23:55

It's really exciting to me because, again, we started out saying, I don't watch a lot of streaming content right.

Will Spencer 02:23:59

It's just.

Will Spencer 02:24:00

But to know that I can, that I can buy, you know, gold loot.

Will Spencer 02:24:04

Like, I really like this guy's stuff and I want to fund that project directly through this platform.

Will Spencer 02:24:09

That's exciting.

Will Spencer 02:24:10

That's exciting to me.

Will Spencer 02:24:11

I want to have control over the kind of things that I fund, that I enjoy and I want to be able to encourage them directly.

Will Spencer 02:24:18

And the budgets for projects, it's outside of my ability as an individual to fund.

Will Spencer 02:24:24

But to know that, that I can participate in the kind of creativity that I want to see in a non exclusive way.

Will Spencer 02:24:30

Like, I don't need a network that caters everything exclusively to me, but if I see something on that network that I like and want to see, that's really neat that there's a way for me as a non accredited investor to fund a project like that.

Will Spencer 02:24:43

That isn't just a donation that's going to a platform.

Marcus Pittman 02:24:46

People spend more money.

Marcus Pittman 02:24:48

I mean, monopoly go got $2 billion in video game transactions in ten months.

Will Spencer 02:24:54

What?

Marcus Pittman 02:24:56

Yeah, monopoly go.

Marcus Pittman 02:24:57

Right?

Will Spencer 02:24:57

So people don't even know what that is.

Will Spencer 02:24:59

Okay, yeah.

Marcus Pittman 02:25:00

Well think for like fortnite, people are just buying video game currency en masse, grand Theft auto, all the sorts of, there's billions and billions of dollars, but think about how much more valuable it is to spend money on, on in game currency.

Marcus Pittman 02:25:18

But instead of getting an extra life, you're going to get a movie or tv show that'll last for generations.

Will Spencer 02:25:22

That's right.

Marcus Pittman 02:25:23

Like, that's a much better value instead of an extra life that lasts maybe like 30 seconds.

Marcus Pittman 02:25:31

And so that's what I would encourage people to think about when they're buying gold loot and they're funding stuff on our content is like, these are stories that are going to last forever.

Marcus Pittman 02:25:42

And so that's super important.

Marcus Pittman 02:25:46

And also one more thing is every piece of content that gets funded on our platform remains on our platform for future subscribers.

Marcus Pittman 02:25:56

So you're actually leaving an inheritance of content and stories for future subscribers.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:01

So five years from now, when we have 5000 pieces of content on the platform, or whatever that number is, the new subscribers will have that 10,000 hours that the early subscribers didn't.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:13

And it's because of the early subscribers and their passion and dedication.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:17

So it really is a subscriber oriented community.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:21

And that's why we make subscribers subscribe and pay money per month before they can buy the gold loot.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:28

So that we know the people that are actually, it's like Costco model, right?

Marcus Pittman 02:26:32

Like when you actually pay for the membership, you care way more about what's there.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:38

And so same thing with Amazon prime.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:41

So you subscribe and then you fund after.

Marcus Pittman 02:26:46

And it's really important because it keeps out a lot of the riff raff and keeps the, keeps the content pure.

Will Spencer 02:26:54

Well, and it's participatory.

Will Spencer 02:26:56

I can participate in this platform not just as an early subscriber or an early adopter, but I can fund projects.

Will Spencer 02:27:03

And it's like the technical term or the term of art is sticky.

Will Spencer 02:27:08

I want to come back and I want to see what's up there today.

Will Spencer 02:27:10

I got my new loot on Tuesday.

Will Spencer 02:27:12

Oh, my gosh.

Will Spencer 02:27:12

I could fund this project I've been waiting for.

Will Spencer 02:27:14

It's not just something that I switch on and sit back on the couch and drone out over it or just like passive consumption.

Will Spencer 02:27:21

It's the subscribers participate in the construction and furthering of the mission of the platform.

Will Spencer 02:27:28

And that's something very different than I think I've heard basically anywhere.

Marcus Pittman 02:27:32

Yeah.

Marcus Pittman 02:27:32

Thanks, man.

Marcus Pittman 02:27:33

That's awesome.

Will Spencer 02:27:33

You're welcome.

Will Spencer 02:27:34

Hey, praise God.

Will Spencer 02:27:35

Thank you for your four years of work to bring it to people.

Will Spencer 02:27:38

And to me, this is great.

Will Spencer 02:27:41

Excellent.

Will Spencer 02:27:41

Well, I think normally I'd say, where do you want to send people?

Will Spencer 02:27:44

I'm guessing you want to send them to lore tv and send them to Twitter.

Marcus Pittman 02:27:48

L o r tv and on Twitter.

Marcus Pittman 02:27:51

You can follow us at watch lore, watch Loor, and then, yeah, subscribe there.

Marcus Pittman 02:27:59

Fund content and, yeah, let's start a revolution in the streaming space.

Marcus Pittman 02:28:06

I think there's enough people out there that want it, so now's the time.

Marcus Pittman 02:28:10

It's built.

Marcus Pittman 02:28:11

It's ready to go.

Will Spencer 02:28:12

So hallelujah, I want it.

Will Spencer 02:28:13

So that's great.

Will Spencer 02:28:16

Well, thank you, gentlemen so much.

Jason Farley 02:28:18

Thanks for having us.

Marcus Pittman 02:28:19

Thank you.

Will Spencer 02:28:22

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast.

Will Spencer 02:28:28

Visit us on the Web@wren.com or on your favorite social media platform, Ren of Men.

Will Spencer 02:28:37

This is the renaissance of men.

Will Spencer 02:28:41

You are the Renaissance.