How Markiplier Broke Hollywood | Ep. 051 Lemonade Stand 🍋

- How do I make money? - It's you. - Are you an old lady or is this? - How? - I'm scared, bro.

- And the kid in the am now doing this. - I keep going to internet and Googling money. Nothing's happening.

“- I think you're the wrong audience for this one.”

- Oh, okay. - Sorry, I'll leave. - So old women can't trade stocks. - Old women, if they have the rights-- - I think anyone, I think anyone can go to

TastyTrade.com. - Where should I go? - TastyTrade is a registered broker dealer and member of Fendra NFA and SIPC. - Four for this show comes from Rocket Money.

- Okay, this is for real. I was on a ski trip this weekend, and I've been putting it off. I've been meaning, because I've let my subscriptions accumulate it again, and I logged into Rocket Money

for the first time in a few months.

- Yeah. - Turns out I've added a lot, and I went through, and I spent like 30 minutes canceling, like every single subscription I have. - What do you guys do in your free time?

- 30 minutes. - Subscribe to things. - Jesus. - Subscribe to the channel. - I had a lot.

- If I'm being real with you, I had to, like, it's surprising about, I think I cut out, like, 250,000 subscribers. - Wow, okay. - I noticed I have one less sub on Twitch.

Do you want to-- - And that's in this episode,

“you try Rocket Money for free at RocketMoney.com/118.”

- You're my friend. - Wrap it up. - I figured you should. - Yeah. (laughing)

- Ready? We're live? - Mm? - Beating. Take 643.

- Action. - Okay, I can do this. - Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Lemonade stand, and welcome to our special guest, Markiplier.

Welcome on to the Lemonade stand. - It's always good. - It's always good. - It's always good. - It's always good.

- Today, we're going to be talking all about the Five Nights at Freddy's Lord. If we have time, we're going to be talking about, Iron Long, the movie that you just released, that has been wildly successful.

Over $2 million is what you just said,

and it's made in the-- - It's made in the-- - Yeah. - And under 51. (laughing)

- I'm not ready. I'll place your bets now for where it lands. - I guess in the comments, yeah, it'll be updating constantly. Mark, thanks so much for joining us.

I guess we are super interested in diving into a lot of the, like, interesting details. How you made a movie. A movie that not only is sick as hell, if I may, but also has kind of broken through the,

like, indie filmmaking thing into a broader mainstream, and there's so much interesting stuff around how this is going to potentially change, and open doors for indie filmmakers. I guess first, for people who don't know you or the movie,

what are Iron Long? What are Iron Long? - What am it? Iron Long is the nickname for a submarine that some people built to go into an ocean of blood.

The movie is about that thing. It was made by a guy named David Zemansky, who is a prolific, not prolific. - He's made something. (laughing)

- He said he was looking at him. - Really got lucky. - We were here on this year. - No, no, he's a great game developer. I apparently had played one of his games many years ago,

like his first game that he published called "Finger Bones", and I didn't know until way later that I had done a less play on earlier games.

“- Is your indie horror game you haven't done a less play?”

I'm like, that's what I wanna do. - I mean, I'm sure there are plenty. There's just so many games nowadays being made because the tools are more accessible than ever for making video games, which is a cool part of it.

And then the retro style of these kind of games also makes it a little more accessible for people to make games, which I think is fun because it emphasizes more on the gameplay itself as opposed to the graphical fidelity of the game.

Even though that style is interesting by itself. So this is a game iron long word. It embraced that style because his thing, he's made most of his games in this, but he also really likes that style.

He's a funny guy because everywhere he goes, he's taking pictures of like grungy textures and things like that, so he can get inspiration to build it. But yeah, that's turned that into a movie and then that's where we are today.

It earned me the spot on this podcast. (laughing) - The end goal, right? That was the slowest. - 'Cause we were watching the revenue numbers

and once it ticked over 20 million, we're like,

- Okay, well, it's fine. - And it's fine. - Yeah, it's just that. - Oh, yeah, I think we'll have Markiplier on my screen. - That's right, 19, it was hard no way.

- No, no, it was a hard no briefly flipped. - Okay, is that keep off the question? - Yeah, I mean, let me gas up a little more for people who are not aware. This movie over the past approximately month

has made $50 million in the boss office. This is wildly successful for not only an indie film, but particularly for somebody completely outside of the Hollywood space traditionally. - And on a budget of three million.

- It was a little over three. I don't even know where they got that number. - Yeah, but the whole internet says three. It's actually a little over four is what it was. So I don't know where they got that,

but that's pretty much what the budget is. - Okay, well, you screwed up my whole math. Could I do this whole thing on ROI? - Okay, there was three. - You just said it was three for this four

for me under five. - There we go, give me that. - If you say it was three, it puts you in the top like 150 films of all time for return on investment.

and we haven't even gotten the blue rail. - I mean, look at that, look at that. - I'll get you in a minute.

“So I think what we want to do is really dive into”

like what the story of making this thing was. Like what are details and crazy stories and all of that? As well as not only the creation of a movie that is a legit ass movie and feels like a real Hollywood thing. It is not, you know, skimping, then how you marketed it

and all the challenges around that and how this thing got distributed to thousands of theaters across the country, which is, again, wild for somebody who is, you know, by most media standards, a YouTuber in quotes.

- Yeah, how do you went toe to toe with Disney? I'm launch winking, that's pretty, that's cool. Almost got him home, we had more people in theaters. They had more money because they had the more premium theaters. - Wait, really?

They were getting like, I'm X's or what? - Yeah, yeah, so they had all the premium hype ticket. Well, when I think, I don't know this for sure, but I'm pretty sure when you are a studio

like Disney, you're able to basically say to the theaters.

You're gonna charge this much for a ticket to make more money. But also, just the premium theaters have more expensive. Like, I'm X and the actual-- - And most mixed theaters, they are more expensive tickets.

- Yeah, interesting. - Okay, so years ago, it's like day one. You decide, you've played this game and you've mentioned this, you play the game, you started to see yourself as the role play

as the character in the thing, you start to have this idea for making the movie. The actual day that you're like, I want to try making a movie. What do you do?

Like, what does the first thing you do? Why, a DM David, the creator, and I said, I said a few things, I, hey, love the game. You wanna make a movie? Basically, that's what it was,

'cause I don't have any acumen to be business savvy or, you know, kind of, schmooze my way into it. I kind of just stumble straight into the question. And usually they're receptive to that, because they take it as like, wow, he's so non-trained.

He's so transparent, he's so approachable, and I'm just like, the movie, the movie, through this, you don't know how to be professional. (all laughing) But that's it, literally, that's it, you got it.

So you reach out to the guy, presumably. - This is like, late 22, right? - Yeah, this is about August of 2022. - Okay. So what's the point at which it goes from an idea of which,

“I think many people have the idea to make a movie too.”

Okay, you're now putting money time, budget into this thing. - For me, it's pretty much immediate. I started writing right after that.

I think the way that I was writing it first,

I spent a month about just thinking about it. I would usually go for long walks. That's how I like to think. So I think about it and kind of just get in my head, and then I'd start putting ideas to paper for it.

Now line, and I'd run them by David every time. So the universe was David. So I knew that it had to be from his perspective, at least approved of what the ideas were. The framework of the game was there.

So it's kind of working backwards from an ending that you know, and then feeling on how that expands to a movie, and then it was a lot of back and forth between me and him. Going through that. - That early stage is just primarily you and him

flushing out what conceptually this would be. - When you start bringing other people in. - Yeah, well, I had a crew that I've worked with before on my other things. So I kind of tapedly sent text being like,

"Hey, are you going to be busy next year?" Like, what's your schedule looking like? And they pretty much knew that I was gonna have another project ready to go, 'cause I talked about,

I also always know what I'm gonna do conceptually

before I'm done with the last one. So I knew that my next thing was gonna be a feature. I just had to find the right concept for it. So I already had the makeup and art department set up the costuming.

I knew the key personnel. I knew the DP was gonna be, and I just wanted to make sure that they were relatively open during the time. - You had a previous project and maybe more than this

through YouTube Red, if I remember. - It was originals at that time, but yes, same thing. - So when, for a project like this,

“when did you decide to pursue this completely independently?”

Like with no outside funding or like studio behind the project? - Because when I did the YouTube originals, YouTube was obviously involved and they funded it, but they only funded it partially. I had to make up some of it on my own,

because when it went from YouTube Red to YouTube originals, YouTube Red was purely the subscription of the premium or I was called YouTube Red at the time to get access to these projects. When it went to YouTube originals,

it was simply funding other YouTubers to do higher end production things. And so I approached them with that and said they had less funding, but there was more control that I had over it. So I had complete control for those projects anyway.

And to be honest, like 'cause they were choosing their own adventures, they were so complicated that they didn't really have the ability to get notes. I'm not saying like I'm such a genius, it's a choose your own adventure.

So they can't follow what the values are even looking like. So like we don't know where this fits into the entire story. So I was on my own for most of it, no matter what.

Rooster Teeth, but by the time we did this movie,

Rooster Teeth had already been sold to Warner Brothers. And right now Rooster Teeth is kind of in a, it's in limbo because it kind of went under and then it got bought by the previous owner and then I don't know where it's written.

“- So the independent aspect wasn't as big of a decision as I think”

people often read into it. Like this is just the way you've been doing things already for a long time. - I kind of also asked on top of that, were people reaching out to you?

Was it any production company or studio after your previous success being like, hey, if you're doing a movie, we'd be interested in supporting it? - There might have been, but nothing really stands out because even though it was a large project,

it was still a YouTube project. So there is that level of respect that they just, I haven't met yet. Even if it was, I got nominated for an Emmy, but I didn't win, I don't even think if I won,

it would have mattered at all to them

because it just didn't have the same prestige, which is why I wanted to do a feature because that has a level of prestige that even if it's deserved or unreserved, it is still the pinnacle of an art form.

And it's like it is in this temple that is a movie theater and it is respected, right? So to win and to gain some respect, I knew that I had to do a project, so no one was really bashing down my door to say,

like, we wanna make your movie. - Do you have any window and to like the cultural conversation within the movie industry of, if this movie is changing that stigma at all?

Because I know people like Freddie W. talked about that for a really long time. It's like, they come to this traditional world of production and nobody really gives a shit. But is this something that's like big enough

that you see something changing? - Yes, for sure, it wasn't my goal to set out to do it, but the number of people that are at least talking about it raises its conversation and kind of legitimizes this. It was something that they were,

“I think, willfully ignoring, at least a lot of Hollywood,”

willfully ignoring the potential of YouTubers here. And actually there were lines because I got catch up with Freddie W. I haven't been ignoring you, Freddie, I swear. I will die, I've been sleeping a lot.

Vacations, taking my advice, I have to dinner and I'll get back to you. - Well, as soon. - You're a top comment, I've learned every episode. - So it's not your opinion.

- I'm really only asking about Markiplier. - Yeah, he's asking about Markiplier. He's asking about Markiplier. - I'm going to comment, he's ignoring me. - Yeah, yeah.

But to answer your question, there is a bit of a shift here because I've had a couple of meetings with some studios, some executive, some key people in the world, and they're all asking me the same thing, which is, how'd you do it?

- How did you do it? - How did you do it? - How'd you do this? So clearly, they want to know because you want to steal it. They want to steal it, they want to steal it.

I mean, yeah, that's basically it. They shut the money or your blood. - Exactly, they got money being made. And they can see the threat that's there. They see that, oh, if people can make this independently,

that means less of the pie is available. So we got to be smart. And I think that's good, like they need some competition. They need to kick in the ass because I don't want to destroy the studios, I'm not setting out to do that.

I think that studios have made some really incredible films

that are very important to people. But I feel like the kind of complacency in the fear there is, you know, it needs to be turned on its head and needs to be turned into ambition and opportunity. And I think they're going to be looking out for other YouTubers

to kind of take the talent from and get some people into make cool things. I think that it is going to be good for everybody. And I'm not out to destroy everything. But the change is happening.

- There's a kind of parallel with that with him. What's going on in the indie games industry right now? We're a lot of indie games have been taking on the AAA titans and outselling them and changing the cultural conversation. I wonder why it happened first and more often

in games than in movies. Is this like, was this extra hard to make? Or why I wonder why this is so... - No matter what, you can make a movie by yourself. You could make a movie with you.

- Well, I wasn't by myself. - Okay. - And this is the distinction, right? So you can make a movie by yourself. But even this movie required a crew of about 100 people.

There was a people that were building the set.

“You have to handcraft to you, artists that are at the top”

of their game, the best of the best you can get to make it. That's why I say it's kind of a pinnacle of an art form. You still need, even if it's all 3D, you need CGR to set a incredibly good at what they do

to be able to represent the vision that is being put forward. Even if I'm directing editing and acting in it, there's still the set designer. There's still the creature designer was on. I mean, that was a Molly Brownman, incredibly talented.

Without her, the horrificness of the monster wouldn't have been come through, wouldn't have had it. It's much impact without the set designer having a plan to evolve the set over the whole course of the show, and there was a plan.

And working in conjunction with the costume designer to have a new evolution of like 18 different steps of the costume and the set to evolve along with the makeup having also 18 procedural steps. There's so much planning that goes into that,

whereas a game like David Zemansky can make a game by himself and release it and it do really well. There's other games, I think Ultrakill is another one

Well, Iron Long wasn't published by New Blood, but this new blood has a couple of developers that I know now.

That game has sold maybe over a million, two million copies.

“And I think that's a very small team that makes that.”

So you can get away with a lot, with less people, with games, but movies still need a lot. Okay, so this relates to something I'm curious about. The fact that you self-published means you're on the hook for all this.

How did you decide what the limit is, right? Because, yeah, you hired 100 people. You could have hired 200. You could have done more CG. You could have done more sets.

Like, when you're going through this whole process of planning this thing, particularly given that you're putting your own money on the line with no guarantee of getting it back, how do you specifically decide that? What does that process look like?

I already had decided that if I didn't make my money back, I'd be okay with that. That's something you gotta do. If you're doing anything like this at this level, you cannot put everything on the line and be like,

if I die, I'm gonna die if I don't get it.

I'm gonna get money back like this is everything you can't push at all on black and be like, "Try hope." I accepted that it wasn't gonna make any money because in the past project I have not made any money on them. Because you've pushed the previous YouTube world.

It's to John make a lot of money back. It's like they made some an ad revenue, but actually I put less ads because I didn't want ads getting in the way that the people's experience. So I made that decision openly.

For this one, it is limited not necessarily by the budget but by the scope of the idea itself. Ireland is a game in order to treat it with respect that it needed to the movie had to follow rules that the game established, right?

So it's inside the sub is one of the biggest rules. It's just there. I would have loved to be able to cut away to another scene and the ship above or in a space station. I would love to have been able to do that

to explore the universe, but that's not the game.

So it can't be the movie.

The movie in my mind. There's other people that have different philosophies for adaptations. And in my mind, I have to adapt it to screen. And I have to bend the rules as much as necessary

to be able to tell the story as well as I can. But I cannot break the rules. This game has a feeling and there's a reason that people loved it. There's a reason I loved it.

And I have to pay respect to that. But at the same time, I am pushing the boundaries as hard as I can with this flexible rule without breaking it. So we have to stay inside there, but in a spoiler a bit. But in the movie, we go up out of the ocean,

but we stay inside. I was just going to sit. I saw it over the last night. And it's so claustrophobic. Because you want the camera to go outside that window.

You don't really want that. I want to see what's going on there.

“And I think that was an interesting show.”

Yeah, I had assumed that was-- Well, I'm not assumed, but I was like, was that a budget thing? That you didn't do more. They seem to that is really interesting to hear. It was very much, you know, the focus in the creative.

Yeah. So we made, we embraced that, right? He's a prisoner. So we actually designed the way the blood one over thing to look like jail bars, you know, like it had spacing there

to that is give that feel of the feeling like. And it's so obfuscated, the voices are hard to hear. There's a lot of noises banging. It's like someone's with a wrench like banging on the outside of the drum.

And it's intentionally uncomfortable because it's like you want to get out. The feeling has to be through the whole thing of just like I want out. I want out.

I want out of it. I'm so tired of it. I'm so bored of this. I'm so done with this, you know, you got to feel like that. You got to really feel what he's feeling.

So I wanted to be on the question, but it's so cool. OK. I mean, you mentioned before, the difficulty of you have to get all of these people at the top of their game in their art form to be able to even come in at this level

of production. And this was, I think, of similarity between us is we're really curious about the granularity of how that gets put together. When I watch behind the scenes of Lord of the Rings,

I'm like, where do you find the guy that knows how to put together the Ork make up for 10 hours? And how does that network come to you? How do you get in contact with all these people that have such these unique skills to be able to do this?

I think that you just trust the crew. And you build a good relationship with the crew that you have. I have a philosophy that these sets should be fun. And the set should be a good time when it's time to work. Of course, it's time to work.

“And that's what working with professionals is all about.”

But because I have a relationship with the people on set, say, Ana is the head of the makeup department in art. And Ana, she's great. She's fantastic. She's a beacon of sunshine on set.

And she actually brings a lot of energy and joy to the set. And that's important on top of the skill. But it also is important because she takes her craft very seriously. And so she knows other people in the level of quality

that her team needs to be at to meet her own criteria. So she knew Jason and reached out. Jason was the one that did a lot of the prosthetic design. And so a lot of the various practical effects that we did with the makeup was spearheaded by him.

So she knew who that was.

Maybe she would have if it's top of the game.

But it's a lot easier to convince someone to say, don't take any other job. Do this job. Put your skills here because I like working with this guy.

“And I think that this, he's going to have an idea”

that you're going to really enjoy and be able to fulfill your craft. These artists, they want to put their art out there. But they oftentimes don't get the opportunity to because working in these environments, which should be fun, making movies should be a such an incredibly fulfilling

experience for everyone. But they don't because the machine grinds things down. So the crew knows everyone in the crew probably knows someone else that is their competition in terms of being it, but when everyone's able to overlap and you're

able to trust the crew to get there and having good producers, like finding the right people, to fill gaps when there are gaps. There's a lot of talent out there. There's not a lack of talent of people that want to fill these roles. So you just have to provide an environment that you hope is going

to get more people to want to be on set. And that's how you get the best work. They want to be there. And that's the feeding, by the way. Feeding people well is the easiest way to make a crew.

You know, I did my shows, Costco pizza, you can get so much Costco pizza, $10 to $5. Hot dogs. Now that is class of the e-sports business. Yeah, Perry knows this really sports around.

We had no money. Yeah. That's the people, but I want to talk to people about the budget.

How did you choose this three, four million number?

Or is it just you just like God exactly what you needed for the film? And that's what it happened to be or like, OK, so beforehand, you weren't like, this is my number going in. No. Really?

Yeah. Probably people that would do that. But when I'm writing, I had, this is the good thing about this one. It's like single location. It is only going to cost as much as, you know, a single location could possibly be.

And we put as much money into it as possible with the amount of evolution they had.

“The only way that we could spend more is by building two of them, which honestly,”

I probably should have done because if you've seen the movie, it would have been really nice to have two of them to work with at the same time. One of the decisions that we made was, you know, how do you make the motion inside the sub look realistic? The original idea was, we were just going to put on tires and we're going to have people

bounce around, you know, fake motion.

But then I heard about this thing called a Nakmo, which is a motion control rig that can, you know, move like helicopter trucks and they film movie it in there and it's a way to get controllable motion. It's a success, it's like pneumatic, you know, machine, it's really cool. It's expensive.

We needed it either for certain days or the entire shoot. And I said, this is going to be instrumental for us to be able to make repeatable motion, especially like the action of moving, the throwing, it'll make everything safer tires unpredictable. If you, the other idea was to float it in a pool the whole time and it's like, that'll

look good, but it's so unpredictable of what the motion is going to be. You can't do a stunt based on that. So we were able to have stunts, and so the extra expense of this was a decision to make, it is going to be expensive, but it will quite literally make the movie. And so I just said, I will do every decision that is going to give the best quality

to this movie that I can, and the number was where the number ended up. That thing sounds like it would cost $300,000 to rent. Look, it did.

“Yeah, it was, I think it was like 25 a day, 25,000 a day, but it's actually a lot less than”

I would. But we, it's 35 day shoot. So yeah, okay. And then we needed to hire that player, he was very expensive, but he was also Nick was his name, he's incredible.

He knew what he was doing, he was programming so fast. He paid for the expertise. Yeah, yeah. And so it was very expensive, but it was so worth it, it was worth it. So I didn't even think about it.

It was just like, this is a necessary cost of making this the way that I want him. Okay, this is a true Patrick, because I'm hearing the through line here, which is that you didn't care if it made money back, you didn't come to cost. Like these are the things that would both scare the shit out of me and started, I've done, you know, I invested in an indie game, but I had a very limited budget going in and

I'm like, like, this must have been something you really, really wanted to do. But yeah, the gap between you playing the game and making the movie is pretty small. So like, you just, you just kind of jumped it on this. Yeah, I am, I can't deny I am in a position where I can financially do these things, I'm in a very unique position that I can make those decisions.

I wouldn't recommend everyone. And there were like budget conscious decisions where we are trying to make sure that every dollar that we have to spend is wisely spent. Sure. There was times where it's like we needed to add it more, add more shoot days, and that's

a huge, like every day on set is the most expensive thing you could have. The people, the feeding on the time, the time in the personnel is like the most expensive cost. So, but we need to be conscious about that. Like when do we do it over time day, when do we go over a weekend, which is going to cost

one and a half. As opposed to renting this longer, we already have it here. There, there is some things to be smart about it. I wouldn't say just keep trucking money at it. And all those kinds of things.

They haven't in games and movies where they keep throwing money at a problem and the movie turns out worse.

I'll give you an example of a moment when I said this is not worth the expense.

“There was, we were subcontracting a VFX company to do some of the simulations for the”

blood and the opening sequence in the movie. And the problem was the iterations that I needed because there was some translation differences between hiring them and what I would say I wanted what they would execute upon in the problem with simulations is they're incredibly computationally intense. They require a lot of hardware specialized for just doing simulations.

It's not just about GPU power. It's about distributed CPU. This is for the visual of immersing it, the fidelity of that shot, the length of it, the amount of time that that blood is visible and it's from straight up all the way down. It is a really complicated shot to have movie quality.

But the iterations that was costing way too much and I realized it would be more cost-effective for me to buy my own computer equipment and build my own farm render farm to make this. It would just take time. So I spent about three to six months collecting old servers on eBay, slowly building it out.

I turned one of my bathrooms into a render farm.

I put another 200 amps into the bathroom air conditioners and all of this was cheaper than continuing to iterate because as soon as I had everything that I needed, all the hardware I needed, I could do it as many times as I needed and all I was paying for was the power. And so that was a decision that I made because it just did not, and it was very expensive to keep doing these iterations and it was still wasn't quite what I was looking for.

So it's like if it's taking me this much to get this far and I'm still not there, it's like I'm going to, even if I had to spend this all again to do it again and that's what it took to build a render farm and it did not. It was still under that. I would at the very least learn something about how the VFX pipeline works and I would

have something that would be usable for future projects as well. You can turn into a crypto farm now too, you can start mining and then you pay it. I'm imagining, I'm imagining like Steven Spielberg and his mansion building a server room and his bathroom is like, no, no, no. And I learned a lot about network infrastructure, I didn't know anything about it before and

I still am not great at it, but hey, I learned a ton.

It was working. It's what made the shots in the movie. All of them. And it's so cool. Yes, I remember chatting with you about months ago was that several of the tools that normally

a Hollywood production would outsource to X, Y, and Z studio and like here in LA, you see these all over the place that you just took in house because you're like, this is going to be so expensive. What other things were there besides this render farm? Because that alone is kind of crazy.

“I believe there's something about like the licenses for theaters, right?”

Something like that. Not necessarily the licenses for the software, for VFX, for very expensive, because who do you need when you have a certain size of a company, they charge you more or when you have a certain scale. They have good deals for indie developers and like small teams, but I don't qualify as

a small team. Even if I'm just one good, I'm just a little guy. There's like, no, you're going to do it. Did you say that to them? I'm just a little guy, that being said, I would like to do collaborations and I think

there's a way to kind of exploit my YouTube channel to be like, I'll do a burn, you know, first some licenses. But we haven't gotten there yet. What was the original question, sorry. What are other areas where normally a Hollywood production would outsource some key part

of the process to a big studio and you said, said, I am just going to do this in-house and learn to do it myself? There wasn't too much more, I did obviously the editing myself and that was good because I like editing. There's funny, you say, obviously, because that is huge for me to deal, that's extremely

large deal. But obviously, you did the editing, right? Yeah, I truly enjoy the editing. Obviously, you did the acting, obviously, you did the process. Of course, obviously.

Obviously, obviously. Obviously. I do like how you're one more thing, you were like, there's only one way the budget would go up and I was like, yeah, I mean, you could have hired like Chris Evans or something. There could have, it's like, you did so much of the movie yourself, I realized that

might not be out of like budget consideration, but it's impressive how many hats you took on for a project. Then there's very, thank you, but it's very, thank you. I'm very welcome. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, thanks. Anyway, it's interesting because I look at that as a YouTuber and I'm like, I'm used to doing this anyway.

“That's what I've been doing when a lot of people are out there being a YouTuber and starting”

out. You know, a lot of have editors by now. And I have hired six editors. I have a team of six other editors to help me out, plus the 3D artist Molly, use we're going to all this.

And so obviously I have other people helping me, but the main, I have them so that I can focus on the bigger project editing that I like, I like the creative part of it. And I think that a lot of directors and even writers would benefit from doing some editing because it is, it is the final step, the polling of all the pieces together.

It is everything that really, really gets to screen is through the editing process.

It's the final pass. Now, some might say the sound is a final fast because, you know, they wait to all the visual effects were done to do the sound and all of them, yeah, I got it. Brad's great and he did the sound mix in this, but you know, I don't want to inflate as you go anymore.

So, I guess editing would be the one to do it.

“And what editing allows me to do, and I think that this is where a lot of people could”

benefit from learning it is like the reason Adobe sucks. Can I say that? Yeah. No, yeah. No, yeah.

Don't be fucking blown. This time is great. The spots are just ended. I said about it. I said about it.

I'm fine. So good timing there.

Because I worked in Premiere for 10 years and I watched it just get worse and worse with

every version. And as soon as I jumped to DaVinci Resolve, I realized, oh my God, this is what it can be. It's so freeing in DaVinci's great because it has editing, visual effects, color, and sound mixing all in a single program.

The post production pipeline, even if you need a big team for making the movie and that won't think that will change and I don't want that to change because I want more people to do that. But the post side, I believe, can be consolidated down more if it takes advantage of these things that are binding them.

So one of the things I want to do is kind of like cultivate, you know, this kind of build out and refine some of the inefficiencies that I saw in the process of the future project, much like the render form. If I have my own way to do it, and I have a pipeline for it, then I can make the next projects happen a lot smoother and with less bumps because I've learned all the problems

in this one. So I hope to make in-house, not just as a control freak, but just because it'll make ideas come out faster if I can, if I knew the process of how to do more of it. Yeah. Can I ask Business Questions now, Doug?

I want to ask Business Questions. Yes. Okay. One more, forgive me. One more final thing.

So the process of you have a hundred people working on this thing in a set that you've designed with a budget, with a script, you have the thing that turns the sub around. You've got all the fake blood, just what, for the average person, what's a day of shooting look like?

“You said there's 33 days, like, what are key things that are happening throughout that day?”

What are the things that everybody needs to coordinate on? What are the hard parts, what are the easy parts, and is there like maybe a moment or two that you were like, holy shit, this is hard or crazy? Oh, yeah. Maybe that.

So the average day started with breakfast, so I provide a breakfast for everybody. I think that's very important. Costco pizza? Costco pizza. No, no, no.

We had a catering trailer there the entire time. So we had a company that joined us for this, the company name of us right here. I believe it's Duncan something, but I can't remember. So I'm going to put it down. Duncan, don't let.

No. No. No. No. They're a lovely family.

They join us for the whole thing. It didn't know it was family. I didn't know it was family. I didn't know it was family. I can't wait for their sponsorship.

My next time though, you could set up a donut shop in your bathroom. Oh, yeah. I can't wait to do it yourself. What are you doing? What are you doing?

Money bags over here. It was a food. It was an integral because it allowed everyone to show up and at least have warm freshly cook food. And we had buffet styles.

We had all kinds of options, eggs, gluten, free stuff, like vegetarian options, and that was both for breakfast and lunch. And then if we needed dinner, we needed to go over, we would provide that as well. A big meal for breakfast. People walk in.

It's early in the morning, usually call times like seven or six some days. And that's pretty typical. The days or 12 hour days, or were I hope to do 10 hour days in the future. I think 12 is just a little too much.

But you get in and so we have a production meeting first thing.

I have to get in costume right away because obviously I'm acting. So I get in costume as soon as I can. I usually eat breakfast as I'm getting makeup put on.

“And then we all meet at what we had was a battle map, right?”

So we had a big whiteboard table that was about the size of this, if it was rectangular. And we had different squares for the shots that we wanted to get all day long. We had a mini model, which with a cutaway, a 3D printed model of the interior of the sub with a little me and camera blocks that we could put where we're going to first set up here.

We're going to next set up here. The next set up is going to be here. And here and here's where we'd plan out the day based on the script and the reason this was important is because the time it takes to bring the whole thing up on the Nakmo get it activated is like five minutes from stepping, uh, take the stairs away, screw the door

shut well, screw the door shut, take the stairs away and then lift it up and then we're ready to go. And that's if everyone who needs to be in their camera or otherwise is in there. If it's a heavy motion scene, we usually would lock down one of the cameras inside. We'd build, like, you know, braces for it to stay so that the camera man wasn't going

to be a problem or wasn't going to, you know, get hurt, down, you know, but then we would have some problem. Each one had to be a custom plan, so we had to, we had to know exactly how we're going

Exactly how long it would be. So the, the efficiency of knowing what was going to happen next had to be planned out from the beginning. And even though we had an overarching plan throughout the, from the beginning of the shoot every day, we would go through and tell exactly what we're going to do.

So then as soon as we knew what the first thing was going to be, we'd everyone go off and start setting up for that shot. Well, I'd get finished up with costume and make up whatever other touches I would need or I would talk to Amy and the supervisor to know exactly how this was going to go on what to look for because if I can't be behind the camera, I'm telling them what I'm

hoping to achieve in this scene. And the biggest problem for all this is I'm acting and I have not had time to rehearse. So then I go and like practice my lines and make sure that I'm getting in the character that's one of the big detriments of acting and directing is you spend so much time directing.

“You don't give yourself as an actor enough time to be the actor that you need to be in”

that scene. And so I think I did a good job on this one. I think I did well. I think I would have done better if I had just been acting or just been directing. You know, I think that there were certain scenes that I was like, I'm going to need time.

I need you guys to give the marching orders of where we're going to set up. I need to go into a dark room and I need to be this character. And so the scenes that were super intense and needed that, I took the time to have that. You do that until lunch. The earlier you get a shot off in a day affects the entire day.

It is a weird thing on set is if you, it doesn't matter what you get. So only get a shot of anything insert nothing. The sooner you get it, the better that day is going to be. If you are wasting time trying to perfect a shot, trying to get the right angle, setting something up.

It doesn't work. Whatever, so only your recording, you get a shot in the can and you move on to the next thing. Your day will be much better. Otherwise it'll be like 11 o'clock.

You get your first shot, lunch is at 12 or one or whatever it is. You got a break for lunch. People come back from lunch. Everyone's already sleepy from lunch. You're told days for a process starts again.

Exactly. So it's like getting the first shot is intense as possible. Then you have an end of day meeting, deciding how the day went.

What we got, what we didn't get if we have extra time which never happened, we'd be like,

let's get set up for the next one or let's do the battle plan for this next one. So we can start sooner tomorrow. Never happened. Maybe once or twice it happened, but you know, everything's always behind it, and set. So you have to account for that.

And that's an average day. It's interesting to the part by the acting. I think the movie was really good and I really liked your acting in it. But I did notice from the beginning of the movie to the end and I heard you shot this chronologically.

Yeah. You clearly get more invested in the character. You get, like by the end, I have a viewer. I'm like more invested in the performance. So I wonder if you, was that a deliberate choice that you chronologically or how did that

work? A very deliberate decision chronologically. There's certain things that we could do. This is the whole build to set this thing. Is there certain things that we had to make permanent modifications to the set to be

able to do some of the effects that we had? The literally cutting into it and changing up things and waterproofing it for when it floods. The chronological was from the beginning because we just have to do that. And yes, there was a lot of me in the beginning you have so many decisions to make.

“Because this plan as good as it is changes every day, every single day you have to adapt”

to something else. And if you can't adapt, you can't make a movie. If you're so steadfast, you're like, "Here has to be this way and I will die before I change it."

It's like, "You're never going to make anything.

You'll be stuck there forever and you'll end up with nothing." So you have to adapt and try to make every problem work. So I spent way too much time directing instead of focusing in on what this character was supposed to be. The advantages, the arc of the story works that way.

It does fit. So it's like, it's not like I did such a shitty job in the first ones. But I know you're thinking that I know you're not here. But it also works because the stiffness and uncomfortableness was part of that character arc. It was an entirely.

It's like I couldn't do it. I had confidence that in the beginning, this guy is finding his footing. He is not comfortable. And the whole thing about the monotonous rival, which was a big part of this, is as you get bored, you weirdly get more comfortable.

The tension does slip and it has to slip into boredom. So that is a character. I did get that. But also I got banged up while I was filming it because I did a lot of my own stunts. So the aches and pains that the character felt were my own aches and pains.

Also in a day like 31 of 12 hours a day, as a one-on-on. By the time it gets the end and there's a scene in there where I've just like the characters lost it. Just losing it is like, I barely had to act in those scenes, it's like I am stalking. He made a fire.

Exactly. It's just like so those were when I was really, really starting to feel a deep connection with that.

And actors have a really, really tough job and they're always trying to elevate their game.

“And so I think that I'm a decent actor, but I do in the future products want to be more”

of a director side of things, because that's where I'm most comfortable with and that's

Acting is extremely stressful and very difficult and it's an art form that should not be taken lightly.

“I want to do it to best my ability, but my God actors put themselves through some crazy”

shit to do their craft and the huge respect to them. Now you have the money for Chris Evans. I love you, I am one of the best people in the world. I love you, Captain America. There are so many good actors out there.

I'm not saying Chris Evans is, is, oh, I don't know what he's like. Chris Evans does also comment on our YouTube videos.

He's not as nice as people that I've never met the guy.

It's just like I understand the reason for names out there, but there's so many really talented, incredibly hardworking actors that are out there. They're waiting for their chance. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't hire a big name for a certain project if it works for it, but at the same time, there's a lot of actors out there.

I want to give a lot of people a chance to do some incredible things. I like Troy Baker, obviously, was probably the biggest actor on this project. He's done tons of things, incredibly popular, franchises he's worked in, and he's done a ton of work. So it's like, I only because I had a personal relationship with him, you know, I thought

he even gave it a time of day to be part of the project. It's so nice working with like these incredibly talented actors, where it's just like you put a script in front of him and they're like, yep, and they just smash it. It's incredible. It's like that.

I've been tears. They're the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. But yeah, I think that there's just such a wonderful world of talent out there, and I'll never get through it all. Support for this show comes from Tacy Trade.

You guys know me.

I have a bad case of the dumb.

I want to invest five dollars in the stock market. Is this am I doing it? This is a piece of paper, where you wrote five dollars on it. So is it going up? You're making a lot of money.

Interesting. Oh, wow. Okay. Is there any other parts? These two guys in my left, they don't know how trading stocks work at all.

They're figuring it out right now.

“But if you want to actually trade stocks, you could go to tastytrade.com/lemenade today.”

I would only do that if it was a registered broker dealer, and a member of FNFA and SIPC. Let me check it out. It is. So, are you trying another--

Oh, million. I'm just milling it. That wasn't how that-- no, this is not-- It's just to be clear.

This is not indicative of how it works.

That's what it is. It works. But you can't just write amounts of money on paper and have it. This is my nest egg. Oh, four.

You can do it. You've figured out a Tacy Trade. You figured out a Tacy Trade. Oh, it doesn't add. They actually lose quite an override for the number.

There's just one spot. They'll only have $4 now. Sport for this show comes from AG1. So admittedly, I thought I liked the taste of the citrus flavor. AG1 will pack it right.

“And it makes me feel like I'm bumping music if I'm being honest with it.”

And I just swallowed the powder on the last ad-read. Do not do that. It's not the way it's meant to be consumed. Just mix it into water like a normal person. Test for the use of this next ad-read.

Tell people not to do it the way you did it. It's no human being would do. Your teeth were covered. It was terrible. That's not how it's meant to be consumed.

It's meant to be consumed that way. When I mix it into my water bottle, they're really liked it. You need to taste it again. And when I did the powder, which they told me not to do,

it didn't taste it. Well, your mouth is nature's water bottle. Yeah. That's not the use of this one. You know what?

It's a mirror. It's a mirror. It's a mirror. It's a mirror. It's a mirror.

It's a mirror. It's a mirror. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. For a limited time, only go drink AG1.com/liminade to get free AG1 flavor. Sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavors.

Plus free vitamin D3 plus K2 and AG1, welcome kit with your AG1 subscription order. Right. But none of that has to do with you consuming it without liquid. This is a limited time offer. Only available loss supplies last.

That's drink AG1.com/liminade, drink AG1.com/liminade, drink AG1.com/liminade, drink AG1.com/liminade. I get, everything you're saying is true, it is true. I think I got to try it again. Well, it's support for the show comes from Quap. I know that.

Yeah. Do you even know what it does? Of course I do. You don't seem like it. I wouldn't, I left you every week on what Quap does.

Okay. You know how when I try to get a hold of you? Yeah, yeah. When you're in Doug, we're trying to schedule a meeting last week and you did it reply for days.

This is a true story. And I used multiple ways to contact. Wait for you. By the way, this wasn't that there was a fault, it's like we asked a question and you didn't respond from multiple plays.

For multiple days, we asked you the question. Yeah. Yeah. And if you had just made your business, if your business had one, which is not to log into, like one hub, I would check all of your messages.

Okay.

“Well, if you want to run your business into the ground, don't use Quap.”

Don't use it. But if you want an easy place that consolidates all the communication in one simple spot, then you could use Quap, QUO. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away, try Quap for free plus

get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quap.com/leminate.

That's QUO.com/leminate. Quap. No miss calls. This is real sick. Okay.

We're getting to business. Mark, you finish filming and making this thing and then becomes, as far as I can tell, the incredibly long process of getting this actually in theaters for people to watch it and spend QUO for you. Money.

Human money. Okay. Let's do this. Let's see. You finished this movie in early 23?

Yeah. Probably March.

“I think we were wrapped at the end of March or beginning of April.”

I can't remember.

So March April 23 is a 35 day shoot and there's this massive gap between then and when it releases

now in early 26. Almost three years. Three years gap. What is going on in that time? So at the same time that we did this, there are a few things happened.

I got a Spotify podcast deal. And so that came with some obligations that I had to make like three to four podcasts a week. So we were recording all the time. Some weeks I had record.

We're going to agree. A lot harder than making a movie. Yeah. I think anyone who makes a podcast is actually a hero and I think the Nobel committee should end the series.

Day out. Yeah. It's just a grind. It really is the toughest job there is. If you guys watched this studio, did you get to the episode where he's dating that

doctor? Yeah. Yeah.

“I think those doctors, those uppity bastards, should like step out of the way for the”

entertainment. Yeah. And that compares the time at L.A. general. Yeah. But so I had that in the lobby to have a YouTube channel and then the clothing

company that I have cloak, I was working on it and then I had to take it over because I wanted to change some things. So all of these things are happening. I worked on the movie on weekends because that was the only time no one would bother me.

Is that a run? Is that it? Yeah. Yeah. Everyone else takes weekends off.

Yeah. And that's what I made the movie. Okay. We're on to it. Love it.

So when is editing finish? Editing? Editing was, well, I'll see the way I had it really pisses off the post house. Was it the day before the movie came out? Pretty much not necessarily.

But it was a couple months before the movie came out because it's really difficult, especially as someone with ADHD to jump back into something after it's been a week. And so it was very hard for me to get the ideas flowing consistently every weekend. So it took a very long time to get there. And ideas would like, I would come up with alternate things.

And I had the set in, well, not the set, the front of the ship in mind. So I could get like coordinates and things as double checking makes sure all the court is makes sense making sure the pathing and the map actually worked. There was a whole thing where the way the proximity worked from when we filmed it to the post side was, we filmed it incorrectly.

And it's not even the developer was on set every day and you know, we talked about it to be like, because the way in the game works is where the arrow points is forward constantly.

And so the proximity isn't just like north of the ship always constantly, it's West

and East is always constant. It changes based on, or it doesn't change based on the arrow. We filmed it in a way that it did. And even that confusing to say because if basically in the game, if you're going this way and something's in front of you would be in the tip of the arrow would be bit.

We filmed it so that it was constantly north because in my mind, I was like, oh, the angle is going to change in the camera inside it. So it would make sense to have the front of the ship be the north would be always a pure reference, no matter what, but it's front of the ship and filmed it wrong. So we had to change it for the whole fucking movie.

Well, in post. Post, yeah. So I would, I would be filming either inserts of the front console to change up. So this is a job. It's just YouTube or rain like seeing the comments, like this is one nitpicky comment

and you're like preparing because there's no way I would be able to track that as a viewer of the where this, it mattered that it made sense. It didn't matter which one it was, it was matter what told the story better, right? And so there are times in there, especially in the front, the shot of the creature going over the sub when I'm looking at what, that's in the trailer.

If you notice the trailer, the arrow is going a different way. And then in the movie, it's going north because I realized from that shot, it didn't make sense because the arrow should be pointing north because the creature's going over left to right and if the lights are going west to right, so it made more sense to really teach the audience that this is how the proximity works because there's such a small window to

teach them. And so it doesn't matter for most people. They get the idea, but consistency in those things, the attention to detail will matter

And again, the game was correct in how to do that and I don't want it just to be nonsense. I had to make sure every number made sense, every position on the map, a sense, and the way the ship works makes sense because then you can put it in the back of your money. You don't question it. It just becomes the universe.

And if the universe is more accurate, then people will not pay attention to it and it won't distract from the story. Now make sense. Okay. So here's the question I'm trying to teasing out.

I'm trying to figure out is like in between you finishing the movie, maybe you're editing during this.

“You have to get a bunch of theaters to agree to show this movie because you don't have”

a distributor. Yeah. Yeah. I want to figure out like get a distributor approach you. Did you think about going that route?

Did you have to like, how did this go? Could I? Could I jump in real quick? Because I think I talked to another couple friends who are more embedded in the film industry. And this is one of the things they were most curious about because from their perspective,

this is one of the great like gatekeeping things in film of if you were to pursue a project like this independently, it's very difficult to actually distribute and get the movie into a bunch of theaters. Yeah. With that context in mind, I'm very curious how you managed to do that.

The theaters, theater owners, they want to make money, no matter what.

And that is the bottom line way that you know you can get in with them.

You can rent a theater screen if you wanted today. You could go to a movie theater and you could be like, how much to rent the theater number nine, right? I want to do a private event there. They do that all the time.

They want to make money. We had the help of this company called Centurion Films. And they are effectively, they're basically a communicator between the movie people and the small independent theaters. The not AMC, not Regal, not Cinemaq.

They go to these independent theaters and they say, like, hey, we will help you communicate with the movie industry to get you movies. But also if there are smaller things, we can communicate and go back and forth. And they take a very small percentage compared to what some of the bigger studios do. Because the work is just purely just like they're going to go to a theater and they're

going to do that asking, hey, can I rent a theater? So they previously did, you know, small releases, this is by far the biggest release. They've ever done. Because we started this with just being like, we're just going to try to have an individual relationship.

We either call them ourselves or we hire someone to call them and we basically hired

them to call. Just to be quote, you're calling theaters and saying, hey, will you show our movie? That's what they're doing. Yes. Okay.

And so they have a relationship. That was it like, hey, this movie is going to be big. It's got a YouTuber. It's like, yeah. Okay, so you're just trying to convince them, this is going to not be wasted their

time. Yeah. Exactly.

“Do you have to like, pay them upfront of like a guarantee?”

So it could work that way or it could be how the studio is doing, which is just be like, ticket share. And so the way that you have a more, you know, it depends on the circumstances. If you're doing an advantage thing where you're only going to do one weekend or something, it might be better to do the buying out the theater.

If you know you can sell it, right? If you know you can fill a theater, you might may more. If you do that. If you don't know what the scope is going to be doing those individual deals might be very difficult to pay upfront and rent all those if you're not going to fill that.

Yeah. You don't know.

But the theater owners don't always want to do the split share because they run

the risk of, well, if no one shows up and we're not going to get anything off of this, where we could sell you this whole thing. You buy it, you know, wall the wall, each theater at a time. So the nitty-gritty of that is down to the individual project and the person who decides what approach they're going to do better.

The theater obviously likes to make money, so they're probably going to be like, "Oh, we're into a little thing." But if you want a distribution in this company, they bring this theater, bring the movie to the theater and they're like, "Hey, we think this can go. This is who the guy is."

And thankfully, you know, there's a lot of theater owners who may know who I am. They look at my numbers and they'd be like, "Okay, this might work." So we had about, he wanted to do three theaters to start with. Three, the guy from Centurion Films wanted to do three.

“And I said to him, like, "I think that and don't take this wrong way.”

I think that's an insultingly low number." Not to me, but to my audience, because my audience is very large and they're going to feel bad if I tell them, "Hey, buy tickets. The people in these three cities." Yeah, John.

And even when we got to 56, I think 60 is how many theater 62 or something like that that eventually were there for the day that we launched the sales of it. And even then, my audience was like, "Oh, I got to drive two hours. Okay. I'll do it."

And they were willing to do it. So the difference here between this and the traditional model is you don't have a guarantee of how many you're going to get. There's no network, there's no like AMC has so many theaters, they're going to put it in these things.

They're going to evenly distribute it, they're going to work out a consistent deal.

So it is a bit more complicated, but by hiring this company, we don't have to do all

that ourselves. My wife, Amy, built the website to show where the theaters were going to be. And so this is a long-winded way of saying there is a system in place for other people to get their movie out there. And even if it's just, you call one theater and be like, "Hey, I would like to show my

movie. I have this many things I will put a pre-order up for sales. This is how we're going to do it. Hey, do you think that you have a time where I could do this?" And they could, you could set it up in a completely unrated, you don't need to submit it

for rating if you want to. And they could do sell the tickets unrated. We obviously got a rating for it.

“And I knew it was going to be ours, so I didn't even question that, was it?”

Is your main channel more family friendly? Because you curse a lot. You're angry in this movie. Not cursing. I'm not a channel.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And that's basically, it is a little complicated, but thankfully, there's a company like

Centering Films, and I'm sure there are other companies out there that are willing to help out with the smaller steps to get there. And then because if it does well, these other theaters, they get formal, really easily. They go like that. Yeah, it does.

Yeah, well, because I know you had like 13 nerd theaters, but yeah, I guess. Because now it's in AMC, right, like I look at listings now. So you started with a 56, you said, right? Yeah, 56 years. It's all the website.

And then by the time I opened it, which was like, I don't know, two hours or something, after you guys launched it already, it was in like hundreds of theaters. What is like, how do you specifically add theaters to that list? Are they calling you or is your company reaching out to them and saying, look, now we have a hundred add more.

Now we're 200. It was a logistical nightmare.

“This is actually where things started to almost break down.”

Because we did not have a bookings email. We did not have a way for these theaters to really get to us in mass, even centurion films was kind of overwhelmed because not all the theaters knew to retouch to them. So they were trying to retouch to me personally. YouTube comments.

Yeah, YouTube comments like random email address. Like this. Yes. Yeah, YouTube comments. Yeah.

YouTube comments. So people posting on my subreddit, there was a ton of, and it was very difficult. Because we had to manually converse with each one of these incentives centurion films. And then we had to get the theater information as soon as it's booked. And then we had to manually put it in the website.

There's it literally a big spreadsheet because Amy, who built the website did not anticipate making 4,000 entries. So it's a gigantic spreadsheet where it's the theater name, the address, the GPS, like location of it, the coordinates of it, so that it can be put on the map and then a website. It had to scale and scale.

So every day we were adding manually just like adding into the spreadsheet more entries, wall centurion films was talking and making arrangements. Then by Monday, when all the other bigger chains were like, hey, something's happening, I got a call from cinema, and they were like, hey, well, we would love to get it. We're getting 50 theaters.

And then I get a call from Regal, like every theater. We're going to put in all the theaters legitimately. Regal was so down. Regal was very, very excited. Then AMC joined up because all of them were just like, hey, it's just selling.

We want to make money. And that's what I mean. There's want to make money. So if you can get that moment and going, even in the momentum, and the momentum doesn't have to be to 4,000 or all international at all, it could be like one theater spills over

suddenly. They've got a lot of showings at that theater, and you could saturate a theater pretty hard. But you know, all of your audiences is going to be there. Then you do like Costa coast. You could do one LA when New York, you could do, and a lot of my audience was actually

rural, so there was a lot of small theaters in the middle of the country that filled up really quickly. So if you've got any kind of fan base, you don't need 38 million to 38 million, that'll

“get you 4,000 theaters if you want to scale up like that.”

If you had less, you can fill theaters because people want, also, the theater experience, people want to reason to go out and have a date, and they want a reason to go people like movies. And so yeah. It's interesting.

Because you say 38 million to fill 4,000 theaters, but this is the first time

that's been proven. If I'm a skeptical theater owner when you're doing this pitch, I would probably say, three months ago, yeah, you have a big YouTube audience, but they're not gonna, they're not gonna show up and go butts and scenes, that's what I would have thought as a person three months ago.

So you've kind of changed that, I wonder, do you think this will lead to other, at least people, maybe not exactly your size, but of that larger class, trying to do this? Like I, this is the first, it proves the point that a big YouTube audience can translate to real seeds. Yeah, I don't think everyone's big YouTube audience can.

They're certain YouTubers and there's no discredited to them, but they're certain YouTubers that have an audience that is there for the content more than the person. And so like you have certain audiences that just aren't gonna go because they don't care enough about. And they might, and their name might be Ludwig, you know, like they could never do that.

What do we could never do that? They could never do that. It doesn't matter. It doesn't, it doesn't, you can't have the acting ability. Yeah.

I was just minecraft is in the movie, you don't think they're gonna show up to Ludwig.

Yeah. It would sit down to watch Minecraft, the movie, but who's Ludwig? That's right. I know I hear he's a nice guy, but you think there'll be a movement with a certain tier or audience of creator that could make a move like this that has that support.

Yeah. I mean, I got to imagine from a business side, Hollywood sees this. They're trying to suck your block of empire. They are immediately sending their drones out to find other YouTubers of similar size and offer them, hey, you want to do a, I just got to be happening right now because they're

seeing the opportunity. Okay. I actually have a huge, huge question with this because I, I wonder, you seem to already weigh through your answers, the part that your fandom plays in marketing or or built, like some of the success of this movie, right?

And so if I'm an indie filmmaker looking at the landscape right now, I'm looking at the indie game landscape where there's a number of like influencer back developers and they're going like that route or if I'm looking at the success of a movie or a project like this, do you think, and, but, and there also seems to be kind of a movement of directors, maybe in the movie industry, cultivating fandom around their, their work has individuals.

So people are just excited to go see their like next next piece. If I'm an indie filmmaker watching this like world of business unfold around me, what could you give me is like my number one take away from this project? Like, what, how, if I wanted to pursue my dream, what, what is my best course from your experience?

“I think the most important thing for people to realize is the power of people on the internet”

is real and tangible, even in the day and day and age of like chatbots and AI is taking over every social media and dead internet theory and all that. There are still a lot of real people out there that want to see cool things, new things and new ideas. Even if you are not the type that is, I don't want to build a big YouTube channel.

I don't want to get a million subscribers.

I just want to make my art. That's great because if Iron Lung didn't have something for people to like about it and that's why it's like it's, it's, I'm super happy with where it landed because some people hated. Some people really love it.

There's something, there is something polarizing there and there is an interesting discussion to be had for there and it wouldn't have done well if people didn't actually enjoy, at least some people didn't enjoy watching it and some people watching it again. It's not entirely just because I have that many subscribers. The content is king above all else, right?

And so that applies to movies too.

“So if you're an indie filmmaker, you have to understand that I have been working on my craft”

as the same time I've been building mine. It's I've been doing both. I've been making sketches since I started. I've been learning about cameras and photography and editing and I've been learning all the disciplines to do this.

I've not approached this from an amateur standpoint. I think that at the same time is like, I'm not amateur in terms of my audience. I'm not amateur in terms of my skill. So I have a long way to go in terms of movie making, but there has to be a recognition there is like as a filmmaker, you cannot expect that if you have not made a movie yet

or several, you know, which I have, even if people don't think it, the YouTube original things that I did, those are longer than movies. The in space with Markiplier was a much more complicated and involved shoot than Iron Lung was. And at more people, more cast, more locations, bigger budget, it had everything going for it to make it larger than Iron Lung was in a lot of ways harder.

And so we, we, we have to recognize there that like there is still a road for people to travel and they are not at the pinnacle of the mountain yet for their skill. And so one of the greatest things that you can do is recognize that YouTube is a beautiful place to put your projects that are building those skills because there is an audience there.

Even if you have no subscribers, if you've got a good short film, people are going to find it. People are going to talk about, all the YouTubers are going to be like, I found this fucking great because they're going to want to make a video about it because content, they're

going to be, I found this great hidden gem of this short film from a director, I've never

heard of that you all are going to like, here's my review of it, they're going to link the video. People are going to find it.

“And then you have to realize that there's a difference between 30 and million and”

a few thousand, yes, but a few thousand can fill a theater multiple times over. You have a thousand views on your movie if those people are really interested in this concept and there is a movie theater near them. If you get 10,000 views, that's a lot of people, a lot of people. And so the metrics of success even in Hollywood are a story because a billion dollar movie

can seem like the standard. That's a bullshit goal.

It's not for the individual film like you're at all, but if you can level the playing field with the technology available, not even AI, but I'm talking like with DaVinci and the editing software and the more accessible cinema cameras and the more accessible cinema lenses, you have this opportunity to make really high quality stuff. But unless you have the skill to do it in the practice and the constant drive and desire

to do it, you're never going to get anywhere.

I'm 14 years into my career. It took me 14 years to go from 0 to 38 million. And it's like if I had to look at other film maker and Billy, if I told you it was going to take 14 years to get your movie and theater and have it be a success, would you take that deal?

Would you work 14 years to get there? And I think a lot would.

“I think a lot would be like, you know, that might be not a bad thing to do.”

So it's like, yeah, listen, I think that there's a world of opportunity for other film makers to do things. Sorry. I remember. That was a fucking amazing answer.

That was so fucking incredible answer.

Yeah, I see this is my problem. I've noticed in interviews if I'm stunned locked by the answer, I'm like, I just want to get lost. That was crazy. Oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh. It's been fantastic this week. It's been five minutes in. Okay, wait. So there's a question that I had watching the movie.

And I did a little research because the movie made me interested in the game. Yeah. I watched part of your let's play and then I watched a video on the lore of the game after we're just trying to get better. You've done an absolutely like the the field you can mind from in terms of your gaming

history is pretty, large. Yeah. Is that you talk about next projects? Are you thinking about other games? Are you seeing other games as ideas now?

Are you like, is this a lens you're looking at the world in? Yes, but also I have to be careful with that. There's a trap there, right? If I only do game adaptations, then you become the games guy. I become the games guy, right?

And especially if I do horror game adaptations, I become that everything I've done before this has been original writing that I've done. So I all in my YouTube originals, obviously they were just like me writing about myself. But it's like I did the writing and I came up with all the sets and ideas and the story behind it.

So I feel like I could probably do another game adaptation next and that be fine. But if the next one isn't an original idea, then I am hindering myself as an artist and to be taken seriously as I move forward. It becomes like you'll be the five nights of Freddy's guy if you only play five nights

“of Freddy's in here, I am. And it's not the worst thing in the world, but it becomes harder”

to be taken more seriously as and it stifles your own growth as an artist to only take the, I hate to say this word, but it's like crutch of a pre-made universe. There is, there is an lubrication to the process from having the university built. And therefore, if you just did to adapt it, that is actually something it's what Hollywood really likes because it's built in families, but it's not challenging as a writer to say like

I am just going to adapt something and coming up with something entirely novel and entirely new isn't probably the most difficult thing, like anyone could ever do. Is that what you're thinking? Is that like your next, you try to do a original world or original story? Yeah, maybe not next, but definitely I need, it needs to happen.

Yeah. And I don't think I need to jump straight into making a movie about it. I could write a book first and then see how that does. And then be like, okay, I just write a book. I have a copy to show you later. I have a question. Like, so it's too part one, what's the name of your next project? And then two, how does the success of this change it just strictly monetarily?

Do you feel like, okay, now I don't know of the 50 million in box office, how much goes to you.

I imagine a huge chunk of that is not slowing to you, but in theory you have a bigger scope right for the next one. Do you feel like that's going to change? I mean, there's part of me having, when I worked in production when I found really frustrating is like, as you increase the scope of it, the contrast between I have a creative idea and implementation, just gets bigger and bigger and harder and more expensive and slow.

And so there's this, I think creative freedom in being really limited and small. Yeah, I'm curious if the success of this is making you think bigger. I think that there is in the same way that I knew that I needed to make a movie to be taken more seriously.

“You have to tackle something eventually is going to be of a big enough scope that people will go,”

how the fuck did you do that? That's kind of a longer term. If I'm looking at YouTube like the 14 years as I have reached basically a point where maybe I'm not the greatest youtuber that ever existed, but I think I'm pretty good at what I do. There's suddenly a new mountain to climb with movies.

learned a lot in the process and if I did it again today, I would make a much better movie,

I think, but that's kind of the whole thing is I'm happy where it is and I'm not regretful of any of the decisions that I made because they were the best that I make at the time. I've got another hopefully quite a few years to make future projects and if I'm not getting better than I'm not happy and that's just me as a creative. If I'm not improving, I'm not happy. So eventually I have to make something that scares me. That is so big that he's so big that

Chris Evans. He scares me. He's so huge guy. Yeah, he's huge. Oh man, he is. He's terrible actor. I heard it from

“Markiplier. Yeah, well, I guess it's an asshole. Yeah, but yeah, it's how you have to do things that kind of”

scary because that's how you know that you're being challenged enough to grow. And so I could be comfortable in the

I'm just going to make small horror movies and I could do that forever and it would be very rewarding

and I would be very happy and I'd probably make a good bit of money. But as an artist, I don't think that I would be creatively fulfilled. If that's only thing that I did, so you have to push yourself at some points and the scary thing about that is like it's pushing yourself in such a way that the logistics of it become greater and the risks of it becoming a disaster grow, grow exponentially, the number of talented artists that you that are trusting you with your vision and working

and putting their names on the line, working on something becomes more because suddenly there's more people and it grows from 100 crucette to up 300 crucette with a splinter unit of 100 people working on another part of the movie. You know, it's just like the risk is there, but the I think the creative fulfillment and the reward for the audience is definitely just a big and just doesn't work. Support for lemonade stand comes from Shopify. Now, I worked at a company at a college,

okay? And I keep trying to tell this story in this particular segment. But Brandon saying that people don't like the company I worked for or the type of games that I worked on. It was yay! Oh, I can't say it. You're the one who said I didn't say anyway. I worked on people's favorite part about video games, which is microtransactions. Right. And I'm going to let you know straight up the money. Having like money transfer is hard. And running a business, a lovely business,

“a people love the transfers money for customers and the shop is hard. And that's why I was”

trying to accomplish my business. Like Shopify, and that was the peak of my career to be honest, it's all been down there. Shopify can help you set up an e-commerce store and take care of that stuff, hard stuff for you. And ironically, that stuff is hard and difficult and challenging. And if you don't want to deal with it and just get focused on the part that matters, which is like making a cool thing you care about, Shopify can do that. It turned your what ifs into a thriving

business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/lamentade. Go to shopify.com/lamentade. That's shopify.com/lamentade. Support for this show comes to a rocket money. Little follow up for Aiden here. I found an actual conversation between me and Aiden from 2024. Two things. Number one. Been watching a ton of your videos lately, like even more than normal. Will not twitch though, right? Great stuff. Number two. Hey, do you actually have a

wreck rocket money? I've been skeptical L.O.L. but I have a lot of monthly payments and it's down to very convenient. Does it still work if those monthly payments are spread across multiple things? I would also like to know that. And I said, I used this actual messaging and the ad range recorded. Now, twice. Yeah, I have with it heavy. I used it back and forth. I even sponsored me when it was called Trubill. But I have lots of scriptures that help me keep track slash cancel.

“I legit have 225 news stuff that I cycle through with the prices on. And that's why you should never”

waste your hard and cash on the nature of twitch sub. Never pay for entry on twitch sub again.

Watch more of this content. You sure won't try. You can't give me five dollars. Try and rocket money for free at rockinbody.com/levenate. Sport for lemonade stand comes from the league. Now, we've been following the journey of our friend Eli on the league and you have a status update. Yeah, we love Eli, right? He's strong. He's good in the post. Yeah, he's pretty good in the post. He's layups gotten way better. Yeah, he's good in the post. And he's been he's been

cruising looking looking for a long term partner. I should say for a long time. He's been swinging for a long term partner. Yeah. He's used a bunch of different dating apps recently. He tried the league, which he's been really happy with. He says that his account got turned around really quickly. You have to get like approved said it happened quick fast. And he's found a bunch of higher quality matches. He likes way better than the other apps that he's tried in the past.

And also, he said he likes that the app only shows him people at once per day at five p.m. So he doesn't waste a bunch of time. Scrolling those girls. It's like daily scroll. I check the app.

maybe somebody professional looking for a long term relationship like Eli, you could check out the league. More isn't better. Better is better. The league finds someone in yours download the app in the play today. On the on the revenue, I had heard. If you're comfortable speaking about this, I had heard that you had a unique profit sharing model with the cast and crew. I was wondering if you could. Oh, no, not a lot. Not unique. I'm just giving them a bonus

book. And what sucks is like that's apparently rare. That's unique. So if you look at the number

“is like 50 million, right? That's what the box office is. But you have the it's a split with the”

theaters, right? It's 50 50 split. I think is what we mostly have. I don't know what all the international splits are. I think some of them are 60 40. Some non is good. 60 40 to them. And so some might be 60 40 to me. I really don't know because it happens. I think if they're dealing internationally, why do they get to, why do they have leverage for 64? Because there's a bunch of foreign. How race is coming over here? No, it's it's just different territory. And kind of the

speed at which you need to like you need to work with this company. And we have more options. We got to move fast. So it's like you got to take a deal where it is. And so most of those are just subcontracted through this company centering films. So you have the splits, it probably averages out to about 50 50. And then you have. So you cut that in 50 and half. You got 25. The centering films takes their cut. Yeah, chop it down. And then you're left with the amount that's going to be repaid for the

budget. And it's like that is that is repayment that I put into the production company. So that's

gets repaid possibly with interest. And so that gets paid off first. So it could be like, thank

far. I'm breaking even. Right. So as soon as you're like, okay, I've broken even. Then everything else is basically profit. So things are based on profits of the people that have points in the movie. Obviously David's a man's key developer the game. Yes, he gets points in the movie. And this would usually be where the studios would have a big percentage, but in this I don't have that. So because I don't have that, I'm able to give a bonus to the crew. So I basically

I took their salary that I paid them for the production days. And I said, like, I'm going to apply that again as a bonus. And so just like whatever your salary was, it's now doubled. And so that bonus given that, you know, personnel and payroll costs are probably the most expensive thing that you have on set. That's that's a huge thing. And then the actors get paid and give them bonuses. And then the editing team, you know, gets gets, I've given bonuses to everybody basically. And then whatever's

left over is mine goes back to me. As you could see the number goes, but I didn't do this to make a lot of money. You didn't sell like you made it for the money. Yeah, even though I'm making a good

“deal money out of it, I think that it's, it really has to be recognized. It's like it's, I'm so happy”

to be able to give the crew a win, you know, a reward for their hard work and they're trust in me. It's not even like I paid them poorly on set. I like to pay people well. And I like to treat them

well. And I believe that without them this movie, you never would have been made. So of course,

I'm going to give them a bonus. And I wish the industry actually would do that. Well, the Disney Bob Iger, if you're watching and I know you are. Next time you leave a comment on your YouTube field, Bob. Yeah. Think about this Bob. Think about that answer. Well, and that actually brings you to a question because, okay, after you're a hit, you've done very well. And the studios are interested. From what you're talking about for your

motivation, it doesn't sound like being purely indie was a big part of it. You just want to challenge yourself. If Disney showed up and said, we're going to give you $50 million to make avatar for Captain America. Yeah, Captain America. Yeah, Captain America, Markiplier plays Chris Evans for all because we get about. Right. Yeah. Save money. Whatever. They give you an option for this. Are you taking it down on principle? Because you want to go indie or

like what? Where's your head on that? That's something you would be interested in or not. They

wouldn't give me control. Really? It's no. Directors never get control. Not full control the

control that I want, even Christopher Nolan doesn't get full control. Maybe now, like on his comedy YouTube

“subs. Yeah, you know what I'm saying too. I think he's bad. I think that it's very rare for any”

studio to give that to you. There's that there's a studio that will be much more friendly to work with. But they'll still have notes and opinions and you are contractually obligated to follow them if they really put their foot down. They can final say, I don't like that because I don't, I'm a bit of a control freak in that regard. And I don't like being beholden to anybody else's opinion besides the creative team. I listen to the creatives that are part of it. Like if, if Anna say had some

strong opinions about what she believes in it, I will take her input and I will apply it to the move. An actor feels like I want to change this dialogue for the sake of I believe this character would say differently. I am absolutely going to take that and I'm going to implement it if I feel like

creatively filled. But if they're not onset with me seeing it happen, I don't trust them.

“So I don't like the idea of taking a deal like that because it just means that there's going to”

be difficulties in the post-process and I won't be able to make a decision like, yeah, I'm going to just work on it on weekends whenever I want whenever I have free time. I'm going to take three years to get this out because that's all the time I got. They're going to not going to accept that. They're going to be like, you know, you're just not going to keep one between 27 and we're going to kill you. You know, so it's contracts are fun and all and big dollar

bonuses have to be a lake of blood, you know, can we get, can we lose the blood mark? It's just so much. It's just so dark. Well, because if you branded it, Dr. Pepper, same color. Yeah, you'd branded it. You'd branded it. It's a little money on, though. Wow, you know, okay, you're talking about the fact that you took three years because you're still doing YouTube, merch, all this other stuff. You, I mean, you don't have to do YouTube anymore.

You don't have to the podcast, right? I mean, you've probably technically had that option for a long time, but I'm curious, like, how do you think about the balance of all these different things going forward? That's something. I mean, sure all three of those are wondered at times. You know, it's like between our movies and our, right? But you know, it's like how, how much do like even you know, I like semi-retired my YouTube channel kind of and like that was hard to be like,

I mean, I intentionally let go of this thing and I still couldn't fully let it go and what's going through your brain is you way all of the things you do. I like making YouTube videos. That's it. That hasn't diminished or even let's say less that you dislike it, but more, hey, I'm going to need 90% of my time in order to make this next thing even worse. Sure, I've done that even one of this project where it's like, okay, I'll work a sprint. Some things got to sacrifice, I guess I'm

not putting up daily videos on my channel. It's gone, you know, maybe a month, a little longer than a month in between some stretches where I wasn't able to post a video. For sure, that happens. But I really find a lovely, like catharsis in the cycle of content creation, the simplicity of it. It is like, I found a lot of peace in the process because it's like an instant gratification. You get a product. You work on it in a day. The next day it comes out.

I mean, I know your videos take long because you do long streams and building up like that. No, I like my brother spent seven years working on his most recent indie game and it's like, I told him multiple times, like, there's no way I could even remotely do a timeline like that. Even the three years, for a long or four, whatever, it's total tough. The feedback loop of YouTube

“and streaming is so easy and gratified. It is, it is. And so that's why I don't want to give it up.”

It's, you know, it's rewarding. It's that audience is also important because it's like, I wouldn't have had this accessibility. Yeah, you see the ability to do this, right? Exactly. But it's not necessarily about that. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it. You know, unless it was a bigger reason, like a greater goal to do something because I can't say the process of making this movie over the three years wasn't fun or it was fun the entire time because it was not fun many

times. It was arduous and it was hard. I pulled so many all-nighters. I got so many more gray hairs because of it. I lost so much sleep. I lost time with some people that were very important to me

that I will never get back again. And I had to postpone even my wedding to work on this thing.

And my relationship, you know, if Amy wasn't so incredible to me and so understanding with this, I, you know, I could see a world where if I was in with someone else, I would have lost that relationship, but I wouldn't look. There are sacrifices that come into all of this. And there are deep, deep, deep scars that can run from doing these huge sacrifices. It doesn't happen easily. But because I believed in the end goal of it, I believe that it would open up an entire new chapter of

my career. It would open up a door that I could then step through and I could be confident. My ability to say like, yes, I can stand toe-to-toe with another director or a studio entirely. And I could make a project and I would have the skill that no one could ever take for me. And I would have the accolades that only I can give myself that matter the most or what I want to do. And so because I believed in that so much, it was rewarding. The process was arduous.

But I also believe that arduous processes and things have terrified you in a way too hard

“are the things that you need to know. Your limits so you can actually grow.”

YouTube is very different from that. It is so relaxing. It is so. It is so gentle. It is so nice and smooth. And occasionally you'll make a video where

you'll really kick a hornistness with Bobby's plates on him. But I've never been bothered

by any kind of negativity online. It's just like, oh, it's so nice. Hey, you know, my opinion is getting out there. It's fun. It's really fun. And there's very few parts of the YouTube pipeline that I don't like. And so I think that it's just out of YouTube politics jettles. Oh, yeah, you should do it. It's just fun. So it's a rewarding kind of break from the cycle of making a movie. Where do the other pieces outside of YouTube and making a movie coming?

business has in your life now. If there's other pursuits that you're looking to build. And in the same vein as the movie, how much the financial opportunity of those things, even plays a part in that anymore. I would say that the financial is not a motivation for anything. I do really. It's kind of a, it has happened. And so anyone that's like a super business, I came in and asked me like, oh, did you make your money? And I'd be like, I don't

mean, because I've never been focused on it with the clothing the reason that I took it over,

it was a very expensive decision because it was working before. But the quality wasn't where I wanted to be. And I wasn't majority on her. So I had to become majority on her if I wanted to make decision. It's expensive. And then I had to basically take the whole business and build it up from new. That's expensive. I'm paying people. And we're not selling anything, basically for a year and a half. But it was necessary to be like, this is going to be better for the end of consumer for the

my audience for people actually buying the clothes if they're a higher quality. If we can actually make sure that they're more ethically sourced, whether we're doing things right, we're doing things

“honestly. It's going to be more difficult. And on the long run, it may not make, you know, profit,”

like a year's student, it probably will, but I won't. But I believe that if you make something of a higher quality that you can be proud of and you can understand the process more by learning about rebuilding it, then you can be more confident going into the future. And I think that reflects on the people that want the clothing and then more people want it because they're like, hey, they're doing something right. And that's kind of the philosophy I've applied to everything that I've done.

It's just like the decisions that I make are not about the money that I want to make. It is just incidental that success follows doing something of quality. And I feel like that is somehow lost on a lot of businesses. Like if you put quality into something, it may not be absolutely a financial success. But the people that are going to, that you're trying to sell to are going to enjoy it more and have a more rewarding experience. And then the intangible benefits, the non monetary benefits of

like having a very supportive audience that is willing to put their trust in me when I say, hey, I made a movie. And then they have no reason other than just me saying that to be like, all right, I'll go to a theater. All right, I'll ask a theater that if they can show this movie, I'll email someone and I'll call someone. I'll go there and I'll physically ask for the manager and I'll say, hey, I wanted this movie here. Do you think that, do you think that kind of

mark a prior stamp is something you've intentionally cultivated? Your process here is very intentional, but understanding that that exists. And it's like this premium sign off on all of these things that you do. And then it's now it is proven itself effective in so many ways. Is that

“something you were like conscious you were building or is it just, this is a byproduct of being me?”

Yeah, I'd say calling it a rubber stamp is probably what it might be in the future if I'm

working with other people. But because I've always approached my channel as being like,

this is me and this is my journey. This is how I have built myself up. This is what I wanted to do. I didn't like my life wasn't, this is basically just me making stuff that I think is fun. And I think, and I will try a bigger project all the time and I'll go forward to there. The, the mark of our stamp in that regard wouldn't necessarily be something because I'm not putting on anything that I'm not already doing that I'm not already there. So I am the stamp right now.

And I, I think the trust that has been built up with my audiences is that I'm going to put everything I have into it. I'm going to, I'm not going to have to ask anything. And I'm going to try it to the very end if it fails. It fails and all crash and burn with it. It's usually what I

“like to do. And the, I think that understanding for my audience has been, you've reached many,”

many years ago. And so it's important to also cultivate that belief so that it can't fade.

So I can always show that I'm willing to show up and put in the hard work that is necessary.

So in a way, yes, but also in a way, it's, it's not even that something that I have thought about. It's just like, I have a duty to myself and my audience to do everything I can. Dada, sound good in these answers. Let me, let me ask, I think long term because it sounds like you had this, you had this very understandable goal of that I want to prove something to myself. I want to open this door for myself and this future, this future path I'm looking at with

making movies and continuing to do that. Do you, but you seem to want to stay independent? Is, is your goal to be a recognizable indie director, these people aren't necessarily indie, but like, if I say Ryan Kugler or if I say Christopher Nolan, people will just go see their next movie and they're a director and I want to go see their project or like the safeties right now.

for a long time? I think it will be, it will be impossible not to because I've put my name

forward on and clearly I've stuck with Markiplier because I'm proud of where I've come from and also it's just like people know that name. So it will be impossible not to aim for that because I do want to have a reputation of quality and I want a reputation of at least I will be swinging very hard for whatever project that I'm going for. So yes, but also, again, it's not what I'm specifically chasing because my goals are sometimes very selfish. I self-oriented. I want to be good

at what I do. I want to be good for me. I want to be happy with the products and I won't release a project until I'm happy with it and until I know that it was the best I could do at the time and I will be very hard on myself if I know that it could be better and I have not put in all the effort that I possibly could. That'll probably kill me someday because I will just do many long layers and help my heart will give out and I will die on the floor of the editing room and I know that's

“probably where I'm going to end up but it's good with the bad, you know? Where's each tray?”

It's going to be a great clip for the opportunity to end up here, you're going to be the best. I'm like your dad's as editing room floor and we're playing with this. Yeah, you know, it's interesting to me because I think hearing your story, it's actually more unique than this question would indicate. I want to talk about creator-led businesses which draw on the massive rise right now and how culturally it's changing. You didn't spend a lot

or any marketing this movie. It was just happenstance of the audience and trust you built up. But when I was buying snacks with this movie, I took pictures of the options available to me. There was Mr. Beast original jerky and there was joy-ribe, which I believe is someone else's Ryan Trane. Ryan Trane's candy company. I'm seeing these pop-up installers and I'm seeing creator-lib businesses rise more and more and it does feel like the advantage of their ability

to market because it costs them nothing once they have their audience built. It's so astronomical over what a established company has to spend on TV or online ads to get to that same level that it's changing the whole industry. It seemed like you're doing most of this just because it's a passion project and what you want to do. But have you noticed how like you've at 14-year career? Have you noticed how that has changed and opportunities have become available to you?

I do. It's impossible not to see the amount of companies that are partnering with creators to make products and things like that. Making products is very difficult honestly. So any kind of

“attempt to do that is brush with troubles through the entire process. I think that the important”

thing to recognize though is pretty much everything even in those of free marketing. It's just a different type of currency. So your audience has a trust and you have taken their time and given them content and entertainment and you have this transactional. That's a very business way of putting it. But in a way they're giving time the most valuable thing they have to you and this trust is built up to not abuse that exchange, right? And if you're going to ask them to do anything else,

they're either going to give up their time or they're going to give their money for the product. It's the exact reason that they took cloak and I wanted to transform it into something better because if I'm going to ask them to pay for clothes, I want the clothes to be as good as they can be. And so with these other companies it is again very, very cool that other these creators

have this ability to have marketing but it's never free. It's not free. A million people in my audience

“had to go and go out to theaters physically spend money and I hope and I think that it was worth”

their time to do that. But if you don't have a constant positive contribution towards that time and paying respect to that, you can't just tap it unlimitedly even for a Mr. Beast or any of these other bigger creators making these products like feastables and things like that, they won't just last on goodwill alone. The goodwill does try up until you start contributing back into the fund and I'm not saying he's not. I'm not saying some are. I'm saying that it is still, it's just

the different type of currency and it's sometimes an invisible currency that people don't even know exist but it does. And recognize it at the first step to understand it that the numbers behind those subscribers are real people with real lives and if you don't treat them with respect, it's

you're never going to go anywhere. I really like that answer as well. I think you're totally right.

There's a video. I think I have a very different outlook on like content and success than he does but Graham Stevens who's like a finance youtube youtuber talked about canning his coffee business he didn't for a few years and the way it has these he's talked to a bunch of people to have these types of businesses in this space and for every like you know feastables maybe that's going crazy right? But most people are giving their crack at launching a product accessing an audience that

wants to engage with them in that way and then it has this initial spike of interest and then immediately stagnates and starts falling off and it's kind of what happened with this coffee company

“that he got rid of and I think a lot of people you have to be at this unique cross section where”

people believe in you because of all the things you've developed and accomplished but also truly deliver on what that product is in order like to give Ryan Trayhand some credit the candy's pretty fucking good like I've tried it and I think a lot of these products that I've seen or tried

from different creators over the years are ultimately pretty bad because they're the quick

cash grab you're trying to get it out there you're not working with the right people no the way you put it and just the terms clicked with me the way about currency because it's like it's like a promise right you're making a promise to them and if it's not good then you're just trading your trust current you're just draining that exactly that's a really yeah it's interesting way to put it that's that's yeah I think I've tried to get that across to my editors about videos

where it's like hey if they're clicking on this we have to give them either a laugh or learn something every time or they're going to eventually not click that's the point that's the promise you're there's a counter point of the process like sometimes I sometimes I mess with my audience because they deserve it yeah sometimes I get a little too up and sometimes I get a little too full

and so sometimes you've got a she guy you guys might know she you know it's not always perfect

no one you know sometimes I really love one in a thousand theaters doesn't show the right movie it's my let's go on the subreddit did anyone was anyone else upset it was just a normal

“you did video it's I think it can't be too pure because if you try to be too pure they know bullshit”

you know they're not really that good and I tell people all the time I'm gonna ask whole Moses I'm like I say it's selfish a lot of it I want to succeed and they know that it's like you're not human if you don't want a little selfishness and so reminding him that I'm better than all of you I better is is important for the let's click let's click that and loop it all right we're

having a mark has been awesome I have one final quick simple question true anything you did

treat yourself after having a wildly successful indie movie or as they're just back to the grind ah no I mean I've I've slept which has been really cool I think that's nice I've been reading some books which have been great I haven't had time to do that I've been starting to watch some TV shows like I said well I was watching the studio which I haven't watched any hilarious it's great

“I really little that the pit has been you know depressing but you know kind of fun it's a good show”

I've been you know enjoying some time to actually breathe and and talk to people because like I was it was 16 in our days for about three years and that's that's no good for anybody saying I mean you saw me at the parties that I would show up to over at Ethan's and I would just be like yeah I got our work on stuff after this and you were like coming in like knives and stuff to tell anybody you also looked at the part of like an angry pirate yeah yeah that was only because Amy said it

all of for me is like I flew in the an hour before that party by the way I don't know if you know that I like an hour or two and I sprinted home old my costume was laid out I put it on then I drew into the party right after that is like and that was all the time I had and I had to make that work but that built trust with me and now you can spend that currency Mark thank you so much for coming on I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation we'll see you next time be sure to check out iron

one only in theaters well by the time this comes out probably out but you maybe in theaters thanks everybody thanks for watching bye support for the show comes from tacy train and we're at the end of the episode not even know why these guys are here they're still watching it they're here when they could be learning yeah we're learning about how to trade stocks last week I thought you would defy the new york and go to the stockings and you're still bringing this up turns out obvious that's

not true it just I grew up my whole life watching ways where they're at the stockings did you even try writing a big number on a piece of paper I both of you are trying incorrect things so often that it's scary I'm going tcttrade.com slash lemonade tate ticket started on how to actually do it Simon asked you by the star yeah or this and swirflashback and just over the raten and then often this is stimp per ne garnish as a star yeah it's so my safe space you mine's damn it that's

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