LOOR.TV | Fight Feminism With Stories: The Renaissance of Christian Media

My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to the renaissance of Men podcast. This is your weekly reminder that big things are coming soon for the show, including a new name, the Will Spencer podcast, and a wider variety of guests and topics. All you have to do is not be surprised when it happens. My guests this week are the founders of a new streaming platform that lets subscribers use their subscription to fund the movies and tv shows they want to see.

Please welcome Marcus Pittman and Jason Farley from lore tv. YouTube are the renaissance do you like to watch streaming networks? I mean, ever since the COVID lockdowns, streaming services have exploded in popularity. Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Max, Disney Plus, Amazon prime and more. The idea behind them was that they were supposed to disrupt the big broadcasters. No longer would you be a servant to corporate overlords at the cable networks who told you what to watch.

You could stream any show you wanted on demand. The power of a generations worth of video entertainment in the palm of your hand. Take that, illuminati lizard people. Theres just one problem. We all met the new boss who was the same as the old boss.

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

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

This has led to a vacuum in the media space as people who are old enough to remember these things called stories go looking for them and find little out there. Now im not a tv guy. Im a book guy. There are three things im not very good rock climbing, cold showers, and watching tv. However, I did enjoy shows like Breaking Bad and Walking Dead before I became a Christian.

And perhaps I dont watch much tv because I know theres so little out there that will pass my new radical right wing extremist standards where I dont want to see wokeness, graphic and gratuitous violence, sex scenes, swearing or anything like that. Because frankly, I don't think they're necessary to telling good stories. But as far as the streaming networks are concerned, that makes me an outlier.

So what if there was a streaming network where I could choose not only what I watch and when, but what's available on the platform to begin with? What if I could vote with my dollars and my time? What if I could truly disrupt the network giants who merely transformed into the streaming giants, leading me to switch off that whole world entirely? Well, I have good news, because it seems to me like that opportunity might just be out there.

Which brings me to my guests this week, Marcus Pitman and Jason Farley from Lore TV. Lore is a new streaming network with a new model that works like I described. Not only can viewers choose the shows they want to watch, they can use their subscription money to fund the shows they want to see. So reptilian illuminatis in boardrooms aren't choosing the programming and farming it out to the DEI production teams.

Instead, talented filmmakers and ambitious creators develop their ideas, pitch them to lore, and then you, the viewer, get to decide if you want to help fund it. You're not just a passive consumer, you're an active participant in the process. One of the cool things about this play is that Lore developed their own technology in order to make it possible. And from my time in the startup world, I know how hard and expensive that is.

It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to build with off the shelf tech. But it doesn't last. Investing the time, energy, and vision to build something unique, and that does it exactly the way you want it to is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to technology, entrepreneurship. And that's what Marcus and Jason describe here in this interview.

It's cool for me to hear about because it weaves together so many different themes of my life and reminds me of my exciting days in my own version of the startup garage. Heck, it might even make me start watching tv again. Now that would be a feat.

In our conversation, we discussed how lore works versus Netflix, boomers spending attention rather than money, not outsourcing to developers in India, the origins of MTV and the Discovery Channel, how the christian film industry actually runs, the feminization of content and culture, and finally, christian culture competing in the free market. If you enjoy the renaissance of men podcast, thank you. Please leave us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

If this is your first time here, welcome. I release new episodes about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week. Just a reminder that many things about the podcast will be changing very soon. This will soon become the Will Spencer podcast. New brand new topics, new guests, same format you love. I hope you don't mind these regular reminders to make sure we all come along together. Also, just another quick reminder about the podcast.

Naturally, I'll be posting free content on the site, but the biggest benefits will go to paid subscribers who'll get a number of perks, including early access to ad, free interviews, previews of my new book, and more. The new substack is available to subscribers for for as low as $10 per month, so visit willspence stack.com and be a part of it now. And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the founders of a new streaming service that lets you truly decide what you want to watch.

Marcus Pittman and Jason Farley from Lore TV. Marcus, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Yeah, thanks for having me. We connected on Twitter, I guess it would say like a month or two ago, and I got to check out what you're doing with Lore TV.

And I just, I think it's fantastic because having come myself, having come from the secular world and being steeped in media and secular media, there's a real lack of solid christian media that we can watch and not have to be constantly fending off bad influences. So I just think it's great what you're introducing into the body right now. Yeah, it's been a fun four years.

And we launched a year ago, officially just spent three years building out the tech and building out a network of artists and relationships and stuff like that. And it's been a slow but rewarding process. And we've done a lot. We funded 55 projects so far. We just, episode three of exposed just went on all over social media yesterday, which was a series that we helped to start before we launched. So a lot of stuff has just been happening as a result.

And I think the other streamers are starting to take notice of what we're doing. So that's pretty exciting. Yeah, I bet you started four years ago is when you kind of have the idea and you've been building out the tech. Say more about that because so many companies, they just go with off the shelf kind of stuff instead of building their own tech. But real value in intellectual property is in the delivery system behind the scenes, right?

Yeah, I think, like, there's a lot of discussion early on about what we could do with the WordPress plugins, and I was completely against that. Thankfully, my CTO was against that, too. He's built a company and exited from that successfully. He actually built the company that's responsible for the buy it now button on Amazon. Oh, so like, real deal tech was part of the discussion early on.

And really the discussion was just like, you're not loving your neighbors if you use off the shelf stuff, meaning you're not loving your investors because you might get a product out quick, but you're going to have to raise money in the long run to change everything out and make it custom. So it's better. Just take your time and build the technology. You know, for us, there wasn't anything that allowed the premier of streaming once a project hit a certain funding goal.

So there wasn't anything like that at all. And there certainly wasn't any technology that used video game microtransactions and that whole economy and stuff that we had to build out and the math behind that and the dollar to loot ratio. So there was just so much that just made sense, like, let's just build it out now, because even if we found little hacks along the way, we're going to have to spend more money in the future to do that.

And so, yeah, we spent three years, I think two years ago we launched our beta, and then after the beta, we spent a year just fixing stuff up and getting all the bugs out from the beta. And then we officially launched with paid subscribers in June of last year. So a little more than a year ago now. And, yeah, it's been exciting. A lot of people say you haven't really done a lot in four years, and it's like, well, no, we've only been around one year, technically.

We've just been talking about it publicly. Most startups and technology companies, they don't talk about their stuff. It's usually stealth, and then they don't ever talk about it publicly until they launch. But we knew that that wouldn't work because we had to build out the network and we had to talk about what we were doing so people could get excited about it. We could get filmmakers attention, investors attention, that sort of stuff. So we did it differently.

But we also knew, too, that no one, whether it's a secular streaming space or the christian streaming space, had the kind of content to make that what we wanted. So we're really afraid of, we're not really afraid of that. And so it's just been a really fun experience. So the tech. So I don't watch a lot of streaming television, just myself. I've never been a big fan of Netflix when it comes to what am I going to do right now?

I think I'll read a book or something like that is usually just where my head goes. So my tv isn't even plugged in at the moment. But I was checking out the lure site, and I was navigating my way around and checking out some of the. Some of the episodes that you. Some of the series that you have available and trying to understand, looking at it, and you pointed out something very interesting that I could see that there are funding bars as they fill up.

When that finally fills up, it seems like you have a microtransactions where you get maybe, perhaps tokens. And as that fills up with the tokens, then whatever the series is goes live immediately. That's kind of the. That's kind of the model in some cases. So in most cases, I would say that's true. So the way it works is the monthly subscribe. Well, let's start with how every streaming subscription works.

Every streaming subscription, they collectively pull together the subscribers dollars, and that goes towards Netflix. For example, your $20 a month goes to executives at Netflix who dictate how that money is spent. And about 60, maybe 50% to 60% varies goes towards actually funding content for the platform. Right. So that's your inventory that you're selling. So about 50% goes to that. The problem is, you don't get a say in how your money is spent on content.

You used to at the box office, you would go and you would buy a ticket, and you would say, I want to see this movie, and this money is for this movie and the people that made this movie. But with streaming, all of that, individual financial control got just eliminated. And so the result has been basically to use streaming as a means of political power and worldview transformations, because, hey, we can make a female version of Star wars called the acolyte.

And whether people like it or not, we get to do it because that's what we want. You know, we're the elite, and we get to make those decisions. So I think, yeah, Jason wants a link, so let me. There he is. There we go. Hey, man. Hey, how's it going, Jason? Doing well. Sorry I'm late. No problem. Welcome to the. Welcome to the. Welcome. We were just talking about you. We just were just kidding.

Jason is our chief content officer for lore, and he works directly with the artists and the scripts and gives any help with production and stuff that he can. But, Jason, what we were talking about was just really how all your money goes towards the streaming networks and executives and the individuals. The individual consumers don't get to vote on what content gets made or not.

It's usually done based on what's called watch Time, which I think is not a valuable statistic, as it's made out to be, because an example of that is if you watch or you don't watch it, but if you heard about it, Velma, the Velma, HBO animated cartoon series where Velma as a lesbian. It's like an adult version of Scooby Doo without Scooby Doo. It was awful. The show was awful. It was terrible. But it got a lot of watch time because people wanted to see how bad it was.

And so they just announced the season two. And I'm sure that's based off of. They're like, no, this is way more popular than the Internet said. But no, it was only popular because people were. So watch time isn't an actual practical example of, like, how people spend their money. The other issue with watch time is that it inflates stuff that the subscriber, the paying subscriber, doesn't care about. So preschool tv shows are the most watch of any streaming network, even ours.

But we actually know that people actually don't spend money funding those preschool shows. They're just background noise that's on repeat for the kid to watch. But it's not something that's an economic benefit for the actual credit card holder that subscribes. So they don't care about it. They're spending their money funding content for adults. So I think that is a very key. So the watch time alone, which all the streamers are working off of, is not a helpful statistic.

I think it's creating a lot of problems for them right now. Like, look at all the people watching the acolyte. Well, they're watching it because they think it's absolutely horrible, and they want to see if the memes are true. That's not the kind of viewership you want of your content. They're looking at it and saying, wait, there can't really be space fire, right? And then there's really space fire on the wing. Oh, my goodness. I've seen the memes.

It makes total sense to me that they would just take everything into a space. Occult, witchcraft, divine feminine thing. That's where they're going to drive Star wars into the ditch and keep it there for as long as they can until they completely do whatever they can to subvert the mythos. But, yeah, it is that bad. Yeah, it's the antihero's journey. That's what they've, that's what they're diving into. In the Jungian Joseph Campbell, hero with a thousand faces.

They're doing the anti heroes journey. And it's sad to watch, but it makes sense because they haven't been able to figure out what makes a good movie, because what they're doing is they're trying to take watch time and then back create everything according to the watch time because that's the statistic that they do have. And they think they've got a math problem on their hands. A good example of this is.

Back. In 2019, Netflix, because of the popularity of the zombie shows of the Walking Dead, they said, ooh, zombie shows are really popular right now. And so they made four more zombie shows. And everybody was like, but I just watched these shows. I just watched this. I don't want more. But they were working off of the stat they had. Cause they think that they've got a math problem on their hands. But one of the principles of capitalism is that the only real measure of desire is the purchase.

When somebody purchases something, that's the only real measure. That's a future facing question. And so you have to have other principles besides math to do well in capitalism, you have to have an understanding of the principles of storytelling, the understanding of what kind of creature am I serving? What kind of creature is man? So all of those things, you can't turn into a math problem. And so the streaming services end up.

They just keep shooting themselves in the knees and wondering why they can't walk. Okay, so I have a bunch of questions about what you just said. The first. The first question I have is, are they not able to differentiate actual watch time from hate watching? Right. Like, can they not tell? Did they not try? They must be able. I don't think it matters to them. Okay, that was my next question because. The investors are asking questions about watch time. Oh, okay. Right.

So that is the statistic that's also used in stock market reports for their annual reporting, quarterly reporting. It's. Look how much watch time we got thanks to velma. Right. So it's completely. The mechanism of streaming is not a capitalistic system, and so it is failing. It is not creating valuable ips in the same way that cable tv did with advertising and those sort of things or the movie theaters do with ticket purchases. So it's not capable of doing that.

So it's this top down structure that basically says, well, we got the $20, so we can make whatever we want. And I think that, in the long run, is not going to be the solution, especially when you look at, like, Gen Z and Gen Alpha right now who support artists on Patreon or super chats or Twitch bits, Fortnite V bucks or Roblox creators. They're spending their money to fund individual artists they care about almost exclusively, not even going to the theaters anymore.

So there's a massive change happening that I think everybody's not prepared for. And that's going to happen in the next ten years, probably, yeah. Boomers are used to spending their attention instead of their money, and the ones spending money in that economy are the ones buying ads. And that is the boomer and the Gen X mentality, really.

It was created on the backs of boomers, though, and the new generations, they understand how valuable their attention is, but they would rather pay the artist directly. They're used to having a direct connection with an artist because they've grown up with that, so they don't want an executive in the way. This is really interesting because I was just thinking about this the other night. So years ago I was in San Francisco, this would have been 2000, 720, ten, somewhere in that realm.

There were two companies in San Francisco at the time. I don't know if one of them made it out of San Francisco, because I don't even remember its name. And Spotify was one of them. It was three, actually. Spotify, Patreon, and some third company. So Patreon's model was, you just fund a guy and it still is this way. You fund a guy to be an artist. I was in the music industry, so I cared very much about how cd sales were being cannibalized by digital.

Like, I was watching that happen in real time. In fact, I remember being an early user of Napster back in 1999. Me and my friends, we were all doing a startup and so we had access to high speed Internet. This was 99. And so we were just pulling down all of our favorite songs at the time. Cause we could limewire as well. And so that proceeded until about a decade.

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

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

Click you hard it or whatever it is, and it goes to that artist, and it bypasses both Patreon and Spotify. And I really liked that model because it meant that I could democratize my time and I could pay individually for a song. And my friends who were in tech at the time were like, no, Patreon and Spotify are going to be huge. You're so crazy. You're wrong. And I'm like, no, I don't want pay these companies.

Like, I don't mind Patreon conceptually, but, like, I like that song and I want to give someone money who made that specific song, not give it to Spotify. So maybe Spotify is a better model in this example. Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting, I was just watching the documentary, I think it's on Paramount called how music got free, and it talks about the piracy of the nineties.

And the guys in a little town in North Carolina who worked at the cd printing companies that were just taking the cds that fell on the factory floor and uploading them to the Internet before they were released, and they disrupted the entire music industry by doing that. But the point of it was they basically called these guys who were pirates and thieves for sure, but they called these guys heroes in the sense that they were just doing what Spotify and Netflix did.

They just knew how to, they just saw it coming. And if it wasn't for what they did, Steve Jobs wouldn't have been able to convince the record companies to let him do iTunes. And so it was really, you know, there's a quote, it wasn't in this documentary, but I've remembered it for a long time. It says piracy is a distribution problem. And I think that's. I think that's true. There's a meme going around where the guy kicks Napster, the music.

The RIAA kicks Napster, or they kid, they kick Napster out of the house, and then behind him is. Is Netflix and Disney. And then they kick Netflix and Disney out of the house. And then he goes back in, back to bittorrent or something like that. But, like, bittorrent keeps returning. Right? Because. Because now people have three or $400 streaming bills every month just to be able to watch everything. So now we're back to that distribution problem. And I think you're right.

It's like the ability to pay one individual a lot of your money as opposed to just paying a little bit and hoping that you get something in return. It's almost like a slot machine with Netflix every month, right? Yeah. Will there be something worth watching this month as opposed to just saying, no, I'd rather just spend $100 on this individual artist who represents my values and will make a story I can dress, which we've seen.

I mean, in October of last year, our average monthly subscriber that contributed on our platform spent $160. Oh, wow. So Netflix and Disney can't get $160 for one customer? There was a venture capitalist that posted on Twitter last week, why doesn't Netflix just let people spend $2 on that? Movies and tv shows they want to make amazing. And we were like, that's us. Hello? And I have a long story.

I went to his website to apply for his venture, and they wanted to know what gender and race identify with for inclusivity reasons. So I just backed out, and he never contacted me, even though we've already built it. So. So there is this thing where it's like, you know, there are worldviews at play here, both in the secular and the conservative faith based streaming space that you're actually competing. That's what you're actually competing with.

And of course, there's a. The, on the venture front, you know, there's the, they, especially in the conservative and christian space. Christian space, more specifically. They're very, very attracted to the red carpet and wanting that box office lottery story. They want that box office. They want to show we can compete in the theaters just like everybody else. Well, of course you can. Just because nobody's winning in the theaters. Yeah, right. Like, no, like, nobody's winning in that model.

And I'm sure, like, as theaters become a more and more rare thing. Yeah, christian films are going to have more wins, but it's not setting them up for success in the future. Like, it's, like, it's not a future play. It's just the last. That is what we do, though, because we're winning at radio right now. Yeah, we're. Yeah, right. Conservatives crush, crush it. Radio. Right.

We're always on that last end, you know, and then you go, well, why aren't christians spending billions of dollars investing in AI technology? I don't know. They think it's demon possessed. Right? Yeah, that's the initial. That's what people think. So, so there's, there, there's all this, you know, almost gnostic view of new technology and stuff that you have to overcome and also gnostic view storytelling where you go, oh, I didn't like that.

That film had a bad word in it, and it was made by christian artists, so I'll never support him ever, ever again. You know, it's like that sort of stuff where it's like, that's not, that's, you don't treat Hollywood that way. Right, right, exactly. The permissiveness with secular media that so many christians have is like, what are you listening to? What are you watching? And then someone says the wrong thing in a christian film, you throw it out. Like, that's completely backwards.

I'll never, yeah, or, you know, it's like, oh, that film was too baptist for my Presbyterianism. Or that movie used catholic imagery to show faith. You know what? You know? So it's just like all these different things. It's like we're so gnostic on that that we don't understand. We're very, very, very, very quick to just throw anything out just by watching a trailer, you know? And it's like, oh, yeah, that, that guy in that movie was gay, but he was the bad guy. Right?

Like, we don't, we don't, we don't think that rationally and have those sort of, like, in depth conversations with arts and media and stuff that, that we need to have. And that's why I think our model is so important, because it allows people to invest in content, fund it with their own money, and then watch it, and then have to go, well, what did that guy mean by this or that? And will I give him more money to try again because I didn't like it?

Or do I just think this guy's incapable of making content, but that's between the artist and the consumer and not the executives who are just forcing content upon you. So you guys provide the platform. That's how we started the conversation. You had to invent and construct the technology to build the platform in the way that you saw content being produced, in the way that you wanted to promote. That model didn't exist. The tech didn't exist.

You had to build all that first before you just built the site to deliver the content on. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Say more about that process, because from my time in the startup world, like during the.com era, 99 to 2001, I discovered we actual technology that we were working on. I discovered that there were a couple different kinds of companies that existed at the time. I was, like, 2021 years old. And so there were companies that were just, we might call them straight content plays.

They use existing technologies, they leverage existing technologies to deliver some sort of service. And those are very quick to launch and very quick to fund and often very quick to fail, sometimes spectacularly. But then there were the guys who were laboring in, quote, unquote in the basement or in the garage or whatever, actually building something of real value. Less spectacular, less interesting, much less flashy, the Steve Wozniak to the Steve jobs sort of thing.

But a lot of people were really hesitant to fund those plays for various reasons. And it sounds like that's where you guys are at. Not about, we're going to launch some sort of new network with great branding. It's like, no, we're actually going to build something unique and original. Yeah, that's very hard to convince people of that because a lot of investors aren't necessarily developers. A lot of them got their money from real estate or, or wherever they get their money from.

So you say, no, no, no. Here's what we're going to do. We're actually not going to outsource to developers in India. I've had conversations with investors that's wondering why we just don't do that. But then you hear from other startups that did do that, and it was a complete disaster. They worked at 03:00 a.m. and you didn't get back to them until they were in bed and nothing could ever get changed.

So they wound up actually spending more money in the long run working with these outsourced developers and stuff than just spending the money and hiring developers in America. And just like there are filmmakers in Hollywood that are looking for a way to get out, there's developers in Silicon Valley that are looking to get out. So you're loving your neighbor by hiring them and providing them the chance to be at the start of a new tech company.

But for the most part, when I was doing this, the one thing that I wanted to do is I was like, christians need to build and own something new. Amen. Hallelujah. We always copy stuff. We have our pure flixes, which is just, this is the christian version of, of Netflix. Like, even in the name. Right? And so we have those things.

And then, you know, when it comes to, you know, apps, you know, like apps and technology, we just have Bible apps that are the main tech of Christian owned, Christian owned companies. You know, even, you know, we can talk about the parallel economy. The problem with parallel economies is that they're parallel. They're over here. And that's fine. Initially, I think you have to have niches to build major brands, but I think that's not a long term solution.

What we need is to create christian companies that become global brands. I think an example of that, two examples of that is chick fil a doesn't make christian sandwiches. Hobby Lobby doesn't have christian arts and crafts. It's just a good craft store. It's just a good fast food chain. In and out, same thing. Right. So they don't cater to a typical audience. But because they do have that christian loyalty, they have a brand loyalty that's insanely strong.

That just doesn't come from, you can't, you can't build that. That just comes from the fact that the owners are openly open about their faith. And so one of the things that was. So this was my first time in a tech company at all, and one of the things that was amazing early on is being able to sit down and say, what are we trying to do? Is there anyone that's done that or built that?

And when the answer was no, we had the discussion, okay, so to do it right takes a lot longer than we have on ramp wise. Sure. We actually lost an early CEO because he didn't like the way we were willing to get to market slower by building it ourselves. Because there was this, we've got to get to market as quick as possible.

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

have built it ourselves, had proprietary tech. All of the stuff that we do have now, we wouldn't have had. We thought primarily about getting to market as quick as possible. And for me, that was fascinating because it was my first time ever having that discussion.

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

So being able to fix those bugs immediately, because we knew our developers lived and breathe and created that code as an art, it was their art that helps you scale. The question is, what happens if this podcast we're on right now blows up and gets millions of views and suddenly lore has hundreds of thousands of subscribers overnight? Well, we've implemented our own system, so we can scale relatively quickly. Right.

So, but if we're, if the influx of subscribers breaks, you know, a WordPress blog, you're kind of dependent on WordPress to update that. Yeah. You don't know if they are or, like, you're, you're stuck. Like, you're in a bad situation. And so doing that, and then I would also say, too, you can't build institutions and culture overnight, cultural institutions overnight. You know, if you look back on the history, me and Jason, like, we, like, we just live and breathe this.

I just started a substack on pretty much television, like, in history. But, like, but when you look at, like, you know, some, let's say, like, I'm wearing teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shirt right now. Right? So they started by selling photocopies of the hand drawn comics out of the trunk of the car in New York City. Oh, wow. You know, and we just think, oh, yeah, it was this hit tv show, but it didn't start there.

It's this long term process that gets that, you know, Marvel movies has 100 years almost of capital, cultural capital behind it that allowed for Disney to be able to do what they did. There's two or three generations of people that can watch a Marvel movie that, that doesn't happen overnight. And, you know, so those are the sort of things you look back and you go, well, you just don't build culture quickly. But, you know, same thing is true with MTV. I just wrote about this today.

But MTV, when they started, nobody knew what a music video was. There wasn't Internet. Nobody could go and watch music. Think about it. Like, what is that? The only, they had 100 music videos when they started the network on, on day one. And those hundred music videos were mainly just like, promo videos used for distributed distributors of record labels and stuff like that.

And then they were like, now we're going to build this whole thing, this whole network around this thing that doesn't exist. And as soon as they launched, they started to have bands that would just make music videos in their garage with their eight millimeter camera or whatever and then just send it in. And everyone in the offices of MTV would cheer when a new music video came in and they would play it because they didn't have anything else to play.

And so you build up all these brands, and so you think, like, the long term of an institution is, it becomes a billion dollar company that creates billion dollar companies, right? Like, so, you know, you look at, like, cartoon network, right? Cartoon network started and all they had was reruns of old cartoons. But eventually they were able to start there. And over time, they built out new cartoons. Some failed, some didn't work.

And then eventually, over time, you would get Powerpuff girls, you would get Dexter's laboratory, you'd get adult swim. And the billions of dollars that Rick and Morty is generating now, right? So you create moving making machines or cultural creating machines, and it takes a while to do, and it's not something that happens overnight. I cannot go to any investor right now and say, I want to start a nationwide fast food chain. Right? It doesn't work that way.

No. It starts with one good restaurant, and then slowly that one restaurant is franchised locally, and then over the period of ten or 20 years, it becomes a national brand, but it doesn't have. There is no quick exit on those sort of things. And I think when you look at, like, oh, yeah, I can just flip this house in 90 days and then just get a return on the flip of the house.

And that's a great investment, and in a lot of cases it is, but it doesn't work that way with a, like, you're not building culture by flipping a house. You're fixing something up and selling it and getting a quick exit. And the same is true with b two b SaaS, which a lot of conservative investors are pretty much exclusive. That's all they do. Like a b two b sash. You can build up real quickly.

You can get 100 users that are businesses that are paying $1,000 a month, and suddenly you're bringing in one hundred k a month in revenue. And then you can sell that quickly and get out. But you're not really leaving your kids a business or culture with a result of that. That's what the left has done so well, is that they have ten or 20 year plans to be able to do what they do. And look what MTV did. There's literally, they call Gen X the MTV generation. Yep, that's me.

You know, so that takes a lot of time and effort. But there's no question MTV is more valuable now than it was 40 years ago, although they just pulled the plug on the ship. So it's. Yeah, yeah. You know, now you would paramount merging all these distinct, iconic, profitable brands into one unprofitable tv channel, everybody's lost their brand identity. There's no unique. There's no uniqueness.

It's like you can watch this horrible cooking show on the same network that used to have HBO in front of it now, right? It's like, what you know what? What has happened? You've gone from curb your enthusiasm, the Sopranos, like, all these genre defying tv series, and right up next to, you know, some weird reality makeover show that nobody watches. It's just a fell space. And that, like, there is no HBO anymore. Like, it's gone, right? Like, how did that happen? They just.

They just came off a Game of Thrones, which is probably one of the most successful financial tv shows of all time, to instantly not having. I'm not talking about the morality of the show. No, no, I'm just saying. Yeah, yeah, you have to warn you, christians do not watch. Yeah, but, but so you just have this giant, massive success, and then suddenly there's no HBO anymore to fought, like, why would you do that? How does that make any sense? And so now you don't have brand loyalty to those brands.

You know, all these people who grew up watching HBO or paid for it on their cable subscription, and they were fans. When HBO announced a series, it meant a lot. And now it's like, wait, is that show on Max? Is that an HBO series? Is. Is the Conan travel show? Is that a HBO show or is that just a Mac show? Like, what's the difference between the two? You know? You know, and then you have to watch it to see that HBO fuzz. Tv fuzz and go, okay, I guess this, this. I guess this is the HBO show.

But, but there's like, there's nothing that caused you to that, you know, Jason, you mentioned recently you watched the Bear and the Muppet show on the same app, and you were like, what is going on? It said, recently watched the Muppet show because I was watching the John Denver episode, which was brilliant, and then the bear was the next thing, and I was like, literally, those shouldn't be on the same app. Those are not the same. Beavis and Butt Head wasn't produced by MTV.

It was produced by Paramount. And then MTV produced the new Oregon trail tv show. And you go, so the brands are gone because they just dole out. They dole because they are all now owned by a parent company who doles out each new show that the parent company signs to a sub, to the channel to produce. So Beavis and MTV didn't get Beavis and butthead. You think that just, that doesn't make sense from an advertising marketing brand.

But they don't think that way anymore because they're in conglomeration mode. And the economy does this. It goes through phases where the people at the top start to conglomerate everything together into large companies, and it loses brand identity. And then that makes space for niche companies to come in and serve niches within the economy and build out a brand. So this is the normal economic story, the economic fluctuations.

But I think christians often, we don't pay attention to the way God built the world. And so we're not prepped and ready. I mean, we don't study economics, for example. We don't study brand marketing. We don't study some of the really important aspects of business because we think in terms of cash, not in terms of wealth, as christian men, way too often. So we don't build out.

We don't build ourselves out well, in terms of making sure that we're learning our industry, learning the way the world works, and then we don't think in terms of building out generational wealth. And so we get surpassed. I mean, there are guys doing it. Master P, he became a Christian, and then he was in Forbes magazine recently talking about the biblical concept of generational wealth. And I was like, Master P, the rapper. The rapper? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Serious. So really?

So God is saying, like, somebody, my people are going to learn this. And so I'm going to send the master p. So no limit records. No way. No way. Totally. So it's not. So God is doing. God isn't going to let his people lose this knowledge. Okay. Okay. I'm going to. I'm going to put this. I'm going to put this on the screen. Screen share because you guys got to see this masterpiece and Romeo now making. I don't know who Romeo is, but I. Can you see that?

Master P and Romeo now making christian content. I want my career to be about God. January 31, 2020. Okay, Percy Robert Miller. Master P. Percy Robert Miller and his son, Romeo Miller, where they told the Christian Post they veered away from their past hip hop messages to create content that reflects their christian faith. But look, he's doing it with his son, right? This is exactly what we need to be doing.

We need multi generational understanding of wealth building, multi generational understanding of business. I've actually. This is. I've had this conversation a bunch of times with people that are complaining about LeBron's son coming into the NBA, and I'm like, what? That's a huge blessing. What are you talking about? He raised his son, right? Yeah, it's fantastic. So, yeah, so, yeah, I'm excited about what. What God's been doing through masterpiece.

And what's really funny is hearing Snoop Dogg talk about what Master P has been teaching him about biblical generational wealth. Snoop Dogg's not a Christian. The Snoop Dogg is like, you know, Master T. Master P is over here teaching me how to be an adult. He's like, because I've got kids, he's teaching me how to build up wealth for my kids. Okay, I got another one to. Go ahead. I got another one to share with you guys while you guys are. Keep going. No. Here's on eew magazine.

I don't know what that is, but masterpiece says, quote, I put my faith and trust in God as he grieves the loss of his daughter. Wow. He says in new Instagram post, the hip hop mogul, 52, thanked everyone for their love, prayers, and support and declared that despite the pain, quote, I put my faith and trust in God. According to Master P, Taytayana has been battling, quote, mental illness and substance abuse since 2015, what he calls, quote, a long and painful journey for our family.

Yet he said, quote, we hope to turn this tragedy into a testimony. Wow, this is wild. Praise God. This feels authentic, too, because there are a lot of influencers right now who are saying christian things, and I have some questions about their sincerity. But this feels genuine compared to those, at least. Yeah. And it was before it was hip. Before it became cool. Yeah, yeah. 2020. That's before it was hip. That's true. That's a good point.

Yeah. So, yeah, but I think, you know, you see it with hip hop, right? Like, hip hop, you know, started early on. It was done, you know, in New York and the west coast, and. And they were mixed. They were using records to make music and scratching and, like, you know, it just came from nothing. And then now it's, it's created billionaires. But that didn't happen. It didn't happen overnight. And so, like, you can't write a check and guarantee a cultural institution.

Like, look at the sound of freedom. Sound of freedom did crazy good numbers last year in the box office. Nobody cares about it now anymore. Right, right. Like, it's forgotten about. Um, you know, they're doing another movie called the Sound of Hope, which is, they're trying to just capitalize off the, the first one. But, like, it's not building in, like, because. Because they're movies that are based off of past events, that, that's not new ip. So you, like, that's all conservatives really do.

Like, all our movies are true stories. If they're, that's our way of, if we're really going to break the mold on christian entertainment, we're just going to retell a true story. But we don't think, hey, let's just create new ip. Let's just do that. And in order to do that, you have to have systems that allow for repeatable and scalable creation of content. So Saturday Night Live is a great example of this. I'm a big fan of what Lorne Michaels has created there.

For the past 50 years, he's gotten improv comics out of Smokey comedy clubs, and he's put them on tv live where the network can't edit it. Right. Like, it's live. It's, you know, they send notes beforehand and stuff, of course, but they fail live. If they do a bad sketch, it's live. They have to recover from that. They have to read the comments about that. And that has created everything from everything in comedy.

Adam Sandler, will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, was it? Right. Conan O'Brien. David. Mike Miles, David Spade. David Spade, Norm McDonald, Dennis Miller. In fact, I have a podcast coming out this week with Wade Stotts where we spend a significant amount of time talking about how an influential weekend update was on him. Like, you know, and which makes sense for where the Wade show is at right now.

Like, yeah, that's, people don't understand what a cultural, look, I'm not happy with the direction that Saturday Night Live has gone in. It's gone super woke and ultra lib, and they managed to get five minutes of real comedy into 90, into a 90 minutes program now. And it's been that way for a while. However, it's launched countless careers. Like Will Ferrell is a household name almost around the world, and he came out of Saturday Night Live.

In fact, the Cowbell sketch might be the greatest, might be the greatest Saturday Night Live sketch of all time. It's up there for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. But I think Saturday Night Live has phases, and I think they are getting a lot of political pressure from the network now to be funny. They've always attacked comedians. I mean, presidents, they've always not attacked them, but they've always made fun of every president.

Yeah. Yes. And so, you know, I think every generation goes, hey, they're making fun of our president. Right. But at the time. But they've always done that. Trump is very easy to make fun of. I think if you look at, I think Baldwin's Trump was mean, but it was also a very good impression. I think it was too spot on, which is why it wasn't funny, because there wasn't no caricature. It was just mean. When you compare that to who's the announcer now?

But he was like, he was the impersonator for like 20 years and now he's in. He's the guy that did Bill Clinton. So his Trump is really funny. So I think we can make a case about Baldwin. But the George W. Bush impersonation was spot on. The Reagan impersonation, the Clinton impersonation. Right. We didn't like Clinton, so that's okay. To make fun of Dana Carter, Bush senior. Yeah, brilliant. But the point is, they have these rebuilding times throughout Saturday night's history.

They always have these rebuilding times. And out of those rebuilding times are the talent that makes it through. And then you look back and go, this is the greatest SNL sketch of all time. Every generation thinks their generation is the greatest SNL generation. What? Cause really it's Matt Foley, motivational speaker. I think that's pretty good. Van down by the river. Yeah. I grew up with Fallon and Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and Ferrell. Right?

So we all have those guys we look back on and say, oh, that was my favorite. But it's been around for 50 years. You can't do that with something that's been on for one season. And most importantly, going back to the scalable and repeatable, it doesn't cost them any more money to do one sketch over another sketch on Saturday night. It's all part of that same budget. So they can just throw out bad stuff one after the other. And eventually you're going to get a Wayne's world, right.

And then that's going to become a movie. Right. And then, right. So they've created the system of just generating, putting comedians through like the most terrifying thing I could possibly imagine, just performing live in front of millions of people. And then from that, it sharpens them and strengthens them and I think makes them better. I personally believe it's my conspiracy theory. I can, I personally believe Lorne Michaels allows bad sketches to go on the air as a way to train the cast.

So I think he, I think Lauren knows that one's not a good one, but I think the cast needs to bomb over and over and over again in order to give. Every comedian does every comedian has to go out there and fail? They do it in comedy clubs. You know, they, but they do it on Saturday Night Live, too. And so I think, I think, you know, I think that's a big part of it.

But, yeah, but I think even, even announce a Saturday, Saturday Live, I think we're starting to see with with Michael Che and what's his name, the white. Guy that's married to the black Widow Johansson. Like, they're weak. He's Scarlett Johansson husband. Their weekend update where they swap jokes and the white guy has to do black jokes and they're insanely racist and they found a way to kind of make fun of the woke nonsense by, like, it's really brilliant.

And so it's, that's starting to create a name for them. And I think we'll look back and go, man, those two guys on Saturday Night Live were the bet what were some of the best on weekend update. But it, but they weren't always that way. They started out, they were pretty, not dry. Good. Yeah. And so, but now they've, they've kind of, so it just takes, but this was saying, like, it takes time. Yeah. And so you have to have these institutions that let artists fail.

And when you're spending $100 million on a tv series, you can't have a failure. No. And so that's why lore is so important, is because an artist can pitch an idea, get it funded at a micro budget or lower budget level, make it, and then they can either do really well or it can do really terribly, but they have an opportunity to build out that name and ip for themselves that you can't do on any other streaming platform now. So basically, we see ourselves as this underground art house.

That's okay. That's great, because that's what I wanted to ask. By the way, when we started this conversation, I would not have thought we'd end up talking about Saturday Night Live and masterpiece, becoming a Christian. All this stuff you guys are putting together, it's so great to talk about this stuff because I grew up with MTV. I was a kid when MTV first started. I remember the first MTV Video music awards. I remember MTV News, Kurt Loder and all that. Yeah, right, exactly.

And then being on the ground and being on the ground for the launch of Napster and all that stuff and the shift of the music industry and being in the tech world. And also, you guys remind me of the guys that I work with in the music industry who are passionate engineers about actually creating the product.

It's not like we're the performers up on stage, the men behind the scenes that really drive things from a tech aspect, whether it be the guys coding pro tools or the guys behind the mixing desk. They're the real heart of the industry. And so this is really fantastic for helping me put together a lot of pieces.

So let's bring it back to lore as well and say, like, so now with all this stuff on the table, how does it come together from a christian perspective or from the perspective of those who actually use lore? Like, I'm an artist or I'm an audience member? Like, what am I interacting with? How do all the pieces fit together to produce the product? Well, you talk about audience, you talk about the artist, Jason. I'll talk about the audience.

So we find the artists that we can say, love God and make what you want. We know that we can give them the freedom and they're not going to try and sneak nudity into the background or something. They're actually trying to serve God with their art.

So we find those artists and then help them put together the best pitch because sometimes they'll come with two or three ideas, and so I'll help them sort through the idea to find the one that is going to serve the audience that we've got gathered best. And then we help them put together a pitch for the audience that says, here's what the show is. So about half the time it's something that's already been made.

You know, they've made a pilot or they've made, they've made an episode and about half the time they haven't. Although we've only ever funded one of those so far because we've only been doing it for a year. And then we try and help them introduce themselves to the audience because often that side is a different skill set than the making of the art itself, is the marketing yourself, marketing your project.

So we help them put together marketing materials and that sort of thing, and then they pitch it to our audience. And Marcus can talk about that side, what the audience does. Yeah. So the audience has two ways of spending their monthly subscription or funding content. The first is with every monthly subscription, you get what we call loot. And loot is basically video game microtransactions, I think like fortnite v bucks or something like that. Chuck E. Cheese tokens is a good example.

Your monthly subscription converts to 1200 loot a week. And then every Tuesday morning you get an email that says you have new loot to spend and you can fund that on content. And so that's really helpful in that sense, that you can fund content that way. But they also have the ability to say, man, I really like that project and I want to give $100 to it. You can buy what we call gold loot. The gold loot doesn't expire.

You can keep that for whatever project you want in the future or spend it all in one go. But your regular weekly loot expires every week. So if you don't use it, uh, it goes back to the platform, and we use that to help market and promote other, other content. So. So that way, we're not kind of just, like, stuck with this massive bank account of people who died and somehow their credit card is still gone. Right? Like, so that's not the worst thing. We can't.

We can't spend it like, it can't be used. So. So we have the expiration on the regular loot, and then you can buy the gold loot. That. That stays forever. But basically, yeah. Our main idea is we want to be a niche brand. We don't want to just be this broad sort of Netflix or broadcast network that really, we're focused on what's content that's going to appeal to Gen Z, what's content that's going to appeal to young Mendez. There's no con. There's no christian content for men. Nope. Anymore.

It's all. It was all made. All of christian entertainment was built around the distribution available through lifeway christian bookstores. So you had Caleb selling music to women at life, that shop at lifeway, and then you had the christian film industry selling dvd's to the women who shop at lifeway. And so we really turned christian entertainment into a hallmark sort of vibe from music to movies to books, all that sort of stuff.

And there's never been a masculine need or a masculine motivation to create content. And so that's really where our core focus is, because nobody's doing that, and nobody has the guts to really do that in the way that it would need to be done. And so that's been really where our focus is. But, yeah, the main goal was just the more people that subscribe to the platform and think of this in the long term play.

So we come in, our first subscribers, when they subscribe, there was no new content on the platform. I bet, like, none. And people are like, this is impossible. Investors are like, no way this will work. You got to have 10,000 hours, I think was the minimum data point. What we kept hearing. Yeah. That people said, you have to have 10,000 hours of content. Again, they're measuring watch time. So that was their metric.

And we started with, I think, two tv documentaries series that we funded during our beta that were still there. And so, yeah, so we, we, so we did that, and now we're up to 55 pieces of content on the platform. Wow. And maybe, maybe more. Now but, yeah, but if MTV would. Have said, there's less than 400 minutes of music videos that exist in the world, well, we'll start with something else. You wouldn't have gotten MTV. And. That's right.

They had to just say, well, we're going to put those on loop. Or Discovery Channel, they didn't have enough content because they were trying to be just documentaries. And so they used to break into the russian satellite television and to have somebody that translated it live through it while it played because they didn't have enough time to fill the space. So they ended up getting in trouble because they were told, you can't actually just break into international satellites.

But they did it long enough that they finally got around to where they had enough content. So. And Johnny Carson made jokes about the russian television on Discovery Channel, and that's how Discovery Channel blew up. So, so, like, even then, it, like, it didn't have, these networks didn't just gain a following. You know, MTV took years before it got its first advertisers years. Okay. And so, so, you know, we look at it as like, oh, yeah, this was overnight success, but none of them were.

And so one other way they can. Find that can be funded, too, is what we, we have what's called blitz mode, where a company can sponsor a show and double, double people's loot or triple people's value of people's loot and have their, their name attached to the show. So, you know, they're blitz moding, breaking laws. And so everybody that spends a dollar's worth of loot, it comes in as $2, and that company makes up the difference.

So blitz mode is the other thing that we've got now that we just implemented as a way for companies to be able to sponsor a show that they want to see made. Yeah. And so that's a great system, too, because it, we're kind of hesitant on advertising on our platform because we don't want the advertisers to become who we bow down to in terms of the content that gets put on the platform. Right.

So you see, like, you know, you see, like, Netflix and Disney, they're all doing advertising models now, but that really means they're just bowing down to big pharma because they're the ones that spend, like, 75% of all advertising revenue. Yikes. In the country. Yikes. So wait, wait. You said big Pharma spend 75% of the advertising revenue in the country for television media. Advertising is big pharma. Yeah. So I remember there was a law. It was.

I think it was during the Clinton era that they legalized advertising, like television advertising for pharmaceuticals. I remember when that was passed, like the supreme Court. And now suddenly, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, for many other reasons as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so that's, that's why, you know, so, so now, you know, what if we wanted to do a documentary that was, you know, anti vaccine or something, or an artist did.

Not us, but the artist wanted to do a documentary that was anti vaccine, and then suddenly we get a call from Pfizer that's like, we're gonna pull a million dollars in funding from you. Yeah. Suddenly we're not, it's not the artists, it's not the consumers that are deciding what content they want anymore. So we didn't want to do that. So instead, we just allow the advertiser to pick the show they want to fund.

Or, I think more, even better, they can just Blitz mode the entire platform, and then the artists are still free to, the consumers are still free to fund the content they want. And, you know, the advertiser can just say, why I blitz mode the entire platform. I didn't know that show was, you know, I didn't specifically fund that show. So, so there's, we're trying to think of ways in which the artists and consumers still work together in that. In that. But that's really been successful.

We got our first advertiser with that, and then also any project that gets funded through Blitz Mode during that time, at the beginning of every episode, it'll do a five second little blitz by this company and then, and then go on to the show. So, so it's really valuable for the company, I think. And then we're also working with artists to make sure that if there's any product placements or stuff in their projects.

And then we're also working with artists to get their content or pilot if they fund the pilot on our show, we're having conversations with other streamers to basically help the artists sell the rights to other streamers to get the whole season funded through the typical normal channels. Because we have the data that shows that people want to see it. Right? Nobody has that. We have that because people spent their money on our platform to fund the pilot.

So we know that that pilot has an audience that wants to see it, even if it's on a smaller scale now, it's still a pretty good focus group size. Bigger than the normal focus group size, for sure. So, yeah, lots of value in our platform for the broader streaming landscape especially within the christian conservative space.

So, yeah, but again, all that data, all the watch time, the funding metrics, the analytics, all those sort of things was part of what we were able to incorporate in the backend because we took our time to build it out. Yes, that's what I was thinking, is that you didn't just go with off the shelf tech, you built your own stuff. You know how it works, you know how to add something to it which is way more flexible.

Now that you can have an idea for how to modify your platform and you have access to the code, it's all just right there and you can update it and test it, as opposed to having to go to some other third party to try and work with the tools that they provided and find didn't work. In fact, I had the guys from Dominion dating on two, three months ago, something like that. They have built a dating platform for reformed christian singles.

And so their first version of the site was based on WordPress. And they found that WordPress did not work great for a dating site. I think they might have talked to me and I tried to talk them out of that. WordPress. Yeah, yeah. And all kinds of problems. And so they rebuilt it from the ground up, which is a really cool story. And now it works way better.

It does a whole bunch more, but they learned the hard way the lesson that you guys had an intuitive sense of like, no, we have to build this ourselves first. Now, naturally, building a dating site, it would seem that the demands are far lower than building a streaming site. If you're going to build a streaming site, obviously that has a much higher tech overhead with delivery of the content, high bandwidths and stuff, versus a dating site.

And if you want to build something that really shifts culture, you have to own it. You can't just be taking someone else's. Stuff and repurposing it, they'll just cancel you. Right. And then what do you do? What do you do then? Like, right, so every, everything has to be implemented. I wouldn't say that every key, every part of our website is custom. We still use Vimeo for CDN and stuff like that. But we've created the website so we can just swap it out to whatever we want. Right.

Or eventually build out our own, which is the goal of. But the other thing too, that's important is the flexibility and that what we've built isn't exclusive to one platform. So we can take the website, we've built the core site, and then part of our current round of investment that we're doing now is to build out the Roku and the Google TV apps and the mobile apps and stuff. But it's all because we have the core built. It's not as complex of a system.

We're not having to redo everything so we can make an Android version or an iPhone version. It's all coming from the main system, the main stack. So that's really what is valuable too, because you never know what new platforms or stuff that is going to come up. You're going to have to make an app for in the future, and you want to be able to get it out there before WordPress updates and let you do it. So that's really important as well. Have you had trouble or not finding developers?

Because I fully agree with not outsourcing to India. I use upwork and fiverr quite a bit for one off design projects and I'm very selective with the people that I work with and stuff like that precisely for that reason. To be able to have a bit more control to make sure that this person's here. Time zone is a huge part of it as well. Have you found with what you're doing, it's very technology intensive? Do you find?

I would imagine people are fleeing not just Silicon Valley as a place to live, but as a mindset and a place to work and are looking for christian companies to belong to. We had a backlog of developers who are just waiting to hire full time, so we don't have a problem at all with that. Everybody's looking to get out of wherever they are at this point. But again, it's not loving your neighbor to pay them less than what anybody else would just because they're Christian.

So that is, you know, important to us that, you know, we don't. We don't think our filmmakers should be paid less money because they're christian filmmakers, and that's not how you build. And you don't build a true escape from Hollywood unless you're able to match their prices. And so same thing with the filmmakers, same thing with the developers is we want to pay them what they're worth and the value that they bring to.

And I can tell you right now that the developers that we have right now are worth a ton. They're geniuses. Our CTO is worth every penny. Just everybody is just so brilliant. And the way they speak their language of code and their intelligence and the way they've just created this technology out of their brain over the past four years has been just incredible to watch. In the same way that watching an artist start with a script and deliver a product.

So, yeah, there is absolutely no problem finding the developer talent. And the hardest, most difficult part has just been finding investment in capital. That's been the roadblock. It's not on the subscriber side. It's not on whether, like, every data point subscribers have asked us to hit, we've hit, investors have asked us to hit. We've proven that it works, and now it's just about getting capital to really scale and throw gasoline on it.

But when there's this flash, flashy idea of Amazon just spent $100 million on the Wonder project, and then Daily Wire just got $100 million for their bent, key thing, and we're saying, no, we're only raising 2 million because we don't have to buy content. I think people go, yeah, well, the rewards of that hundred million dollars is going to be better, which is not turning out that way on any front. Like, you know, Daily Wire hasn't created any iconic brands.

Every show they have has Ben Shapiro in it as whether it's a cartoon character or some side character, you know, they haven't been able to take that money and use it well. And so again, like we said, like writing the check, the big check doesn't guarantee the big payoff, especially in entertainment. There's no guarantee of that at all. So convincing investors has just been a real challenge. It's like, no, what we're doing.

And we, we think in terms, you know, you talk about business, you talk about finding your niche, but when you talk about entertainment, people just think there is no niche anymore. It's just massive box office success, massive Netflix success that reaches wide and broad. But that's just not how it works. It's not how it works. You know, people forget that Netflix started with niche.

They started by just having mail in DVD's in certain cities, and they slowly grew after time and, and they catered to a very film loving, core film loving base where you could review the movies and the algorithm would serve you more content based on the content you loved. And now it's just like everything is, has to be for everybody, and that just doesn't work that way. So I think convincing investors, hey, this isn't a real estate play. This isn't a quick exit B two B SaaS.

This is a goal of being one of the largest private media brands in the world. And that's just going to take time to get there. And the goal is that you're going to invest in something that you can pass down to your great grandchildren in the same way Disney did. Right. And so that's a harder investment play, especially in a turbulent economy where everybody just wants to get their exit really quick and cash out before the banks collapse. Right. But it is like, that is what you have to do.

You have to invest in that long term media play. Jason, do you want to talk a little bit about the kind of filmmakers, like, I'm guessing get a lot of people exiting Hollywood? Like, please help us get out of here. Yeah. We focus on, on two spots. One, the people that are trying to get out of Hollywood because so they've already got the experience. They've made.

They've made some things, and now they're, they're looking for a way to stay connected consistently to the audience that they're building. So that filmmaker is one that's a good fit for us. The other one is the new, young, up and coming filmmaker. So we've been trying to connect with the homeschool filmmaker that started making movies in their backyard at ten years old. And so they've got their 10,000 hours of expertise by the time they're 18.

And Hollywood doesn't know how to take them seriously, but they also don't want to go to Hollywood and get diddled. We're there. Yeah, exactly right. So those homeschool filmmakers that are building up their expertise as storytellers, that are looking for a community of storytellers that care about the craft, that they can join and be a part of and start their career at the, at the beginning.

So we had a great young filmmaker that homeschooled, and he had been, he was working on his second feature. He was 17 years old, and he contacted us, and it turned out one of our current filmmakers lived just a couple of miles from him, so they connected. And now he's been being discipled in the film industry by an expert, a guy that has been doing it since the early nineties. And now he's out of Hollywood. He's a Christian.

And now we've got a young guy that is getting discipled by really one of the great christian filmmakers right now. And those sorts of connections, I think, are really valuable because you have to build a long term army of filmmakers that don't care about the red carpet, that don't care at all about the red carpet. They want to serve the Lord, and they want to serve their audience and make great stuff, love the art itself as a means of serving God and serving an audience.

And that isn't because of the way the Christian, the, quote, unquote faith based market has been built. It doesn't attract that kind of person right now. And so there's a lot of young christian filmmakers that are really talented but have no place in the faith based market because they don't want to make. They don't want to add horse and a little girl with cancer to their story. They don't want a story about puppies, so there's no place for them.

And so we're trying to really hoe that field so that they can come in and plant and harvest. Yeah, we were at a christian film festival, and there's this young guy, really talented filmmaker, made a movie with no budget, like, while he was in high school. But it was about drugs, right. And selling drugs and the consequences of that. And it didn't win or get nominated for any of the film festival awards.

And, you know, you had one of these filmmakers go up as a keynote speaker, and he says, we have a seat at the table now. And I remember that that kid came up to me, and he goes, they keep talking about having a seat at the table in Hollywood, but I don't have a seat at the table here because he doesn't make feminine content. And that, that really stuck with me as a problem. Like, you know, like when Jason mentions, you know what? The movie doesn't have a horse or a dog. That's not a joke.

They literally require that. We heard a story of one christian filmmaker who turned his script in, and they said, it needs a dog in it. So he put a dog in the beginning of the script and had it ran over by a car in the first five minutes, just. Just so he could get the deal like. And that works, huh? It worked well, the quality of the. Story, they could put a dog on the COVID That's what they needed. They, like, we need to be able to put a dog on the COVID Really? I was wondering about that.

Okay. Yeah. So. So the joke is, if you go to a christian film festival, they'll ask you where your horse, your little girl, or your dog is in your movie. Oh, that's christian films. Okay. Because that. Because what they do is, you know, there's not. The christian film industry is not run at the executive level by storytellers. They're run by mathematicians and data scientists. So what they look at is. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I was.

I worked advertising for pure flicks, and I was told, we're not an art company. We're a math company. And so what they do is they realize that their audience, this is their audience, which is 55 year old women. This is what they want in their movies. And, you know, this is what Hallmark and Lifetime does. And so we're going to copy that. And we know that if we put a dog on the movie cover, it gets more plays. Our dog movies are really popular. Our horse movies are really popular.

So that's sort of, that's how they do it. And they realized that they don't have to pay a lot of money for those movies because it doesn't really matter the quality, because the majority of the people that are subscribing to these christian streaming platforms are doing so more out of charity and donating than they are, like, whether or not the quality is good. So they found out that there's a lot of churches that made movies with their youth groups or with their just on the side.

And they found out they could just pay these churches $300 a year to license the movies and fill up their library pretty quickly. So that's the system we started by saying, you know, christian movies shouldn't suck. And we were never talking about the artists being bad artists. All artists are going to fail, and they're going to make movies that suck. That's fine, but they have to have the freedom to do that on their own.

They shouldn't do that because the executives have decided that these are the things that need to be in the movie and that's going to make a terrible movie. And then they have monumental amounts of executive notes and final edits on the end, and then by the time they deliver their film, it's not the film they started with that. That is why christian movies shouldn't suck.

But if you're talking about whether or not an independent artist is going to make a movie, and it just was bad, but that was the movie they made, and they wanted, go do something better, man. But you should have the freedom to do that. You should have the freedom to fail. And so that's really, you have to ask yourself, why is it that if christian movies have made all this money, pure Flix got bought by Sony, they have money. It's not a lack of money at any stage.

The movies that have done well in the christian movies theaters have done really well. They're low budget, high return movies. So it's not a lack of money, it's a lack of risk and a lack of courage to really push out of the boundaries that you've done. And I think a lot of it also is there's not incubation systems to find new artists.

All the movies are done by the same people, whether it's, I should say all the movies are done by the same brothers, whether it's the Harmon brothers, the Irwin brothers, or the Kendrick brothers. Right? So it's like, so it is an incestuous kind of industry where people who know each other are the ones that get the gigs, but there's no new platforming of new artists. You know, you never see on a movie, christian movie introducing, right?

Like, you know, first time director, you know, we don't ever see that. Hollywood does it all the time, but we don't ever see that. It's always the same writers, same directors. They know how to make money in return with what they're doing, and they keep doing that same thing. And that's gonna work until the people in the retirement homes that watch them die, and then it's not gonna work anymore because Gen Z is not watching Pureflix movies.

No, like, they're not doing, like, they're not doing it. They are making TikToks making fun of them, though. And that should give us pause and concern because there's really massive TikTok channels that, of people that only make fun of christian movies. And that's really sad. And that's not a good look for us at all. Like, we're the ones that pioneered art during the reformation, and we built architecture and buildings that took 400 years to build.

And now we're doing puppy movies about a dog during Christmas. Like, like, what's going on that is on purpose and it's continual. And, and I think a lot of it too is funded with a goal to sort of keep christians at bay. You know, that that's what happened. That did happen with country music. So country music and christian music were one in the same.

And then, you know, there was this concern about, well, how our country music art is going to talk about beer and bars and trucks and stuff if the christian music is in the same. So what they did was they put a lot of money and they moved the christian music industry 30 miles outside of Nashville to Franklin, Tennessee. And that's where, you know, that's where daily wire rooted out. Like, you know, TBN's headquartered there. Everybody's moved. That's christian entertainment capital of the world.

But it was started as a means to kind of isolate christians into their. So they could control, hey, this is what a country music song sounds like, and this is what a christian music song sounds like. This is what modern praise is. And then they separated those 230 miles apart. And that's absolutely true. And it's foolish to think that that's not being done with the christian film industry as well.

And so that should give us a lot of pause and a reason to really invest in something that doesn't have those loyalties and connections. That's fascinating, because I think back to what country music used to be with Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie was. He was a socialist, but not in the way that we understand socialism today. You know what I mean? Like, George Orwell was a socialist as well, but he was genuinely interested in the working class, not world domination.

So there's a principled form of socialism in the early 20th century. But I look, I listen to, like, Woody GUthrie's lyrics, which is so much about the people. It's like folk music celebrating the values of simple, humble folk people in their own wisdom. And then you look at country music today, and it is beer and trucks and stuff like that. It's like, when did country music lose its soul? When did it lose the soul of the people that it was designed to appeal to or whose songs it was?

Songs it were. Songs it was. When did it lose that? And I can understand when christian music and country music were torn apart. When christian values are put over here and country music is put over here, you get them both lacking that, we might say, populist kind of appeal. And the faith that it's rooted in. And now that you pointed out, now I can see it in christian and christian media overall, when was the heart ripped out of it? And just put over here on the side.

Okay. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. We've gone from Ben Hur to the horse movies. Right? Like, how did that happen? And so, and the same thing I say, the same thing is true with christian country music or early christian music was amazing. Right? Especially. I mean, even if you look at, like, hymns, like hymns of the day, like, you know, the classic hymns and stuff. And we've gone from that to Caleb constant reprises. And so, so there's. There has been this separation.

I would say a lot of that is feminism and the appeal to women. I think it probably made a lot of that. You know, my pastor, Doug Wilson, talks about how, you know, you sing the psalms, because the psalms is a masculine form of worship. Amen. The enemies are real enemies. They're. They can destroy your nation, they can destroy your family. They can kill you. Right? And then you compare that with modern worship music.

And the enemy is all inward, emotional, or damage to relationships, which is most of the movies. You know, if you look at, like, even the movies made for men or made to whether. So if you look like fireproof and courageous are two movies about men that did really well, but they were made for women to take their men to the theater to fix them. Right. So, so the, so there isn't any real enemies in those movies.

For the most part, the real enemy is just themselves and, or the damaged relationship of the family, which are, which is bad. But that, that's as far as you go in those films. Compare that to a braveheart. Right. Women are being raped. The country is at stake, and you're probably going to die. Mm hmm. Right. So, so like, that, though, that's a, that's a psalms. Right. And then, you know. Right. And then you compare, you know, the puppy movie. That's the Caleb music. Right.

And so, so there, there's a massive problem. And it's, I mean, it's gonna take courage. Like, you know, like, I think me and Jason talk about all the time is like, we have to make sure that our artists aren't lured by the red carpet. You know, like, they can't, like, they, that can't be their goal. We need the artists who are more like, you know, Matt Parker and Trey Stone, who, when they got their Oscar nomination, went to the red carpet high on LSD. Right. They didn't care. They didn't care.

I'm not saying, I'm not saying the christian artists need to be that way, but what I'm saying is I think there is a reason why South park is still influential. Yeah. Because they're not afraid of offending anybody. They don't care about. Like, they're not afraid. They're, they're not like, man, we're not going to get invited to that party if we do this episode on, on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Right. You know, they're not worried about that. And I think into the ditty party. Yeah, yeah.

I need to get in that diddy. So good. So I think, I think there's a lot of value there. I think there's a, you know, in terms of, like, looking at, like, what has made them successful over the past 30 years. You know, it's cartoon built on construction paper. Right. Like, you know, and so, you know, and that built a billion dollar brand. They just sold for a billion dollars. Right. So I think, you know, you look at those things and what Comedy Central gave South park was unparalleled freedom.

They could do what they want. That's what built it. And so I think us in the christian film industry, we have to give artists freedom. We have to just say, here's the way to build an audience for yourself by failing over and over and over again until something hits. And you have to reduce risk on the technology and platform side and the financial side.

And. But that's over the long term, 20 or 30 years from now, I think that you're going to see people, major filmmakers and artists who made something on lore, and people are going to go, man, they got their start on lore. That's amazing. I think that's what you're going to see. You see that right now, like with Tim Engle, a barely biblical, which is an animated show where teddy bears reenact the most violent Old Testament Bible story. He just finished episode two, which is about ehud.

It's called left ahead. Right. So, you know, that shows funding right now. You know, it's, it's, it's. He's doing it for 21,000 an episode. That's nothing. Nothing compared to Hollywood union prices. It's unheard of. And the show is amazing and it's funny. And I don't think I've had heard, and the only negative comments I heard was people complaining about references to circumcision. And we're like, you do know this is an Old Testament story, right?

Like, that is pretty, pretty big in the Bible, right? Like, all the gentile bears have a full tag and all of the jewish bears have a clipped tag. It's really funny. No way. Yeah, but it's also, but it's also, we're not making content for people that are offended by that. Yes. We're making content for people that see the value in that and have not had content made for them. And so that's a challenge because you're building out a new audience. And it's hard, but it's relatively easy.

I think when you solve those problems, the problems get less and less over time. Go ahead. Oh, no. So the question that I wanted to ask is the confrontation that I feel brewing around these two ways of doing Christianity. So, for example, just this morning, I was listening to a brand new interview from Tom Founders Ministries. He was interviewing a woman named Carrie Gress, who wrote a book called the End of Women that just came.

It came out about a year ago, but it apparently didn't really catch fire. Tom Ascoll got a hold of it, read it, and had her on. And the interview literally came out this morning. I was listening to it as I was getting ready for this interview. And so in this interview, Tom Ascoll says, this is public. This is on YouTube.

He's like, I guess I'm a recovering feminist, because he says those exact words, because he recognized in this book, which is about how even first wave feminism was a cult and origins. A lot of people have been talking about this. I've had Rachel Wilson on my podcast. She wrote a book literally called Occult Feminism, and that episode now has, like, 40,000 views. Like, it's blowing up. It's fun to watch. People are investigating the occult origins of first wave feminism.

Now, Carrie Grass has done it with her book the end of women. And so Tom Ascoll is reading this book, and he's like, I just thought that first wave feminism was good. I never questioned any of that. And now he can actually see that feminism top to bottom. There never was a good version of feminism. So this is kind of emerging, and, like. And I hold Tom Ascoll in great esteem. Many men hold Tom Askell in great esteem. So this isn't about Tom per se. And he took accountability for it.

Says, I didn't even question these things. And so now we're talking about producing masculine christian content for a massively feminized Christendom, where I think feminism has been quite content to hide for a very long time. And now this is going to come up in a really big way. I don't. I don't know how all that shakes out. I mean, you guys are. You're in Moscow. So Doug Wilson's like, yeah, I've been fighting that battle since. Since before you were born, kids. So speak into that.

Yeah, well, I don't think you can fight feminism without stories. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, we can sit there. We can go, oh, man. I mean, look, if all of our content is feminine, feminized, all of our worship music is feminized, all the entertainment that we're consuming on a christian scale, feminized. That boils down to the church, right? Because people are watching entertainment six days a week, and they're going to church once on Sunday. That's right.

So if the entertainment they get is listening to Caleb over and over and over again, that's going to boil down to the church. But what we don't have is we don't. We're not getting it from the secular side, where we have female archetype heroes, you know, and Star. You know, they're saying that Star wars is a women's story, too. No, it's not. No, not. It's literally kill the dragon, get the girl. That was literally the premise of pure.

Patriarchy, like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, fatherhood patriarch. That's. Yeah. Empire strikes back as the central pillar that's holding up that entire thing right now. And that. And that's why. And that's why the Mandalorian was so popular too, because it was father son adoption, covenant sin and repentance, baptism. All those narratives are in that. Right? So. But it was all masculine.

Then third season, they did this whole arc with Starbuck about this female and just completely forgot about the kid and, you know, the child and Mandalorian, what happened? No way. Right. You know, because they had to recover from losing Gina Carano. Right. So they had to spend a whole season to kind of bring this woman back into the picture, and nobody cared about it.

So. So when all of our stories are female action heroes and daily wire is responsible for this too, they've put out four movies, I think, all with female action heroes. And so when this is all our stories, it makes it a lot. One, it disenfranchises men, and then it makes men not want to fight. Why do I have to fight? You know? And so we need masculine entertainment again, like teenage mutant turtles. Like, those are actual weapons. Yeah. Right? Like, when do you have a cartoon? When there's.

They might have Sci-Fi weapons or, like, space guns or something, but you don't see people fighting with swords and nunchucks anymore. I was just thinking about why I think Cobra Kai so popular, right? Like, that is. That is actual. It's a show with actual fights and people fighting their bullies. And, like, that's, like, we don't have that anymore. Everyone's, like, so sensitive about bullies now. And here you have this show where it's like, no, just punch them in the face, right?

Like, it's just like, we just don't. There's a longing for that content. And I think, like, on every top gun, right. Every major movie or tv show we've seen over the past, I would say, since COVID has been masculine in nature somehow. You know, I was watching. I was watching the new Ghostbusters movie, the first new Ghostbusters movie, second one. But they made a reference to something, and I was like, as soon as they said, I was like, oh, man.

They completely eliminated the female ghostbusters from the canon when they said that. Oh, okay. Oh, well, the whole movie was based on the fact that there were no more ghostbusters, right? And it's like, you're like, wait a minute. Wasn't there this female Ghostbuster version? No, no, no. Never happened. I don't remember anything like that. I don't remember anything. Then I remembered all the articles of the women who starred in that who were really upset. Good by that movie. Yeah, yeah.

But that movie was a good movie. Right? Like, that one was good. And so it was just, you know, I think it's demonstrable that male driven content is more popular. Women watch lifetime and men watch action movies. But women watch action movies with their husband. Yes, of course. Like, most of the time, you're not watching Hallmark movies with your wife. That's right. You might every now and then, especially around Christmas. That's fun.

But, like, for the most part, you know, you're not going to go to a movie to see a rom.com. you're probably more likely to go see something you and the wife can enjoy together. Right. And women enjoy. It's the man that makes those entertainment decisions most of the time in the home. That's right. And men, women enjoy action movies. Women enjoy the Lord of the Rings, or they enjoy Braveheart, you know, because men don't enjoy Roman, men don't enjoy relational things quite so much.

I guess it depends on the man. It depends on how authentically, like, like sleepless in Seattle. I mean, I haven't seen it in years, but that was a pretty good movie. I think a lot of people like that movie, but it's a very rare. Men like romance movies. Yeah. When the men is. When the man is portrayed as man. Yes, but I think. I think, like, you know, you like, well, nobody watches the WNBA, right? No, like, nobody's watching, right? Nobody's watching WNBA. No way.

You know, women's soccer, one of my favorite show. Welcome to Wrexham. You have this whole narrative about the female soccer team at Wrexham now. And it's like, I don't care. I just get past those scenes. It doesn't matter. But, but I think, like, women watch male sports and go, I want my husband to be that way. Yeah. And men watch it and go, I want to be that guy for my wife. Right. So there's this, there's this unite. Knighted. There's this ability.

But most of the time when men watch, like, a hallmark rom.com, the man is like, I'm not that. I'm never going to be that guy. No, I can't be that guy. And I don't even want, like, even if I was that guy, I'd be embarrassed. Right? Like, so it's like you write and so they only appeal to women and in women's fantasy, in women's own fantasy, whereas like, braveheart. Women are like, I want to be rescued by a man like that, and I want my husband to be that guy. Well, hold on.

Yes. But I think a lot of women resent the notion inside themselves that they want to be rescued. That's the feminist programming. It's like, that's why they need more. Stories of them being rescued. They need to be in nun. They need. They just need to be consumed with stories of women needing to be rescued, because eventually that'll change the mentality of the culture and transition them into, this is, I am a woman, and I do actually like it when I'm rescued. Jason's working on a rom.com now.

You could tell them about it, but it's on that same print prince called. The lesbian in the lumberjack. And I wonder what it's about. It's about a woman who thinks she's a lesbian, but it turns out she's just never met a real man. So she's on her way home to Portland after a funeral, and her car breaks down on the side of the road in rural Oregon, and a lumberjack pulls over to help her with her car. And she's like, I don't understand these feelings. Feminism leaving my body. Right.

And romantic comedy ensues. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun to write. Now, I want to ask about this because I think a lot of people are hesitant when it comes to christian content because they worry that they'll be enjoying a really, a nice narrative of a story, and then, like, bam, out of nowhere, like, something will shift in terms of become, like, overtly gospel or, like, they'll. They'll take a really nice moment and they'll just insert something that doesn't.

I don't want to say that it doesn't belong because, of course it belongs. But where, like, the illusion will be shattered or something like that. They'll turn it into a teachable moment, let's say. And people don't like that in the woke world. Like, and it seems like the christian space would be like, we don't like that either. So maybe. How do you navigate that? But it feels necessary. Like you didn't put enough gospel verses in that. Like, come on, can we just.

Yeah. So you get that kind of feedback, and for what? I just ignore it because I'm not making a sermon illustration. That's not my job. My job. If it's a comedy, the job is to be funny. If it's an action movie, the job is to. To make people's adrenaline pump. It's a horror movie. The job is to scare them. Right? That, that's what, that's how it works. When you're serving an audience, you know what your job is as a Christian?

Your Christianity should imbue everything in the movie because you're a good Christian, because you love what's good and true and beautiful. But your job is not to make a sermon illustration. When you're making a movie, your job is to make a movie. And I think that's what a lot of, a lot of people that look at christian movies and say, well, I want us, I want you to make a sermon illustration. I can bring my friends to, and I, so that they can become christians.

I just say, well, no, just bring them to church. That's what you do with your friends. You want to hear them have a sermon, preach to them, bring them to church. If they can't bring them, if they don't trust you enough to bring them to church, you need to be a better friend. Non christians are not going to theater to see God's not dead. No, God's not dead. Seven. God's not dead on the moon. I don't even know what that is, but it sounds, but I think, too.

Like, you know, if you want to be more exegetical about it, God created the heavens and the earth, and he gave us scripture. But the heavens and the earth are not scripture. They're general revelation. Okay. But they're some of his most beautiful, fantastic works of art, right? So heavens, earth, stars, the universes, the galaxies, all these sort of animals and plants are beautiful, amazing works of art. And they declare the glory of God, but it's not enough to save anybody.

They're just amazing art that reflects who he is. And I think in the same way, christians have that freedom because God did it to just make art that just reflects who he is. But it doesn't have to be exposition of special revelation. That's an insane idea that, you know, you know that it just doesn't, it doesn't make sense. It's a trap we've fallen into because it's easy.

It's easier to get one pastor to buy 300 tickets and pass them out for free than it is to make a good movie and have it compete in the free market. And we know that's the case. And then why they do that? Because we are friends with the guy that invented that system of marketing to pastors. Buy the digits, and he hates it. And he hates what he created. Oops. And he wishes he never did because it's ruined the entire christian film industry. So. So, you know, like, this is what exists.

Like, this is the system that has been made, and it shouldn't exist anymore. I personally don't think it should exist anymore. I think. I think a christian movie needs to compete against a Marvel movie. It does. And if you can't keep up, then that. Then come up with something else. But don't try to just get mega church pastors to buy out a whole theater and to watch your bad movie, because it's an evangelistic opportunity.

I think you're misusing the church tithe at that point, the church funds at that point, and I think you're just kind of trying to take what you can and not be dependent on the free market. This is a scam. Go ahead, Jason. Yeah, it was an idea that was popularized by the second great Awakening and then brought into the mainstream by early Billy Graham marketing guys. So it's something that really grew out of the terrible theology of the second great awakening.

And, yeah, we need to get back to just using art as a service, letting art be a service industry to your neighbor and not an evangelistic ministry. This is really helpful for me because I run into this with some of the things that I do, some of the videos I want to make, some of the stuff that I want to write, like, is the expectation. And part of this is probably my own fault for reading and listening to so many pastors, then that's their job, is to bring it back to scripture.

So I'm like, well, do I have to support everything that I say throughout the entire thing with scripture verses? I don't mean to say there's anything wrong with that. It's a glorious thing. However, it often feels like creating the content to fit the spec rather than putting the spec into the content. You know what I mean? Like that meaning the specification, not the spec in an eye kind of thing.

And I can understand how many christian filmmakers or content creators or of any sort would be like, do I have to turn this into an evangelistic opportunity? Or can I just make something enjoyable and glorious for the glory of God?

And that's a. I would imagine that's a confronting idea for many christians who have grown up in the world where it's like every song has to be scripture verses, everybody, every movie has to be evangelistic in nature, and it becomes fatiguing, I guess, because I don't mean to say to go be in the secular world, but it's like, can we make. Can we enjoy something for the sake of it, I think, is the question. You cannot, in the current christian film environment. Got it. Okay. Yes. You cannot get.

You won't get money to fund. You won't get money to do it. And so, you know, there's a lot of people that are really successful in the christian film industry because they just put their head down and they make that stuff over and over and over again. But one of our, I think one of the keys to our success has been when we talk to an artiste and they pitch us an idea, you can tell immediately that idea is made to be sold in the christian film industry. And you say, what are the ideas you have?

People said no to? That's what we want. What is that? And then they tell a much better story. They have much better ideas than the ones they're formulating. One guy pitched me an idea. His first idea didn't. Didn't get sold. And so he pitched me another idea a year later. He's like, yeah, I'm working on this now. And I looked at him and I said, dude, you're just making that because it's going to get picked up. Like, you don't really care about that story, do you? And he was like, no. And. Right.

Like, it's. It's heartbreaking. Like, like, it's. It's. There's nowhere else to go. Like there. Without lore, there is no one else talking that has the guts to say, hey, this whole system is like the taxicab industry. It's terrible. It's dirty and filthy. And we need to be a way better, more efficient system. And Uber was not going to get the investment from the taxi mob in New York City. They had to go against them.

They had to say, look, this is what we're doing, something completely different. We don't even call ourselves taxis. We're just going to actually, we're just going to ignore the laws and risk the fines because we know that people like this so much that we just got to get it out there. Like, that is the mentality christians and conservatives need to have when they build stuff where it's like, hey, the current system is completely messed up. It's run by unions.

It's whatever that system is, we got to completely disrupt that. How do we disrupt that? Let's allow the subscribers to fund their own content. Let's do that. Let's try that. Right? And we've seen our model solves every problem the major streaming companies have had. Everyone. It reduces churn. It gets us higher subscriber value per dollar. It gives us data and feedback instantaneously all these problems that streamers can't get. We solve those problems insanely disruptive.

And it's been attempted before by Hollywood leaders and each time it's been attempted Hollywood has sent the mob after them to threaten them and blacklist them and say they'll never get any directors or actors to work on this platform. So it's not a new idea. I think it's just, it hasn't been done by the people who don't care enough about Hollywood. And so that's why I think, like we really have the opportunity here to build something wholly unique that's never been done before.

And I think all the economics point to it. And so the only thing remaining is just the accredited investors with the guts to really want to disrupt things. And that's hard to find in the christian and conservative space, although I have gotten interest from leftists in what we're doing. Interesting. And we've turned them down. So, which is really discouraging. It shouldn't even have to have that conversation because there should be so many other people that are willing to do it.

But there is a worldview problem, I think, between christian investment and secular investment. Yeah, I mean, I definitely want to talk about that, but I think what I'm interested in also is your own hero's journey because I hope everyone listening can hear that again. This isn't like we're going to turn this around in six months and launch it. It was three years, three years of building the thing before you could even bring it to the public.

So all the exciting stuff that we're talking about now with funding various content creators and filmmakers and different ideas and actually having an impact in culture and making something for the sake of enjoyment that comes on the tail end of a three year commitment to a vision which no one, which doesn't exist. Like until you have a minimum viable product, it's like if this thing, if the floor falls out, we have nothing.

Besides, what if the real light learning was the good friends we made along the way? That's kind of what you've got, right? So I guess I'm curious about the commitment to the vision, like the idea and then that three year journey of we're going to work behind the scenes to build something that doesn't exist, that no one believes in, that no one's heard of, that disrupts everything and we're going to stay committed to it even though perhaps we feel crazy. Perhaps it's like, what are we doing?

You go through all those things. I'm familiar with that. So maybe you can talk about this because this is the modern hero's journey. We're not saving the village anymore with the. Maybe in a few years if Biden gets elected, maybe. But for right now, you're setting out on a quest to accomplish something almost impossible. And this is what it looks like.

Yeah, I think we started out, we got our 1st 500k very quickly and we built the product and we spent three years doing that and taking the time to do that. That's not bad. Then we raised another 350 and our 2nd, 2nd seed round. And currently we're trying to go after bigger czech investors because we really need the money to scale immediately and quickly at this point.

So now you're at a different level where you're having conversations with people who have a lot more to lose, I think, than the regular, accredited investor who can put in a 25k check or whatever. When you're going after two hundred fifty k, five hundred k investments or more people, there's a lot more risk on the investor. Which is true. Which is true. But I don't think you can build things that matter without that risk.

I just don't think that can happen when you have guys, I reference b two b and b two b and real estate a lot because that is a majority of a lot of these faith based investment trademark organizations where they're, you know, you go and talk to them, they, that's what they do. They do, they do lots of money in real estate investments and B, two B SaaS investments. And then you say, well, what about movies? What about christian movies?

You invest in christian movies and they go, this is what they'll say. They'll say, no, but I've donated to some, right? So they don't even have the confidence that these movies are going to succeed and they shouldn't because they're not good. They know it's not good. So a lot of the christian conservative investment capital space, they've been burned a lot because they'll put this money into this movie and it'll lose money. They won't get a return.

And then the filmmaker or producer will come back and say, I know it lost money, but here's the reports of people who got saved watching your movie. So it's all worth it. And they're kind of like, well, yeah, that's nice. But you did promise a return, right? Like, or at least right? So that was so, so there's this map. There's this map like this. This is why, you know, and then of course we're saying, hey, we're making christian movies. And people go, oh, no, not more. God's not dead.

And we're not talking about that at all. We're just saying in general, it's christians making any movie, and that's never been done before. There's no category for that. That doesn't, what does that mean? What's the difference between secular movies and conservative movies? Right. It's like, well, a good christian movie is. Any movie is a good christian movie. Yeah. Right. Like, any good movie is, sorry. Any good movie is a christian movie. Right? Braveheart's a christian movie.

Yeah. I think you can make that case because we're presuppositional and how we look at art and entertainment and image bearers making content. If an image bearer makes good content, it's, it's good content. It's objective and true. Right. So, so, um, you know, so, so I think like, that.

But, but, yeah, that would be my encouragement is, like, if there's any accredited investors out there that really are looking to be disruptive and have the backbone for that, to give us a call, like, you can email me. It's Marcus or tv. L o r t v m e r c u s o r t v. You just email me. I'd love to hop on a Zoom call. I can go over all the financials. I can send you the deck, whatever you want to know. We're pretty open about it. We've never hidden anything from anybody.

And we'll tell you what we're going to do with the money and how. I believe no other streaming service, let me put it this way. We've raised $850,000. With that money, we've launched 55 pieces of content. Now, no one in Hollywood can make one piece of content for $850,000. Right. Can't be done. We've built the technology, too. With that money, I think we have a really good opportunity to be the first major streaming platform that's also profitable. None of them really are now. That's right.

And I think we can start giving profit dividends once we surpass 100,000 subscribers, which is a very tiny number. But we don't buy content in advance and hope that it works. So we don't have this massive content budget that we have to spend every month to keep putting content out. The consumers do that as they want to, and so we can be super low risk.

We're technically cash flow positive now because everything's just running itself and it's funding itself and now every dollar that we get is going to go back into bringing in more revenue for the platform. That's a great place to be as an investor. And so especially since there's no cap on how much our users can spend every month, that's even better place to be for an investor. You own the tech and we own the tech. Unreal. Yeah, we own the tech. Yeah. So it's a great system.

And they're not saying no because of our model. It's because it's probably going to be relationships lost because of what we've done. And that's. What do you mean? What do you mean? Really? What do you mean relationships lost? Well, I mean. Well, I mean, there's a lot, you know, everything's built on, you know, everything nowadays is about being nice. And you can't make disruptive films and be nice. No. Right. Lesbian. The lumberjack is going to offend a lot of people. Right? Please.

Yeah, please look. Right. And you know, you know what? You know, CB's has three, three shows that praise the FBI. Three FBI shows. Why does CB's need three shows about the FBI? I want to make three shows that show the FBI in a bad light. Right. So, you know, the government might come after. Not like us. Right? Like there's a, like when you imagine, imagine the amount of effort. You could see this with the Biden Trump debate last week. Immediately media just changed the whole narrative.

Just in one instance, we've been saying for four years Biden has a problem. And immediately overnight, it's been nothing but what that's only thing the news is talking about. Well, that was on purpose and strategic and top down instructions. It was coordinated and it was given by government officials. The newscasters said, I've been on the phone with Obama's people and political newscasters throughout this whole debate. I mean, political operatives. Why would they even say that term?

It's such a dark term and they're just open about it. We've been talking with all these people. So if they're doing that with news, of course they're doing that with entertainment as well. Countless government officials work on entertainment. Openaiden just brought on an NSA advisor on their board. Amazing. So they're doing it in tech, they're doing it in cable news there. Of course they're doing it in Hollywood and stuff.

Why hasn't there been a really positive movie of reenacting January 6 yet? Be awesome, right? That's a great question to ask. Is that allowed? I've been pitching it for three years and I haven't gotten any traction, no way. But that's the point. Like, there are systems in place. And I think when I say, you know, investing in lore and more, doing really well, you're going to lose relationships.

I think that's a fair case to make, and I hope that to be true because you're not really changing or transforming anything if you're not offending people to some degree. And if you want to keep things the same, there's tons of ways you can invest your money. There's RegCF through Angel, there's all these sort of things. Like there's ways to keep things the same and you can make a return on it, and no one will care 20 years from now, no one will remember those things.

But if you really want to change things for your grandchildren, you can't do it without storytelling. That's controversial and upsets all the right people. So what's really interesting about this is so back during my.com days, it was just meet a bunch of college students, and we stopped out and did the startup and we raised $20 million from Hewlett Packard. It's a story I haven't told very often. It was a big moment. Half of that was cash, half of that was hardware. I was in my early twenties.

People started coming to me for advice on how to get their startup funded. And so I learned how to evaluate whether a company was worth investing. And I was, I myself was not an investor. I was just doing the thing, but people were coming to me anyway. And so I run, when I hear about companies, I run them through a series of filters. Like, does the product work? Yes, your product works. Like, does the product do what it is intended to do? Yes. Like, is it a known thing?

Is it something that's available to the consumer? So how big is the potential income ceiling? Huge. And then I asked, do you have your own technology? Yes, you have your own technology. As I run you through the filters that I learned for evaluating different investment opportunities to help people with this, it checks all the boxes. But here's the big one. This is the thing that I learned from talking with VC's in that world.

Venture capitalists, they say that they look at the numbers in the business plan, and I think they do. I think a lot of that. They just want to make sure that you did it and you thought it through. Right. But I don't think any business plan has ever actually been read. You know what I mean? They just see, yeah, they check that. You check all the boxes.

But what I learned from, from the VC's that would talk to me about it is they said they don't actually evaluate businesses because no one actually knows what's going to be successful or not. Like you can, you can say whether something looks like it has all the pieces of success and then it can fall apart. Like how many people passed on Uber, how many people passed on Airbnb. And these are enormous companies, right? Not to mention Google, Facebook, all that stuff.

So what the venture capitalist would tell me is that we don't invest in businesses, we invest in people. So we see, is the idea good? Does it all work? Do all the pieces fit? And do I think that these people are the guys to pull it off and that's what they ultimately make the decision on? So as I talk to you guys about this, you have all those pieces in place because clearly you guys are the guys to pull it off because you've done it for four years. Based on my experience, you did it right.

And I also hear that youre going to have to find the right investor whos going to be on your side. Youre not just looking for dumb cash, youre looking for someone whos like, im willing to risk it all for a big return, an enormous culture producing return that cant just be measured in terms of money and oh yes, it can be measured and should be measured in that and we shouldn't be afraid of that.

But to say, like we're going to swing for the fences against this corrupt and failing culture and do something truly powerful that can shift things permanently. Yeah, finding that guy or that, or that group. Like, because that's what you need. Like, you don't want venture capitalists to dump seven figures on you and then be monkeying with the formula. You know what I mean? Like you want someone to be like, I'm bought in.

Well, the wonder, wonder project, right, which is Irwin brothers is new thing. They got $100 million from Amazon. What strings come attached to that? Yes, all of them. All of them. Exactly. A knitting factory, all that sort of stuff. So I've been very, very cautious about who invests in us, and that narrows your window a lot. But also I think the benefit for us is that we've done a lot with very little in comparison to everybody. Exactly. And I think that scares people in a good way.

And I think, like, you know, if we were to ever just get a guy that's like, here's $10 million, that would be insane. Like it would change everything very quickly and it would cause a lot of scrambling. I think from a lot of other people, because my goal is for people to look at lore content and go, oh, man, if we're going to beat lore, we have to make content like them. And I go, yes, yes, please do. We win. We win. Like, that's when you winden right?

So that's why competition is great and even if your business ultimately fails, but it pushes things forward. And I talk about general magic a lot with this. I don't know if you've heard of general magic. There's a documentary on it. But way back before the Internet existed, a group of people left Apple back when Steve Jobs was fired. And they said, we're going to make a smarteende phone, a smart cell phone before the Internet exists. It's crazy. They invented emojis. They had email on it.

They spent hundreds of millions of dollars, did this massive deal with at and t singular. And then they hired two guys. One guy came in as a janitor just because he wanted to work there. And then that janitor worked his way up to being the head of engineering at this company. They launched it, the first smartphone, and it completely failed. People were like, what the heck is this?

Because the Internet just so happened to come about right as they were at and t was investing all this tech in cell towers just for this one phone. And so it completely failed and the company went under and it bankrupted. But Steve Jobs returns to Apple and hires the head engineer, and he works to make the iPod and the iPhone. And then the other engineer company is the one that went off to make Android. Amazing, right? So the question is, even though General.

Matt and then the other head developer went over and created eBay. That's right. I've heard of these things. So the question is, if you look at, like, at and t invested millions of dollars in this thing, did at and taideh and all these other companies lose money because general magic failed? Technically, yes.

But if you look back now, every single one of those companies, especially at and T, because they had a five year exclusive with the iPhone when it came out, because of these relationships that were already formed, they all made money because the smartphone does now exist and it wouldn't happen. So you take long term General Magic succeeded because it did what it was supposed to do.

And Steve Jobs invited the CEO of General magic to his keynote, where he announced the iPhone for the first time and used some of his language in that presentation as an homage to say, we couldn't do this. We couldn't have done this without you. Amazing.

And now every one of those companies, whether it's at and T or Philips or Sony, who donated hardware, worked on the hardware, every one of those have made billions of dollars as a result of a smartphone, whether personally, because they've invested in new smartphone tech or their own smartphones, or because their company uses smartphones to be more productive. Right. So over the long term, that industry was created because investors took a risk on something that no one's ever heard of before.

That's a great documentary, by the way. You just google it and find it. I think it's free on most places, but it's incredible. And so that's how we have to be looking at, like, okay, we have this really bad christian film industry right now. How do we just move everything in a completely different direction?

And that requires capital and risk, and there's no amount of projections and financial things that you can do to basically predict the result of what happens to when christian entertainment starts surpassing Hollywood movies on a regular basis. And people remember the days that Hollywood existed, and it doesn't anymore because these christian companies came about, and that's like, how do you can't project that on a spreadsheet? You're absolutely right. But you have to believe that it's possible.

And then we live in a world where God wants those things to happen, and that's just faith. At that point, it's like, here's my five stones. I'm going to slay this giant, but here's. Go ahead. Sorry. I know. Just real quick. Like, me and Jason always talk about when you see armies being defeated in the bible, it's always the armies that couldn't possibly do it. And so me and Jason always ask ourselves, is our army too big? We don't want our armies too big.

Fire. Yeah. If we just get this investor, if we go with this investor just to get a quick injection of cash, will that be like putting on the armor, David? Putting on the armor? What is that? And I think all the investors that we've gotten so far have been really amazing. But now what we need is that lead investor who's, like, not only going to invest in you, but I'm going to introduce you to other capital at least the same way I do. That's right.

Because I don't see you guys as a donation or charity or, I hope this is true. I really think that there's a value in a business and a brand here, and those are a lot harder people to find, but they're out. They do exist. And I have faith that we're going to find them. But either way, are things operational and running and things are scaling. So either the subscribers are going to join en masse before the investors catch on or the investors are going to catch on.

So it's just a matter of which one's going to come first now. And so it's a really exciting time, and it's the, the payoff has been great. And I think that, I think the big thing is, is that it's not necessarily christian content in the way that people think of christian content, right. And that's, and that's the trick is that, like, when people hear christian content, they think of whatever, like, God's not dead or I guess, left behind or something like that.

I haven't consumed much of this stuff. It's just good movies. It's just good content. It's not woke. It's not, you know, it's not disgusting. You know, it's not, it's not base. Right. It's like, it's not anti woke. Yeah, exactly. It's not explicitly anti woke. Exactly. It's just, it's good, compelling, enjoyable stories, which is, I mean, we have the faith with the best story. We should be crushing it with stories, right? Just have the courage to tell them.

And I think that's the thing is, like, people have this image in their mind of what a christian story is today. And that's probably the hardest thing is to get that out of people's heads and say, you know what? Braveheart is a christian story in its own way. Star wars has, I mean, I guess the force is not really christian at all, but, like, but you can see that. You can see the themes built in of fatherhood, right?

And maybe, like, Christian isn't the right word to describe some of these things, but these very human stories. And what is human is truly christian in its own way. And to pitch that to people, right? And to say, like, look, we're just getting back to what storytelling used to be, you know, before, before it got absolutely subverted and corrupted by a corrupt Hollywood engine and all the diddy parties, right? That's, that's ultimately, that's ultimately what you're saying.

And that's a, I mean, it's just scary because people will be going up against the woke mob, right? They'll be going up against, like, a culture, like a hundred years of, of leftist cultural values. But who wants to fight that battle? Who actually wants to sling the stone? Got to be someone out there, right? There's got to be. There'S got to be so for the listeners, perhaps there are some accredited investors of the sort that you're talking about.

But assuming that most of them are, what can the listeners to this podcast do to help you guys in the mission right now? Yeah, like a lot of people ask, well, I only have, like, a, you know, I don't. I'm not an accredited investor. You know, I think it's stupid. The government requires that, by the way. I think it hurts poor people, that poor people can't take risky investments with as little as they have. But that's SEC regulations.

But if you're not, what I would say is subscribe to lore, give it three months of your time. Just fund content and invite your friends to subscribe to lore. And then if you don't have a lot of money to invest, just buy $100 in gold loot and put it towards a project for an artist. If the artist is raising $20,000 for a show and loot, he's going to get all that $20,000. So buy loot and just know you're supporting the artist directly.

Let's see if we can start a reformation and just show people and show a lot of people that they were wrong, that this is what people want and this is what people want to do. And that takes a lot of effort and having a strong core subscriber base that sticks with you and understands the value. But I believe that's out there, and I believe that's what people want. And I believe a lot of those people are people that listen to your podcast or listen to, might listen to Joe Rogan's podcast.

I think that's the same core demographic, and it's just a matter of getting the word out there, right? Get the word out there. Something exists. Like when the guy on Twitter is saying, hey, you know, 2 million, why don't. Why doesn't Netflix let you fund movies and tv shows at two or $10 apiece? And the replies of that guy's thread is, watch Laura already does this. Watch Laura already does this. But, like, that's great. That's exactly. That's exactly what needs to happen.

And also, just follow us on Twitter and social and share our stuff. Help us break through, like, this sort of, like, algorithmic sort of stagnation that all our socials are on because we're conservative. Sure. Yeah. Social media just sucks right now, so just tell your friends, send them an email. Yeah. Yeah. It's really exciting to me because, again, we started out saying, I don't watch a lot of streaming content right. It's just. But to know that I can, that I can buy, you know, gold loot.

Like, I really like this guy's stuff and I want to fund that project directly through this platform. That's exciting. That's exciting to me. I want to have control over the kind of things that I fund, that I enjoy and I want to be able to encourage them directly. And the budgets for projects, it's outside of my ability as an individual to fund. But to know that, that I can participate in the kind of creativity that I want to see in a non exclusive way.

Like, I don't need a network that caters everything exclusively to me, but if I see something on that network that I like and want to see, that's really neat that there's a way for me as a non accredited investor to fund a project like that. That isn't just a donation that's going to a platform. People spend more money. I mean, monopoly go got $2 billion in video game transactions in ten months. What? Yeah, monopoly go. Right? So people don't even know what that is. Okay, yeah.

Well think for like fortnite, people are just buying video game currency en masse, grand Theft auto, all the sorts of, there's billions and billions of dollars, but think about how much more valuable it is to spend money on, on in game currency. But instead of getting an extra life, you're going to get a movie or tv show that'll last for generations. That's right. Like, that's a much better value instead of an extra life that lasts maybe like 30 seconds.

And so that's what I would encourage people to think about when they're buying gold loot and they're funding stuff on our content is like, these are stories that are going to last forever. And so that's super important. And also one more thing is every piece of content that gets funded on our platform remains on our platform for future subscribers. So you're actually leaving an inheritance of content and stories for future subscribers.

So five years from now, when we have 5000 pieces of content on the platform, or whatever that number is, the new subscribers will have that 10,000 hours that the early subscribers didn't. And it's because of the early subscribers and their passion and dedication. So it really is a subscriber oriented community. And that's why we make subscribers subscribe and pay money per month before they can buy the gold loot. So that we know the people that are actually, it's like Costco model, right?

Like when you actually pay for the membership, you care way more about what's there. And so same thing with Amazon prime. So you subscribe and then you fund after. And it's really important because it keeps out a lot of the riff raff and keeps the, keeps the content pure. Well, and it's participatory. I can participate in this platform not just as an early subscriber or an early adopter, but I can fund projects. And it's like the technical term or the term of art is sticky.

I want to come back and I want to see what's up there today. I got my new loot on Tuesday. Oh, my gosh. I could fund this project I've been waiting for. It's not just something that I switch on and sit back on the couch and drone out over it or just like passive consumption. It's the subscribers participate in the construction and furthering of the mission of the platform. And that's something very different than I think I've heard basically anywhere. Yeah. Thanks, man. That's awesome.

You're welcome. Hey, praise God. Thank you for your four years of work to bring it to people. And to me, this is great. Excellent. Well, I think normally I'd say, where do you want to send people? I'm guessing you want to send them to lore tv and send them to Twitter. L o r tv and on Twitter. You can follow us at watch lore, watch Loor, and then, yeah, subscribe there. Fund content and, yeah, let's start a revolution in the streaming space.

I think there's enough people out there that want it, so now's the time. It's built. It's ready to go. So hallelujah, I want it. So that's great. Well, thank you, gentlemen so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast. Visit us on the [email protected] or on your favorite social media platform, Ren of Men. This is the renaissance of men. You are the Renaissance.