 So please let's get a warm, immediate welcome to Brad Wyman and Pen's left. You know, Pen just has set the tone to get everybody right into it. Okay. You know, I thought everyone could get a little taste of what Directors Cut Pen's new feature was. By the way, of your crowdfunding pitch picture. Sure. Can we run that? And then we'll get into some conversation. Roll the clip. I'm more than half Magic Show in Las Vegas. People love our Magic Show in Vegas. Children love our show. Children, company, and airports. I'm your mom's favorite atheist. I'd be nice to your mom. I wear glasses. I read. I even went from a celebrity apprentice to raise money for people with intellectual disabilities. I'm a big guy. A lot of crazy ideas. But I've tried so hard to be nice. Now I'd like you to contribute money so I can make a movie. I'll need a lot of money by moviemaking standards. But any more than I have myself. The movie I want to make is called Directors Cut. I've already written the script. It's really nutty. And I'm way proud of it. I've teamed up my favorite director of this section, Adam Griffin. There's a lot of great movies. But the one that kills is a movie he did called Look. It's one terrifying, scary, smart, clever. He's directing this little video we're doing right here. It's like nothing you've ever seen. It'll be funny in place. But it's a scary intellectual mystery. We need to cast the perfect woman to play the lead. We're looking. She has to be great. Whatever we cast to play the lead will be the star of our movie and the star of a mystery movie within our mystery movie. You'll understand that as soon as you see it. And if you contribute and help us make this movie, you'll be the first to see it. And Adam and I have a lot of great rewards to get you to help make our movie. It's going to be nutty and scary. The kind of movie I want to see. No, I don't play the hero in Director's Cup. In Director's Cup, I'm not the hero. In this movie, I'm the bad guy. Your mother isn't going to like me in Director's Cup. No one asked me to help us make this movie because I need a job. I have a job. I do a nice magic show in Vegas. And I'm not asking you to help us make this movie because I want to be a movie star. Fuck it, mate! I'm not going to be a movie star. I want to do this movie because I'm so fucking sick of being a fucking nice fucking guy. I don't want to be the bad guy in this movie. And I'll be such a fucking bad guy. I don't remember that I'm really a fucking nice guy in the movie. In Director's Cup, Adam will be director. But my psycho character will be himself in Director's Cup. But this is the character Adam will be in control. If you'd like to help me realize my dream of being the crazy, the bad guy in the movie, contribute to fun anything. The movie's financed. We don't have the money we need, but that has to stop us. No, too much is always better than not enough. Should we pass that? So we're going to do that. Since we've stopped the campaign, we've paid almost $20,000. And where would people find you to do that? We have a site called McPentBad.com. One of the things we've done is, as you know very well, one of the reasons that we haven't enough to fund anything is that the movie I talk about is being really my favorite movie in the past 20 years, the movie called Look. And you have to know Adam Rifkin's look because Look is too common a word to have to search for. But it's on iTunes. It's called Look and it's an incredible movie. It was produced by Brad. So one of the reasons we were involved with that and because Brad was at the time with Fund Anything and we went and did that and we were done with the whole fundraising. We just kind of, there's so much fulfillment to have to do which is kind of a, that's the term they use for all the stuff they give the people. Rewards. Rewards. And there's so much of that to do. And almost 10% of the budget for the movie will be done with the rewards that people have given us. So we just kept it going. Also because it had been fun. I was afraid some of the rewards we're doing are you get to come backstage, you kind of tell her, we give you a magic lesson, you get to come to my house for a movie night, you get to hang out, go to lunch. There's an awful lot of access and I thought it would be creepy and bad to open myself up like that and the real shock so far. I mean the creeps may be a lie but so far it's been an absolute joy. I mean, it's a weird thing to say. I saw Matt King who does a great magic show in town and you get a chance to see it over in Harris, the best comedy magic show ever seen. And Matt King said, you listen to my podcast and you'll be talking about how much I enjoy meeting the people that funded the movie. And he said, so what's the real deal on that? He just assumed that I was lying on the podcast which is a fine assumption to make but in this case I am going to be telling the truth. Well I think being new media and to just kind of segue into that this is not traditional financing. So traditional financing you probably go talk to studio heads and stuff. Well we did. I mean part of the thing that you want to do if you're going to crowdfund is first of all you want to fail the other one. I had this script kicking around for four or five years, the script the director's done. And I've gone and pitched it and the pitch always went very well and we didn't get to the next step with a few studios. But you've only got about seven people that you can talk to in Hollywood. You've got to kiss any of them. You've got to kiss a lot of them. An awful lot. But that's okay. You're going to be working with people and it's okay to... And they're putting up a lot of money. That's what you prefer. The nice thing about this is that although you have to be nice in order to crowdfund to about 5,000 people as opposed to about five people if you did the traditional way the 5,000 people are actually good sane nice people and the five people are dangerous hateful psychotic. It balances off that way. I don't know who's asking if you prefer to kiss or maybe something here that enjoying dangerous psychotic ass kissing. God bless you. Go to the studio with it. But you love your fans. I do. We also never had a real fear of our fans. If you go to every show in Vegas after the show Teller and I hang out and meet anyone that wants to meet us after the show it's the equivalent of everybody having a backstage pass. And none of the show does that. And we did it not because it was a sparkling idea but because we used to we're carnitrash so we used to work fair and stuff there was just no backstage and when we were off-road away we just kind of continued meeting people after the show and everyone assumed that as soon as we got to Broadway we'd stop doing that and it just kind of didn't. And so it takes us we played London last time we were playing a theater that was like 3,500 seats or maybe a bit more and it was filled up and so the amount of time meeting people out of the show was actually longer than the show itself. We actually crossed that threshold we would do a 90-minute show and then an hour and 45 minutes afterwards talking to people. And we enjoy it. I mean it turns out that if you're the kind of person that likes a Teller show I can't stop liking you go way out. It is so sad and cynical and heartbreaking the number of people I know in show business that show contempt for the very people that support them and you've seen that too. And it's so sad I mean the sadness is not really for the people that they show contempt for but the people who feel that contempt. What a horrible experience to walk to a show every night for people that you don't respect and care for. It's just so sad so make sure you pen. I don't know. So crowdfunding became this really, really good idea and I talked a lot to a very good friend of Neil Gaiman whose wife Amanda Palmer did the big crowdfunding thing for her record and she said that she gave out 30 rewards of going to people's homes and doing a concert on her ukulele just by herself in people's homes and she said of the 30 shows she did 28 of them weren't creepy at all. So I'm going for that same ratio. So we got a taste but you know tell us a little bit more of the inspiration and then also some of the different cool new media things that even have to do with the site and crowdfunding and being on the set give us a taste a little bit What we talked about when we first started doing this was I have a bunch of Twitter followers and what you ended up doing is my Twitter has always been done by me alone Am I just a tad short of too long because I know you're something I'm honest to Yeah, about 1.9 But I was done by myself and there's a lot of marketing people that take over you know celebrity accounts and stuff but I've always typed it in myself and without really much direction or idea of what to use what I was trying to accomplish it really was kind of what they designed it for I really was just kind of typing things that popped into my head For the king tide to do the crowdfunding I ended up burning a little bit of my Twitter because I was doing so much of contribute now, click here, do this what you just have to do there's no way around you are asking people for money and you need to ask them for money and there's no shame in that but it does mean you give them back the stuff you were doing Exactly, what I'm talking about is put a ton of energy into more value for financial contribution Our goal so far, one of the things we've done is if people gave X amount of money they get to come to the show and come backstage and get a magic lesson and our goal in this is we're hoping that every single person that contributes actually feels like they've gotten much more than they expected and much more value than they wanted and so far we've done that very, very well and we've spent much more time than the people expected and for the magic lesson because I play before the show I play upright bass for about an hour I'm unable to be bad with it before the show so I brought in the best magician in the world Johnny Thompson who is the guy who mentors Teller and I and has for a long time and really writes with us and directs with us and really works on every move we do and coaches us are going to be doing the show I brought him back to teach people magic and we had a guy last week came in from Canada and before the show got a magic lesson with Johnny Thompson and then after the show he met me and Teller and so little bitch fooled us with a trick that Johnny had taught so it's an inventiveness in getting people to cite that I was really thinking more about trying to lead you to the inventiveness of the movie and new media and how like even the villain might appear one of the things that really inspired the idea of director's cut very, very quickly so that I can expand on it is I was fascinated by the idea that we're all familiar with director's commentaries and director's commentaries over movies always have this close, light, personal feel that you really trust the director and you get kind of lulled into this very personal space so I thought that the idea is having a director's commentary that was done by someone who thought he was the director but you found out as the movie went on really wasn't the director the criminal who kidnapped the lead actor that's you so I'm going to do the whole director's commentary and you realize about half way through or third of the way through but I'm not really the director but I'm really the bad guy of the movie and I had that idea and I had it all written and all laid out but one of the problems with the movie one of the logical problems was I had to get my bad guy onto the set like he's delivering pizza delivering food or something it was a pretty weak part of the movie and then we started monkeying with the idea of crowdfunding it I went back and rewrote the whole script because now the logic of the script becomes better because the bad guy me, Herbert the character's name gets on the set by crowdfunding so he is the person in the movie as a reward he gets to be on the set and take pictures and that allows him to go over to the person who has the fdp site and is putting up of all the videos today he just videos the guy typing in the password and that gives him all the outtakes of the movie so he can recut it the way he wants that also gives him access to the police uniform that he steals and that gives him access to the lead woman in the movie who he kidnaps and that forces his knife point at his home to redo the lines the way he wants them to cut them back into and then going with the authenticity yeah well I want to actually prove it in and then we got very near our goal on fund anything we got very very close at the last second we had Herbert Blunt who's the character and then wrote a message on our board that said Adam I can't wait to help you direct this movie I can't wait to be part of funding it I'm so happy I'm going to be there all the time working with this movie you can follow Herbert on twitter and you can also kind of tell what actresses we're talking to because he begins following them oh no that happens one of the things that I love about Blair Witch and everybody loved about the Blair Witch project was the fact that it didn't happen in a movie theater but really was the first movie to happen in social media and I love that I love that there was all that stuff going on so I want to really have director's cut really be that so as the movie progresses and as we make it you will see the bad guy sending in his own videos doing his own vines following people making comments to Adam and showing up on the set so I'm hopeful that this movie will be bigger than just the 90 minutes that happens not bigger in terms of sales but bigger in terms of the sloppiness of it where it really happens I think that's brilliant the inventiveness of using everything that's available to you well one of the things I did and you might like this is one of the rewards you have in the crowdfunding site is you get to have a line in the movie that's one of the big things in every film that crowdfunding does is you get to have a line in the movie well our movie because part of the subject is crowdfunding and because Herbert the bad guy is on the set filming them making the movie and cutting that into his movie while they make this other movie the way we're doing the lines is that Adam Rifkin stands up with a bullhorn with all the other people and says okay who's here from the crowdfunding that has a line in the movie and they raise their hand and lie not and then Adam goes okay let's hear each of your lines which don't appear anywhere else in the movie so I just want to let you know if you want to get meta on my ass I'm there to beat you so we've now talked about new media now it's all working within the picture and all the different ways it's going to be continue to promote and work it where are we when are we going to make this thing? we are right now as in the the accounts we're ready to go we have hired Dory Zuckerman pre-production we're in pre-production and by the way days after he's funded we actually started on paper pre-production before we were completely funded we actually had a Tevin doing budgets and so on and right now one of the things that everybody gets even if they put $10 in the movie is they get a copy of the script as I say on the crowdfunding page spoiler alert it's the fucking script one of the surprises if there is a script it's a right but Adam very much thinks I think he's right on this lead director Adam thinks that we should have our lead actor the woman that's going to star in the movie in place before the script goes out to everybody he just thinks it's respectful to have her have the script first so right now I can't tell you who but right now our top two choices for stars of this movie have the script and the preliminary stuff around them the managers and agents really like it and they're reading it over and if either one of those two says yes then we start as soon as she wants to the nice thing about crowdfunding is our movie is a very low budget movie we have 1.1 million dollars very cheap movie but then again there's all sorts of expenses that you don't have when you're crowdfunding they're sucking off a lot of that money to keep their operation going you don't have completion bonds and any of those none of that there's none of that to pay for so actually a 1.1 million dollar movie should look like a 2 million dollar movie it's personally why I felt a lot of crowdfunding I've made many pictures of that budget the financing comes in immediately no papers no documents it's in your bank as the transactions happen and then you really have a real capital to work with and not all these fictional numbers I was having this argument with Patty just the other day wait a second the budget I signed for was this how can we only have that much to make Patty did monster with me now Penn though just to get off of director I have to say I do want to talk about a little bit more media you have a podcast every Sunday? yeah I do a thing called the Penn Sunday School and I've been doing that for a while it's going to have a Corolla's network however you define nobody knows any of this stuff it's being invented as we go crowdfunding is so new podcasts are fairly new really 10 years and it's a really wonderful way I just love how we're becoming completely unstuck in time people tweet me that they listen to the podcast every week at the exact same time and that's not the time that they do it but I do it it's just part of their schedule works into their routine and doing 90 minutes a week I mean out of Corolla does 90 minutes a day and that's a whole different kind of thing but you don't do anything else you don't write books, have a magic show I'm not sure about the amount of work I'm talking about the intellectual content if you do once a week for 90 minutes you can really kind of dig into a topic oddly doing a show every day morning radio you have to jump around a little more than you do one week you make more personal and I love doing that you know we have an expression that Glenn Allah runs the old pentateller operation show it out to Glenn wherever he is amazing guy we don't, you know he always says about selling a show it's not anything, it's everything and you can't tell whether Twitter sells tickets to pentateller or whether direct is cut it forms Twitter or they go back and forth or Sunday school and they do everything and I just finished I did this movie called Tim's Remire you know a lot of the questions you get you do crowdfunding is people will ask you I think a very reasonable question which is why don't you fund it yourself and the answer is I mean the blunt answer is of course I can't afford it but there's a reason I can't afford it which is the movie The Aristocrats I fund it with all my money and we haven't got the money back Tim's Remire yet well I was an ocean picture producer I can just tell anyone finance your movies don't spend it because also too I think it's a great validation that people want to see this picture it's not about ego, it's not about I want to make it you've had you know literally the community and the crowd finance your movie that's also part of me studios too much their gamekeeping function is a real and valid function if you really can't get money for your movie any place that you probably should make your movie there's a little bit of an argument with that because I believe that movies that are great pitches are almost automatically not great movies I think if you really can get everything good out of your movie in a 10 minute pitch maybe what your movie should be is a 10 minute pitch that having been said I think that you should have a feeling that you can get other people on board before you jump in big so can I ask why I mean is this I mean blogging, tweeting you know features your little magic show I mean is it I mean why Penn in magic and have a great career why are you using on these new medians I mean why I don't think there isn't any sort of overall plan there's no sort of I have I have the success I wanted I mean all I want to do is do a show to tell her and I completely accomplish that and there's no sort of using all this to build up some big big plan as a matter of fact we were a big corporation and we had that big sales meeting where we said here's our plans for 2014 we don't have we'd be like well we'd like to do everybody as we like to do more shit than we want to do thank you we don't have any sort of big goals but all I ever wanted to do you know when I was I grew up in a dead factory town in western Massachusetts and all I ever wanted to do was have ideas and then give them to other people and magic shows are really really good way to do that and if that was all I had I would be thrilled to pieces but with other stuff there I just loved doing it I mean Twitter this funnel that you know in order to say something I thought was funny in the 80s to have people hear it I mean people more than my friends I really had to go through all the gatekeepers of Letterman or Stern or Rolling Stones or People Magazine or all those sure you have to go through all of that and I mean this has been the downfall of many people but I like it is I can get an idea and write it on Twitter instantly and also get feedback I may be the only one that I know has over a million Twitter followers that I believe and I'm always afraid to make promises that aren't true but I believe not necessarily answered but I read every single Twitter that sent back to me what I was doing Celebrity Apprentice and I was sequestered for five weeks I probably missed several hundred but in general I put aside probably two hours a day to read everything I get from people and it's wonderful I like to talk to people who want to talk to me so is it clear to say it's because it's there that you blogs tweet I know some of the people that were involved in starting up Twitter and they gave me it's one of the reasons I don't have real Penn Gillette I just have Penn Gillette because they gave me in the first list of Twitter addresses they just gave me Penn Gillette and for the first year I did not know how to use it I did not understand it at all I just kind of kept toying with it a little bit and then kind of feel for it and enjoy it I had a Vine account since the day they started and just after watching Brian Koppelman do his wonderful screenwriting six second screenwriting lectures which are wonderful I finally got a feel for how Vine seems right for me so just in the past two weeks I started doing vines every other day it took me a while to learn about email you know I had my email I had my email address in 1984 and at that time if you had email the only people you could write to were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates you know hey Milly what do you have for breakfast oh great fruit me too so then because my first address Steve Jobs got it for me and so it was a very small group trying to tell people then what email was why it was better for certain things than talking on the phone was very very difficult and then as each thing comes in you know texting in Twitter and Vine and Instagram and Snapchat and podcasts get popular you have to learn all over again what that kind of communication is talking on the phone is very different than talking in person email is different from that and I just love learning about it when I first nobody in this room has the experience of learning about email you were all born with email around you but that wasn't true for me and I get to learn about it it's not true well I think some people love my age but what I think that's fascinating and it's why I've converged to financing online and I will continue to do so is that I don't believe there's an excuse anymore you know for anything if you want to make music make music put it out if you want to make videos put it on YouTube if you want to promote it start tweeting and doing Facebook you want a podcast film and none of these things cost really anything so if you are expressive if you are creative we now live in a wondrous time where all these tools are available I don't think magician 60 years ago you can now have a chance to do all of the different things that you're getting to do boy it would be cool if magician 60 years ago was tweeting wouldn't it? I don't know do we have any time back there Mike do we have any time left because I can't read it by the way I think it says 17.7 did the pension take some questions anybody want to ask Pat a question I think we can put the house lights up there's a mic there there's absolutely no one there we've answered everything but wasn't it there's so many there's a mic right there in the middle if you want to get up but you know I think there's a cocktail that said that movies wouldn't really be art until the tools were as cheap as a pen pencil and paper we're just coming really close to that we're coming really close to being so good to be able to to do that of course you know that there still is a very very good reason not to do your own films or your own podcasts or your own music and that is if you suck people go out and create your art and everything else no no there's some things you shouldn't be doing go ahead hi there I just want to thank you so much it's been really exciting for you to speak and a couple things first of all my brother-in-law is a dead ringer for you so if you ever need a standing pen I'm sure Tyler would do it yeah you know so many any big fat ugly guy doesn't wear a hat person they look just like me and I always want to say they so much would rather I can't look for life I just want to thank you because I have a son who for some reason got involved in celebrity apprentice he was in high school we watched it we loved what you did he just went to college he's majoring in marketing and I think a lot of it had to do with what you call student celebrity apprentice and I watched how with your crowdfunding use collaboration and I thought about in the apprentice how you bring in your partners I just love that theme and just thank you so much brother-in-law introduce yourself yeah I'm Barbara Vasconi and I write the blog why your PR works God bless you and who are you? Hi I'm Andrea Ball and I am co-author of Facebook marketing all along for dummies I just had a question about how do you know if your art sucks I've just been having this argument with Brian Kaplan with Brian Kaplan Brian Kaplan wrote rounders Ocean's 11, 12, 13 all those things he's a fabulous screenwriter he's been all this inspirational stuff coming people you know go out and do your art let's just suck Charles Kupowski you know the great poet and writer said that the best service you could do to anyone who was going into the arts was to discourage them tell them they had no talent they were awful and they should quit anybody who told that to wouldn't quit because of what you said should not be in the arts so I think there's an argument although I'm not the one who's willing to do it there's an argument that making it difficult is a is an okay thing I mean you really if you have to decide if you want to be a writer you probably shouldn't be a writer if you're not giving up every day writing for two hours just automatically on your own with nobody with no sort of gun to your head and no sort of promises to yourself you probably shouldn't be doing it everybody that I know that writes doesn't really have a choice I mean if I had another job I would still be writing the same amount of writing thank you I have two questions because I'm a pretty jerk the first is specifically for Penn being that in the past on your podcast you talked about being extremely scared of horror movies what made you decide to do a horror movie and then for both of you in terms of crowdfunding how are you going to remain I guess legally accountable for the funds that they were already appropriately and just in terms of background on the accounting on that sort of stuff what do you do to a chore of people that the money's going to go to stuff having to do with the movie directly rather than just paying a production assistant to go get coffee yeah well one of the things you will is you'll pay a production assistant to go get coffee you're not trying to protect against that that's one of the things that happens in making a movie you do need production assistants and they really should be paid I'm making a horror movie because you know I was terrified by any sort of slightly scary movie I realized that so much of the intellectual ideas I was interested in were happening in horror movies that I had to get over that George Romero's own description of Night of the Living Dead does not use the word zombies his description of the movie is it's a movie about what happens to America when a truly radical political system takes over that was his description of Daughter of the Dead George Romero's movie although James Gunn did a wonderful version after Romero's Richard on The Dead which is my favorite movie I like because it deals with the importance of society and interaction with people you don't know personally how important that is and how paradise cannot exist even to material wealth friendship, sex and love you still need society around you and I think that because horror movies and also graphic novels and so on deal with such big subjects, life and death and fear and terror they allow the intellectual to hitchhike along with it and I wasn't willing to not have that and the ideas of Directors Cut are much more important to me than the scares kind of like in our magic show the idea behind the tricks may be more important than the tricks but we still try to do tricks that are really good. In answer to the accountability... I'll finish that and we'll get to the next question this is a direct-to-consumer contract and if you don't act like Penn is Act which is to overcompensate and make your consumer, the person that's bought the reward, think they've gotten more than they bargained for then you won't be crowdfunding again so that's my answer and also in kind of a deeper answer of the accounting there's a lot of stuff on the crowdfunding that nobody knows I mean there's all sorts of questions about it sales tax sales tax and all sorts of taxing interstate stuff that just nobody knows yet that we know you're kind of creating this new thing so what I'm hopeful of is that we can make the 5,000 people who's helping make this movie really, really happy and try to pay all our taxes and do all of that and hope that with a good movie at the end of that that that's a reward and we can do it again I mean all of this stuff we do in our lives once you've gone beyond just creating food you know what you do is you're just playing pinball you do it well and you get to do it again exactly next please introduce yourself hi I'm Charles from Success Freaks and first off Success Freaks first off I wanted to say Poon Intelligence Bullshit was an amazing show Southern Baptist Church home that really changed the way I saw the world a lot we're all about chasing success discovering our gene finding it living in Success Freaks my co-host and partner is in the Renaissance world he's my intelligence if you will we get that a lot because he's short and tall but we know you came from the Renaissance and while you're known for telling sir you're like four foot coming from the Renaissance Festival world was there a moment where you almost gave up on your craft knowing that that's a hard world to be in not knowing where you'd be successful today is there a story where you almost gave up and you're not the Gillette that you are now I'm so sorry that I don't have that story I uh when I was doing terribly I thought I was doing fine Mike and he he worked at one of the most heart-crushing jobs you can have being a jail guard and then came home to his family and got all his joy from his family and never once complained about his work it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized how awesome this job must have been and when I was working as a street juggler I was supporting myself and getting some joy from my job I consider that to be um success and anything beyond that is wonderful but it's incredible that we live in a world and in a century where we can get some joy from our jobs 100 years ago that just plain wasn't true that was really really rare and it's still rarer than it should be but it's a it's a pretty beautiful thing I'm not one to quote Neil Simon but Neil Simon said that the difference between making zero a week doing what you love and making $200 a week doing what you love is enormous and after that you don't just notice the zeroes here as much so I think that my level of what I consider success is probably so much lower than other people's I consider myself a success the instant I was eating and supporting myself even though the first time I was doing that I was living on the streets and actually homeless I was still eating and doing shows and I was still in the pieces one of the problems we had Broadway was that a lot of the interviewers would talk to us about let's talk about the horrible conditions you went in before you made it big on Broadway and tell her not to just always the answer when we were wicked happy we kind of bummed their shit because when we were doing renaissance festivals I was having a fabulous time and when we were climbing trash and playing hundreds of theaters that had 50 people in them were fabulous we were creating stuff and people were applauding for it and in my heart I can't really tell the difference between 200 people applauding and laughing on a street situation a renaissance festival and 200 people applauding and laughing on Letterman I know intellectually there are hundreds of millions but in my heart I can't tell the difference so no there was no time to give it up because I have no other skills if I do show business I just go to jail who's next? I have to thank you for your work on I found it on YouTube on telling people about the truth of vaccinations and how they work and we need to look at the numbers and what happens when you look at groups that are compared against each other what the truth is thank you for that well yeah thank you on the bullshit show the show that I had to push for the hardest was through the vaccine show and it's a complicated thing to say because bullshit the idea was was always we always had a stand over the internet it was the bullshit of the anti-vaccination people and I had to argue this show time forever and insist that we'd be able to make that sexy and funny and that's why we give the real medical information in the middle it's delivered by a top explorer but thank you the vaccination show is my favorite of all whatever it was 90 bullshit shows thank you please introduce yourself hi my name is Alan Martendale I'm a podcaster and a student filmmaker my question is it really can apply to both of you but this particularly for Brad you seem to have really embraced social media and the crowdfunding and what not how do you think the rest of traditional Hollywood are they adapting to what's going on in social media and the different opportunities Hollywood is always the last to get it in fact you know I don't even know if they've still embraced digital technology yet but I think everybody is looking for a new and exciting alternatives for financing and I do believe truly which is why I do what I do that at some point every film will have some aspect of crowdfunding to it for the social engagement for the ability to have direct communication just like when people that had films refused and I was there to put a facebook page up for their film or a twitter account for their film they were against them in Hollywood and now I don't think there's probably a film out there that doesn't have both we can work with the internet association based in Washington DC I have a question for Penn Gillette with technology being integrated in various industries in really unexpected ways and startups coming out with all these awesome new ideas do you have any plans to further integrate new media into your shows like coming out with an app or a digital trick maybe make my text messages disappear we have got it there's a pen and teller app with a really, really good card trick when we put it out we did put a lot of muscle behind it we had other stuff going on we were watching a tv show and stuff so we didn't do a great deal of support for it and it wasn't wildly successful as an app it didn't sell a zillion it wasn't really successful as a trick and it really fooled the show of our people so yes we did do an app like that you don't want to do technology in a magic show live magic used to be on the forefront of science they would always do stuff with it they were the first to do stuff with ether, electromagnets were first done with movies were first done with magicians and showed as part of magic shows people are so tech savvy that we have never been able even for a second to get ahead of the audience there's nothing that we know about that the whole audience doesn't also know so when it comes to doing the magic show live it's better to stand away from technology and go with good old fashioned lying thank you just a couple more here three more questions there and sharing some time with us my name is Chris Curd and my podcast show is called social media unscrambled and I had a question how do you do that? predict the future of social media do you have any ideas or opinions of what the future is going to bring? it's going to get better next question you're not going to get new breakthrough ideas on social media from someone like me I'm up with that stuff and they'll keep doing it and the one thing that bullshit creeps over and over again and I talked about it on my podcast two things are almost all of these truth one is the world keeps getting better and two is people just keep thinking it's getting worse we're getting better on every front and the stuff we're doing now my children are seven and eight and I'm amazed to just think that they won't be dealing with Twitter or Facebook or anything we have now but there'll be all sorts of better things and it all has to do with it comes down to people the fact that we can communicate instantly with people all over the world and the fact that we can share our hearts with people who aren't the same room with us it's beyond any wild utopian fantasy that any writer or creator has ever had it's all good and it's going to get better thank you guys hey Ben, I'm JP Sturmstreet the smart, energized entrepreneur of my podcast I saw your show last time I was in Vegas I told everybody about it recounting all the tricks and stuff I was completely amazed the question I had is my mom always said never talk about religion or politics man I wish she told me that so my question is you're not so much smoother so my question is did you do that from the beginning or did you wait until you had the big stage before you started speaking your voice on this topic I have always felt that the job of a entertainer, performer artist who would want to do it as Alan Ginsberg said about the poet is to stand naked on stage I believe you're supposed to speak from your heart and I think that that's very good advice your mother gave you like the other advice she gave you very good advice for Thanksgiving dinner with the relatives and very good advice for backyard barbecues but I think if you've decided to go into communication your job is to not hold very much back I hold stuff back a little bit on my family I hold back on how the tricks are done because that's part of my job or I hold back on some of the tricks but I believe that religion and politics are really really really important and I believe the best way to find out your role is to say what you believe to as many people as possible a lot of things I've been corrected on I would not have been corrected on if I didn't shoot my mouth off and I think the best way to find out how what you believe holds up is to hold it up for scrutiny there's a great book called John of the Roush which is called Kindly Inquisitors that really talks very much about taking the marketplace of ideas into the 21st century so I think it's very important about the religion of politics because they matter and the answer to the actual question is I always have that isn't a new thing at all one final question I can't believe I'm the first person to say this but I'm so excited to be making a movie with you and I am a super pimp at Wow Is Me and my actually wasn't a question I just wanted to say you have a heavy influence on my son who figured out how to hack the parental controls on my Tito so he could watch your show so thank you for being such a good influence I want to thank Penn Gillette for your touch them all and I am really was excited to just be a small part of helping you with your picture