Do you want to get paid for your ideas? 3 experts explain how.

You need enough skill to be able to execute it well. And above all you need enough analysis to head in the right direction, because otherwise, like you were saying, you won’t head in the right direction. So it starts first with research and analysis, then comes execution, and you won’t have your blind spots wide open. So the more research you do, the more you try to figure out how this execution is going to work and work well.

What are the best models, the benchmark, and not to call it copying or spying on the [laughs] competitors that work. But beyond that too, the spying, or in any case the benchmarking, of what doesn’t work. Yeah. In what others are trying to do, what’s missing?

What does the community say when they go, “I loved this part of your product but it’s too bad that this and this and this.” And if you do it enough with other competitors, well, you see what works and you see what the audience expects. That’s research, that’s analysis. What does it take for execution? Well, behind that, you need the factory in China and to be able to ship them all over the world.

OK. That means how much, the minimum quantity the factory asks of you to launch your first project? OK, it’s a minimum of 1000, and per unit cost it’s going to cost me 7 dollars. Which is to say at minimum it’s going to cost me 7000 dollars to do that production.

Cool, I keep it in mind. How much is it going to cost me to take my prototype and ship this game all over the world? So there you have to ask for quotes from container shippers and fulfillment centers all over the world to figure out how much it’s going to cost in total and everywhere, even if they’ll never tell you and it’ll never be exactly the right number in the end, but how much do I need to budget precisely to ask my community how much money I need to have? It’s the same thing when you go look at private or public funding.

Yeah. Your file has to be airtight so they say, “Ah, I’m used to receiving this kind of file, it’s heading in the right direction.” They’re able to tell that you need a script, a script breakdown, that you need a producer, that you need such and such a thing. In fact, all the steps these people lay out are legitimate, they know what there is to do.

If you weren’t trained or you didn’t work in this industry before, well, you have to do that research yourself, because if you launch and you say, “But there’s a similar project that was launched, so I should do the same thing,” well, that’s not the finger, that’s the elbow you’ve got in your eye. And there, you’re forced to say to certain people who come to see us and ask me the question, “I’m 30, I’ve got 10,000 dollars to put in, what do I want to do?” Me, generally, without discouraging them, I say, “What are your blind spots? What are your strengths and your weaknesses?” Because every entrepreneur has their strengths, every entrepreneur has their weaknesses, and it’s the same thing for your product and your audience. It often resembles the 3 P’s we use to sell things well.

Know yourself, know your product, know your audience, it’ll go well. You’re going to have to change and readjust, but that’s normal. Readjust. Yeah.

So go on, launch yourself. If you wait for the right moment to launch, there’ll never be one, because it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. You need the skills to make a good plan, but you’ll never have a good plan if you haven’t acquired the skills. You accept the idea of a, from earlier I keep thinking about a link I see in the discussion, that you have scouts, you know, who see a signal in a piece of work and who sometimes put in people who respect precisely those famous constraints of fitting into boxes, but who slip into their project something that they know full well the person who’s going to read it, so you’re going to receive it and go, like, holy crap [laughs], like, he understood, a Trojan horse, you get it, all the way to production where sometimes you fall in love with a project, you know it won’t be profitable, even that you’ll learn nothing from it, and it’s hard to let go even of projects, because your creator’s ego can get mixed up in there. But there, you remember that the signal-launcher was just like, I believe in your project, there’s going to be a lot of work to do, and you’re going to have to let go, you know.

Even for me, I had to let go of the reins of what that project was going to become, because it wasn’t becoming what I wanted, you know. But again, it wanted to be a lot of things, and I’m just coming back to your question to wrap up cleanly, but it was like, you’re 30 and you’ve got 10,000, and you say you’d have made your prototype differently. No, I do the same thing. You do the same thing.

I do the same thing and I propose the same thing to people, actually. Yeah, people are afraid to launch because it’s very frightening. Yeah. And in the end when you do it, yes, you have a very good chance of failing, of having failure.

I have to stop with my anglicisms. I did my studies at UdeM at one point, my professors are going to come pull my ears. [laughs] But it’s going to be difficult and you won’t succeed everywhere. Yeah. But a bit like in role-playing, or in any case the quests of RPGs, tabletop role-playing games as much as pen-and-paper, you either get paid in gold coins or in experience points to level up.

Yeah. And what matters most is to gain experience, because it’s not true that with the skills you have, if you launch somewhere, you won’t make mistakes, because you’re innovating, because you’re doing something you like. So ask to be paid in experience. And that, life will bring it to you.

Ask to be paid as much in gold as you can to survive. But your goal as a young entrepreneur is to endure and to have enough resilience to reach a point where you have complete knowledge of your industry, of your products, of your strengths, your weaknesses, and at the same time things have changed since, because when you launched in 2017, it’s not the same thing on Kickstarter in 2025. You have to keep updating yourself, and it’s much easier to do everything you’re saying if at the base the product, the project, you choose excites you, because if you don’t like what you do and on top of that you’re not paid and on top of that it’s hard, well, everybody quits. Yeah, [laughs] that’s it.

There’s no sense to it. Everybody wants to keep their comfort, their security. And there you’re not doing what you love. It’s very difficult, and on top of that you don’t know the market and you don’t have the skills.

Forget it. So if at least you love what you do, you’ll see everything else. But at least you’ll love the journey. Yeah.

Yeah. And it’s important to love the entrepreneurial journey and not to tell yourself, when I’ve sold my company or when I’ve made millions with such and such a thing, I’ll be happy. No, if you’re not happy now, your whole process and your product won’t be good. You have to love what you do.

You have to be passionate, you have to feel there’s a calling and that you have a vision, that you’re going to bring something, that you’re going to bring something even if it’s not commercial, and even if you tell yourself it’s way too big and ambitious, that’s fine. If I pull it off, and even if we stop now, and even if life is fleeting, at least there’ll be my name on the project I wanted to deliver, and I’m proud of that work. Yeah. And you can’t have that pride if you don’t love what you do and you don’t throw yourself into it completely.

There’s a need for that passion, but there’s also a need for that resilience to tell yourself, I’m an entrepreneur, so I know I’m a skydiver who’s going to assemble his parachute while I’ve already jumped, because I don’t know exactly where it’s going. Use the train analogy too. Uh, I’m a train conductor, but at the same time I have to lay the rails because I’m defining, [laughs] it’s a bit complicated. Charlie Chaplin tried several times and it makes for good auto-logical cinema moments. But it’s a bit like that.

Yeah. You have to do both at the same time and be comfortable in the discomfort. Yeah. Because you’re the one who’s, uh.

You can’t be alone seeing everything and having everything on your shoulders and doing like, no no no. It’s when you say that that you make mistakes. So yeah. The people who are going to have to crash will crash, if you’re risk-averse enough, in any case if you pay enough attention to what you want to do later and you don’t take on personal debt.

That’s the first piece of advice. No personal debt. That’s my advice. [laughs] Never personal debt. If you have debt, if it’s a loan, it’s on your company. OK, because your company can fail, but if you crash and on top of that you have to declare personal bankruptcy, yeah, in my opinion that’s not the same story.

So there you go, I’d just say that. 30 years old, no personal debt for, uh [laughs], very, very good. Yeah, 10K, but don’t, I’m waiting, 30 years old, 10K, 30 years old today or 30 years old back in the day, let’s say we’re talking, if it were today, I’d, for 10,000 bucks there, with, just for a wild show, to see all the money I spent in the past, like, and it now adds up to the value of 10,000 bucks, just to do the metric, but yeah, because we talked about funding on Kickstarter, I do the same thing, I think like you do, like, I did the workshop and with 10,000, well I hadn’t really put in 10,000 at the time, but you know, like, if I’d had 10,000, I’d have hired an illustrator right away and a writer right away, because for context we talked about Kickstarter amounts, but you got funding later, in 2016 we applied to a grant called Multimodal Literacy, which was a grant, well, it had been 10 years that the Canada Council had a grant in educational pedagogy and pedagogical innovation. It was the last of the bastions, it was like the final year. And me, I applied to that fund with a pitch to finish the WS platform, which was a platform of connected orality.

Basically, you read and it triggers nodes in a computational system that makes moving images appear and dynamic soundtracks based on your reading. We pitched that to the Council, who funded it to the max. So I did the five tombs that were missing, that’s it, it was more than the funding, the first funding of Thomas’s Kickstarter. So I’d still like us to put the numbers back into balance, into an equation a bit, because it’s around 200,000, 2100, you know, the max you can go get from the arts council to do a project of that type.

Basically the Council, which funds individuals. Yeah. Mine was more of a cutting-edge project. It was like an example that had to remain, let’s say, in the intangible heritage.

Hm, it’s a Quebec project I’d traveled the world with but that was going to kind of die on a shelf. So I explained the educational context to them a bit. Yeah. How hard it is to get into schools with an interactive multimodal educational project when there isn’t even internet in schools, by the way.

So it was already [laughs] complicated to get into schools with a thing that required an internet connection at the time, perfect. In any case, I won’t really get into the details of integrating that into a school, but it wasn’t the right market. So they said, look, I do have a story, I do have a platform, we can make it sustainable and keep it alive. That’s roughly what they funded.

Yeah, that’s what exists. But it also shows how much they were, uh, down for, I don’t know how, but it was also people, it was people like Lauren at Radio-Canada, a producer who spoke well of me, a guy at Ubisoft who had funded my project, who talked to someone important. Yeah. Uh, at Ubisoft, who made a push, I wouldn’t say political but, you know, who talked to someone of importance, it was Morgan Bouchet, I remember, Morgan Bouchet from Orange who calls me one evening because he talked to my partner, saying, listen, your project has to exist. G, of Orange, you know, VP of communication, who absolutely wants this project to exist, and then you start making threads, you get invited to France, you talk with the VP of innovation of France in front of the prime minister, all sorts of things, and you’re like, OK, maybe my project has some importance, but they were more motivated by the fact that it had importance [laughs], the fact that it had importance in France gave a lot of impact to my return to Quebec, so it took a bit like Robert Lepage, without wanting to say it, but you leave your country and you come back like a prophet, and then when I came back I did South West, I did TEDx.

OK. But after that, again, I’d have needed to meet a producer who believed in my project. Yeah. And who was going to support the exploitation side and what we, what we’re starting to do again, by the way.

Yeah. But you know, it’s another process that would have had to start over. And at that point, I kind of stayed alone in that fading. You know, it’s not because you have a critical success, like I’m telling you. Yeah.

That the market is ready. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who finds a producer who knows the timing and who says, this is it, it’s time.

Right now it’s time because AI is here, because there are things, but you know, back then it was really a battle in the invisible, convincing people that one day those films, you’ll be able to read them. Is it a film or is it an application? And I’d say it’s both. I don’t understand a thing. [laughs] A book in, but wait, he knows this stuff because he makes games, you know, you make games, you make board game applications, but you know, you also know that world, and maybe everything’s going to be mixed together.

Your knowledge, actually, of how people buy and consume something because you do it yourself is important. When you do something that you yourself experience with pleasure, it’s very different from if you were just making a product, I don’t know, porn, you know. [laughs] Ah, but you see, we, uh, we’re working on a video game and we got into the Indie Asylum, and there we just found and just signed a contract with a publisher, and we even traveled to where he lives since, unfortunately, for the moment there really isn’t, in any case, it’s just starting to come out of the ground, a publisher, a Montreal, Quebec video game publisher, so there’s one that just came out and it’s already full, we’re working with them, they’re called Gambit, they do super work, they worked on the exploitation, uh, of Expedition 33, which won every Game Award yesterday. So they’re very competent people. But they, as our publishers, will say precisely that out of 400 publishing requests for projects they receive per month, we cut 80 percent because we sense they’re simply commercial projects.

Ah, that aren’t, uh, driven by a passionate team. That passion, which for them, but for that publisher, for others it’ll be other criteria obviously, but if you’re not passionate about what you do, if you don’t love what you do, and you don’t find people who can fund it, yeah, it stops. And actually that passion, I don’t know how you situate yourself relative to this, but sometimes I have impostor syndrome that tells me passionate people aren’t competent enough people, who try to tick certain boxes precisely to say, look how good my project is, but there’s a little bit of amateurism in there, if you will, at least I had that feeling, and actually there are a lot of people who say your project has to exist, your project, your passion, that’s what holds your team together and makes the thing move forward, sometimes it’s a bit double-edged, because it can lead you precisely into certain intensities of work that can have consequences on mental health. But on the other hand it’s also what lets you tell the difference between real projects that have a real chance and ones that have no soul, you know. Exactly. You need a soul.

Yeah. And I’ve rarely seen a soul in a game without a horcrux having been created. Which is to say you have to put a part of your blood, your tears, your, and your sweat into a project for you to really be able to make that difference, because there’s so much noise, there are 4000 board games that don’t come out. There’s something, it’s, it’s hard to talk about it without a kind of pang or hesitations sometimes to name it.

But when I saw Red Dead Redemption, the game, you know, it’s a game where before the game came out, we’d seen how much the team that made the game suffered, not just creatively, you know, it was an extremely hard game, but it’s a very realistic game. The people who hear this, I’d say it’s a game that, at the storytelling level, is very deep, even, you know, I could criticize Rockstar on the tone of Grand Theft Auto, but in Red Dead Redemption they really pulled off a masterstroke in video games, you know, but I also had the story of how they made the game, and more and more I think, in society, how we make things, how we choose them, how we train people to get to work better, is important too, you know, because me, we just started, we started from the idea of, like, what would you do with 10,000 bucks, and also, had I known to be better prepared, I’d have said, uh, where do I want to go with that 10,000, you know, do I just want to create in a dopamine-driven way, just like a creative release, or do I really want, structurally, strategically, to use that 10,000, you know, in a market I already have, you know, because by having more context, yeah, I’d have added a market context. I’d have added a context of who’s missing from my team, maybe, because I don’t know everything, you know. Yeah, I’d have saved time, actually, by just spending a month or two and maybe spending 10,000 not just on my own stuff, but maybe you’d spend the 10,000, I’d have had to meet this guy. I’d have said, how would you spend the 10,000, or even to Lauren.

Yeah. And just for 2000, I’d have gotten more for my money than staying alone with my opinions and my ideas of the moment. You know, I was very convinced, eh, when I did that, since it was like a dream, it was just, this is what it is, and that’s just, it’s absolutely pointless to do that, you know, and the number of times I went, like, yeah but it’s beautiful, no it’s a beautiful vision, no, of computing, can you imagine if we get there, yeah, and that was just the prototype, prototype like Minority Report but a positive version, you know, like, imagine if it’ll be, it’s beautiful, but poetic, but it got transmitted all the same, you know, there’s, it got transmitted, we, we have it, but it’s true that the people who were in that world in mathematics believed in it, you understand? They’d say, ah, mathematicians, they saw the soul that was in it, you know.

They saw that applied mathematics was going to accelerate with compute. They all knew it was going to happen but not when. Yeah yeah yeah. It just happened faster. [laughs] Yeah.

Laurine, DK, you’re in Montreal? Uh, young today, at 30 years old? No, well me, I’d say, in the end, to be, yes, fairly strategic and to use the system in place, that’s actually very Netflix, by the way, eh. Yes.

Well, it’s context not control, eh. Me, I really liked that at Netflix. It’s, uh, always, always context and never, never being told what to do. Well, after that, it’s true you also have to free yourself a little from the context, because otherwise you do nothing.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s [laughs] it. There you go. But it’s true that I find there are, well, afterward you can tell yourself, yeah, uh, I’m not chosen, I’m not selected.

So seeing all that a bit as enemies or people who don’t want to help us. But I think there are still plenty of things in place. Well, me, I set up these talent programs, and I’d say it can be a possibility, because it lets you confront your idea, precisely, do a bit of R&D on your idea, and also, well, me, I find you shouldn’t give people easy ways to get told no, actually. What do you mean?

Well, actually, these are professions where it’s very difficult because there’s a lot of competition. So if you’re not well prepared, and if you give, if you’re not ready, uh, well, obviously it’s not going to work. Don’t hold out your hand to get slapped. A bit, well, so you might as well be, so sometimes you don’t really know and it’s not super simple either, but I’d also say to be capable, well, and there I’m maybe going to be a bit of a philosopher too, but I mean, for me, beyond the multiple technologies, well, the pipes, well, there’ll be plenty, there’s been, there you go, radio, the internet, soon we’ll have the, the glasses, well, I mean it’s going to be wonderful, incredible things, but in the end, me, what I believe in, I think for thousands of years it’s been this, humans. Why do they need stories?

It’s really the story of Via. There were so many technological variations, but in the end it’s the story of Via that touches people and endures, you know. What works is that it’s a human experience. You tell something human to other humans, and that’s what makes it fascinating and exciting.

It’s true, it’s the notion of format that has become fluid, because you know, a game stays a story you tell with your friends, and you’re the narrator, and in R it’s also, it’s you, the narrator, and if I’d been able to detach from my own story and say, tell yours, because the idea was just, become the narrator of the film, you know, it’s like, well, there was someone who’d seen it at TIFF, who’d seen the film, and there was a silence in the crowd, because most people, when they saw it for the first time, didn’t understand what they’d just experienced. That’s already, like, pretty chatbot for the first time, and then not to understand that it’s real, let’s say, and not to understand that it’s just a prediction and not anything other than a text hallucination, but that you let yourself be cognitively seduced, so there he’d said it’s like the 18th century when people, uh, narrated the film, there wasn’t audio yet. There were people who got up on stage to narrate the film, but there’s someone who said it’s the same as a good liar, a benshi. And there, I was like, ah, that’s interesting. Maybe I’m bringing back things from the 18th century, because what’s retro [laughs] innovation, like a board game, it’s freaking fucking popular, more than video games, in card games and board games, it’s already been as big as video games.

And in Korea and in Asia, it’s huge there. Actually, you know, there’s plenty of potential to say that, ah, a format that’s snubbed today could come back into fashion, nothing is created, everything is transformed. Uh, we always reinvent the wheel telling ourselves, whoa, this wheel is really good. [laughs] But in the end, the next wheel will be better. And I don’t know how you situate yourselves, precisely, regarding this impostor syndrome when you launch into this.

For me, it was something pretty, pretty strong, actually, because I find that where you need preparation and help and analysis, uh, it’s not the same skills used when you’re an entrepreneur for the first time, when you’re an entrepreneur after several successes and failures and so on. And then, once you’ve succeeded enough in your entrepreneurship, you become a business manager. And there, you become a business manager and you want to become a business manager who has succeeded at several, uh, projects and so on. And each time it’s different trades.

As an entrepreneur, yes, you’re a scout, but on top of that you have to say, hm, this year I’m going to learn a new trade, I’ll learn marketing, logistics, I’ll, and it’s endless. And actually at one point you’re like, wait, am I really in charge of logistics, or did I just help, did I find a good plan and it’s heading in the right direction, and in the end things change. I was like, ah no, actually I wasn’t so bad. But being able to move forward and come back with enough introspection, me, I know that’s pretty much my strength. It’s what lets me, precisely, tell myself, wait 2 seconds, where am I?

What do I want to obtain? What are our objectives? Above all, the way I want to do it, because if it’s to cross the finish line all alone, that doesn’t interest me. If it’s without my partner and the rest of my team, that doesn’t interest me.

If it’s to lie, to cheat, yes, short-term, at certain moments, I can say, don’t worry, let it pass. Yeah. Yeah. But you pay for it three times more dearly later.

And in the end, there’s nothing more expensive than working with amateurs, and there’s nothing more expensive than precisely launching and telling yourself, “It’ll work, don’t worry, we’ll find a solution.” But at the same time, you have to tell yourself that, because there are plenty of things that, and this kind of gray zone of, “Wait, am I full of bullshit, or [laughs] on the contrary am I starting to have enough traction, enough legitimacy, to reassure myself?” Yeah. If you’ve got the solution for that, I’ll take it. [laughs] So precisely, what’s the dynamic with your partner regarding that? Regarding the, it’s, uh, we’re from the same forest but not the same wood. He’s a marathon runner and I’m a sprinter.

I could use other images for [laughs] the difference, but we’re very complementary. That’s exactly why we went into business together right from the start, actually. It’s that, yeah, he was, Gary is a creative director who worked in advertising, so graphic design, but art direction, art, writing, and then we did game design together for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th game, and at one point I had to let go. I already had a game design team, I couldn’t handle the grants, the biz, the sales, the, I had to let go of game design, which at the base was what had motivated me to get into this.

I had to transform myself back into corporate when I’d left corporate to become an entrepreneur. The loop. And that loop, in the end, when you try to close it and you try to move forward, and you absolutely have to be transparent with your partner. For me, the partner is super important.

It’s a, when I see a duo in entrepreneurship, an old one that has enough mileage together, it’s that you’re going to be together, you against the rest of the world, more or less, whether at the economic level, the political level, the governmental, societal level, whatever you want. If you’re not capable of having absolute trust in each other, like, we’re together, we’re moving forward in this, and one of you leaves the ship, that puts you twice as deep in it as if you’d stayed alone. I agree with the theory of the duo and supporting it. Me, all my big things, all my other companies, duos, even trios with a CFO.

If you add someone financial who thinks completely left field, or an ontological aratologist, you know, like someone who looks at even your business, like, ontologically, it’s OK, there’s an interview, you’re coming back to the mic. [laughs] There’s an interview, there are two humans talking to each other. What’s happening? You know, like someone who does ontological prod, but, well, you have to be capable of describing the entire ontology of a domain for your AI to be performant. When you, rewrite, define ontology, because I think for the majority of people, the film professions, it’s broad, right, well, an ontology comprises the entire exact explanation of what a film profession is, so, figure it out, it means human resources does such an activity to obtain such an impact, with such a deliverable that looks like this, and that’s validated by a person called an evaluator, who’s tied to an industry policy, tied to a finance law for national sovereignty [laughs], whose president signed yesterday evening the interest, so it’s ontological, but everyone does that without naming it like that, OK, eat that for breakfast, me, this year I trained a screenwriter, a director, someone to write, someone to do research, just to see whether, indeed, when you teach, you do a bit of ontology, but you know, you transfer knowledge, you make course structures, you say, learn this, practice that. There, the AI is going to learn our trades like that, but it’s also going to respect, maybe, the craft or the art direction of someone who learns to explain well what they do.

You know, it’s going to, for me, it’s only going to develop the trades better for those who practice them, really like you or even like you, but it’ll have to be from them that education through AI happens. It’s going to be a personal relationship with, it won’t be a school that trains people for that. Yeah, it’s going to be your relationship with the AI that’s going to be important. Yeah, the way you give it your things, the way you accept or don’t your relationship with it.

It’s very relational, AI, in my opinion. The future of AI is going to be that, that’s really where we’re heading. Yeah. How much each person is going to choose to interact with it is going to be the recipe unique to each one.

Yeah, I don’t know if there’ll be a sovereignty of usage, like, this is how we use it, but I’m not sure, like each person brushes their teeth differently, but I swear I [laughs] think that no, despite the dentists’ ads that say three times a day, in my opinion we’re going to learn things from each other, you know, I could say how you use AI, interesting, you know, how I use it, and it’s a bit like, that’s it, human relationships are as complex as our relationship to, it’s, it’s another entity, it’s another intelligence, like talking to a dolphin, you know, or a dog, it’s like, there’s something happening but we don’t yet know what it is. It’s not entirely rational because it’s a predictive engine, the, it’s, it’s statistics, so it’s completely fucked up that we think it’s true. Yeah, for sure. That’s just how it works.

We accept it when we talk. Me, I’m blown away by your story. I’m blown away by your story, I see links. OK.

But the AI also sees links, but different from us, on top of it. So it’s, like, just interesting if you’re curious and well prepared to say, OK, we’re well structured, we have our creative plan, our R, we’re going to ask it what it thinks, and there it gives us possibilities, the blind spots, it’s pretty good for, we wouldn’t have thought of that, you know, but it’s like having a madman on the team, you know, you just have to choose whether it’s the time or not, it takes someone rational who says, whoa, that has nothing to do with what we’re doing, it takes someone, AI, who says, too early, yeah, too early, the world, I’m not sure the world wants to get, uh, force-fed AI right now and to think that we’re going to replace the entire image industry. You know, I think there are trades all over the world that want to be protected. A lot of pushback. Yeah, indeed, so there’s respect for the people who do the job and who are going to have to learn, like I had to learn this year, to transfer things toward that, because otherwise, well, I don’t exist anymore.

Me, building a website, a 22-year-old kid can do the job I did last year with one prompt. [laughs] I still have to bring value in my interventions. I have to figure out who I’m talking to and how I educate them, because the scaffolding is going to move fast in this. Since it’s moving too fast, there are a lot of charlatans setting up in the industry, and I can make a film for 5000, but good luck. I can maybe make a game for cheaper.

But have you thought about the container? I’m not sure that handling, it kind of ties in with what you were saying before about all the upfront preparation and all that. It’s, it’s colossal, actually. We don’t realize it because, necessarily, we were forced to have communication that’s positive, inclusive, because our community, we want to take care of it.

It’s even at a, if only at a financial level. You don’t want to turn against you the people who support you and who fund your projects. But beyond that, you also have to manage that community. And that community manages itself, sometimes in a toxic way.

You still have to manage that. And no matter how much you try to anticipate everything as much as possible, uh, even if you work with an IP, for example, and you take the exploitation rights and you’re able to go see the licence holder, who says, hm, I quite like your project, here are the terms, let’s keep talking, you do a first meeting, a second, a third, a fourth, finally it’s validated, you send him a pitch, he says, “Fantastic, here’s the minimum guaranteed royalty I want and the percentage you have to pay me on such and such a thing.” OK. Already, to get to that level, it’s a lot of discussions and a lot of weeks and months of back and forth.

But yes, you grab that community in the good sense but also in the bad, because that community already exists, it’s already formed, it already has expectations. If you don’t respond, hm, there’ll be some who say, “This game sucks because I’d have preferred another one come out the way I’m expecting it. I don’t want the people in my community to spend money here.” And actually they’re, they’re people who are precisely looking to have problems. If you have a hammer in your hands all day, you’re going to see nails everywhere. [laughs] That’s a little bit what can happen with toxicity in certain communities.

There are statistics that are mind-blowing. Us, no matter how we grow, we always have 0.5 percent of our community that’s sometimes legitimately angry. OK. And expresses it in an absolutely public way.

Yeah. And they’re going to ask a question they want to answer themselves. Even if I answered the same question, the same query, the same timeline, the same thing on the previous post or comment, no, he wants me to answer him, personally. Even if it’s the same question.

There are demands that come with that community. When precisely you work with an intellectual property and you take, because it’s a shortcut to take a property, yeah, whether you’re passionate about it or you’re just alive and you saw there was a profitable exploitation that could be made of it. There are advantages and disadvantages. Yeah.

The disadvantage of an IP is generally managing the expectations, precisely, of the licence owners, and there are others behind them. And that’s going to depend on each licence you take, because if you work with Harry Potter, yeah. It’s not going to be the same problem, because they’re very, very, very, very, very enthusiastic. On the other hand, it’s not going to be the same royalty percentages on your net sales that they’re going to ask of you.

Yeah. Uh, you can take a lower licence, it’ll ask less potential royalty of you. And for those who are wondering, hm, they’re talking about royalties, I’d really love to learn during this podcast what that looks like. On average in the game industry and the board game and toy and the video game industry, in terms of royalties, it goes from a minimum of 5 percent of net sales up to 25 percent when you have a licence where you could just slap the licence on and it would sell the same. OK?

There you go, that kind of IP asks 25 percent, uh, of your net sales. So if you sell it directly to a consumer, you owe them 25 percent of that net sale without deducting production, logistics, and so on. There are others. It’s going to be much more, there you go.

And the containers, and these, the containers are a topic, but this kind of entrepreneur’s headache, well, it’s every year, it’s every day, it’s every week, it’s every month, and always in an unpredictable way. For example, we’re in January. We’re in January, it’s been a year and a half that we’ve been in contract negotiations with one of the biggest distributors in the world. And there, all of a sudden, there’s a, uh, political power grab by an elected official, uh, who lives south of our Canadian border, uh, who decides to put American tariffs in place.

And well, that, since it gives no visibility on the cost of production and the tariffs they’re going to apply because it wasn’t clear enough, all my distributors said, “Hi, I’m not taking any games because I don’t know at all what hit I’m going to take. So I’m going to focus on 20 percent of my products that bring 80 percent of my revenue, and I’m not going to take any risk, because if I make a calculation error, I’m dead.” That’s a legitimate response. That’s legitimate reasoning.

And well, that, if you’d planned your cashflow with that contract, because it’s your distributor from the very start. Yeah. Surprise, it’s another surprise, and the more you arrive in an industry in recession, the more it’s the case, the more this kind of problem happens. So it’s also something I want to pass on to those who are listening. An economic recession, an economic depression changes and reshuffles the cards of a specific industry.

If you’re at the very bottom of that ladder, chaos is a ladder. You can try to grab, uh, things, but it’s going to be even more tumultuous. No matter how solid your boat is, you can’t manage the sea. Yeah. So you try to do your best depending on, the IP is another kind of sea, uh, where you precisely have to play with that community.

Yeah. Integrate it, but at the same time it stays your vision. So when there’s a question of control and creative freedom, that’s why it’s super important to go and find out precisely what kind of licence, with whom you’re going to work. Because if you go work with a licence and that, from the very start of the communication, oh my, it’s unpleasant to talk with them, and you’re going to work for years with them and send them royalty reports and so on, well, it’s not going to be pleasant.

Whereas when it goes well and you have the same passion, you have the same passion for that licence, well, things already go well. Your contract, it’s there. To protect you when things go badly. So your contract is there to protect and to talk about all the things. If it doesn’t go in the right direction as planned, here’s what we commit to, and what, there, you have to tell yourself, I don’t feel like annoying the licence, I want [laughs], I want it to, I want this to get signed, you see.

I want to make this game. Except that if in their contract there are terms that say, hm, a few years from now, this is going to be a big problem, ask yourself the question. Do you want to put that much energy into building someone else’s intellectual property? Hm hm. And to have problems.

Whereas on top of that, working with this licence isn’t pleasant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It’s the kind of conversation you’re forced to have with yourself. You do it for the money, you do it for the passion, but do you do it short- and medium-term? It’s also a dynamic to think through. Us, we got lucky because we’re big fans of all the games we make, but we precisely have that economic stability that lets us take and choose the projects we love.

Yeah. Yeah. But it’s the chicken and the, that’s why passion is super important. That’s why even going toward an IP is a cost and a benefit.

But you have to be aware of that cost and that benefit. And there it’s again a part of analysis you’re forced to do. How do the other people, for example, who have used and exploited that same licence feel about it? Contact them.

Yeah, it’s true. You did this project, this project, this project, there are maybe 10 who’ve done it. There are maybe five who’ll answer you. There are maybe three who’ll give you a real answer.

Yeah, but maybe the three, they can tell you it’s going very, very, very badly. And there, all of a sudden, you have a wake-up call that says, hm, maybe avoid. If there are three, if the three say, no, we loved working with them and we want to keep doing it. Yeah.

Well, that gives a good direction. It’s a bit like a partner, in the end. It’s a partner. A business one, but where there’s no equity sharing, except we share the same project and you’re forced to follow directives. For example, in Vampire the Masquerade, vampires don’t heal.

OK? They’re the undead. So they can’t heal and increase their number of life points. On the other hand, since their body decays, they can repair it.

So if they repair their body with blood, we’ll say mend damage, so repair damage and not heal. Well, that’s one of the directives in precisely the charters we have to follow with the licence. We have to make sure that all the vocabulary, the lexicon, follows that licence, because it can’t have a dissonance with your work. It has to be consistent.

So there again it’s, it’s, what are your IP directives, your intellectual property ones? What do I have to comply with to be able to make this kind of product? And there, it’s really going to depend on the licence you choose, because there’s the difference between it goes well, yeah. And, hm, there, it goes badly.

And there, how do you make it go well? But you see, me, that’s why having a producer is really important, because mine, I didn’t have a producer, what happened is the territorial claiming, it’s, lots of people interested in your project for all sorts of reasons, but they make you drift, you, that means they’re not there for the project, they’re there for their own interests. It’s hard to read all the time how to choose your producer, but the producer makes those choices much earlier than you. And when things come up like trying to grab the direction of a project, he’s just going to go, like, look, we don’t make theater plays.

Yeah, it’s not a project for schools. Tabarnak, the attention, [laughs] it’s supposed to be a story told in a film. We’ve done 26,000 other things. Well, the producer can do that channeling because it’s actually his pleasure, uh, to manage this kind of thing, but I wouldn’t say always a pleasure, but his capacity to do it for a long time and sustainably.

Yeah yeah, whereas the creative side, me, once the project was created, it was like, but it’s long [laughs], it’s way too long, you know, that’s why me, the AIs, I dreamed about them, almost, but you know, I mean, I’m not yet convinced it’s going to be well received, but we’re going to see with Disney, but uh, with Avatar, which has plenty of things in it, but you know, I think we’re going to get used to being confronted with those images soon too. Yeah yeah yeah, much more often than we’d want. And at the same time, we’re going to start to notice the craft, we’re going to start to see the real, and then the glitches, and we’re going to say, uh, that people are going to come back to games, in my opinion, they’re going to come back to complex and philosophical films of the soul, because, like, we want to be embodied in something. Yeah, that’s it.

It won’t have the same value. We’re going to see films, probably, that are extreme and provocative on every level, because the human is going to want to express something in there. Even being able to put out your own film by saying, hm, I’d really love it tonight if you’d put out a film with such a theme, such a thing, and in the end it’s doable, the problem is it consumes an enormous amount of energy too, a slop that’s real, a lot of fake news connected to that, and in a way even societally, we’re on a, and sorry to my dear professors at UdeM, but I don’t have the word, the word in French doesn’t come to me, and I’m afraid it’s not the same semantics, but an antification of society, we try so hard, precisely, to be as efficient as possible and to have the most profit, that we put out more and more products that have planned obsolescence and that have, how to say, that have life cycles that are shorter and shorter and more and more fragile in a certain way. That worries me a lot at the level of intellectual property. I think there are a lot of people who consider AI as something radioactive for the moment, because there’s still a lot of, how to say, progression in the face of the fear of change.

It’s that, yes, we realize that translators, right now, well, their job is done four times faster by AI. Yes, but the details, the devil is in the details, and that cognitive dissonance you can have precisely with that suspension of a narrative work, it pulls you completely out when you see, for example, in a video game, that a character who should be feminine is translated with a masculine pronoun. Clearly because the translation was automated that way, and well, it’s just a detail, but it pulls you out of the work immediately. Yeah.

Yeah, but I think, well, it’s true that on AI, me, I find that today there’s a frenzy, a gold rush. Well, I mean, we saw it for the Internet in the 2000s, we saw it for tulips a very long time ago. Well, I mean there you go, there are phenomena. We’ve gotten to talking about tulips and the first crash. [laughs] No, but there you go, I think it’s human, there’s a form of attraction, and at the same time, it’s normal.

Every new technology is also very exciting. After that, I think little by little it’s going to integrate. Me, fundamentally, I think that on creation, in any case, AI, as you were saying, is statistics that make averages, and creation is the opposite, that is to say it’s a unique vision with a roughness, whether for commercial or niche projects, well, whatever the project, you need a gaze, a human gaze, and that, well, it’ll be able to help, certainly, do things, but it’ll be able, in any case, I, well, I think there’s a bit of a fantasy today of this idea of the replacement creator, there’s a fantasy in the industry, actually. But fantastic, the people who build these systems, as much robotics as research in neuroscience, you know, at M, it’s, they’re seeking to embody the machine, right, they’re seeking to make a robot with that, not caring much about the human, they learn from us, but yeah, the end goal of that is a robot that has something inside, that has senses, that sees, that learns like us, they don’t care much about us, so when they put that out, it’s very dangerous, actually, how we get it introduced to us, because as you were saying earlier, people aren’t entirely ready at all, we weren’t educated for that.

Yeah, the Internet, we had 20 years to prepare. Yeah, it’s true. It was much simpler as complexity than AI. Because the Internet was simple, it was relative.

Yeah, it’s clear, relative to AI, it was really simpler as a revolution, it was big. And we’re all still dependent on the Internet, which I believe today has helped us all in our work, in the end. And you can stream it on the Internet, that’s all. You’re simple.

Now, we can put a film on the Internet. We can make a game, you can do your marketing on the Internet. You can download a film faster than you have time to watch it. [laughs] For those who knew Napster, it’s, whoa. It’s quite a leap forward all the same.

And it’s exponential. But, but I want to finish on the point that, you know, you were saying I don’t even know where we are in the line, I think we were talking about IP a lot, but you know, me, I say my IP now, for me it’s the founding prompt I make when I make a piece of software, that now if I take a piece of software that would have taken me 3 months to make before, I can make it in a week with a sentence that describes very well what the software should look like in the end, it’ll have 20 sections, it’ll have two questionnaires. Here are the Excel files, here’s who’s going to use it. I describe, actually, the pitch I’d have given to a team of developers, and then I send that.

That’s my IP. I save that with my client. That’s the unique command no one can replicate. It’s yours.

It’s signed on such a date. We send that to the lawyer for an affidavit. It’s your founding prompt. That’s it.

The proof of that is that there are people who’ve done doctoral theses from a transcript. So that’s the transcript of the thesis that was produced, of 150 pages. Give that to Gemini 3, it produces the same thing, the same thing as what the guy did over 3 years of his life. So I’m just bringing back the completely crazy idea that, indeed, there’s a fantasy of saying it’s going to keep going like this and there won’t be a crash, but OpenAI won’t make money for 30 years, and we’re talking billions a month, so there are going to be crashes coming regarding that, but disillusionments, maybe disillusionments, but the fantasy of continuing to develop thinking machines is going to continue through those people who want, at all costs, yeah yeah yeah yeah, uh, to mathematize this creativity that we call human, but you know, it’s trying to replicate us, it’s trying to imitate us, but maybe not just to replace us.

That’s what I mean, it’s, me, I see it as an opportunity right now to find another form of IP, to find a way to protect other things, to protect the trades. Not to protect just ideas and stories, but to protect those who make the stories, and the trades. So protect the method, protect your way of making decisions, protect your way of reading a script. Yeah.

Or yeah. Well, your name, you know, uh, personal IPs, like, me, my way of reading a script, that’s my strength. Me, it’s the crazy metric way I manage to make a game profitable in the first place, it’s knowing how to do the containers, you laugh, but it’s, it’s an important part, doing the containers, much more than even making the game, the game is now down to 10 percent of your life, and then, ah no, you’ve solved all the other problems for it to exist. That’s exactly it. [laughs] With my partner, generally we take a “lake on our shoulders,” so a cabin, where we set ourselves up for three days where we cut everything off, precisely, and we create new games, we create new games, and then afterward we test them.

OK, this works, this doesn’t work, after that we have a whole timeline, so necessarily we’re not going to go off into completely crazy IPs when we know that our next two projects are going to be with Paradox and Ubisoft, for example, no, that’s in 5 years. Let’s not waste time, you see. But in those moments, indeed, that’s where all the creativity comes out. And then afterward the work begins, because everyone’s excited to create something, and then everyone’s going to say, “I created an extraordinary board game.” You see, it’s the mix of this and that, it doesn’t exist. Yes, one, it doesn’t exist for a good reason. [laughs] Because it’s not because something didn’t exist that you’re going to be capable of technically surpassing everything that makes it so you’ll be able to present your project publicly to other people.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to work if you make it. It’s not because, on top of that, you fund it that it’s really going to come out of the ground, because on Kickstarter it’s crowdfunding. Which is to say that if, normally, you’re capable of producing it, well, you have to produce it, because your reputation and your company are in danger if you don’t. But if you don’t manage it, you’re not criminally liable.

So you have people who cheat, you have people who lie, you have people who steal, you have people who really think they’re going to be capable of making this project. But of course it’s going to work. Containers have been at 4000 dollars for, uh, for 25 years. Yeah.

Yeah. But had we thought about Covid? No. And nobody [laughs], and actually you’re forced to adapt.

You’re forced to adapt and to survive. That’s why, if you always go tapis, all in, on all your projects every time, and you never, precisely, put aside money, reserves, and a little bit of prudence in the management of your operations, with a producer who knows how to do it, who’s capable of saying, “We’re going to keep 10 to 20 percent of this budget aside because it’s the first or the second time you’re doing it. If it were really your first, I’d have put 30 percent.” But the deadlines, the timelines, and the budgets, you have no experience in that. You’re going to crash, you’re going to be late.

Us, at Kickstarter, the advantage is that it’s a little bit part of that culture too. There’s no project that doesn’t arrive a year late. And not because everyone tells themselves everyone’s late, I can be late. No, everyone really tries to follow that deadline, but in fact you realize, wait, but the playtest is much more important than that, the first read-through, for example, of The Fugitive, there were, what, 54, 55, and until the last moment of the writing of that film, they still didn’t know whether the hero was really going to be a murderer or not, there’s rework, rework, re-re-re, at one point it’s like, am I going to be able to predict it, not really, more and more, I’m going to be able to avoid making mistakes.

And that in itself is already enough. But if you don’t, precisely, have a cross-functional skill on your team that can support your blind spots, you’re going to crash. Are you going to be able to grow and learn? No, there was nobody who was good at logistics.

I had to learn logistics. There was nobody who was very good at marketing. We had to be strong at marketing together, and each time, actually, it’s like, can you take it on? Can you add more?

But how many hats do you have? Yes, you’re creative, but you’re also this, and then you’re also that. And there’s a lot to work on in there. Managing a licence as an additional thing in that process, that can indeed be a trap, it can be too expensive, you can lack support, you can lack time, you can be, they can, the licence can be very, very, very hard on those deadlines and impact you financially.

Us, that’s not the case, because we work with people we feel like working with, we’re passionate, they understand it, but it precisely requires having connections with people proactively, doing networking, and in 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, you find yourself talking to that person. It had been 3, 4 years you hadn’t spoken to him, and there you both realize there’s a synchronicity in your careers, in your projects. But actually, if you hadn’t spoken to him 3, 4 years ago and you hadn’t put in that time saying maybe one day something will come of this, well, you don’t have that opportunity. Us, we’re living that with investors right now.

The seeds, you’re like, whoa. I didn’t think that this person I’d seen 9 years ago, who’d been the only [laughs] person to really not stab us in the back when we’d started, who on the contrary helped us, but it’s that person now who’s going to invest in us. And sometimes, ah, that path, even he hadn’t seen it, he didn’t even know he’d still be around, uh, a few years from now. But that’s why it’s super important to be transparent, to be passionate, and to be courageous, or in any case resilient.

And it’s true that, well, to continue on that, I find too that it’s important to talk about it, the fantasy about AI, but there’s also the fantasy of the creator wanting to be, right away, well, me, I remember among the young screenwriters who came to Series Lab, they wanted to be showrunners right away. Showrunner, showrunner, it’s in general, and on top of that in the United States, precisely the role where you’re both creative and producer. Well, so it’s a, it’s very specific, showrunner, it’s really because it’s different in France when, yes, it’s very different in France. There’s no equivalent, or even in Europe.

Well, us, we worked a lot on that, precisely, to see whether these are skills you can combine or not. But, well, in any case, just to say, there’s also the matter of developing your know-how. There are the ideas you can have, uh, so maybe not having only one idea but also several ideas, but also learning your trade. If you want to be a screenwriter, you can also go to the workshops, the writers’ rooms, work with others, learn alongside those who’ve been doing it for several years.

It’s not committing yourself. And it’s true that sometimes there’s a bit of this idea too of, me, I want to do my project. I understand, obviously, being driven by a project, it’s, we were talking about passion, well, it’s important, but I think you can also be a little, uh, yes. Well, tell yourself, OK, maybe I’ll be a little modest and, rather than doing a sprint. Know that it’s a, to use your metaphors, that it’s a marathon and that there’s still a temporality.

It’s still projects, well, unless you have a, it can happen, eh, you can be Xavier Dolan and make extraordinary films since you’re 18. Well, there are, there are sorts of people like that who emerge, it’s a bit crazy, but otherwise, it’s true that creative project developments are still long stretches of time, actually, and so I agree that even if there’s the excitement of the start, you also have to anticipate by telling yourself, “OK, well, it’s going to be long, I need to have people I can lean on professionally but also, there you go, who are going to support me, and learn, and not be, well, there you go, learn about trades, if you want to be a screenwriter, be a screenwriter,” well, I think it’s also interesting to have that approach. I’d even say, I was making the marathon metaphor, me, it’s when I was in cinema, I was a film student at the University of Montreal, and then I became an assistant director on every set rather than director, because I wanted to know everything a director was not supposed to do. Ah yeah, because you know, the director is supposed to be focused on directing actors.

Yeah. And on a fine reading of the script, of the environment, and of the setup, and it’s using the present moment with the actors and not being disturbed by the technical side, you know, but it remains that sometimes I’d associated the director with everything, but the one who sweats the most is, like, the assistant director handles the camera, the sound, he manages the crises, he manages everything, actually, what I thought was the most interesting job, it wasn’t the director’s, which I took for granted, that someone who knows narratology and directing actors knows how to do the rest, but no, the one who knows how to do the rest is the assistant director in the background, who also learns to read the script, to talk to the girl who takes the notes, you know, who checks what’s changed in the script, all the trades, the assistant director. Yeah. Me, I tell people, if you find yourself in a business, go be a sandbag placer, putting bags on a spot. What’s the best piece of advice? Place sandbags on spots, my guy.

You’re going to hear all the DOPs’ conversations who [laughs] criticize the camera, you’re going to hear the sound recordist who criticizes the choice of location. Yeah. You’re going to learn everything, why each one is unique, and there, that’s imperative to know in screenwriting, because when you write or when you read a script, you know it’s going to cost to do this, or you even know the location scouting, on certain films now, maybe it’s less complicated because we can invent people, environments, but you know, it still takes someone who reads between the lines, that, that’s a 1-million script there, that’s, whoa, you know, 10,000 bucks, you know, and we can shoot that in a car with a YouTube camera, with a camera. Now, we make films on an iPhone, but you know, there are films that can be scripted to be conceived for an iPhone.

You know, these are trades that evolve fast, you know. Good metaphor. Uh, a quick word about the pool, Thomas. A quick word about the pool.

Uh, well, I’m going to be very sincere. I’m full of cognitive biases like everyone, [laughs] but I have an obvious attachment to the pool, since since 2015, actually, the pool accompanies and stimulates and gives value to the creative and cultural economy. In Quebec in all its diversity. And us, when we left in 2017 to make our first game, starting in 2018, I started going to knock here and there on all the grants that existed, uh, the nonprofits that could precisely give us funding but also mentorship, advice, but also how it gets us into a cross-functional industry like that of video games. And everyone closed their doors on us.

Really, we knocked everywhere, we weren’t legitimate, we’d done two Kickstarter campaigns. That’s nice, guys, but are you full-time? Do you have a board of directors? Where are you at with your cap table?

Excuse me? No, I’m, I’m not there yet, actually. And when we were there and we played the game and we went full-time, we worked like crazy. We did this crowdfunding campaign, uh, on Vampire the Masquerade Chapter, which takes place in Montreal, and since we had a game that was set in Montreal, we thought we’d have other grants, and no, still nothing.

Uh, and it took a day of letting go, of going, precisely, uh, and I’m even surprised to be telling this story, but uh, I took a day, a day of rest in that crazy month, which was, uh, I think July 2023, and I go with a friend who, uh, brings his girlfriend, and his girlfriend works at the pool, and her friend brings one of her colleagues from the pool. That’s how I met, here, Camille Bertin and Audré, who worked here before. And it had been years that I was knocking on every door, and when one finally opened, it was in the middle of Osheaga, in the middle of the crowd with some, “I heard about Fly. Can you tell me a little about what’s happening?”

Ah yes, and actually it takes people like that, passionate, who want to grow the cultural and creative industries in, they even work right in the middle of a concert. Exactly. Exactly. And we met afterward, and then we, we took part in a first program that actually let us, uh, expose the technology we were in the process of creating. Yeah. And then afterward to introduce us to mentors in the video game industry in which we wanted to evolve, and to cover, all the same, the biggest part by percentage of what a specialized mentor costs, who’s going to tell you, here’s, if you go in this direction, all the traps avoided, all the things you have to have.

That accompaniment, beyond the funding too, which we got on a specific campaign to go ask for help in, in marketing. The pool, it was there with us at a moment when no one was there. Since then, it’s a place where everyone gathers, precisely, to exchange, to talk together about everything that’s happening at the cultural level, to create those connections, and to bring in people who are part of this industry, who want to bring something. The pool, since we got precisely all that help, well, all the other forms of help have since opened up. Actually, they were the first to open up, to trust us, to listen to us, and to take the time, because it’s very complicated to educate people who don’t understand something that’s innovative, like precisely, well, potentially even Piti, or the technology we created.

And at that point, there have to be people who are really competent, who want to put in that energy and to understand us. And the pool was really that first step, that first stair in our staircase of growth. It let us, for example, meet the first producer of Assassin’s Creed, to tell us, here’s what’s going to happen in production, here are all the traps to avoid. But also to meet, for example, Pierre Moisan, who tells us, in the industry, here are all the people you have to understand, and here’s how it works.

You have to go to ADC in 2025, you have to go here, you have to, I have to invite you, and there at that point, ah, you work with the pool, cool, well I’m going to introduce you to the, I’m going to introduce you to Investissement Québec, I, and actually it’s the first door. The hardest part is to start, it’s to open that first door. And for that, well, the pool was there for us. At a moment when we needed it, and it continues to be.

We had, uh, several, uh, several mentors with them. At the same point, at one moment, to stop, we’re maybe going to leave the place to people younger than us, you know, [laughs] minute. And, and that’s what we do. And then we even sometimes have serendipity with people who say, “I contacted people at PME Montréal who sent me to the pool, and finally I got your email and I’m going to do a Kickstarter campaign.” And sometimes it’s just, uh, through the pool that sends them to us.

And even if we’re no longer actively part of the pool’s programs, since it changes every year, whether it’s the deep dive, whether it’s the digital transformation, transition, and all the other opportunities that the pool precisely gives to creative and cultural businesses. Uh, I have eternal love, obviously, for, for the pool. We’re here today, on top of it. Uh, yeah, it was, it was a defining moment that precisely let us grow at a moment when we needed it, when we needed help.

Yeah. And uh, and for that, I obviously have gratitude and humility regarding this situation, because if I’m sick that day and I don’t go to Osheaga, I’m not here today, or here in the end. And that’s a lot of things you learn precisely in entrepreneurship. It’s, sometimes you, you don’t know exactly why. Yeah.

The networking at a 5-to-7 at the end of December or end of November. You’d really like to go home and spend time with your friend, your family, your partner, your spouse, whatever. Yeah, well, that day, it was worth it. And then maybe that day it wasn’t worth it, but maybe in several years, ah yeah, what you were saying before.

That’s why you have to plant plenty of little sprouts everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. And you also have to ask for help from people you feel like working with, whether in licences at the intellectual property level, but also with all the nonprofit associations that exist in Quebec and that protect our culture, the French language, but there’s the Guild of Quebec Video Games that protects, specifically, the guild.

But there wasn’t that for board games. Ah yes! And so there, all of a sudden, we find ourselves helped at the pool. We get into a guild, we get into the Indie.

Wait, but what is this level of support and, and well, that’s all precisely the associative network that exists in Montreal, there’s, knock on every door. And us, the one that opened first was the pool. So officially, thank you, pool. Bravo, pool.

And on top of it, it’s super well explained what it’s for and how you can use it. So there you go. Thank you, Thomas. With great pleasure.

Uh, we’re going to wrap up. I think we did, uh, a nice, uh, there you go, we explained a little bit the different pros and cons of each way, uh, of, of experiencing IP, let’s say. [music] Talking about impact, about what we’re really trying to do, basically, in doing projects, whatever the trade. The mark you want to leave. Yeah, I’d add some, perfect. [laughs] Go ahead, we can go around the table. Yeah.

Uh, well, me, I’d say maybe it’s true that I got less attached to a project than to trying to [laughs] be the white knight trying to change a system. Yeah. Uh, well, it’s true that I don’t know what it’ll become and there you go, it’s very modest, my little contribution and my stone, but it’s true that at one point I told myself, uh, there you go, why are things the way they are, maybe we can do it differently. And it’s true that I believe a lot, again, well, I got attached to accompanying professionals of all types but also emerging ones.

But it’s true that at one point I was still very interested, and that’s why these last few years I’ve also worked a lot on youth. Today in our industry, we’re constantly telling ourselves, where are the young people? They’re not with us anymore, how do we find them, how can we talk to them, etc. And, and my point was to say, well, you have to, actually, the young people, they’re like us, that is to say you have to go talk to them, you have to propose things to them.

They’re not at all brainless, actually. [laughs] That’s it. They’re very, very resilient, very impactful, very, very intelligent, and so you have to go propose to them, and, and above all, me, I thought to engage them too in creation, because I find that, there you go, it’s important too if you want to create a sort of emotional bond, to propose to them, there, we’re here in Quebec, the government, the Ministry of Culture is in the process of thinking about a plan following the report “Blowing on the Embers,” about, among other things, well, there’s a whole very interesting plan, but on the image-education part, and so it’s true that it’s also a bit, what do we put in place, and I think you have to be fairly proactive on these questions. Not tell yourself, “Ah well, the young people aren’t interested in the Quebec programming, well, too bad.” Well, no, and it’s not just digital discoverability, that is to say you have to kind of create the digital desirability, which is to make people want it and also to go get them. It’s not just by doing TikTok programs, but it’s just creating stories they’re going to want to see, and, and also letting them themselves create stories where they can see themselves represented, and, and find themselves. So there you go, me, it’s, it’s true that that’s what interests me today, and, and how to let youth be able to keep creating and inventing and imagining.

So your mark would be a bit to keep the generations connected to each other through, yeah. Well, in any case, uh, again in the idea of telling yourself, there are maybe people who today don’t think themselves at all capable of telling, actually, or of creating stories, and in the end they have totally valid and interesting stories, and it’s even maybe these ones that are going to be the most, the most successful stories, because they’re different, and because all of a sudden, me, I remember one of the youth projects we’d had, it was, we’d said, it really has to be open to all the high schools in France, so not just, well, I’m not going to get into the French academic system, but not just the general high schools, the vocational high schools, the agricultural high schools too, and we’d had a project from a group, there you go, with stories about cows in a small town in the middle of the French countryside. It was absolutely brilliant. Ah yes, I don’t think we’d ever have been able to, well, say that.

So what I mean is, there you go, it’s also about giving that possibility, and, and to have stories that are precisely different, and there we were talking about AI. Me, it’s true that the only thing is that this homogenization, I find that at one point, uh, there you go, I just want to have plenty of very different stories to see, actually, as a viewer, quite simply. Yeah, it’s, the more important. I get the impression that what you do at the time of reading.

Well, in any case, you have to leave those possibilities open [laughs] and not have it close up into just repeating the same things infinitely, actually. Yeah. An amalgam of everything, a mush, [laughs] really a precise gaze. Jonathan, to finish, making the machine that lets you read dreams, just like, you know, you sleep or you talk or you walk, just to finish that platform, to finish it this year, you know, we’re going to put that out, we’ll say it’s open source, we’ll say, we’ll tell the creator, it’s a dome, you can make an interactive film that reacts to movement and to speech, it costs nothing, go ahead, and learn, and that’s going to come with an AI, obviously. And then you’re going to learn to use the, to use that, and it’s going to be educational.

We’re going to have to find partners. We’re going to have to find how to bring that to market, actually. Yeah. And in my opinion, beyond IP or licensing, it’s going to be the, the B of open source for me.

You know, it’s going to be the antithesis, actually, of the more, I’d say, productive approach of that idea. That is to say, giving it to other creators, yeah. Rather than staying dependent on it. You understand? Because it’s going to evolve fast.

Yeah. And since it’s just an indication of where things are heading, I won’t be another, I’m not OpenAI, I’m not, ahem, Google. It’s clearly just an influence I make in the market. You know, me, it’s more of a systemic impact, a total control, like, that maybe you’re seeking with your knowledge, because me, my knowledge, I see it heading toward a market direction.

You know, I tell myself, OK, my idea is still a little too farfetched, the dream machines are coming in 2, 3 years, you know, we’re going to sleep, our dreams are going to record, and then we’re going to be able to edit them and review our memories and become aware that our episodic memory isn’t quite the same as the one we, oh, we reinvent our narrative, and psychologists know that we invent memories and narratives too. Film is going to change. The importance of film is capital. Film guides us. Minority Report, the films of Dreamers, Bertolucci, François Truffaut, cinema is going to become super important because it’s the meaning of the world, even games, it’s based all the same on a licence, but you know, it’s a story you tell yourself.

It’s true that you really explain to me the real ramifications of being a board game fan. But it’s, there’s something, there’s a human experience that’s lived, and then, you know, me, I play Unlock with my girlfriend, escape room games. Yeah, it’s a crazy passion put into that game. It’s very creative, it touches all the intelligences.

Me, I’m good at certain challenges, in others. So, someone thought of that. It’s sick. I tell myself, in the future, it’s certain that me, since I was into, and I see quickly how it affects my work, I tell myself, in a year, it’s going to become just a bit like a dream, actually, to make an application.

It’s going to be like, I’d love to be in such an environment, you’re going to be in such an environment, and then you’re going to be in immersion made by experience designers like us but with other tools. You’re the technological inclination of the, yeah, I’d love [laughs], me, I’d really love to help, actually, I’d really love to help the trades, I wouldn’t say classic but, to be grounded in pragmatism, to see AI as the next ontological transition, actually, of their trade. It’s that right now we think your trade is this. Me, I can replicate you in, in 5 years, I’m going to be able to replicate a lot of the things he does in a human way but that actually aren’t the things he loves, that he’s forced to do, that he’s forced to do. [laughs] It’s impossible that I could replicate everything he does right now with an AI.

For sure that’s what’s a bit complex. Yeah, because it depends on the trades, eh, but someone who needs to be in contact with plenty of humans, uh, me, my great strength is precisely going to conventions, uh, going to land contracts. Once, we were, I think, 5000 dollars away from just dying. We needed to sell 500 boxes of our first or our second game precisely to breathe.

And I go to Gen Con, so I go to Indianapolis last second, but, like, with a lot of hope and little chance that it’d really come to fruition. And in the end, I manage to meet someone through audacity, to grab a contact the next day, and then finally to present in under 5 minutes, because there was an error in the reservation. He, we sit down. Well, finally it’s you and me together.

Cool. You want to tell me about two games, well, 5 minutes? Yeah. There, if I don’t pull it off in the next 5 minutes, I go home to Montreal and it’s going to be, it’s going to be complicated, you know.

And in the end, you meet that person, it goes super well, you manage precisely to do it. But that, an EA, the EA can’t do it. Yeah. You can have the right email.

Yeah. But if you’re really someone not transparent, not passionate, then yes, no matter how much you write that you’re passionate in your email, people look each other in the [laughs] eyes to know. Yeah. Yeah. It’s true that the real ideas, you know, in the, I’m not a big defender of AI applied to everything without critical reflection.

But yeah, it’s true that the encounters, you know, like when we used to go into cinema and there were tables, you had a producer and then a screenwriter who sit down, and that respect of the ideation between two humans where one of them listens and forms a sort of, OK, what does this represent as a project, you know, it’s not just receiving the story and then guiding, it’s not just helping with the screenwriting. It’s also, like, I’d love this idea to go from the script to the film and then from the film to the marketing, and who knows full well where the artist is, roughly, there, you’ve got 5 years, or you’ve got 2 years with him, and then there are films sometimes that you’re going to take over 10 years, you know, like there are people who take 10 years before making a film because they’re not ready to make the film, and it’s too personal, they have to rewrite the script 1000 times, they change screenwriter twice because the screenwriter didn’t understand, yeah, but that’s all learnings too when you do a project, me, I changed producer four times. Julien is maybe going to be the 5th, but you know, [laughs] changing producer is also choosing the direction of your project. It’s the speed you choose to give your project.

The trajectory, maybe you have it in your heart, but the speed, even, of who you surround yourself with, you know. Yeah, clearly. So, uh, the mark you want to leave, the mark, the trace I want to leave in general or with an IP or with Fly? Uh, general.

General. Uh, I’d really love, and we do it as much in the solo format, precisely, of our games. Us, we’re enormous fans of tabletop role-playing games, beyond Vampire the Masquerade, Dungeons and Dragons, Cthulhu, Fallout, for me, the ultimate form of the game and of the narrative story we create around precisely a board game, a film, or whatever, is the tabletop role-playing game. And it was a phrase that Alexandre Astier had told me in one of his interviews that struck me, because I completely agree with him.

When you create a common narrative story, uh, based on, uh, probable or improbable die rolls, in a collaborative way to create a story tied to a game, you create the story, you create the game, and above all you do it collaboratively together. And that, creatively, requires precisely that each person can tell themselves, a bit like an improv match. Yes. And, and to add, to add things at the ludic level, that’s something that interests me enormously, since it’s role-playing games that brought me to where I am today.

When I was 14, I was introduced to role-playing, and it really was a revolution for me, because I was capable from that moment on of telling myself, “I’m not Thomas, I’m a 50-year-old vampire.” How does a 50-year-old [laughs] vampire behave? Really a, a, a barbarian, a rogue, what’s his story? Me, I’m a character creator, and I played for years, for, like, thousands of hours of role-playing games in a basement instead of going out when I was 17, when everyone was going to clubs. No, no, me, I went to play Dungeons and Dragons and to skateboard, and, and I wouldn’t have traded my Saturday night for anything in the world. And, well, me, my goal is precisely to give that creative capacity, whether in our board games, in our role-playing games, or in whatever we want to do, to give that possibility to say, you can be creative, it’s going to change your life, it’s going to let you discover a part of yourself.

It’s not reserved for an elite or some other part. You can do it at your level, and you can do it well. And the more I get the impression that we give this power to the player to say, choose your story, yeah.

Become this story, embody and interpret this story, the more I find that the player’s user experience is enhanced. So that mark, me, it would be more at the level of Fly to, one, make games that I, that I feel like making, because I keep doing it. Even if I’m no longer the last hands on game design, I test everything that comes out. There’s nothing that comes out that I haven’t touched, played, validated, and so on. But I also want to do it in an ethical way.

I also want to keep doing it. It’s not because there are cashflow lows and highs that, uh, I’m going to have to take blind spots or shortcuts that aren’t moral and ethical. If I’d wanted to, uh, have this kind of, how to say, attitude, I’d have stayed in an old career where I was a commission salesman. Uh, I changed that because I saw that even when I was a commission salesman, I was capable of not, uh, lying, of not distorting reality, and I had better results than my colleagues who did do it.

And there actually that, actually people want that transparency, they want that, and when you play the game, yes it takes more time, but it’s so much more rewarding in the long run to do it well. Gratifying. It’s gratifying, and you don’t need to hide, to have a cognitive bias of saying, “Yeah but I’m doing this temporarily.” No, no, the line, you know it.

Your moral line, your philosophical line, stoic, whatever, the, how to say, the dogma in which you place your values, respect them. You can perfectly do business and be creative and develop yourself in that without compromising yourself. And, and if tonight there’s someone listening to us who precisely asks themselves that question, I want to tell them that, and I also want to say something else regarding launching IPs that have been launched and want to relaunch, at random. Wink wink. [laughs] But I’m kidding a lot.

It’s, it’s very complicated in board games to do a launch, to stop, and to start again. And I understood why. Someone gave me this solution at one point, with a, with Charlotte Noyes, whom I salute if one day she listens to this podcast, who explained to me that actually there’s so much noise, there are so many licences, there are so many films, video games, board games that come out per year, that if you have no more stock and the basic consumer in two clicks can’t quickly get it shipped to your, to their place, or buy it in a shop, well, they’re going to move on to something else. And if you keep making that stock and on top of it you put 30 percent of your profits into continuous marketing precisely to bring back visibility, bring back stock, bring back visibility, bring back stock, that’s how you can keep a licence alive.

Now, I want to launch Via before, there, making the film, that. We could make a board game for Via, you understand? You can make a board game, you can make a few, you can also put this board game for free on the internet. You put it on Board Game Arena, you put it on Tabletop Simulator, you can simply see, “Oh!

The people I invite from my community to play it, they tell me it’s good, I’m capable of doing it. The prototype, it’s digital, but at least, they’re concretely capable of doing it. There are plenty of tools, there’s plenty of help, there’s plenty of demand. Ask for help, put 30 percent of your profits into continuous marketing of your products, and be certain there’s stock, because even if you have a very good, incredible IP that everyone loves, a community like that, people see it in a second.

It’s a really important point. The notion of production too, that goes, you know, when you get into markets, yeah. Uh, each market is different. The film market was different, the software market was different.

For example, when we launched our iPad application, it was already too late to make a profitable iPad application. People weren’t even game to pay a buck for an app. But they were ready to pay 25 bucks for a book. Yeah.

And there we changed markets, we said, “Fuck the iPad,” and we put all our energy on the book because it was much cheaper and much more profitable. But at the same time the book, when you arrive in a library, it’s 50,000 bucks to have a first, oh, that’s another kind of hierarchy of needs there, and the costs are elsewhere, absolutely not 50,000 to put, you know, on a first facade, but if I’d come from, if I came from the book world, it was the absolute truth there, yeah, me, I was in total opposition to the model, I’d put 50,000 on a website instead, yeah, but the book community also rejected, in a certain way, the format of my book. There were a lot of things I didn’t respect there. And when you say playing by the rules, it’s important, because I came in, I shocked the world, you know, of the internet, of objects, I shocked the world, you know. If you shock everyone, you end up with fewer supporters there, I had a lot of philosophical supporters, but business-wise, nobody, nobody got their feet wet.

You know, those who helped me were the cultural world, the embassies, or all those who didn’t want the idea to die. Yeah. We did well, because basically the idea still exists. I, clearly, we’re going to talk again, but [laughs] the idea is that rewriting was beneficial too.

You know, the time that passed, I had a screenwriter go over it again, I saw that I wasn’t a writer. I accepted that I wasn’t a [laughs] writer, but it’s all learning things about the fact that that’s the role of a screenwriter, like I say, the role of an assistant who discovers. OK, I’m not that. I’m really a crazy idea-generator.

That’s going to continue, there. [laughs] It takes someone who’s in production who says, like, this is heading into another machine that isn’t Jonathan. Otherwise that’s it, that’s, that’s why you hire people who come to fill your weaknesses and who go into the, well, and you have to let them do their job. You hired them for that. You’re micromanaging them to say, today you send me this, this, and check how you do your work.

Yeah, no trust in him, you did a bad casting. It’s wasteful, you see. So that’s also giving, and giving power to someone who’s precisely there to direct, even though he’s under your hierarchical responsibility, telling him, “Yeah, you’re right. OK, yes, I’m listening to you.

I’m listening to you.” And listening to your team is one of the most important things, because we work more, we see our team more per day than we see our partners and our family. So it’s someone who’s in your files 8 hours a day on plenty of stuff, several days a week, and who there is going to give an opinion. Listen to him, listen to him, note it down, because if he’s alone, it’s maybe a, a, a, a, a, a, a statistically weak reality, but you start to have two, three. Oh, there, you’ve got a nice lead.

And for that, you have to actively show that you listen to your team. Yeah. And not, “I’m listening to you, I’m listening to you, eh.” And then you leave the moment he opens his mouth. No, no.

Hear them, listen to them, note it down. I’ve never met a CEO, uh, or a managing director in any case, lately, at certain levels of the industry, who didn’t all have something to take notes on, on the spot, uh, and in an analog way, not digital, strangely, even in, in, because, because you can’t know everything and you can’t remember everything. Yeah. Take notes, ask for help, dare, launch yourself, and the failure, from the moment you don’t repeat it, it’s going to be fine.

There you go. [laughs] Uh, Lauren, I know you had a time constraint. Is there something we didn’t address that one of you, you, to address the importance of really understanding what gives you energy and what, uh, drains it from you, because, because you’re going to lose energy on ideas there, and on projects. If you haven’t learned to manage your energy, which is an abstract thing, we talk about it, you know, you can do meditation, vibrational stuff, but managing energy, tension, me, it was my great quest, but today it’s going better, but that’s it, managing attention is actually understanding too how it is that I was losing so much energy, you know, because I have a lot, but I can also waste it, learning to manage my energy well, completely agree. And then, uh, I’d even say, focus first on what’s easy, what we still call low-hanging fruit, that’s first, handle that, because if you let it go now, it’s certainly going to rot. And then, two, there are several fruits, there are several places, there are several things you want.

You can make a fruit salad, but if you don’t take the trouble to go grab precisely everything that’s there, well, you won’t manage to, focus on what pays off right now, immediately, and that won’t be a blocker later. Work, always work long-term, never short-term, first off. And then surround yourself with the right people. Surround yourself with the right people. Partner with a person you trust.

Me, I have the incredible luck of knowing Gary since I was 14. Yeah. I’m the godfather of his daughters. We’re partners together.

We play role-playing games together with our wives. Well, there’s no reverse gear. The work has to function well, otherwise it affects the rest, you see. It’s, it’s true that life is prophetic too, you know.

You can sense or predict your life depending on the trajectories you allow yourself to believe. Me, I know very well that it’s going to go well there. Yeah. But, but that doesn’t mean the bad, uncomfortable moments don’t happen.

Yeah. Yeah. I expect them too, but with maybe more grace. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s it. But after that, it’s true that in these creative trades, often we don’t start out on career strategies. Well, it would seem it’s a bit contradictory.

Me, I’m a creator, precisely, I invent the world. So I’m not going to project myself into a career, specifically. But in spite of everything, indeed, there’s a bit of reflection on what’s maybe a little easier at the outset rather than something else. And that doesn’t mean abandoning your dreams or your projects, but still having a little moment of reflection on it, because it can, yes, it can save time, it can, like you were saying, go knock on doors.

There you go. Well, there, the pool, that clearly, well, it’s not to do advertising because we’re doing the podcast, but we can [laughs] do advertising too, but it’s true that, well, me, there you go, I also made my career on that, that is to say offering spaces like that, of trust, of research and development, to creatives, because it seemed to me that it was absolutely fundamental in, in, in these trades, so, and it’s true that in the end they exist, so it’s worth going to find them, and, and, uh, and benefiting from them, actually. And it’s maybe even the best way to protect your dreams, because if you have doors closed in your face, at one point you give up. Whereas if you understand, yes.

And I’d even say there are the two, there are almost the two, the two things that can happen. There’s having the doors closed, and so that’s very hard, because, well, psychologically it’s still very rough to take it all day long, full in the head. Well, there you go. But there’s also, me, I saw, when it was the moment of the boom on series and it was about finding people to make series all the time, you had to train people, etc.

There are also people too young who got a bit thrown in and a bit burned too. So, we can tell ourselves, well, they got the chance to do a project, but actually they weren’t ready, and a series, it’s, well, it’s like a video game. Well, I mean, it’s extremely, it’s a lot of work, it’s very complex as writing. Well, I mean, it requires being fairly solid all the same.

Yeah. And so there you go. So what I mean is, yes, it’s better to be a little armed. Yeah.

And we were talking about the, yeah. There you go. And then to reflect [laughs] a little bit on, and to ask, like you say, ask for help, ask for advice. Yeah. Sometimes you know what you want yourself, but at times it’s good too to have a few other wake-up calls, or a reality check.

There you go. [laughs] A question about the 10,000 there that you were saying, your advice for someone with 10,000 there, it’s worth a lot of money, 10,000, it was worth 100,000 10 years ago, you understand, or for me it’s just to wrap, because you were saying conclusion, yeah, your advice for someone, 10,000, yeah, it’s true, I was curious to hear just your advice too, Julien, if you want, but uh, it’s because I find the question is good, it’s that, it’s worth really a lot of money, 100,000 today, but it depends on which field you’re in, you, yeah, it’s broad, it’s 10,000 in screenwriting or 10,000 in AI, we won’t have the same answer, or even the same discussion there. Well, me, I can speak for monExpansion, which is really the, the company that’s, uh, in the process of crystallizing there now. I align with what you’re saying in the sense that you can make a game plan, a business plan, and uh, tell yourself it’s going to be profitable and relevant because it makes sense on paper, or what I did, uh, the Netflix venture stopped because they closed in Munich, and I told myself, whoa, I have a chance, uh, I have 6 months max, 8 months ahead of me where I can experiment, and actually I pitched myself on doing things. I went to see Camille, I say, “Camille, are you up for me doing a podcast with you?” Ah, but it’s Camille. [laughs] She goes, like, “Well, yeah!” And then I have no idea how I’m going to monetize it.

I have no idea, uh, how it’s going to work. I’ve done podcasts at my place, at home, but there it’s another game. Uh, so it’s a bit about doing this exploration through desire. There are also projects we, we discuss with Jonathan because it, it excites me, Via.

So there are several branches like that. After that, since I do have the experience, it’s to tell myself, “OK, I know it requires this much time, this many resources, this much energy, so I’m not going to accumulate them and burn myself out, uh, and also out of respect for the projects I commit to.” But there, I see now, after a few weeks and months, that actually, by the way, I talked about it with my wife, my wife tells me, “Calm down, you’re in the process of sowing seeds, spring is coming.” I was, oh, and there really was that, there really was that thing, at best, of going toward the mental, because until before, I always did that. I always went with the mental, you see. I left Netflix, I told myself, “Oh, I’m going to make online courses on leadership because I did that at, at Netflix, it worked super well.

Everyone was giving me compliments regarding my coaching. Bam! That, zero, it didn’t work, because actually, in fact, I didn’t want to do that. So [laughs], so yeah, there you go.

Me, my advice, if you have 10,000 dollars, it’s, uh, take advantage of it to experiment, but don’t waste time. In the sense, don’t do that. Uh, you know, I never watch Netflix, even if, but I watch, I don’t entertain myself, you see, every day right now, even if I’m not paid, even if I don’t have a, I’m as efficient, as, uh, disciplined as if I were paid very dearly. So that would be my advice, it’s, don’t waste time entertaining yourself in things that, uh, that don’t head in the right direction.

Uh, go on, go all out and act as if you were already paid, you know. That’s it. Yeah, it’s a bit that. The famous fake it till you make it. [laughs] Yeah.

Yeah, that’s it. There’s pleasure in doing it, so uh, but uh, if you fake it well enough, at one point, you won’t need to fake it. [laughs] That’s it. Well, listen, listen, thank you for your presence and your participation and this soul you brought to the set today. I think it’s going to be really super pleasant to watch.