Tobias Deml on Impact and Gaming Wall Street

June: / Welcome to Story for Good, the podcast where entertainment meets impact. I'm your host, June Neely. Today my guest is Toby Deml. He is the co-founder of Prodigium Pictures, and he co-founded the SIE Society. Toby has helmed more than a hundred projects as a cinematographer, director, and producer. He's best known for directing the project that we're talking about today, the HBO Max docuseries, Gaming Wall Street.  I can't wait for you to hear this discussion, so let's get into.

June: Welcome to the show.

Toby: Thanks so much for having me.

June: So, You're originally from Austria. what drew you to the US to start filmmaking here.

Toby: That was interesting. So, the US came before filmmaking. In Austria, this mandatory military service that all men have to do after they reach the age of 18. I thought it was a real, of time and didn't wanna listen to a bunch of, instructors telling you to get in the mud and whatnot. even though that part would've been fun, but then you do a lot of boring clerical work for the military and that was not my thing. So instead I spent a lot of time prepping and then eventually getting a small government grant to do a so-called Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, where you go abroad and you teach children or adults about the Holocaust from the perpetrator side.

So from the Austrian and German perspective of being the perpetrators of the, second World War and of the Holocaust. And so I worked at the Museum of Tolerance and it was just kind of happenstance that the Museum of Tolerance happened to be in LA. I'd been a visual artist since I was 14 doing freelance work, sort of never planning to go to college. also having a very sort of, nuanced perspective on the US from Iraq War, Afghanistan war, sort of seeing it from the European pacifist side. And then once I came here, I was like, wow, this place is really cool. And, I did a half a year in Canada where I realized that sort of the culmination of all these different things that had gone through as a teenager drawing, photography, VFX CGI, all could be applied in film. And so then I decided, you know what, hard pivot into film and, started studying in the US and never looked back.

June: Wow, that's amazing. Was it, hard to switch to the filmmaking side? Like as far as getting into schools here? I don't know if you have, is there like a visa process or

Toby: The, so the visa process has been the last 15 years of my life. So F1 visa, F-1 Visa, Q1 Visa initially for the Holocaust memorial service. And now I'm on my third O-1 Visa it's a a huge headache. It's, it's extremely difficult to deal with the immigration system, the totally legal above board way. There's so many shortcuts that you could take, but I decided I'm gonna try for the hardest meritocracy possible. The O-1 visa is definitely that. and studying film was. I would say a natural extension of a lot of the things that I've been doing. I certainly sort of believed in myself as a generalist, as somebody who can do photography, who can draw, who can do CGI, who can do complicated programming. And so I was like, I'll put this all together. it was sort of a good extension of an existing skillset.

June: In 2011. Is that when you ended up meeting, your partner who you started Prodigium Pictures with, Hiroki?

Toby: I met Hiroki, in community college. So both of us were international students. Both of us were dealing with the same visa situation. And so somebody had told us that there's this, uh, entrepreneurship visa when you start a company. And so we're like, Hey, we're straight out of community college.

We had one year where the US government gives you a work permission after you finish a degree. so we said, let's just start our own company instead of being runners or a PA somewhere and just. See how that goes. And both of us had, collected a lot of credits as directors and cinematographers and producers, and so we just kind of bootstrapped this thing.

 But then realized very quickly there was actually no entrepreneurship visa.

So then we went, both, went back to school, and then eventually got the O-1 visa after the second stint of working in this, sort of student visa work permission year.

June: And then you mentioned that in 2012 that you had kind brush with death that changed things for you.

Toby: Yeah, that was the sort of big turning point I think for me because, up until that point, you know, I'd never really reflected on what I loved about art so much and why I wanted to do art and why I did visual art. and I had this, incident where I went surfing in Malibu, and I'm not a very, like, I'm a very bad surfer, so I was just kind of like, I learning by myself, I'm a mediocre swimmer, so I, I, I can do fine, but I can't do fine for like 40 minutes of swimming. And so eventually I got really exhausted, was far out on the water, no boards, just sort of like for fun swimming around, body surfing. And then I realized when I turned around that the land was really far away. it was this kind of, oh, there's like, there's no double net, there's nobody there to save you. You're just out there by yourself and it's this very clear life and death kind of scenario. So I was like, okay, I gotta swim back and start swimming. But the waves were getting bigger and bigger. and it was, I think in the middle of a rip current and so just couldn't reach the land. And I could just see my body sort of resources depleteAnd I realized like, okay, I've got like 15 seconds left, of power in my arms and then they're gonna go out. And the next surfer was super far away, couldn't hear me over the loud waves. my friend was on the beach, also exhausted, couldn't come back in to save me. so I had this realization like, this is it. Like I'm gonna die and there's no, escape route here. And interestingly enough, I was agnostic at the time and I always heard from people that were like, you know, then you turn to God and you like, start praying or whatever. Didn't even cross my mind. I think what crossed my mind was a lot of the people that I had helped during my life, the people that I had impacted with my art. And I never really thought about my, I guess, role as an artist in society. It was just like having a good time, you know? and I realized that I had helped a lot of people and had created cool art that I was very proud of and that was gonna outlast me.

That and I thought a lot about the people that would be sad that I was gonna die, but kind of realized, you know, I was 23 at the time and I was like, I think I did a good job. You know, 23, I've like checked most of my life boxes kind of thing.

My, my bucket list. and it did an okay job. And the moment that that realization happened, everything just became totally peaceful. And I knew that I was gonna die and I was totally okay and I was, I just completely accepted the situation. and then I hit a sandbar with my foot and stood up in the water.

And the water was just to my waist. And I, I literally looked death like this close in the face, you know, I knew it was certain, I knew it was gonna be painful, but I was totally okay and suddenly I'm standing there in the water, I recharged my muscles, swim out on the on the beach and just plopped out. I'm like, oh my God. It just came this close. And this was kind of at an interesting point in my life cause I'd just gotten accepted into Berkeley I was gonna go there to sort of try to figure out like what I should do with my life. And so suddenly I have this experience and it took me about six months to really think about what that means for me.I kind of realize that I was just doing art because I wanted to impress people and I was just doing art because I wanted to be famous and rich and, you know, have all these worldly, materialistic things. but all of these things were totally meaningless the moment that I would die. And up until that point that this invincibility of youth where Every young person kind of believes it's other people that die have cancer. It's other people that run, get, run over by cars. It's not me. And at some point you realize that it could be you. that was my realization then at 23. And I realized that it's totally unpredictable. You know, you spend 40 years, you sacrifice relationships, you go through whatever kind of things people go through when they try to make it in the film world. I also, during the time I did a lot of reading. And so a lot of people that really accomplish incredible things would say, you know, the accomplishment itself, it seems like the goal, but the moment you've done it, you wake up the next morning, you're like, what next? so I realized like, that can't possibly be a smart investment of spending the rest of my life pursuing this sort of satisfaction. I had a very long period of time where I seriously considered quitting film altogether, entertainment altogether, art altogether. 'cause I realized like there isn't really anything there that is outside of me.with saying, you know, I wanna make people feel something.

I wanna do cool things. But at the end of the day, when I was really honest and the near death experience allowed me to be brutally honest with myself,I realized, no, I wanted was always satisfaction. What I wanted was something that made me extraordinarily happy, make me feel like I'm loved by so many people, and appreciated by so many people.

And that was the real goal that I was pursuing. I realized it was just a terrible goal. It was just something that was not really viable.

 film, what does it really do? Or entertainment? Does it really contribute anything to the overall thing? Does it help the human enterprise? And my initial reaction was like, no, it totally doesn't.

 Now I'm gonna throw it all away to become a scientist or a teacher or some other thing that is actually useful for society what if there is something in entertainment that is actually salvageable? And,  um, I had remembered these people that said, you know, movies can change the world. And also remembered a number of movies that impacted me so deeply that they completely derailed my life, changed the direction that I was going in, changed how I treated other people. So I was like, there's something there, I think, but I need to be, I need to be sure and so being at Berkeley, I had all this time to just read endless books. I convinced my thesis advisor that this was gonna be a thing, like an interdisciplinary study of all the ways that movies and other forms of entertainment, television, books, o other things that include stories, actually affect the world.

And my thesis advisor was like, this is way too broad. You're not gonna get a good grade. I'm dude, I'm not here for the grade I talked to all these people, was in the middle of starting the Cinema of Change podcast. So we were able to interview people like Philip Zimbardo, the guy that ran the Stanford Prison Experiment Albert Bandura, who did all these incredible social learning theory work. And at the end of this journey, and with a thesis paper that's whatever, like 80 pages long or so, and really thorough, I had enough data that I knew, okay, movies and other forms of entertainment actually do affect the world in a very real way. There's a huge history of censorship on books because books affect the world. Books affect society. Books affect the way that people think. And governments are scared of these books. They understand the power of it. the history of censorship is the proof in the pudding for social impact through various forms of media. and movies and TV shows in a way are sort of this multi-dimensional form of media. So I kind of identified that moving image as the most powerful form of media to affect people. and then I was like, okay, I found my thing. This is it. It's the social impact entertainment. There was this term floating around that somebody, and I still have not found yet, who, at Participant Media had coined. And so that's what I dedicated the, foreseeable future of my life too, at that point.

June: What a profound moment to have at such a young age. 'cause I feel like there's so many times where we're, we're all working careers and then we get to a point where like, what am I doing this for? Like, who am I doing this for? What purpose do I have? What

Toby: me it's more about the principle you contributing something to society or not? And over the years I've gotten a lot smarter in it. initially there's sort of this big trap that you basically become just a vessel for the impact. And that's not very healthy on a,health level because you just kind of put yourself and all the people that are close to you second and you put the big world first. And the big world is obviously the ultimate goal, but you have to do this in a very balanced way. And so over the last 10 years, I've learned to balance it. your unhappiness actually matters a lot. You know, it's sort of the inside engine that runs a lot of things. SoThen there's just a ton of responsibility that comes with wanting to do something big. cause the more impact that you have on people, the more dangerous you become at the same time. I think nearly everybody that I've met in social impact entertainment, that is a really big figure, has gone beyond that stage of maturity where you realize the more power you have, the more responsibility you have. So there's great saying in Spider-Man, you know, great power necessarily implies great responsibility,

But I think it's sort of a human principle. You know, that the more power you have and the more impact you have, the more responsible you need to be with wielding that power.

June: Is this kind of what led into your Berkeley Cinema of Change, moving into the actual magazine and the podcast of lifting up other people who are working in the impact space and

Toby: there was definitely a moment when I realized, okay, if I'm the only guy that does this this is kind of dumb, you know, because what am I gonna do? And so I realized that it's more about growing the pie. And, you know, if if you think of the entertainment industry as a cake, the, the pie that the social impact entertainment is pretty small.

And I was like, if I can grow that slice, that'd be amazing, right? And if the whole cake becomes that slice, if everything becomes social impact entertainment, that's optimal,

so part of Cinema of Change was We wanna publish a lot of these thoughts and make them accessible to people, but then also create guardrails for people to understand that there's all of this risk that comes with it.

I think that the more that it is a sort of shared, open, sort of open source environment, the more, people can actually advance in those conversations.

During your time, doing Cinema of Change, you got to meet and converse with,many different people in the impact space. Is there a moment or an interview that particularly struck you?

 There was a, a movie that I watched,a class. It The,psychology of stigma and prejudice, a lot of the class was about racism. And at the time I had, for example, zero identity as a white person.is, I think the, the flaw of pretty much every ,every white person, especially white people from Europe who have very little relation to the idea of race to begin with. I mean, except for the sort of, you know, 1945 Hitler heritage was all about eugenics.I watched this movie and it was called The Color of Fear, It's a very simple documentary.Just a bunch of guys basically sitting in a circle and talking about their relationship to race. And it destroyed my racial identity. Like it just completely unrooted the little thing that there was and created a complete mess. a character in the doc who's a white guy and he basically says, I've got no racial identity and I also got got no problem with other people of other skin color. So I don't really know why we're here, but I'll be part of this. And by the end of it, he realizes all this internalized racism that he has it's done in such a nuanced and kind way. and he starts crying and. I never looked at this guy as somebody that represented me, but I realized once my own kind of experience happened, I was like, I completely like projected my own identity on this guy. And as he morphed in the movie, my, our identity morphed too. And when I tried to reintegrate this sort of puzzle piece of identity into myself, like I couldn't, I decided, you know, there's, there's no point in rejecting this,this is like a very truthful experience. So I eventually, because we had cinema of change going at the time, I saw that the filmmaker Lee Mun-Wah who's actually a diversity coach for the Pentagon.

June: Oh

And for a lot of other places where he teaches people to get along.And so we talked with him and there's this great, podcast recording of Lee Mun-Wah where he just goes into this very, very layered, thought why he made this documentary, why the documentary became so powerful. I mean, it's one, one of the most powerful and simple documentaries I think ever made. Probably the film that had the most profound impact on me in my whole life.

Toby: Albert Bandura was another incredible one because he was 91 at the time. He died at 94. He had done nearly 30 years of the highest and possible research in the psychology of, tv shows and specifically, serial dramas, IE telenovelas. the data that he had and the the level of sophistication that he had as a researcher was just massive. He's the fourth most quoted psychologist ever in history. and He did 30 years of research basically into how TV shows affect the way that we learn about being human. And this idea of social learning theory that actually predated a lot of that. I met him because I read,about work of one of his students.

I wanted to get in touch with that student. That student was unfindable. So I contacted the other guy that was on the paper, that was Albert Bandura And then I realized like, oh my God, this is like the guy, he's like the rockstar of the field. And once I got in touch with him, he's like, oh, that student Robert O'Connor is actually dead.

And I was like, what? Your student is dead. And then I looked up, oh, Bandura is 91. And Robert O'Connor at the time when he died, was like 75. And I was like, this is just crazy. Youthat was one of these, I think, big turning points for me. 'cause it opened up a whole universe. He introduced me to Miguel Sabido who is this like,epic figure in the social impact space that very few people in the US know.

And then Miguel introduced me to this whole world of social behavior change communications, SBCC, which is a total fascinating parallel universe with way more research acumen than the film industry could ever, or the entertainment industry in general could ever have.

but Bandura really, it shaped a lot of my work and thinking after meeting him. Yeah.

June: Wow, that's amazing. Let's talk about your series.it's a two part HBO docuseries, Gaming Wall Street. this series explores the stock market frenzy of GameStop and how a group of armchair investors and online vigilantes ultimately helped expose the dark underbelly of Wall Street.

Now I don't claim to be an investment guru in any sense of the form. Like, I have stocks, but if you ask me what they were, I, I couldn't tell you. It was very interesting to watch this docuseries because I was aware at the time, 'cause the pandemic, you have so much time to be on social media. So I was aware of GameStop and Wall Street and Robinhood, but not nearly to this extent. So what was it that led you to create this series?

Toby: I have too many long back stories to things. My dad has been running a ethical ecological investment newsletter for 30 years, at time, and I never had any comprehension of what this stuff actually is. So I'd see him typing stuff, I'd see him making all these charts that seemed like pushing out this magazine and asking me to read some of it. And wrote some of the articles that sort of introduced a certain technology or a certain field, that I was very familiar with. But I was just like, what is this whole investing thing? I, I don't get it. The whole stock stuff. And then like millions of other people pandemic hits. I've got time on my hand. I'm like, oh, this is, this is it. if I ever get to learn this stuff, it's right now. My little brother had learned it before me as I was like, this is so stupid. I'm like behind my little brother. And now, you know, it's three years younger, typical sort of brotherly, rivalry. So I looked into it and I tried to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible absorb YouTube videos of all these different investment,advice people. But then I found this place on Reddit called Wall Street Bets, and I was like, this is insane. it's all these people that wanna use the stock market as a casino, and they just have an enormous joy both making and losing a lot of money. It's totally absurd is all these people that share, Hey, I just lost a hundred thousand dollars yesterday. And you're like, how do you have this much cash?

and they talk about all these very complex, I mean, some of the schemes on,on Wall Street Bets are hyper complex people buying weird like oil futures and then trying to trade them and all these like obscure, areas of the market. so I was like, wow, these people are actually quite sophisticated, but they all talk like they're a bunch of like 15 year olds that have just like way too much testosterone going on. And I was like, this is a cool, weird sub that nobody knows about.So I pitched it to my producing partner, Tessa, and I was like, this could be a documentary. And she's like, oh my God. Like another idea for a documentary, which we've had many of in the past. Why don't you write a pitch for it and we'll see if there's any, like, if it has legs. So I started putting it together and I realized there's all these characters, so would reach out to this weird guy who like pretended to be a roaring kitty and he had all this cat themed investment stuff and I thought it was hilarious. Then from one day to the next, there's like 10 terrible ideas going on at a time that everybody's either jumping on or jumping off a terrible idea. So one of the terrible ideas was, can we get this, bankrupt video game retailer called GameStop to go really high in the stock price and then basically squeeze out all these short sellers that had bet against it. And the higher the price, the harder the pain for these ultra rich, short sellers. So they would have to, basically end their bet and that would push the price even higher. That was the concept sounded like horribly unrealistic and crazy. And there was a lot of other ideas like this, but suddenly the GameStop thing just took off I was like, oh my God, this this is our doc.And Then of course all these other documentary companies are like, we are making a GameStop doc. had shot a few things in Las Vegas with a really great character at that point, and we're like, oh my God, here's the pressure of the competition now. And We had raised some money for it, so we're like, either it's everything or nothing, you know, either we go all in or not, and we're like, you know what, the whole thing was about going all in, so let's just go all in. I had invested in GameStop I had like ridden the curve up and down. I was one of the crazy guys that ended up holding and then, you know, going back to flat basically. A lot of the other competing documentaries were sort of a scene on the news kind of execution. So a lot of them had hired a director that could be a good fit, but actually had very little, emotional chips on the table for the story. Whereas me and a few other, uh, documentarians who actually like wearing it ourselves,but we ended up kind of realizing very quickly that you cannot tell the story unless you tell the story of the short sellers too, of the Wall Street side of things. So we teamed up with, a company called, Films who were Wall Street guys, two, two guys, one short seller and hedge fund, CEO and a securities analyst.

And so we all did this together and it was a co-production. And suddenly we had this insider Wall Street knowledge, and I said, there's all these conspiracy theories that people have on Reddit. Likeanything worth pursuing? Sort of to like really get the story deeper

And they're like, oh yeah, here's actually this one thing called naked short selling, which is basically sort of an abuse of the mechanism of betting against the stock. And it's one of the areas of the stock market that is somewhat obscure by extremely powerful firms. And then there's a ton of loopholes that you can utilize to make extra money. John, the Hedge Fund Manager was one of our producers, he's like, I hate this stuff because, when you do that and you abuse the mechanism, you actually are doing something that's a disservice to the overall market, which is your,risk and reward is uneven because you've got zero risk and just reward.

And that's something that shouldn't exist.That's something bad and especially if only a few people can access it. So We went all in on this idea, and then basically when we pitched it, teamed up with Gun Powder and Sky, which is a studio that does a lot of narrative and documentary projects. It the first time that they took a meeting since the beginning of the pandemic. So that was sort of a cool thing.

And we put together this really crazy trailer. They said,it's a really sort of saturated market. There's a bunch of GameStop projects out there, but let's give it a shot. And so we went to pitch it and we pitch it to HBO Max. And HBO at the time had turned down two other GameStop projects already. And they were like, this whole GameStop thing is probably not, gonna be a thing, something that we wanna pursue ourselves. So then we pitched them and they're like, oh, this is very different. One of the themes that we had next this financial violation and abuse of the mechanism, storyline was also a storyline about representation. For most of investors, it's still very male dominant, white dominant, affluent. the stock market is sort of this basic ingredient of how an economy works. And everybody should be able to reap the benefits of a powerful economy. But if you exclude people by just making it complicated and making it inaccessible, or by creating all of these tools to rip them off. You're kind of hurting the overall society. was also this layer that my dad had been this activist investor intrying to teach people how to invest in companies that actually make the world a better place. This is a storyline that's really close to my heart and something that I have a unusual level of care and access to. And I of a few of these factors, HBO was like, we turned on the other two, but we want this one.

And so it was this crazy ride of finishing this.And We ended up competing with Netflix who also had a show at the time. We knew about it, we knew who was directing it. You know, trying to look over our shoulders like who's gonna be first? We beat the Netflix team by a few weeks, and so they had to pushback their release date by a few months, which I think was not, not fun for them, but

 yeah, it was a really crazy experience

June: The other thing that struck me about this, and this is like the production side of my brain, there are so many locations and there are so many people you were interviewing, what was the production schedule like?

schedule like?

Toby: was, uh, I think in total we maybe filmed for like 30 days or so, spread out. By the time we had pitched HBO we had filmed like 20-25, so we're nearly done. We're very close to the finish line when know, We had three producers, really trying to find the heart in the story and the things that had nothing to do with finance necessarily, but more with all these incredible human stories that came out of this. and then John at Burke, who were sort of the inside finance guys. and then me, who kind of kept the big picture of all the nerdy stuff.Because of this teamwork, we kind of realized, okay, we need all these different kind of characters, all these different flavors. And the stories that we had seen there were so incredible.

We wanted to chase down more stories, but at some point you realize if you too many characters in documentary, there's nobody that you really care about. And so we kept it to a manageable amount and we actually, maybe a point of pride to some degree. We never cut anybody out. So all the characters that we filmed are all in the documentary. I think part of what was important for us is to show this is a really diverse world. The people that fight each other on the stock market every day are, could not be any more different from each other. And Even the people on Wall Street where you think they're all cut from the same cloth, they're so different and they're so crazy and they might be friends one day and enemies the next and you just never know.

It's just this giant mosh pit in a way, um, everybody saying my idea's better than your idea and then putting X dollars on that idea.

June: The series itself has like a wealth of information, you have like these really cool animations throughout it. What was the editing process like and how did you balance all that information?

Toby: that was definitely, uh, Tessa was really instrumental We kind of constantly bounced back and forth over The how much information versus how many human storylines we should have. And I think we generally agreed, but I was very keen on putting as much information in it as possible. But there'scalled cognitive capacity.

So when a human takes in information, there's a certain capacity that can take it in at, and at some point it just max out and so I knew that there was a limit to how much people would be able to absorb in a given amount of time. And when we agreed on two episodes at one hour each, I knew, okay, I can teach you these kind of concepts and some of the stuff I just need to not put in there because there's just no space for it. The hard thing about finance documentaries, and I think part of the reason why there's not a lot of finance documentaries

 With finance, most people have no idea what it is, how it works, so you have to spend nearly 30 minutes explaining to the audience what the basic ingredients of the plot are before you can even start what the plot is.In the beginning it was very difficult. We had a bunch of really great editors, But all of us were trying to figure out like, how do you actually get into this world, right? And it was sort of had a general structure, but then realized pretty quickly we need to start it off with a human story that's very compatible with the first thing that, would understand, which is the internet.So instead of starting with a finance thing, We said, let's start with the crazy people on Wall Street Bets before we even understand what finance is.I don't know when this happened, but at some point pretty early on I got obsessed.

And

obsessed for a long time. I've got a few Spotify playlists, um, of soundtracks, and I listen to it all the time, somewhat to the dismay of the people that work with me inbut there's this great opening soundtrack of Tron Legacy and uh, Jeff Bridges has this really cool thing where he talks about what the inside of a computer might look like, and it is how he's always been imagining it and how he thought he could never get there. But then one day he got in and it starts this epic track. by Daft Punk and that song and that narration is incredible. So I was like, I wanna do like this, but applied to the stock market. And so When we eventually got Kieran Culkin to narrate our show, I already had this whole script figured out and I had a character in mind for him. and I had a way of explaining what the stock market is and how finance works in like two minutes, which is kind of crazy, but it's all coupled with these cool animations. And it had gone through a whole like, layer of revisions among our producing team where we all said like, is this clear? Because I have to assume a 14-year-old teenager would watch this with zero knowledge of finance and they'd be able to understand every single thing if they paid enough attention all the way until the end.we're like, you know what? Cool music, cool narration, cool visuals, people are gonna stick around for that. And then we start with a human story that's about the internet. .

How did Kieran end up being the narrator did, you go to HBO and you're like, listen, I have this amazing idea. You're gonna love it.

No, actually all the credit here goes to HBO and to our editors and also to Tessa so I was actually super against having a narrator. I was like, all these goddamn narrators, always like a old white guys, like our stock market, blah, blah, blah. And I was this is terrible because it's gonna turn people off.

It's gonna be so old and outdated. But the editors kept saying, dude, you need a narrator.we'd all record our own voiceovers and like, toss it in the, in the rough cuts we're like, oh, it's like, it's kind of nice.

Like it builds a bridge between this and that. And I had hoped that we could eventually get one of the characters to basically say these lines that where the connective tissue and walk away. then HBO was like, you know, you should really have a narrator. And they were so clever about it, they never like forced me or something.

They were always like, it would be a really good idea. What do you think? And then,names like Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis were floated around because they'd both kind of created their own businesses. They knew about investing, And then they mentioned Kieran Culkin.

 One of my only things that I was able to do during that docuseries with my free time, which was literally like 30 minutes a day probably, 'cause we're working like 14 to 16 hours. And I needed sleep and food, was watching Succession. The moment they said, Kieran, I was like, oh my God. There's this character that Kieran plays in Succession that is this like, goofy but funny, but also like incredibly rich and high level of access kind of guy. And he understands the world incredibly well. And was like, that is a cool character. And if that kind of character were to tell us the story of GameStop, that would be something that I'd listen to.

 I created a, character called N. You know very creative, maybe N as narrator or N as Nick, whatever. I came up with this idea that this person would be a former or current hedge fund employee who saw this all happening from the inside as a sort of mid-level person and hated his boss and just despised the sort of ruling class of Wall Street, but was working within Wall Street.

 He was reading Wall Street Bets on his side and thought it was so funny and so stupid. And I created this character because I knew of actual hedge fund people that were on Wall Street Bets and would say stuff like this.

AndI thought it would be so funny and also just very authentic and real within the story to have one of these characters actually tell us that story. And so eventually I told Kieran, you know, this is the character. and he's like, sort of a familiar character. You know, people later speculated it was Roman Roy.

I'm like, it was never Roman Roy, but it was somebody that was a somewhat similar personality at a very different level of society. You

Wow, that's amazing. what a great partnership between you and HBO to put that together.

 you know, they built the brand on being artist friendly and I can wholeheartedly agree with that brand. It's totally true.

June: along with, this series, you also created this, robust impact campaign that went along with it, you partnering with organizations like Better Investing and Financial Beginnings. And then you also worked with, Urvin Finance to Co-found the We The Investors Movement. How did that partnership, you know, come to be

Toby: been doing the social impact entertainment thing and I have a lot of scientific background in it for the last 10 years. this was my turn of saying like, gonna walk the walk or just talk the talk? I was very insistent on doing an impact campaign. HBO is like, this is not really our thing, but whatever we can, we can help a little bit. And I was like, no, no. Like I'm crazy about this. I had seen so much. And Tessa had seen so much of the people that we interviewed and we said it's very important to spread financial literacy.

'cause that was one of the fundamental problems that we saw when we interviewed people for the show, is that there's just this incredible amount of inaccessibility to it, and it's very scary to learn investing and it's very scary to learn about the stock market. And so we said, okay, investor literacy has to be part of it. And then the deeper that it went into the show, the more I'm like, this whole system is really messy. And unlike a society that progresses pretty quickly in creating laws, In stock market, it's a lot more complicated. And one of the problems is that there's a revolving door between Wall Street andWashington, DC And so the lawmakers, and this is the same all around the world, you have incredibly powerful financial firms that influence the process of either making laws or rules. And when you break a rule, it's not even a criminal offense, it's just a civil offense. There's just a fine. the whole system is basically built to have extremely, weak incentives to play by the rules. I was like, this is crazy. Like, we need to do something about it. And the only way I would say to really get regulatory reform enough oomph is to get people behind it. So that was the dream, how to get there and no idea. And so, we initially said, okay, HBO, we wanna do these two things, literacy and regulatory reform. And we had put together this real extensive deck with all this stuff. We're like serving it on a silver platter. Here's all of our impact ideas. Do you wanna be part of it?

They said, okay, you know what? We'll hook you up with our CSR team at Warner Media. But, whole regulatory reform thing that's like a way above our punching weight. Because we're a publicly traded company, we can't just try to like manipulate the rules of the stock market as one of its players. If you wanna do this. you can do it on your own. and you can say from the filmmakers off. And I was like, great Thank you we'll obviously, not drag HBO's name in the dirt. we partnered with the, Warner Media team to do these partnerships with five different nonprofits that included Better Investing. was basically about getting people that watched the show to type in an URL that was at the end of the show that would then provide you five different links and you could click on whichever nonprofit you liked. And then we worked with the nonprofits to actually create landing pages and other sort of experiences that would be, feel kind of natural. So you go from the HBO site to this other site, the organization says, welcome from HBO Max, you just watched Gaming Wall Street, here's where you're currently, um, probably thinking about learning how to invest. So let us help you. And it was very important to have very, like above boards, smart, long running, stable non-profits that would help us,you use the two hours of building all this knowledge so that once you get to the slightly more boring part, you have all the basic knowledge already and you can kind of like work from there.

And then on the regulatory reform side, I didn't really know who to partner with and what the right move was. But there was this guy, I kept reading on Reddit all the time, Dave Lauer. eventually I just gave him a call while we're literally doing color for episode two. I was like, Dave, you know, I wanted to have you in a doc, but it just didn't work out with too many characters already.

There was too many storylines going on. But what do you think about partnering on an impact campaign? And especially, can you give me advice on what impact campaign would actually be effective? I think this is one of the biggest things that I've learned from people like Miguel Sabido, is don't try to reinvent the wheel and be the hero and be like, you know what?

We're gonna make this incredible impact campaign, Talk to the people that have been doing that kind of impact for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. You are just entering that space. You just was, were fascinated because of a story, because of something personal. Now talk to the experts that actually know what is gonna be an effective way to bundle energy. he said, you know what? It's kind of funny that he called me. This is kind of the perfect time. We've been thinking about doing an advocacy campaign. I've built already an alliance with other for and nonprofit companies that all want the same thing. We all want market reform. And I was like, well that's a crazy coincidence.

He's like, when is your show coming out? And I was like, on March 3rd. And he's like, oh. John Stewart, The Problem is coming out on March 3rd with him in it, and it's called The Problem with the Stock Market. And it's gonna talk about those specific market reform things we're like, this is crazy.

Like weird coincident people on Reddit later speculated there was this big conspiracy between Apple and HBO Max and I was like, I wish that these people even talked about release dates with each other.

 but it was just a crazy coincident. they dedicated a lot of resources. We dedicated a lot of our own resources. This was all on us you know, reinvesting, some of what we had made with Gaming Wall Street back into the impact campaign.

'cause we're like, this is the real goal of the show. You know, you gotta be entertained, but then you wanna do something and if we don't give you something that you can do, it would be unreasonable to expect that people just are gonna be angry and that it would be extremely productive.

 I realized that if you wanna do a social movement to change what the stock market does and how the finance laws are constructed, you need to present people with a very clear plan that is written by people that really know the system from the inside. And then tell you, this is how we're gonna change the system together. Lend your voice, lend your activism, but let's not try to come up with a hundred wheels and we'll never know which one to actually pursue.

we had a lot of debates in this small alliance of five different orgs, including us, the right kind of goals were to pursue. And we had a long list of possible goals and possible things that we should do. And so we zeroed in on one goal that was gonna be the first goal, which is a thing called Payment for Order Flow, where basically really big market makers, these sort of large bank-like institutions on Wall Street, can make a ton of money by ripping people off fractions of a penny at a time, basically looking into everybody's playing cards.

it makes these people a ton of money, but for everybody else, it actually is a net negative. we need to either make that practice illegal or make it so unprofitable that nobody wants to do it anymore.

And so they created this beautiful campaign. We had all of these conversations back and forth, and Dave Lauer and his team at Urban Finance, they had all these great ideas that, like an Investor Bill of Rights. And I was like, this is great. And then we came up with this hashtag, We the Investors, and when the campaign launched, it launched at the same date uh, show launched. And we did this big, big push on both Reddit and Twitter, putting our own names, my own username, it's my full name. So it's very easy for people to see, okay, this is the real guy that directed it. And all just backed this campaign. Within three months, it had grown to like a hundred thousand people. we had a very sophisticated, um, petition that we put together where wanted people to sign the petition. 70,000 people signed the petition. We worked with a lobbying firm to get it in front of the SEC, which is sort of the stock market police. The head honcho of the SEC is called Gary Gensler.

 Him and the chief economist met with our advocacy team, including, Alex from, Urban Finance and Dave Lauer from Urban Finance. They presented them a really sophisticated, market structure analysis where they said, look, this is bad for the whole economy. If you let people rip everybody else off, everybody's gonna lose trust in the market. They like this presentation so much that they invited 23 other people to a second meeting all from the SEC. So now

 I think we give them the powder to their existing plan, the, the black powder for it to actually say, okay, we're gonna go through this.

So two weeks later, they made a huge announcement that they wanna do this massive market structure reform, some of which completely aligned with our goals as like nearly our talking points. One-to-one. and it would be the largest market structure of reform in 15 years.

Of course, once they announced it, a bunch of billionaires sued them because it would turn off the money tap for them a little bit. so it's gonna go through as complicated regulatory reform process. But is sort of the closest job that we could do. And it was the most, I think, productive thing for a big crowd of people to say, Hey, we wanna do something, let's push something. And shake the basket a little bit.

June: It's amazing.what you said about impact campaigns I think is so important for other filmmakers and other people in the space to hear, because it's true. We, we do get attached to a certain story because we, see this and we wanna tell the story, but then when it comes creating some sort of like, impact or take action afterwards, like you said, don't try to recreate the wheel because there are people who are already working in this space several nonprofits and stuff that you can lift up and work with to create, campaigns. There's other times where I've watched films or shows and I've been like, oh wow, this is really amazing. You know what next? And then it's just like nothing.

Toby: Which I, I don't blame any filmmaker for . becoming a social movement builder next to already pursuing a ultra complicated, hyper competitive career, one more thing to add to your plate. at the same time, I think it makes the whole work way more meaningful. I think lot of filmmakers eventually realize that, that there are like, oh, hitting a wall here, I'm just making these cool things that are really cool and I'm working with awesome people and I'm having a great time.

Or it's still a grind every day and it's hard to make money with it and all of that stuff. at some point you're like, what, what am I doing all of this for? You know? And so then you have the playbook laid out for you and you're like, Hey, there's a thing called Impact campaign. This is how you run it.

This is how you do reasonably, even with limited funds, I think that's when you, you can unlock that next level of being a filmmaker I think it's very important to lay the breadcrumbs and make a blueprint for other people where like, this is how you do it, this is how other people did it, and this is how they either failed or succeeded.

 The modern way of doing it, I think is always reform, and you have to do it very smart. And not every single issue requires regulatory reform. Many other things are behavior change, attitude change, it's other things that that matter. But the stock market context, this literacy component and the regulatory reform component were the most effective ways of distributing that energy that was already there. There was a lot of anger. Our show was built on anger of people trying to rebel against Wall Street with their own tools.

June: Yeah. 'cause there was certainly a lot of anger that I remember, towards, Robinhood shutting down and not letting people trade. I remember getting, emails from my own stock investment app saying AMC and GameStop as volatile don't do anything.

And I'm like, wow, these people are really like opinionated about this. I'm like, let people trade if they wanna trade.

Toby: Totally. No, a fascinating, example of, I think, you know, the, the conspiracy theories that everybodysort of like shut down trading to like, protect the big bad guys. reality is that it was just total incompetence, on many different fronts, incompetence on the highest level, which is the DTCC sort of the. The stock market plumbing system, if you will. But then also high level of incompetence at Robinhood, they had created a breed of investor that didn't really exist before, which was all these people that were there to just sort of have a good time gamify the whole thing, which is totally fine.

You know, it's, it's great to have fun. But they were encouraging that stuff and they were building a system that actually worked a little bit like a casino where you would have all these little things that would make your behavior start, into gambling rather than investing. people wanna gamble their choice, if you build a platform that encourages gambling, that's on you. They got massive fines for this stuff, but at that point, they had not built a very sophisticated radar for anticipating things like this. And it was not just Robinhood, like your, broker, most other stock market apps all had issues because the way that the market is basically built is that when people take enormous amount of risk. You have to put down an enormous security deposit. And the bigger the risk, the bigger the security deposit. And this, basically, this Game Stop moment was like maximum risk ever experienced. And none of them had enough cash for security deposits that big was billions and billions of actual liquid dollars that they had to dump into that security deposit box.

The, it just didn't have it. So their only choice was to say, we will make it less risky and we're gonna shut down the buy button.

 But of course, you then hurt all the trust of all the people in the system.

And the right thing would've been to just halt it all, just put a freeze on it. You freeze the stock price and you say, we're all gonna go, and we're all gonna collect a ton of money from our investors to say, Hey, we're gonna put down billions of dollars of security deposits because we messed up.

We built a system where all these people can take massive risks and now we're all screwed. And instead of screwing them back, now you're double screwed. take responsibility, put down the money, and then we'll see what happens.

people don't care. They just care about keeping the system alive.

June: They care about keeping the plumbing functioning. They're not there for fairness, you know, and so it was just a lot of bad things all lining up at the same time and then creating a bunch of conspiracy theories. Which of course led you to create the show and then create this, amazing impact campaign to it, Even though this situation, how it unfolded and everything, I feel like it definitely created, a moment to allow this talk about like investing, because I feel like more people were talking about investing than who were talking about it beforehand.

Toby: would say too, short term, this was bad for everyone. Long term, it was actually kind of good. It made people really care and really angry. And then hopefully our Impact campaign gave them an outlet to express that anger and, and eventually improve the system overall. So you're totally right.

I think if, if Robinhood had never shut down trading. I don't know if there would be a GameStop documentary. You know, it would've been just a weird thing that happened.

June: One of the things we had mentioned earlier is that you co-founded the SIE Society, along with, Robert Rippberger, who was also your partner on Cinema of Change.the website for everyone who's listening is siesociety.org. hosts a wealth of resources and educational information, ways to connect you with others working in SIE.What led you and Robert to creating this society?

Toby: we had done the magazine for six years, so it was 2019, and I was approached by a PGA producer, Kia Kiso who said, you know, this whole thing that you've got in Cinema of Change, we had built this big ecosystem sort of map and database of all these different organizations that were active in the space. 'cause one of the biggest realizations that we had pretty early on was that the social impact entertainment space is like atolls. it's just a bunch of small islands in a big ocean, and nobody knows that the other people actually exist. So you end up reinventing the wheel and you take the same energy investor monies, limited resources to do the same thing over and over. And so you're just wasting a ton of resources in that space. And if more people knew of each other, they could exchange more knowledge, they would build on each other's knowledge, and they could actually use that resource and energy to advance the field rather than reinvent the wheel each time. And so we created this big database and Kia approached us and said, Hey, we'd love to integrate this into the Producer's Guild social impact and entertainment task force.

And I was like, wow, they have a task force. That's cool. so we met with Kia, we met with, one of her colleagues, Will, who was a co-founder,we kind of realized that we should join forces, but that the PGA would be too exclusionary. We had both joined the PGA after a few months.

 the Producer's Guild is very much a Producer's Guild only kind of place, which is totally fine. You know, that's, that's its role. And we envisioned something that was much more welcoming to writers, to directors, to people that are not in the Producer's Guild

 We said, let's just create a separate standalone entity that we're gonna call something. And eventually it became the SIE Society.We contributed all the resources that we had from Cinema of Change and sort of folded it into the SIE Society.

Then both Will Nicks and Rebecca Graham Ford from, Producers Guild basically joined us as founding members, I would say it was a really,appropriate move to go a little bit away from the magazine and go more towards a community and a platform and a ecosystem of sort of Switzerland of information about social impact, entertainment, people, resources, IE instructions, impact reports.

So you can read what other impact campaigns did or didn't do and how they approached it. then this massive ecosystem of, of people and organizations. it's been now three years and it's steadily grown and eventually it resulted in the Impact and Profit Conference

and of course the other part that was really important for me is bringing a lot of this science that had already been established is already out there, incredible studies by people like, Bandura, the history that the whole builds on, which is about 50, 60 years and the earliest sort of stepping point of Sesame Street.

 we're standing on the shoulders of giants. We are maybe at the frontier of it, but this thing has a long track record and a long heritage.

And we need to take that stuff and put it into textbooks, into things that really build knowledge and build competence

June: when I was first introduced to SIE, it's because I had worked at a nonprofit and that's where that term came to me and I was like, wait a second. I've been in the film industry for 10 years now. I had never heard of this term. I didn't know what social impact was. I had worked in plenty of reality shows, which just felt completely draining. 'cause I was like, gosh, my name is on this and I don't really want anyone to know, but this is my work. coming into SIE,I was like, oh wow, this is a breath of fresh air.

 Where I felt like, oh, this is in my purpose. This is kind of what I want to do. I want to create, you know, socially good impact. I think that it's it's amazing that what you guys are doing with the Society and then with the conference, which

what was it like, this conference together

Toby: Yeah, it was really cool. So this idea for a conference existed ever since we created Cinema of Change. We're always like, there should be a conference of some kind, blah, blah, blah. nobody did it. You know, like, what? Like, this is kind of an obvious thing that you need to have, but, nobody wanted to do it. And then, after I met Albert Bandura, he told me about this guy in Mexico. Miguel Sabido, Robert and me ended up going down to Mexico interviewing Miguel for like 10 hours straight. We have a ton of video material off him, sort of for posterity and archival purposes.

And Miguel is this TV producer that has made these incredibly massive shows in the seventies in Mexico that, bent the population growth curve of the whole country to a more stable, fertility rate. He, created an insane amount of, adult literacy, where our impact campaigns of Gaming Wall Street just totally, is like a tiny pebble compared to this massive boulder of, of impact.

 He's this sort of legend and he said, you there's this conference you need to go to, it's in Indonesia. And I was like, oh my God. First I'm traveling by with a rental car to meet Bandura. Then I'm flying with a plane to uh, Mexico to meet Miguel, and now he's telling me to go three continents over to Southeast Asia to this conference. I ended up going. it was this incredible experience. It was called the SBCC Summit Social Behavior Change Communication Summit. So that was back in 2018. they did another one in 2020, but then of course the pandemic happened.

So the moment that Covid started rearing its head, they were like, it's off.

eventually 2022 they did it again and we did it in Morocco. this time I dragged both Robert and Will with me from SIE Society. and again, there was nearly no Hollywood people.

It was us. And then there was, executive director of Women and Film who just happened to be there because the Gates Foundation told her. I realized like there's this bridge building that is totally lacking. There's this world of SBCC that has a 50 year history. They build very directly on the work of Miguel Sabido and Albert Bandura, Sesame Street, they're all in this like academic bubble and in this foreign bubble, they mostly operate outside of the United States. And here is us sitting in this Hollywood bubble and our bubbles never really touch. And when they would touch, there would be an insane amount of knowledge that could be shared in both ways.

SBCC for example, I would say there are at least 25 years ahead of the entertainment industry in terms of rigor and research and overall knowledge of how human behavior and human brains work. We are more of the magic generational, you have a magical talent to make great stories Science is not really a thing in Hollywood for the most part, it would be this incredible exchange of knowledge. And so we said, okay, you know what? to put together this bridge. Maybe that is the conference that we've all been envisioning for a long time.

It was the very idea of SIE Society eventually was to run conferences. And so we said, okay, I think it's the right time. And this was like a really crazy process of prepping this. And eventually we got really great people to speak at the conference. It was all done only in like six months or something.

But we ended up having Peter Farelli, the director of Oscar winning Green Book. showrunner of Madame Secretary with an executive producer from, Grey's Anatomy with all these great people that came to share their individual knowledge, including reality shows. JJ Duncan the showrunner of Project Runway.

She was there to talk about unscripted. I talked about our Docu series. And so we just had this really cool coverage of all these different topics that were all relevant, that made a lot of people feel included. it was like more than 220 attendees and 22 panels in two days. And I was at the Skirball Center in LA, which was the great, great location.and all these people from the SBCC world suddenly were welcome to Hollywood. we kind of take on that torch that other people had carried before us where they tried to bring these worlds together. And so now we're trying to do this more from the Hollywood side.

this was a true partnership. We did it together with the Johns Hopkins, for Communication Programs. They're this massive, organization with 800 employees worldwide. that co-organized it with us and they also run the SBCC summit. So hopefully we'll also create a pipeline of Hollywood people to come to the SBCC summit

that's sort of the goal, you know, so it was really cool.

June: first off, we should probably mention that you are doing the conference again, next year in December. so definitely everyone who's listening should attend. It is a great conference.where do you see the SIE Society, role in the future

Toby: I think it's basically just exactly where it's at ofbut growing in the actual amount of people that can take advantage of it and growing in its importance in the industry. of our plans are, for example, to encourage a lot of universities to have classes or minors or majors. That are totally dedicated to social impact and entertainment. there's a few, USC has something that's adjacent to that. UCLA has something adjacent to that. isn't really an organization like SIE Society and somebody has to carry that responsibility of being the neutral, center that a lot of people can come to for, for knowledge and information and also share their own knowledge, what they consider to the secret sauce.

 so part of the idea is for people to share this common sauce so we can lift the overall space up and everybody can learn from each other. And then we can all still hog our little secret sauce that gives us some competitive edge. I think SIE society so far really encourages this connecting of people. I think the conference, you know, I, I can see it grow pretty dramatically. I feel like next year, December fifth and sixth, by the way. So for all the listeners, put it on your calendar for that. conference.siesociety.org. the conference I think is gonna be at least double the size next year.

not in terms of speakers. We'll just have even better speakers and even cooler topics. But in terms of people that can come and learn from this, and we wanna make this as inclusive and meaningful as possible because it's just missing in this space. And unless we really keep making that same commitment and just growing it together,It will always be a stifled lost opportunity. I feel like every year that the entertainment industry is not deeply dedicated to creating an impact with its massive global reach. It's a lost opportunity to create a better civilization, a better society,

Absolutely. 'cause I feel there are so many things that people learn about the US learn about our culture, and they learn it first through Hollywood, through movies, through tv. the amount of times you hear people talking about learning English through like watching Friends it has a huge influence on the world.

June: what we put out there is important because that's what people learn from.

Toby: Yeah, and the US government is totally aware of that. there's a lot of history of the US using its soft power, not just by having the oil price tied to the dollar, but also by having all these like, incredible TV shows or cool military movies where the US military is so awesome, exported around the globe, you know?

 but at the same time, I think there's all these, pitfalls obviously that come with it. It's very easy to ignore that. It's very easy to just say like, you know, it just is what it is. We're just making cool entertainment. Everybody wants to watch it. in India. You know, there's this like massive, effect that, Baywatch had. of the Baywatch creators I think were like a let's spread white supremacy. You know, it was just a, an artifact of how the industry worked at the time and the people that were really popular at the time. and so there's zero blame that I would assign there. Uh, I think this is all just learning lessons. It's all things where we can learn from the past and be like, we can do better.

 with every interview always end with, you kind of like five rapid. fire questions.so the first one is name a TV show, film, or podcast that came out recently that had, an effect on you in some way.

probably Bad Surgeon. that's a docuseries on Netflix that was incredibly disturbing and taught me a lot aboutthe culpability of people to trust doctors, which is a necessity. You know, you gotta trust these people when they put you under sedation and open you up. But then also the importance of the quality control that these institutes and hospitals have with not accepting shysters and not accepting half done science. So that show was like an incredible reminder, how important good science is. incredibly disturbing. Like it just made my skin crawl. got in touch with a director, I was like, dude, this is nuts.

 it's an incredibly well told story. It's been told multiple times before in other docs, but he just pulled this off in a very, very next level kind of way.

June: That was super interesting for me as a non-doctor. so yeah, I'd say that one I I feel like I'll watch that, but I feel like just your description, the one is making me like, oh, what is this?all right. Second question. what is the cause that's closest to your heart?

Toby: oh, this is really interesting. I don't know. okay. Actually, the cause that I find the most meaningful is the human brain. it's ground zero for all innovation, war, bloodshed torture, genocide, achievement. Everything that human history is ever done has been done by human brains. And the problem is that we barely understand how it works. And we're now in an age where artificial intelligence is accelerating at the pace that we've never remotely we're able to even imagine. And yet here we sit there with our brains and we barely understand how they work. And I always think that we, our brains are like a smartphone and we use it like a hammer. I do think that there's so many things in human society that could be so much better if we understood how the brain worked. for example, depression, you know, if we understood really how depression worked and with a way better way of treating it, be it clinically, chemically, psychologically, whatever it might be, the amount of productivity that could unlock would be massive.

I think the more that we understand the human brain, the further we can push any society and, financial stability, hunger, pretty much all crises in the world, I think can be solved by either directly and directly understanding how the human brain works. But we dedicate so few resources to that research, goal.

June: name one nonprofit that you would love to lift up?

Toby: A nonprofit, maybe a nonprofit that I haven't worked with yet that I'd really love to do something for. so this is a really tough one because I know so many

 care about so many of their goals. Yeah, I would, I would say one, one nonprofit that we're currently helping that I think is really brilliant.

They're called All-Star Code and it's an organization that basically helps, mostly boys of color, mostly Black boys, learn how to code in their early teenage years, and then very, brilliantly shepherds them through their mid to late teenage years through their first internship. Gives them incredible amount of opportunities to get an internship at Nike and Google and Facebook and other big places.

 and then helps 'em get their first job and catapult somebody from, a world where they most likely will not have an ability to make anywhere close to a six figure income, to making well beyond that. hopefully in the indirect effect, then returning some of that wealth to their families, to the areas that they came from. So I think that's incredibly meaningful. I think what they're doing is incredibly useful and very much for the times.

June: Yeah. What an amazing organization. Thank you for sharing that.if you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be?

Toby: Oh, there's so many people,so many people that I've dreamed of collaborating with for a long time. probably Keanu Reeves. 'cause my favorite movie ever is The Matrix, and I do think that you know, next to the existentialist philosophy that the Wakowski siblings,we're able to sort of bring to the table. I think his performance is just. Like out of this world. And I'd say probably also the Wakowskis, even though I know that they're sort of their own stuff now, like brilliant minds.

And you know, the, the stuff where the Matrix and Cloud Atlas came from,

lot more there. so probably just all around my favorite movie,

June: And then last question, which is a little silly. if you could choose one song to play every time you walked into a room, what would you choose and why?

Toby: Wow.

I think it'd be really weird for all the other people that are in the room that are like where's coming from? I don't know. There's this really great, placebo cover of a Kate Bush song. Called Running Up the Hill.

And you listen to it with the lights off at maximum volume with like a proper base system, like just blows you away.

And I, I was a, when I was a teenager, I was a huge fan of the OC and I watched it in Austria. It was all dubbed in German and stuff. Running Up the Hill is one of those, the, the placebo cover as one of the pieces of the soundtrack. I listen to soundtrack music all day long, so it would definitely be a soundtrack song and I'd probably pick that one.

June: an amazing choice.

Toby: thank you Toby for,

June: coming onto the show.

Toby: Awesome. It was a pleasure.

June: Thank you for joining me today on this episode. Story for Good is created, hosted, and produced by June Neely. For more information about the organizations or projects talked about in the show, or for media and sponsorship inquiries, visit us at storyforgoodpod.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the show, and be sure to share it with a friend.