Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Fake Your Own Death (GONE WRONG) | Marcus Schrenker

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Marcus Schrenker was a top-tier financial advisor throughout the early 2000s, handling millions of dollars in client money at a time. After being outed for unscrupulous business practices, he needed a way out of trouble - concocting a botched plan to fake his own death.Check out Anomaly Documentarieshttps://www.youtube.com/@AnomalyDocs Follow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books!Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KDude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

This is Marcus Schrenker. In 2009, he tried faking his own death by crashing his airplane near a Florida neighborhood. As it turns out, Mark had a lot to run away from after being caught scamming his company's clients out of millions of dollars across several states. In the days following his capture, Mark was exposed in the media as a con artist who crossed every line to get what he wanted, even stealing from members of his own family in the end. In my mind, we were going to do this interview. and you were going to be releasing the video probably after the interview or when this interview came out

something along those lines like I wasn't realizing the interview was going to come out and it actually showed up on my YouTube so it showed like I picked up a thing and I saw shrinkers pick you I saw his thumbnail

and I was like huh like you know there's a few out there little ones 10 minutes five minutes I thought oh look at this there's a whole thing and my first thought was, wow, I wonder if you knew. I was like, I wonder if he knows that there's an, and I thought I should probably tell him that

you know, that, that this is out. Yeah. This just came out. And so, but I, but in the meantime, you know, I clicked on it. I started listening to it. And and, um, and then, you immediately mentioned my name. And so, but I, but in the meantime, you know, I clicked on it. I And then you immediately mentioned my name. I still didn't know it was you until I heard my name being mentioned. And then I was like, oh, my God. And I was like, wait a second. I started clicking, click, click, click.

And I was like, oh, he released it. And I thought, oh, he released it early. To tell you the truth, so the way the production went was I had this thought that maybe I would wait till the anniversary, like January 11th or 12th or whenever I was and put it out. um over the holidays though like i found that i actually had way more time than i anticipated i would to actually get it done right and after spending who's it two three months in marcus shrinker's head basically through reading the book reading the documents bringing the documents to work every day printed out highlighting just the whole nine yards i went all in on this video in a way i I haven't in a while since I did Crazy Eddie from New York.

But by the time I was getting to that point where I was actually editing the video and seeing the progress, I was just ready for it to be finished out to the world before New Year's. That was the end of it. So I had always actually had the goal of getting it out before New Year's, but I honestly didn't think I'd be able to meet that goal. And then, I think it was on the 23rd or the 24th of December, I looked at my video and saw all the recording I had done and how much I actually had left of my script to edit, record,

revise, all that stuff. And I was like, oh, my God, I could totally get this out for New Year's. Right. So I went ahead and did that. Yeah, I was going to say, by the time it, by the time the YouTube record, recommended it to me. It already had 50,000 views. I am really impressed with how well it's done. And I have no idea if the guy's actually seen it or not. Like, I don't know. Maybe I, I assume he's the kind of guy that would Google his own name. Like, I could totally see that. So I haven't had any, you know, feedback from him yet that I can confirm. Although I had one person in the comments, I think it was yesterday or the day before, a very like no subscriber. been on YouTube for a while but has never really done much and they were like oh you didn't

post any sources that's a little suspect or that's a little sketchy or whatnot and first of all I have a credits to the video that lists every single you know um video like program that I watch like Dateline all that stuff I listed all the names of the stations and news outlets in the credits and then I even put in the credits if you want or sorry in the video description if you want an itemized list at everything that I used, all 60 resources, I have one, just ask, basically. But I didn't want to just link to a Google Doc or anything like that that can be traced back to my email unless somebody really wants it.

So whether that was him trying to, you know, poke the bear a little or not, I'm not sure. But it wouldn't, I wouldn't put it past him just based off of what I've heard from you and other people I've talked to. I wouldn't be, I mean, look, I think when you, you, when you do, or when he does see it, I think very quick, I think he'll, he'll probably shoot you off an email talking about suing you and all these other things, all these other things that he won't do. Yeah, yeah. And you know what? I've talked to, I've talked to friends who are lawyers or in the legal profession. And I'm reporting a news story that's the public interest.

There's nothing that he can really do. And I took care also because I mean, I found some of what he's up to nowadays. I'm pretty sure he's a photographer nowadays. I can't confirm that, but he's certainly not flying clay, and that's for sure. But so I found some pictures and this and that, and I made a conscious effort not to use any of it because I don't want to give him that leash

where he can go ahead and try to, you know, oh, well, you used one picture of mine, so I'm going to claim that as my copyright and get this taken doubt because you're using my stuff without my permission. All the video footage that I used was from television programs under fair use where it's transformative

and all that. I don't think he really has much recourse to... No, he doesn't, but he'll always, he'll usually make that effort, you know, and he'll blatantly lie in a letter to YouTube. He'll blatantly lie and have letter to, you know, he can't provide anything. And even

if he does, you know, it's like you said, it's all fair use. He doesn't have use. He's got to be careful because on YouTube, if you make a copyright claim, because I've had to deal with this before, where people have actually taken my videos full sale, blurt out my logos, and then uploaded it as their own,

but they get content I need by YouTube and I get an email for it. You have to be really careful. If you say that you're taking somebody's video down because it's yours and you own the footage, it straight up says, I confirm that this is my stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, under penalty of perjury.

So he's risking perjury if he does try and do something and isn't exactly going about the right way of doing whatever it is he's trying to do, i.e. getting the video pull. Like, I'm not, I'm not saying that it would be pointless for him to try because, I mean, there have been plenty of times. Friends of mine have had videos pulled because somebody didn't like what they put out. There was a bit of a battle, but very rarely, have I noticed

that somebody can just walk right up, make a pointless claim and get away with it without like even after a little bit, sorry, after a little bit of illegal or YouTube back and forth with YouTube themselves,

a lot of times YouTube will be like, yeah, okay, this guy doesn't really have a leg to stand on, so his claim is we're just going to not deal with. But I think it would be very interesting if he did try to pull something, I hope he doesn't. I mean, it's an headache,

but at the same time, I've had in the back of my mind since I started the video or at least editing the video that it's always a possibility. So, if he tries, all the spite of him on,

like, he, it wouldn't be the first time, as we know, with how we got the book, bailout pulled from, from Amazon by trying to say, oh,

you know, the shit that he tried to say what's so funny about that too is like you know like you didn't you find like i've been contacted by people that have producers and you know production uh companies who have while they're kind of vetting me they're like hey tell me about this a cease and desist from marcus shrinker and i'm like like i didn't even know he had filed a cease and desist yeah i just knew he had filed paperwork with my probation officer and amazon like he never filed anything with me. Yeah.

Like, I'd never seen that. Other people have told me about it. I've never even seen it. Yeah. Well, the one thing I found when I was making the video, especially after reading and rereading the book and rereading again when I was putting together my script, because it was always kind of my anchor where I wasn't sure of when something happened. I just flipped through the book.

Oh, okay, yeah, I was in between this and this. And that would kind of set me on the right path. But what I found interesting was that even after he got pot, this was a guy that was willing, not just willing, but eager to talk to anybody and everybody. And you can see, I think it was the 2020 clip where he's like tearing up a little when he was recounting his story and acting all remorseful and this and that. And like I had a couple of people that I know that I would send previews of the video to that said like, there's just something like in his eyes. so you can tell that there's a lack of sincerity. And even when he's tearing up, you don't get that sympathetic feeling in your chest

when you would watch somebody else who, you know, has had their hand caught with the cookie jar. It's genuinely remorseful for it. He is just basically, like, it's crocodile tears. He's trying to... Well, he's still, like, it's funny how he's talking about, like, I jumped out of the plane and it was going down there.

Like, isn't it weird that you jumped out of? of the plane at exactly the place where you had stored your bike the day before. He's like, I can see how that's, that, that, that coincidence is, is, is very strange how it looks, but it's, it really, it's like, what do you, like, you must think I'm an idiot. Yeah. And it was funny, because there's a couple of times, um, in your book where he drives that, like with the, the Kinney's family CPA. One of my favorite lines in your book is about how he's like, right, right. I can see where you were mistaken as it, like, he's putting it on. her I caught you and you're trying to say I'm the one that's it's like oh yeah yeah I can see how

that would look that way yeah he said that he did that to me multiple times where he's like no no I can he is I can see where you're uh where you're confused or something like yeah I'm confused you're lying yeah of course I'm confused you're lying of course it looks that way because it was that way right what are you trying to pull and um like with like uh 20 20 that just that tearing up and oh you know like it was so horrible that i put my family through that and then the judge flat out said to him in the legal documents that i was looking at and i you know obtained if you were so concerned about how that would impact your family you sure didn't seem that way when you're actually going through the motions of you know stealing people's money churning people's

money lying about euro funds or lying about this being a good investment or that or whatever like you really didn't care when it was like you didn't care until you got caught like right i think that that was and like you know what his lawyer that guy that he had Chadwick like that guy did a fantastic job yeah making that work uh how it did but i still got the sense that he almost wasn't even satisfied with that uh the strength oh no he wrote letters to the judge he wrote letters to the judge he wrote letters to like he still was not you know and even me he he when he would talk to me it was always about how he shouldn't have been locked up he he you know it was such such crap you know let's talk a little bit about um you know where you were raised and and how you ended up starting this channel

and and doing these um you know documentary videos so i um i'm from canada uh Ontario specifically small town, you know, I went to school, high school. I had a huge interest in video production from an early age. I took all the classes. I was in a specialized program, actually, at my high school that allowed me when I was about 18 or 19, I worked at a local television station interning, making television commercials back when, you know, that was still a thing that happened at TV stations where they would actually have the in-house creative team.

So I got my feet wet early on with that. and then I kind of had this idea that it was going to be, you know, an actor, stuff like that. So I moved up to Toronto, you know, the big city where a lot of things are produced. And then I realized they really didn't like big cities. So I moved back to my hometown and kind of bombed around for a few years. I wound up going to university and getting a degree in history. And while I was in university, a lot of the jobs that I worked either had an element of filmmaking. So I worked for a film festival at one point.

and or they had they related to my history training that I was getting and I mostly I mostly studied Latin American history, Chinese history stuff like that. So international was always my focus academically but I found that I was getting I was finding I had an interest in stories historical stories that mostly from the last 50 or 60 years. So not really. really history in the sense of archaeology digging up bones or anything like that. I was more interested in recent history.

And in particular, I was finding I was being drawn to stories that I would hear about when I was like anywhere from the age of about 7 to 17 of like weird offbeat kind of stories. Like there was this internet forum I used to go on quite frequently called Something Awful forums.

And on there, it was a common. forum but there was a plethora of different topics being discussed and one of them was called the the weird Wikipedia article or creepy Wikipedia article or offbeat I don't remember anyways it was a long story short it was a thread where people could just post interesting stories that didn't really fit anywhere else so there was one about this group of Russian travelers I think it was in the 50s or 60s and one night they were camping and all of a sudden Hey, so what did you want to talk about?

Well, I want to tell you about Wagovi. Yeah, Wagovi. What about it? On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No, just ask your doctor. About Wagovi? Yeah, ask for it by name. Okay, so why did you bring me to the circus?

Oh, I'm really into lion tamers. You know, with the chair and everything. Ask your doctor for Wagovi by name. Visit Wagovi.com. Savings Exclusions may apply Media just swept this party of seven or eight people

and they all ran outside into the snow basically naked and froze it up and for years they couldn't figure out why and what it wound up being as I recall was there was some kind of avalanche or weather effects

that basically spooked them and they thought that they were going to be snowed in and they had to get the hell out of there before that happened and of course being in that mania everybody just races out without you know getting properly dressed up and they freeze to death now what was interesting about it was before they actually came like people in the modern day came to realize what exactly was that was happening there was all this kind of paranormal stuff that people were talking about like

all the other travelers were reporting that they saw like orange orbs in the sky and stuff like that or or the other thing was like when they found their bodies they were all like their skin was all bright orange but when I read the story you know 15 years ago or whatever it left out the fact that the reason that their skin was all orange is because they found their bodies like three weeks later so of course their skin was all orange because these bodies were already decomposing yeah yeah decomposing and being exposed to the elements so it was kind of that almost paranormal but not quite paranormal element to it where I think there was always an explanation

that was logical and scientific in the end but it would tantalize you with these weirder details and then I got into other stories like one of my videos is a fellow named Jack Chick and literally how I found it about Jack Chick was I was working out Walmart and I was cleaning the bathrooms as a teenager and you'd find these little like

these Christian comic books that would tell you why you were going to hell like Harry Potter is going to cause you to go to hell or this or that. And I was fascinated by this and I wound up doing my own research into who this guy was that was producing him and it turns out he's been doing this since like, or he was doing it, he's dead now.

But he was doing it since the 60s. So, and like in the 70s and 80s in particular was this heyday because he was talking about how Dungeons and Dragons was going to I don't know, poison your soul or whatever. So it was all these

kinds of loosely related stories that I would read about or find out about. And I found I had a great, great interest in like finding out the actual details, especially if there were, like I would go and I'd, um, so how I got into the YouTube channel, I should say, um, is that, uh, I would go and look up these videos on YouTube and I would, there was no video on it. So I thought, huh, after enough times of that happening, I thought, well, you have the, there should be a video. There should be a video. You have the training and video editing, you learned out of research historical stuff

in university and you spend enough time working at museums and stuff and giving tours to people, why not write a couple of scripts and see where it goes? And if nothing comes of it, nothing comes of it. But the first video I did was on a fraudster who stole elderly people's money

in Japan. His name was Kazuo Nagano or Nagano or however it's pronounced. But early on and even to this day, I'm not always the best of pronouncing words. because a lot of times I read stuff I don't always get the video footage of it or get video of it

until I'm already well into editing it and I realize my error and fix it usually. But anyways, going back to what I was saying I came to the conclusion that, okay, these videos don't exist yet but they're interesting stories that I think people

get something out of. Like, there was this my second video was a guy called Jamaka Eyewater and he pretended he was like this Native American expert that came from sub-tribe, and I think he even said he came from Canada or something like that. It's been a while since I've looked back on that story, but he basically built a career as an author and speaker, pretending to be a Native American, giving the Native American perspective on things. And it turns out he was like some Jewish guy from New York or something, or California.

It was California where he was from. He had a background, like both of his parents were Europeans. Like, there was no Native American blood in him. And then he was called on that, I think, in the 80s after he had already won, like, the Newberry medal for writing, like, I think the book was called Ann Powell that he wrote. And, like, this was a book that kids read in, like, grade schools and high schools in the 80s and 90s. And he, over the years, like, there was this guy named, I think was Hank Adams. He was, like, really prominent Native American, like, real Native American scholar.

And he was noticing all these inconsistencies on what this guy was saying. And, like, he would flat out make up things. about this tribe that he purportedly was from and he uh this Hank Adams character started really keeping tabs on him and called him out basically and then all of a sudden this guy story changed like oh well you know like my my birth parents were European but I was adopted by Native Americans and adopted into their tribe and blah blah blah blah blah blah which I believe wound up being true except for the fact that he was adopted into their tribe when he was in his 30s or 40s

after he had already written all these books about this tribe that he was supposedly adopted into as a kid. So he was another one of those shrinker type characters that was constantly making things up and constantly changing his story however it suited him or

to who he was talking to or whatever. So I found that I was zeroing in on a niche of fraudster type characters or unscrupulous characters liars basically a lot of them were and like the psychology

of how they were so good at it was fascinating to me and that's how I wound up doing Crazy Eddie which is one of my more popular videos of last year and in general but basically Crazy Eddie how that story came to me at front of my about two or three years ago was listening to Rogan's podcast and Joey Diaz was

on there talking about how when he was growing up in New Jersey and everything he'd see these commercials commercials for Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane. That's what he'd say. And what it turned out being was that Crazy Eddie had stores in all five boroughs in New York and basically blew up as the first discount electronics chain. And the way he was doing that was because they were cooking the books. Like they were skimming money off the top of every cash purchase that was made by people and literally stuffing their mattress full of this money. And then they eventually wanted to

take the company public. So he sent his. cousin to school to become a CPA to learn how they could do it, like learn how they could get away with continuing to defraud their investors and everything like that without ever wanting to pay back their money. And again, like the details are fuzzy to me because I was like six or seven months ago when I did that story. But there was this whole, like I have a 50 minute video on the entire process of it. And it was quite remarkable how much of a science this guy and his cousin had it down to scamming people. And so I guess for me, it's the sheer audacity.

And like all of it is always, there's always a comedic element to all of it. Like it's funny that this guy, Jamaki Highwater, wound up lying his way into being the American consultant on a Star Trek show. I think that's very funny that nobody betted this guy. Everybody just took him at his word based off of who he had lied to before. who had also taken him out his word. So he basically had built up this reputation, got on to Star Trek,

and was advising them. And 20 years later, people are like, yeah, that character that he was advising the writing for, there was nothing about him that even remotely could be considered genuine. And same with Grazieetti. Like, it was funny to me that he was coming up with all these hairbrain schemes for how he could basically steal from his investors and from the U.S. government.

and he would like he was such a character like he had his pause and everything so even when they would write scripts they would write scripts in a way for his commercials I should say that would

basically they would write things down that they knew he would want change later on because they knew he would go in and he was the type of guy who was the type of narcissist that would want to always have the final word of the script So if they knew that they wanted the word breezy used in there,

they would use a word that wasn't breezy, but very similar to it in a way that the writing would suggest that no other word but breezy would be good. And Greasy Eddie would come along and be like, yeah, the script's fine, but you need to change this word to Breezy. And they'd be like, great, okay, we have the script that we want now because we basically tricked him using his own narcissism into rewriting the scripts.

Right. We know he wants to participate. We know he wants to participate in some way or correct it in some way. So let's give him, let's paint him into a corner where he'll come up with exactly what we wanted. Exactly, exactly. And I was going to say, it's like the president picks the head of the Federal Reserve Bank. But the truth is, the banks that own the Federal Reserve Bank give him a list of 10 people that he can choose from. We're okay with any of them.

but this way it makes it look like you chose the head of the you didn't but yeah exactly and we're going to make sure that those nine other options are so like by contrast so unqualified compared to who we want that you have yeah you're down to two but yeah so that was basically how i got my start um i started writing scripts and just editing videos how long ago is this how long So five years ago, as of this July, and it was because I was working at a, I was working at a place where basically I was behind a desk eight hours a day. And like, it was a museum, but I worked in the gift shop. And I was behind a desk for eight hours a day. And I would watch all these tour guides come, like go through every half hour. And I would see the crowds of

these people that they would entertain for half an hour handing them tips, $5, $10. And I'm like, We know what. I don't think I'm half bad of a storyteller. I might not be Alfred Hitchcock or anybody like that. But I can certainly, I think, hold somebody's interest for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. I'm going to try my own hand at doing basically my own tour guide type things. But I'm going to do it using my experience in video by making YouTube videos. And those turned into, like they started out as maybe 12 minute long videos. And my first one that was over 20 minutes was I think about Papa John. because that was when he was going through his whole media shitstorm of oh I'm going to eat the 40 pizzas in 30 days and that was when he was losing his marbles because they basically

took the company from him after he got caught on all those training calls basically using racial wasn't racial slurs or yeah like so they were doing he was doing role playing he was using some words that people consider weren't exactly

politically correct and he was also and complaining because Obamacare was coming in and he was talking about, oh, I'm going to have to raise the price of pizzas by 25 cents to be able to pay for the health care for all white people. And I'm thinking to myself, like, I don't think most people really give a shit at their Papa John's pizzas, 25 cents more

expensive. Like, maybe, I don't know, the people that are, the people that eat Papa John's every day, okay, sure, they're going to notice an increase, but at the end of the day, he was making a really big deal out of it. And it was funny seeing him get, like, basically go on the news and just rant

and rave like a crazy person and then the company finally was like okay you need to slow down because you might have been the guy who started this company you might be our CEO but you're starting to affect our bottom lines by going on MSNBC and rant and raving about how horrible it is that your pizzas have to go up 25 cents we're going to loop you into some training seminars like teleconferences and straight yet a little so that you can be a bit more friendly of a PR guy for like a friendlier face for the company. And so in these calls he was doing role play and he

started just out of nowhere like bringing up all these racial words and like slurs and this and that and like to the point where the people on these conference calls are like okay hold on what are you doing here? Like any of well you know what if this happens blah blah blah blah blah and they're like

like they were just shaking their heads like and then those calls as I remember it either got leaked or transcripts of them got leaked and long story short he got in even more hot water and that was when they basically ousted him

and brought on Shaquille O'Neal as the spokesman for Papa John's after that point and where you can tell you can pinpoint actually where it was that Papa John got kicked out of his own company because around that time they changed the logo from having an apostrophe

in the name like to imply it was Papa John's Pizzerial the possessive to just Papa John's with no oastrophe as if that was just the like Papa John was like Captain Crunch or something just some character that they had invented and wasn't actually real and it was because they kicked him out of the company and he tried raising a stink about it and saying well you know I started this pizza place out of my grant or my father's uh bar or something like that and I solely the whole story about how he sold his truck and so that they could afford the pizza ovens or something like that and uh anyway

Anyways, the Papa John's one was the first one to go over 20 minutes because it was topical at the time and I wanted to strike on it, but I started realizing the longer form content is where the money is on YouTube. And so I realized, okay, if I want to actually start making a couple of bucks off of YouTube, I'm going to have to start making things there are over 20 minutes. And then that led into over 30 minutes. And then with Crazy Eddie, I finally hit the 40 minute mark, or sorry, the 50 minute mark. most. And then with this video, I probably could have done another 10 or 15 minutes, but I wanted to keep it succinct. I didn't want to, like I wanted the script to be punchy and I didn't want to go off meandering as I probably have in the last 40 minutes. I'm somebody that needs to stick to a script. And anyways, I found that with like these 40 minute videos, there are a lot more interesting and people, they seem to resonate more with people.

So going forward into this new year, I'm probably going to be focusing on making less videos, but longer videos. Right. Well, this one's only, so how often do you release the videos? So my release schedule is all over the place. Like when, so I work a job where basically I'm off in the summers and I have a lot of time to work on videos. I was, I've been off, I'm off this week. I'm off last week. So I had a lot of time to work on Shrinker.

but it's harder during, like when I'm at my full-time job to find the time in the evenings or the energy really to put videos together. So I find that I have to do a lot of my research on the weekends, and the research is always what takes the longest. Once the research is done, I can record fairly quickly, edit the videos fairly quickly, and get them out. Essentially, I have been able to finish a script and then get the video out in 10 or 15 days. If I'm going whole hog in the editing, everything like that.

The process for the average video, I would say, can take anywhere from six weeks to two months. Now, that being said, that being said, I had, like, I did one video in the summertime right after Crazy Yeti. I think it came out two or three weeks later, and it was on some Polish criminal. It was basically the Polish Robin Hood. And that took me three or four weeks to do because it was an easier story. All the facts were laid out very nicely. And then 10 days

later, I had another video out about the judge who sued his dry cleaners because, again, was a very straightforward story. He sued his dry cleaners for $54 million because they stole his pants, which is the most ridiculous thing in the world.

But a lot of times the downtime between videos comes from me because I'm very discerning with the topics. I get a lot of topic suggestions and I court topic suggestions from people but I always say like there are no guarantees like so there's a lot of topics I won't approach so anything involving like child abuse and all abuse I stay away from because I don't want to profiteer off of that and quite frankly it's an uncomfortable topic to to talk about in the first place so I don't I don't really do those kinds of videos. Now, early on, I did do a video about a troubled teen help center, but that one was a little bit different because it was a lot of people after the fact coming

out and wanting to say their side of the story and exposed basically this place because it was funded by like Hollywood, like, B-list Hollywood celebrities from like the 50s and 60s were pouring all kinds of money into this place in the 70s and 80s. And, uh, basically I found a web forum where people came together and were like yeah I was there too like I was here from 71 to 73 and this is what I dealt with and that so that one was a little different because I found actually there were a few people that I had been in touch with directly that were on board with it so I thought okay I'll do this but again that was early on in the channel before I kind of established those rules for what I am and I'm not willing to cover so a perfect example of a video I was going to to do and then I did some research and dropped at the last minute from actually just before Schrenker was I was going to do a video on this guy called lobster boy a lobster boy had I know like Gibsonton Florida yeah yeah uh he had extradactylie which basically made his hands he uh like the fingers all fused together like lobster like lobster glob right and I uh it was a

very entertaining story up until a got to the boy where it was like yeah he he smacked his kids around He smacked his wife around and he was really ugly about it too. So it wasn't just like him yelling at them or be getting like all pissy and just being an angry loudmouth. He was actually quite physical and that was a substantial part of the book that I had read that was kind of my primary source on the topic. So I kind of decided, you know what? There's a little too dark for my taste. I'm going to go ahead with a guy that instead stole millions of dollars off of elderly people and hardworking pilots. you didn't do lobster boy i mean there's always there's always the possibility in the future

that i could revisit it for now my the girl when that whole thing was going on the chick that i was dating that i dated for about four years by the way and it was engaged to be married to her her mother was a secretary at the law firm that represented lobster boy oh no kidding that's hilarious So you have like a direct connection to the story. Yeah. Because initially the, when, you know, he was killed and the video came out where they're showing him like abusing the kids, right? Yeah. And then later they find out they get the audio. Yeah.

And you find out that's not what was happening in that video. No. It was a lot different. Yeah. And the other thing too is the only. So that particular video with the audio, I found online on some archive website that archives old news stories and stuff like that. But to get access to the video, it was something like they wanted a huge amount of money for like 20 to 30 seconds of footage. Like I think they wanted over $1,000 for it.

And I thought, you know what, with how much this video might make, I could justify that later on in my life, in my career. Like, if I have five videos that are all making five grand in a year, well, then, yeah, dropping a thousand bucks on a video is nothing if I'm going to get that return on my investment in the end. But it's still, like, I'm still at a stage right now where it's shaky. Like, I did a 33-minute long video on the cat lady that got all that surgery to make herself look like a feline because her husband was cheating on her. And she was a billionaire. like she's still around and she she's nuts like all straight up say i think that this lady is a little

cute uh you have to be to get all that surgery but uh she like that video only made a couple hundred bucks and it's been out for like three or four months so if i would have dropped a thousand bucks on that i would be seven hundred dollars in the hole and i'm like one person so anything any money that i make off of the channel usually goes back into the channel but i can't really justify myself paying out a pocket a thousand bucks especially right now in the current financial climate

justify paying a thousand bucks for 30 seconds footage on a video that might be 100 bucks now lobster boy might do famously I might make 10 grand from it but there's still the issue I would want to find an angle to the story that more emphasizes less emphasizes

the really dark shit he did and more the dark comedy of how his the chain of events led to end shooting his son-in-law and then getting shot himself a few years later.

Well, I think that a part of it would be Gibsonton, Florida is basically it's a carny town. Yeah, that's what I... I mean, you know, there's a lot of odd people yeah. Like that's a very, very inexpensive place to live

And it's filled with these people that, you know, they, they follow like the, you know, the circuses, you know, the traveling circuses and carnivals and, you know, so they're carnies. And they, you know, they're there. They work a few months here, a few months there, a few months here. And they leave for months. And then they live in trailers and it's an odd situation, huh? There are people up the road. And that's kind of like their vacationing town. Or when they're in their off season, where they kind of, their base of operations is from, the impression that I got from it.

Right. That's a base of operative. That's definitely the way. So, you know, you've got it's a very transient area with a lot of odd people. One thing I found remarkable that I had read about when I was reading about Gibson in preparation for the afforded video was that it was interesting to me how they emphasized that, like this community. truly is a community where everybody was looking out for each other and like they they were more tightly knit than most, you know, affluent communities that you see in Canada or the United States. Like these people were really truly looking at each other's best interests. Yeah, they're on the fringes. You know what I'm saying? They're on the fringes. So they tend to stick together because they feel like it's them against everybody else. And it's actually reminiscent. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie. It's from the 30s called freaks. and it's where the Goobble Gobble One of Us, like from the Wolf of Wall Street,

that's where that came from. And basically the point of the movie, from what I recall, is that it's this girl that meets all these people that at first, your impression is that they're low-lifes, their weirdos, they're freaks, as the title implies. But over the course of the movie,

you really come to an understanding that they are, they're, like, have a better heart than all the scumbagged, rich people that go and gawk at them and point at them and go and take the piss out of them and everything like that. There are better people at the end of the day

than these people that are supposedly the civilized, affluent people that are, what's the right word for it? The so-called good people of society really are like good in comparison to the so-called freaks of the movie.

And that was, so when I was reading about Gibson, it brought me back, to that film and I thought, huh, that's also an interesting angle that I would try and incorporate into a lobster boy video because he kind of, there was mixed opinions on him. Some people said that he was the nicest guy ever when it came to taking care of his, um, like his people, his employees and his people that work for him on the road. Because he, he actually came, he was quite a shrewd businessman. And, uh, had he not always

been on the sauce, he probably could have made quite a name for himself as, you know, a very successful Cardi, for lack of a better way of putting it. But because he was an alcoholic and he couldn't get off the sauce, that basically led to his downfall. And most of his violent outbursts he did have were a direct result of that.

So I would think that that would be an interesting angle to weave into it. It was like, yeah, there were a lot of people that understandably thought he was a piece of shit. But at the same time, there was a lot of people that spoke very highly of him based on and

like all bearer was at his funeral that said yeah what he did with his family was God awful but he always did right by us so I think a duality is interesting and there was some of that duality too I found when I was researching shrinker

especially after shrinkers like those early days where people like he was still missing and not there wasn't the man hunt for him like they thought there was like the first day after he left and people were coming out of the woodwork to say, yeah, like, it's terrible. Like, I know that he had some troubles, but I can't believe it would lead him to do this,

blah, blah, blah. And then a few days later, he had Tom Britt come out and say, yeah, I could totally see, like he was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Right. But you say, real quick, how did you even get on to Shrinker? How did you even stumble across this board? There's a gentleman who's been a patron of my channel pretty much since I think the first second video and he's been like one of my biggest supporters all along and he actually uh one night

i was having a few drinks online with uh and just chatting with them and he said well you're always looking for stories that um are basically new stories from 10 or 15 years ago that people might vaguely remember but there's a much deeper story to he said i remember this story happening here's the wikipedia article have a quick skim through that because it's basically the Wikipedia article per Shreaker is quite small in comparison to the whole story. Like it's a couple of And he basically

said, I have a feeling there's much more to the story. Go ahead, read the Wikipedia article and tell me what you think. And I read it and I thought, yeah, there's something more here and that was what set me off initially was that potential for I thought like you could

take the Wikipedia article and maybe make an 8 to 12 minute long video like the kind we were talking to earlier than you could see. And the, upon reading the sources for the Wikipedia article and all the stuff that was left out, I was like, okay, there's some interesting things going on here. Like, and there's a lot more digging I could do. And I saw a potential initially for a 20 minute long video. As I was doing the research into it, I came across bailout and I came across quite a few older sources like the, like Dateline and 20, 20 and all of those things.

So initially before I had bought bailed, I think I read the excerpts or the condensed version that you have on the website. And I read through that and I was like, okay, I need to get a copy of this book. But I also need to get in touch with this Matthew Cox guy because he sounds like, he sounds like somebody that would have quite an interesting insight into the story,

which you did. And so we got chatting that way. But while I was watching the Dateline and the 2020 and there was, I think the episode of Who the Leap to Die Mary that, Michelle was on right piece of the puzzle like so over that uh well probably 90 minutes worth a video that was there each one had something that the others didn't have and that led

me to believe okay there's got to be a paper trail or something like that that connects all these dots and can actually be spun into a full narrative because the the video that was put out by the indianapolis uh insurance commissioner or whatever it was like a series of three vignettes of three criminals from Indiana and he was one of them of course and it basically talked about the financial side of things but it didn't really get too much in depth

with the actual people that he affected then the Dateline video that was where we got the side of the story from who was it Smith Smith and and Kenny like Charles Kinney actually was on that video and that was where he talked about meeting the kids the more

intimate side of their relationships and how he would Marcus would basically insert himself into people's lives. And that was another thing that I found very entertaining about the portion of the book that you had where he was talking about how he got the list

of the pilot names. And like by driving down to the airport, basically schmoozing and giving the pity party at all, I'm a college student, my thesis is going to be impossible to do without this and blah, blah, blah, blah, basically playing the con game. And then taking that to the next level and actually phoning up

the pilots and my favorite part is where he would be like good afternoon captain and like you would basically he was like uh greasing the wheels with everybody to get exactly what he wanted but the fact that he was able to do that over such a long period of time like 10 15 years where like Charles Kenny said like I went to his house and I met his wife and I held his newborn child and stuff like that um I found that really while while shrinkers ripping him off while shrinkers rap ripping him off like and lying to a space event saying oh yeah we got some great investments or oh yeah your pants they'd be really smart to invest in this thing that's not going to pay off for 15 years except i'm not i'm not going to tell you that part but well you know what's

funny is he would say whatever he had to say like after 9-11 he was telling people well you know with you know with terrorists and things of that nature the best place to put your money now with all the terrorism is this like he was he's using whatever scare tactics he can to get you to do what he wants with your money so he can make a commission and have access to the money. Once he had access to the money, now you have a real problem. Oh, yeah. And the remarkable thing is that he would then turn around and in court when he was getting all these lawsuits from all these companies after 9-11 that wanted to pull out or were getting a little annoyed with him because things were understandably not doing this well financially

and these lawsuits were piling up. That was his very defense as well, you know, people are spooked by the 9-11 market. meanwhile he's telling he's spooking people into investing against their own interests while turning around and telling the court yeah nobody wants to do business right now because of this thing and it's a really terrible thing but that's that's why my business isn't doing well and why I shouldn't be on the other ones right and like the amazing thing to me too is that there were warning signs like when he got arrested in 1992 for selling the fenced jewelry back I should never have been allowed like it was and claiming bankruptcy yeah and claiming bankruptcy and

twice how are you a financial manager like almost the third time right before everything came crashing down around him and uh that guy should never have been allowed to handle people's money after being caught selling um stolen jewelry and then the other things he heard about like um something i didn't touch on that much in the video was how his father was superintendent for the school board that he eventually got moved into after the whole incident with stepfather. And there was a news article.

I'll never forget it. One of the first news articles I read about was how, oh yeah, Marcus, he used to get into a bit of trouble as a kid. Like he installed a water cannon on the back of his father's pickup truck so that he could shoot water at all the kids in the neighborhood, spray them down with it. And I'm like, okay, so right off the bat,

this is telling me that this guy was a like a bit of a dink really and somehow he was always able to shmuse his teachers and lie to get at a class and eventually like

I don't know but Purdue University is probably not cheap to get into no I'm going to say he's not stupid I mean he's got you know he's a super which the problem is most most pathological liars I think are probably

intelligent. You know, the problem is they get such a thrill out of lying to people. Yeah. You're fooling people. They chase that high. Oh, I pulled the wool over somebody's eyes rather than just being calculated about it.

Because you could be a pathological liar and nobody ever find out if you're intelligent about it. And he could have easily done that. And probably still been getting away with managing people's money and, you know, skimming a little off the top, maybe not living in a five bedroom home, but maybe a three bedroom home. And if he doesn't own five planes, he owns one plane, but he could quite easily have gotten away with everything he did,

had he just been a little more discreet and not... That's not this guy. No, it's... I wish... I wish you could have a 30-minute to an hour conversation with him. I would have relished that. I almost was tempted to reach out to him, but by the point where I felt like,

Like, by the point where it dawned on me, maybe you should get in touch with Marcus and hear his side of it. I had already devoted so much time with the script rating that I was like, yeah, I don't want this video like in tanking this before I need to do it because I already put so much time into it. But I would relish a 30 minute to an hour conversation with them. To hear his side of it because, I mean, obviously he's going to have his own side of it and he, I'm sure to this day feels like he didn't do anything wrong. And that's where the interesting part of it comes is that, yeah, he was a pathological liar and he lied to a lot of people. But in his mind, does he truly consider every single little thing he said a lie? Is he even aware that he's lying 90% of the time? I'm sure he's aware that he's lying or that he's calculating about it.

But I almost get the sense that he's been lying for so long that if he tells you that he, like to your face, that he's got a green Cadillac and it's actually more of a blue color it's not even dawning on him that that's a lie that's just him seeing something to you yeah there's no he has no guilt he's no like there's no empathy

there's he doesn't understand he's one of these guys that is watching TV and everybody in the room laughs at a joke and he sees them laugh and then he goes because he sees everyone laugh but he didn't get the joke he didn't get the joke but he doesn't want to look like a stupid one right he's very good at mimicking what he thinks the proper response is yeah like that mirrored behavior um and like i mean this is a guy that was lying in the hospital he's recovered from the slash wounds on his self-inflicted slash wounds on his wrist lying in the hospital under guard calling up a stepmother saying that his arm got ripped off in the plane crash like what about what about when he what about when he what about

about when he was being sued and he told them that he had um he had a multiple sclerosis yeah like like the or what was it didn't he also say that he had colon cancer or pancreatic cancer or something at some point say anything he had to to get you to do what he wanted to do that was when he was selling some he was selling something to a client yeah and the client told him that he had, you know, whatever, pancreatic cancer. And he said, oh, my Lord, I have it too. Like, it was like, almost like this twisted Mancousin that he has where, like, it's almost second nature for him to just blurt out.

Well, yeah, I have cancer too. Like, even if he would have done it anyways, like to just to scam the person, it almost, it comes off to me almost like he hears it and he's like, yeah, me too. Like, I totally have that without even realizing. he wants to make that connection and then and then the moment the person's like and you're working he's like you know I talk to my wife and my kids about it and the truth is that I could stay home and drive them crazy for the next six months to a year but the truth is I love what I do so much I love helping people I love the you know and you know he gives this whole spiel where the guy feels bad for if he

doesn't but then the guy's a scumbag if he doesn't buy his part what he's pitching because we both have cancer and you're still working and I'm not and you're doing it because you help people because you think this is the right thing to do and gosh darn it I'm going to buy this product from you yeah yeah like it it's insidious um how even after the fact too like he's standing in that courtroom and they're just listing up like remember the time you stole from your aunt remember the time that you lie about having MS remember about the time that on date line you uh told them X, Y, N, Z, and we're proving to you right now, because we have videotape

evidence of you contradicting this, remember the time that you said that your arm got torn up, even though, like, it's a very obvious thing. Like, nowadays, he would have probably had that call with his stepmother through

FaceTime or whatever. He wouldn't have been able to straight up say that his arm got ripped off, but it's, like, it's all stuff that's so easy to prove him wrong a bit. And yet he still does it. And that pathology to it that makes it so interesting to me that is there really a way to undo that in somebody?

Like, can he ever get out of that? No, he can't. There's no medication. There's no, like, there's medication that can help them kind of control it. And then. But they don't want to take. It's like, it's like bipolar. They don't want to take the medit.

Or schizophrenics. They don't want to take the medication. You know, it makes them feel weird and they don't feel themselves. and it kind of, you know, makes them, it mellows them out, but it eliminates those highs. So he, they love the highs. Yeah. That's why they do what they do. So you just took the highs away.

I understand it's detrimental to me, but I love the highs. So they're like drug addicts. It's, that's totally like, it's, that's totally about it. It's an addiction to them. And it's, it's remarkable to me. Like I, like I said earlier, I found out. that from a comment, now I can't verify this. I looked into it myself, but I couldn't find anything that actually confirmed it in any, you know, court receiver documents or whatever

or search engines online. I couldn't find anything about his brother suing him in 2016, but according to one of my viewers, that's what happened. And I pressed for details and I haven't gotten any yet, but, uh, oh, he's been arrested multiple times. Yeah, he was arrested in, uh, now, the only reason I didn't put this in the video, because it was literally one website, that looked like anybody could have built, like created it and just taken an old mugshot of him and thrown it up. But it said that he got arrested in 2022 for, like so about two years ago for domestic battery,

I think is what it was. Twice. Twice. He actually got arrested because I don't know why you couldn't find it. I actually had gone to the sheriff's website and pulled up the photos of him. But I, you know, but I don't remember where. it was and I actually had told I think I told you I contacted that guy that I told you about and he gave me the name of the sheriff's website and everything where I'd pull it up maybe maybe the

charges got dropped and shrinker got them to take it off the website or something I don't know but I mean I saw the arrest photos I saw the what he was arrested for the whole thing I talked to that same fellow briefly as well and he had mentioned that there was something along those lines and he went into just slightly more detail but for whatever reason he wasn't able to give the full details of it so I just I didn't pursue it too much because at the end of the day I ended the video off on a note of hopefully he changes his ways but don't anticipate it right so without dwelling too much on stuff that I couldn't get actual details like if I could have got like if there was a news article about it and then also the

court documents about it, it would have been terrific because I could have said, okay, well, this is what was in the news about it. Right. This is the note we're going to end it off on that this is still ongoing, but aside from like all I had really to go off up was speculation because it just said

if I look out the website, it just said something along the lines of domestic battery and there wasn't any details beyond that, which is unfortunate because again that seems like something given his history that should be more like out there in the media yeah so sorry the website that I

found was called Mugshots Zone and that was the only place I could find online despite all the Googling and all the searching I did he was arrested in Santa Rosa County they say and it was on battery domestic violence bond was a thousand Nothing beyond that could I find. So it's unfortunate because it would be interesting to know exactly what was going on. Right. I don't think that just based off of your kind of your code on your website about what's going to happen the next time he scams some unfortunate person, I don't think you're too surprised.

Yeah, I'm finding out that he's been arrested for. Yeah, I would not be shocked if at some point he's not re-arrested for scamming somebody. And this is just, it's, it's in his nature. He's not going to change. I mean, these people don't change. They just keep doing what they do until eventually they get a little bit better at it. But eventually he'll get, he'll steal from somebody else and get arrested again. And, you know, that'll be.

He's already remarried from what I've not been able to find out. So, like. I'm sure he's taking her for everything she's got. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, unfortunately, like, we, we wish everybody all the best, obviously. based off everything that's in front of us. Right. Yeah. I sure wouldn't be investing my money within that's been sure.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny is he, you know, when he was at Coleman, he's telling people that, you know, he was just like you went over in the video that he, he had worked for NASA. He had interned for NASA. He worked for NASA. He, that he was, he was a fighter pilot, you know, that he was, I mean, all these ridiculous things.

that people are telling me, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, Marcus flew in Desert Storm. Marcus was in the invasion of Afghanistan. Marcus was an uncle. For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. I'm like, none of that's true.

Yeah, but the timeline doesn't have. Right. And so, you know, writing that book about him was so difficult. But it's funny, I was telling my wife, I was like, it's really too bad that it's not on Amazon. You know, it's on Barnes & Noble's, but it's too bad it's not on Amazon because that book, when I first released it was selling great. And it's, and it's, out of all the stories I've written, it's probably, it's up there. It's one of the best. Oh, yeah.

It was like I read the book three times I think Like front to back not just including flipping through it And it's a hell of a read Like I've told every single person that I know that reads books Like on a regular basis and just consumes books You should get this book because even though I've done the video on it Your spin on it your take on it is so refreshing and unique As far as true crime literature goes

Because he actually did time with the guy Right It's like anybody that's a fan of true crime should have a flip through it because it's funny too like it's really well you know what's so what's so interesting about it is that like the nice thing about being locked up with these guys is there's no way a normal true crime writer could spin the amount of time like nobody else was going to get that story out of him no because nobody else can spend the amount of time that it took to spend nobody else it's just not unless you're you know ben

Mezric, you know, and you're able to spend, you know, a year writing a book and really engross yourself because you're, because you're making, you've got, you're already a multi-millionaire, so you can spend a year on your next project. Like, nobody can spend the same amount of time I was able to spend. And even Ben Mezreik can't spend that much time with the other person because they have a life. Yeah, we were in prison. We don't have lives. Yeah, you're there. You may as well make a cost of it. So, so I'm writing and then I'm talking to him for two or three hours. I'm writing and then I'm talking to him about it for two or three hours. I'm writing and then I'm ordering documents and I can

wait for the documents to come in because they have plenty of time. All the time in the world. Yeah. Right. And I found that out of all the videos I've done, this was probably one of the ones that drained to be the most just like I don't want to say mentally draining because it's like I wasn't emotionally impacted by it or anything like that. But like it takes a lot of like when you're not somebody who's a lawyer or somebody who's in business parsing through all this stuff. boiling it down to the layman like it's i'm sure you remember from writing it like it's a lot of information to take in process and then what what about those letters that he was writing telling them everybody he had sold his house he packed up his stuff i don't like money anymore

i don't like money i mean so the lies are so overwhelmingly um you know apparent and just disgusting it's like yeah you can't like the stuff he says is so just you know it's like you you must think i'm a fool yeah and you didn't even say that in the same breath going and like talking to talking to kinney's one friend who's like he's really close with saying oh yeah this is everything heritage is offering for 2007 right you mean the company that they just closed yeah yeah and like i was a little confused about the whole like so there was heritage wealth management there was another company called heritage yeah and then there was icon and i was yeah i was going to say it's

some point, I explain that. I do a footnote where I explain that I consolidated all of them because he changed the names of his company so often. Yeah. I just went with heritage wealth management. That's what I did as well. Right. And stuck with it. Because otherwise you have to constantly explain, keep in mind, he's now closed this company and he started this one, but it's the same basic company. You know, so I didn't want to do that to the reader. It's, it's also difficult when people start, you know, they're constantly changing names. Yes. You know, so you, a lot of times you say, I'm going to pick one name. And I, I did that with another book I wrote on Frank Amadeo. He had several companies under the umbrella of one company. And so it's like this one was defrauded and this one was defraud. This one did this. And he closed this one and opened this one and transferred. So I just went with, this is the company.

You know, and you put a footnote, it's too confusing for me. If I were to tell you how to do it, it would be so overwhelming and confusing. it would take away from the overall story arc. And I'm not going to do that. And that's kind of why I streamlined some of the details towards the end, too, because there were other things like Michelle being on the hook for, you know, for role and all of it. Like I could have gone into maybe a little more detail about that.

But at the end of the day, the video was about Mark. And that was another thing, too, actually, that I found interesting is he goes by Mark Schrenker now. He went by Mark in a lot of the documents I found and stuff like that. or video or whatever, he was calling himself Mark. But then sometimes, so the media always referred to him as Marcus, and then other times,

like he'd be dealing with a different set of clients and he'd be going by Marcus. And I found that kind of interesting too, because I was like, well, what is it? Is it Mark or is it Marcus? And I just went with Mark because it rolls off the tongue a little easier sometimes when you're reporting, quite frankly.

But, I mean, he does go by Mark to this day, so we as well go with what he's currently calling. himself. Yeah, he's, yeah, he's, I'm sure he's working on his next indictment. Um, and back, uh, very quickly, back to what you said about the NASA thing. I had to laugh because after our last chat, I was just doing a little bit of snooping on Facebook and, you know, I caught up with where the rest of the shrinkers are at now. And one of his sons, who's now an adult, was actually posing in front of some display that had to do with NASA. And I thought, uh, I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, eh?

Yeah, let's hope he's, I wonder how all of his kids are doing. Yeah, well, the daughter's estranged from both him and Michelle. And I guess Michelle, based on what the daughter had said in the one article, Michelle essentially

kicked her out of the house. And from what the daughter was saying, she had a lot of conflict with brothers. Now, when you go on to Michelle's Facebook, it's all pictures of Michelle and the son. nothing of the daughters you go on to Mark's Facebook

every so often both post a picture of the daughter and say missing you blah blah blah blah blah blah which leads me to believe that it's the daughter who doesn't want anything to do with Mark rather than unless Mark is just trying to post the picture of his daughter for sympathy which I wouldn't past him either. Yeah I wouldn't either

but it's interesting to me that he would even bring her up when by the daughter's account, the two parents don't want anything to do with her. Well, who knows? Family. Family, yeah. Well, so, yeah, how long, so are you going to start posting more?

I mean, your channel's got like over 50,000 subscribers. It's doing pretty well. Somebody who sounds like it's just a hobby, you know, like, I mean, you got 50,000 subscribers. That video's got a ton of views in just a few days. I would love nothing more than to be able to do this full time. It all comes down to the financial side, right? Like, you got bills to pay, so, and like, I'd like to be in my career that I went to school for six years for. But at the end of the day, if YouTube video making makes more money or leads to more lucrative things, like, it's funny because I never expect this to happen.

But I've heard friends who are YouTubers or have really big channels, and then I see comments on their pages, it's like, oh, Netflix should give you a deal. And I always think to myself, wouldn't that be the dream of getting like Netflix money to basically produce six to eight episodes in a year? and that's what I do full time that's like a dream come true but at this stage of the game it's still something that's kind of hobby something I take seriously like it's something that I want to do well

at doing I want to produce things that people are going to watch two three years from now there's a lot of what are called content bills on YouTube where it's just somebody who basically reads a Wikipedia article slaps very rudimentary stock footage on it calls it a day, posts it, and they do that every day, and they get tons of views, but they always peter out after a year or two. I'm going on my fifth year of doing this, and each year I've

seen growth rather than, oh, I did really well in the beginning and now everything's petered off and I don't even get, I don't even break a thousand views per video. That's right. I would rather have that stable foundation to build on than to just content and all stuff because I know that after a year or two, I would be burnt. Right. That's the hope. Like, I would love to get into more writing or video editing, but it's all going to come down to what the audience wants. If the audience shows that they want more videos by way of watching my stuff and that continuous engagement and interaction and, you know, putting more money to make better videos in the long run is something that, they would value, then yeah, by all means, I'd love to do that. But at the moment, I, I'm one guy, right? So. Right. So, but your goal is ultimately, you'd like it if this

would pay off. So you'd be doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Even if, even if it were the kind of thing that, like, I got a good run, the way that, like, you know, those people that have like a million subscribers on YouTube, they have a good run for five or 10 years of it. And then they retire from it and go and do something else. I would be perfectly okay with that too. Um, but the end goal of it, it would be lovely, lovely, lovely to make that kind of money where I could support myself full time off of it and not have to live basically like a pauper doing something that they love, but like, you know, the struggling artist kind of thing. I'm past that point in my life of being the struggling artist. I want to have a family and take care of them and stuff like that. So

it's, uh, it's definitely something that I want to do in the long run, but if it doesn't pan out, I have other stuff that I can fall back on, right? So, but hey, let's hope that this year I break 100,000. Yeah. I at least want to get that that silver plaque. That's one thing, like the plaque that YouTube gets. Yeah, I would love to have one of those. So that would be, uh, how still, like, here's a thing.

Like, I thought that was so silly. Yeah. I did. And then, you know, then, you know, we got the plaque. And I, and I was, I was pretty cool. It's pretty cool. I was like, I was like, fuck that. plaques care about that black and then I we got close and I was like who it's you know and then we

got the black and I was like I got the black it's like being the guy that like you know you grow up maybe you come from a working class being I don't need a BMW BMWs are for assholes blah blah and then one day you can afford a BMW you're like I got to get the BMW I got to get the BMW yeah and it was funny is you know people walk into the studio and they'll be like oh wow you got your plaque you got it's right you got over and I'm like it the fact that it means something to people. Yeah. What's so silly to me. And then, you know, but then once you get into it and you're into YouTube and you start paying attention, you're like, no, that's an accomplishment. Yeah. Like that's a milestone. So, you know, I like, I mean, I have two university degrees that I

sometimes have up on the wall, sometimes don't. I would almost feel it's a bigger, like anybody can go to university and get a degree. But to have to be able to say I have 100,000 people that when I post submit on a video they'll be there and ready to watch it that's a good point of pride to have that you can entertain a hundred thousand people at any given time or have their attention that's something to be very proud of i wish 100,000 people were watching my videos it'd be great if it really worked like that but so i've got about close to 180,000 that you know and only a fraction of them are watching the video i always find it's about whatever your subscriber count is, you can guarantee about 10% of that will be there for the opening

of a video. Yeah. That's what I do. I get 10% of that number, then I'm happy with that. I would be thrilled with 10%. Yeah. I'm getting five. Well, I'm getting five to 10%. So, I mean, some of the videos get more. So on average, I'm getting about 5%, which is, you know, it's okay. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm happy that it's doing what, that the channel's doing well. Yeah. It's, it's a great channel. So, all right, well, anything else you want to? So I'm going to put the link, obviously. We'll put the link in the description box so that anybody can click on the link.

Actually, you know what I'll try and do? Especially it'd be great if you remind me. At the very end of the video right now, we'll put the actual, we'll put, I can, one, I think I can put your channel. Cool, yeah. And I can put the video that we've been talking about, that you can just, so the person can click it right now at the video, it should show up and you just click on it and it'll bring you right there. Or the subscriber, well, you could also subscribe once

you get to the video, but either way. So yeah, that might, that might work too. And I'll also put the link in the description. Yeah, thank you. That would be great. And again, earlier on, when I was talking about how I got started, if I ramble, feel free to just chop that out. Oh, fine. It's something that I, like, I know the history of where I got to, but until it's actually coming out of my mouth, it's like, oh yeah, well, then that happened. Then that happened. And, you know, I was working, I was working in a gift shop when I started writing my scripts. Probably shouldn't have been doing that on the clock. But if you're going to stick me in a gift shop when I wanted to be a tour guide, then that's what I'm going to do. Whatever. And five years later,

who cares? Did you ever, um, so on, I want to say it's Apple. There's a series called, um, it's called silo. Okay. But it's based on the book, Wool. Now wool was the first commercially successful self-published book on Amazon. Oh, okay, interesting. And the guy that wrote it had written, he'd gotten a publishing deal before for a science fiction book. He published it, got a real publishing deal, the book bombed. He then wrote wool and nobody was interested. Like, yeah, the last book bombed.

Like, okay. So he, at the same time, self-publishing, Amazon was coming out, right? KDP was coming out and you could self-publish your books. Well, when he wrote these books, he was working as a librarian. Interesting. And he's like, and I had time. Like, I had time to write. So you're not going to believe this, but a ton of people don't use libraries.

Like they're funded, but people don't really use them. So he had downtime. Right. So he's taking notes. He ends up writing it and he self-publishes it. Well, first he starts, he's publishing excerpts of it on a blog. And then people are like, oh, you got to put this into a book. So he puts it, he makes an entire book, which was his plan.

He makes this entire book. It's called wool. And unless you read the book, you don't really understand it. Obviously, YouTube realized, that's not a good enough. We're going to go silo because they're actually, these people are living in a silo. Yeah. And it, so we're talking about. It did very well.

It blew up. That's awesome. And there was a huge article when I was locked up that I had read about it. There was a couple articles, but one of them I read. And it talked about how like, I don't know, like the owner or the whatever, the managing editor, whoever it is, the president of like something like Simon & Schuster or Penguin or something, contacted him and said, look, we're willing to give you, I think it was like a million dollars. for the rights to the book or the print rights to put it in source and he went he said let's see

I'm making $80,000 a month right now and he said and it's climbing yeah he goes so why would I take your million to walk away he said when in 10 when in 11 months from now 12 months I'll have that million yeah And I've already, I've already made half a million.

Like it had been like six months. He's like, I've already made it close to half a million because it was steadily going up. And so they came back and they said, okay, we'll give you, they never really tell what the number is for the print rights. You can keep the self-publishing rights. The, you know, for the Kindle, for the print on demand, we want the rights to print the books and put them in bookstores. And they gave them a small or reduced price. which was out of his, which I couldn't do anyway.

Yeah. You're going to give me a bunch of money for the right to something that I don't have the rights to that I can't do myself. So it was one of the first books. And it was massively huge. But it's so funny too because they optioned the film rights. You did it? Like some big company came in and optioned the film rights.

And then it never got made. 15 years went by before it finally got made. Incredible. That's just how long it takes. Yeah. And, you know, but this guy, so I've been watching, where I watched the first season, only one season, it's fucking amazing. That's a great, great story. But, you know, this is a guy who had failed and kept going and was on his, it was his, he turned his side gig into something phenomenal.

I mean, I love that. I love those guys who like, hey, I'm going to do this on the side. Maybe it turns into something. Maybe it doesn't. And he actually failed once already. Failed so badly, nobody wanted to give him a second chance. And instead of him saying, oh, then I'll just be a librarian. There's nothing wrong with that.

You know, instead he was like, yeah, I'm going to keep trying. There's this new thing. And that's the kind of mentality I always try to have. Like, every once in a while, I'll have a video that comes out, and it bombs. And I won't be able to figure out why. Like, I did one on a guy called Dr. Chaos who was basically this computer nerd or two took over the subways in Chicago over a Saturday night.

He shut everything down. and then they found like his little Idaho that he had basically he the reason that he shut it down is because they found him he was basically an urban explorer they caught him with cyanide on his body that he had stolen out of an abandoned factory

and he just kept it with him because he thought of his pool he was basically like an overgrown man child but it sounds of it but it shut down the subway because they went and they found that he had actually the storage room that he had taken over changed the lops on and had all this computer hacking equipment and all kinds of stuff. And they basically thought he was going to be the next Ted Kaczynski

when he was, he was never going to be the next Ted Kaczynski. He was like, just some nerd that liked to pal around with his friends and ghost slunking and all that stuff and found chemicals and kept them on him because he thought it that made him cool. But they basically made a huge mountain out of a molehill and it was a really interesting story. And it got, I think, like, 15,000 views.

It wasn't a popular video. And then I did one on like the coolest cooler, which was this Kickstarter campaign to create this cooler that basically was just souped up a little. And it was a very cut and dried story of the guy overpressed,

underdelivered, and then didn't give anybody their money back. Like, I didn't think it was a terribly, like it wasn't the most interesting story I've ever covered, but for some reason that one got 100,000 views and I couldn't figure it out. Having those two contrasts, it would be very easy to to be throw your hands up in the air and be like, I can't figure this out.

I'm just going to, I'm just going to phone it in, basically. But I don't like that idea. There's a book I read called The Perennial Cellar by a guy named Ryan Holiday. And it basically walks you through, like the story you were just telling me with that silo, how that happens and how artists go back to the drawing board and they don't give up and don't just resign themselves to being a librarian or whatever. And they keep going. and it's perseverance in the end that pays off.

And that's something I always, like, if anybody ever says to me, if I want to get 50,000 views on YouTube like you have, or 50,000 subscribers, what should I do? And I basically tell them, keep making stuff and always try and do a little bit better than the last time. Right. Are there people that have 15 videos on their entire channel and millions of subscribers and millions of views?

Sure. But what I would say is, what were they doing before they made that, channel that gave them the tools that they needed to be able to hit the ground running. I basically came into making my channel with skills I picked up in high school and working at a TV station for three months and the ability to research based off of getting the same four-year degree in history than anybody could get with a little bit about those. So I kind of started from a foundation of not really knowing what I'm doing and just going ahead. Now I would say my videos are much better produced, much better research. And it took that

five years, but what I'm excited about is, where could I be in five years from now? And maybe I'll have a different YouTube channel that I start, but only has five videos before it hits a million views or whatever. Maybe not. Maybe I'll stick with what I'm doing. The point is, you got to persevere. Always have to set yourself to that. Okay, that little bit of daily increase. and yeah all right so let's wrap it up let's wrap it up

great conversation I actually so going back to my very first video the Casuala Nagano story that's a video that because I'm heading up on my five years after the channel something I actually want to go back and research even if I don't put together a new video

or I do something for Patreon exclusive or whatever I want to go back and revisit that story based off the skills I have now. So if you're ever interested in talking about that story about this Japanese fraudster who got murdered in front of 30 people because he was caught scamming the elderly and it was on national television, him literally getting stabbed in his apartment, you can hear the screens and all the TV reporters are just standing there listening to what happened. It's a very interesting story how he built it up and there's also some cult like elements. So if you're ever interested in chatting about that, I'd be more than willing to.

but this was fun I like I don't get on podcasts very often but I always have a great time so thank you for this opportunity Hey I really appreciate you guys watching the video do me a favor hit the subscribe button hit the bell so you get notified of videos just like this

Also do me a favor Please consider joining my Patreon I am going to leave the link to Anomily Docks or yeah anomaly docs The YouTube channel And we're also going to put up the whatever they call that

and we'll put up the video about Marcus Shrinker and I really appreciate you guys watching. See ya