Omaze: A Unicorn Business Built by Giving Away Millions to People & Charity

0:28You've raised over 300 million for charities. messy or whatever, like try to do stuff. The Pope, Arnold Schwarzenegger, messy, whatever. I know, I'm such a name dropper. What did you learn about literally dying? I had a near-death experience. I flatlined for four and a half minutes. Bloody hell. Today on the show, we're talking to Matthew Polson, the co-founder and CEO of Omaze, about a fundamental tension in business, the perceived choice between making money and making impact. Matthew has built Omaze, which is an enormous company that's raised over$300 million for charities worldwide. But here's the twist.

1:04Instead of traditional fundraising, Amaze created an entertainment company that gives away dream prizes from luxury cars to incredible celebrity experiences. And it's the perfect win-win business. The company grows, charities receive more funding, and participants get the chance to win life-changing prizes. If you're building a business and trying to figure out how to align profit with purpose, or you just want to hear some great stories, this episode is perfect for you. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode where we get inside the greatest minds and the greatest moments in business.

1:38Without further ado, here's our conversation with Matthew Paulson of Omaze. Matt, welcome to Secret Leaders. Thank you for having you, Chris. So Matt, you've built something extraordinary with Omaze. It's a company that makes a huge amount of money you've raised over 300 million for charities and you do it in a very unique way you're giving away to people the whole time you still manage to make a profit but i wanted to start somewhere slightly different i wanted to start with what did you learn about literally dying what i learned about dying um i learned it's by the way not a question we ask everyone yes that's our first question normally yeah that's a good um i mean i had a near-death experience I flatlined for four and a half minutes and being, I had a very, I was on the other side.

2:29I had a comeback to the light type experience. And what I learned from that was, it made me believe in a lot of things I didn't believe before. it made me believe in the power of love that that's actually i now believe it's that's essentially like the fundamental substrate where all energy is connected and i felt an experience of that on the other side where you your ego dissolves time dissolves and you just feel like you're a drop in the ocean and the entire ocean and that was good that was good to feel that it was very affirming of i have a lot less fear of death now what's the difference between that and a really strong psychedelic trip um i've never done a super strong psychedelic trip so i can't i can't totally compare that i've heard people describe like if they've done dmt or whatever and they come back to that um i do think i think this information is around us at all times and our brains and this isn't me this is like this is known as you could probably know better than me like we our life becomes so focused on the things that we think are going to make us survive that we just kind of reticulary constrain the information around us right um and and so therefore you're taking in way less information when you do a psychedelic it opens up your prefrontal cortex and you can hear and perceive information that you wouldn't otherwise right and it's just like it happens if we're in a relaxed state we're taking away more we hear music better whatever if we're focused like looking at our screens like we're shut off to a lot of what's out in the world um so i think psychedelics open you up to information that is always there um but you wouldn't necessarily perceive and i think that's kind of what was happening with me in the other side how did it how did it happen i was born with my stomach twisted in a knot i was supposed to die when i was born oh and then the scar tissue from that surgery like freakishly broke off all these years later and it created a bowel obstruction and i didn't know it at the time i just looked my stomach was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and like i looked like three months pregnant over days or yeah over like three days i went from like three months pregnant to six months pregnant to nine my stomach had always hurt throughout my life so i just was like used to dealing with that but then at some point i was like oh this is this is very uncomfortable so i called my friend who's a doctor and said i'm throwing a party tonight you know there's this girl coming really excited about do i have to even do it do i have to do something about this he's like yeah you should go to the hospital so i went to the hospital they did all these tests they didn't know what was going on they then after a couple hours said to my parents and then our coo had also come because i was supposed to meet her they said to my parents and her name is helen like you guys go home we're going to keep him overnight and if he's not better by the morning then we'll do surgery then so helen drives home to her house pulls into her driveway it's midnight and she's exhausted she's been at the hospital all day and she's going to get out of the car and something tells her to go back to the hospital and she's british and a coo and very serious she's not like a venice beach like listen to the cosmos type person like so like this was not normal for her but the voice was undeniable and she drove back and if she hadn't driven back i would have died like 45 minutes later really why why about her driving back she came in and my my heart rate had plummeted and machines had not alerted the nurse and so she came in and her grandmother had been in the hospital so she knew how to read the machines and she saw that my blood pressure was dangerously low that's bloody hell yeah and so she went got the nurse and and the nurse like that can't be right he wouldn't be getting oxygen to his brain so they did another test got the same results they called the doctor she took one look and like called in a crash team and rushed me down into surgery and then they came out of surgery and they said to my mom look the good news is we figured out what's going on it's a bowel obstruction the bad news is his heart rate is continuing continuing to plummet we don't know why and he's in critical condition a couple hours pass my mom goes downstairs to get my dad and my brother and she's coming back up the elevator and she hears on the loudspeaker code blue in room 437 and my mom works in a hospital so she knows that means flatline and she knows that's my room so she gets out of the elevator she starts running out in the hall she gets to the door and the nurse says i'm sorry you can't come in this is really serious and she says look i was there when he came into this world if he's leaving this world right now i'm going to be in that room so they let her in the room and i am flatlined on the table and they're doing the paddles paddles i can never remember that word paddles yeah defibrillator they're doing the defibrillator you weren't conscious at the time so yeah yeah yeah um and they're you know they're zapping me and my body's bouncing up and down but i'm not responding i'm totally flatlined and so my mom starts to crumble you know it's one thing to lose a child it's another thing if it's happening a foot in front of you um at the same time my brother is outside with my dad and this doctor came out and said to another doctor in front of my brother not knowing it was my brother okay we lost this guy i think he's gone and so my brother pushed my dad in the room and my mom was faced this way towards me and my dad kind of came in from from her left and he was crying so loudly because he thought i was gone and you know that she turned around and said gary you gotta like you gotta be quiet or they're gonna kick us out of this room you know And when she turned, she said she saw something that just transformed her.

8:28She said all these people, these doctors, these nurses, these staff members had gravitated outside the window. And there was like 40 of them. She said they looked like this silent church choir just sending in positive energy. And she was so moved that these people that didn't even know her son were sending in love. that it was just like transformational experience for her. It just like filled her up with strength. And she took a deep breath and she turned back and she just started coaching me. She was like, Matthew David Poulsen, these people are fighting to save your life, but you are not fighting hard enough.

9:09You need to fight harder, Matthew David Poulsen. You need to fight to come back to us. And they said it was this really surreal experience to watch because here's this 65-year-old mom in an operating room. That's never the case in Grey's Anatomy or something. And the flatline went on for four and a half minutes. Wow. And they don't usually fight that long. But because she was fighting, they kept fighting. And then at one point, she started thinking, this has gone on too long. I'm like, I'm going to lose my son. And if I lose my son, my husband's probably going to die with a broken heart. and as she went there, the main doctor kind of like shook his head as to say, this is like done.

9:55He started to like pull away, and she grabbed him by the arm. She said, please, don't call it yet, and then he turned back, and he said, wait a second, and they're all just watching the flatline machine like go along, waiting to see if it'll tick up, and then they said they saw something they'd never seen before in a hospital. Instead of it ticking up out of nowhere, I just popped up. from the table yeah and opened my eyes and like and like literally came up awake and then all of a sudden i looked and i see all these people staring at me like the the choir i just see all these people i don't know looking at me and and then i finally like saw and they're like their faces are in shock you're like and then i saw my mom and i just kind of like lifted my right arm and like i'm like that give a thumbs up and the doctor said that was the most extraordinary experience well then there was two more days of like crazy stuff where i was almost i was supposed to die for two more days like all this other stuff happened um yeah bloody hell that's amazing feels like uh so i'm interested because you've obviously told the story before a handful of times but you know you get goosebumps listening to it do you get emotional anymore telling it i do i just got emotional there i haven't told it for a while um it takes you back there like the heroism of my mom you know like i didn't really like everyone's like oh that must have been so hard like i didn't really go through it like i was you know like she had to go through my dad had to go through like the idea they were going to lose their son and there was two more days of where i was going to die you know and and all this other crazy stuff happened and and and i just think of like what like you guys are parents like what what that must have felt like and that's where i get emotional and her just her courage you know she summoned some kind of power that was like she didn't she's like i didn't have what i what i was able to do during that time like i don't know where that strength came from i didn't know i had it that's incredible thank you for sharing yeah So you can totally, I guess, see, you're working in this sort of actually meaningful and purposeful space.

12:15But I guess what I'm hearing from you, I want to put these words in your mouth, like, let me know if this is right or not quite how it happened. But you are doing something purposeful and meaningful, but it doesn't necessarily feel completely like the most powerful and most natural way that you can amplify this cause. Exactly. yeah i just realized like that we are never going to like when i asked the doctor what his explanation for how they saved me you know he's like we're inspired by your mom um like before the second surgery she was grabbing the doctors by the cheeks looking into their eyes saying this is my son but today this is your son and this is your brother and their company is trying to do good and you need to help them he's like so we were motivated by that but outside of that there much larger forces at play and i said well as a man of science like how do you define larger forces and he said it was love and it was optimism that saved you so then like after that i was like how do i put as much of that out in the world as possible and it was clear that doing celebrities was never going to be truly world changing and we didn't control our supply we could like so there's a limit to like how big that was going to be and that was That was the moment.

13:31And how, so how long had you been, like how old were you? Like how long had you been doing the business? I was, I was 40 years old. I'd been doing the business for six years. And then after that we changed and went from celebrities to now we do houses. So you come out of that experience and you like what, go back to the team, you go back to your investors and you say, guys, A, here's this crazy story. but B I actually I feel like there's a pivot here I feel like there's something that we can do we need to change our strategy and this is why and the reason is love were they not all like dude like we know you're in a hospital in California but please just fuck off we've got venture capitalists here I've had VCs from California on my boards before like we're changing because of love guys yeah but what's what's the term of love yeah exactly it's quite big yeah it's quite big yeah it worked on it for tinder yeah and so you just spoke about the i suppose psychological change that you went through afterwards in terms of i feel it's coming across as if you feel lighter in life you know you feel more connected and so how has that manifested itself in your life yeah i do feel like it took me a while to get there I almost was depressed for a while about it because you have all these people who are like, you've been on the side.

14:59What's the insight? Or you're here for a reason now because there's this whole crazy story of how they saved me. But after a while, I got to the point where I learned, and this sounds like, I can't say this without sounding cheesy, but I learned what it means to actually love yourself more. That was the first thing. I wasn't doing that before. I was very ego-driven. not in like a i was never like an asshole am i allowed to say that on the show okay yeah i was never like yeah i was always like a kind person but i wasn't kind to myself like i would always really worry about what people other people thought of me i would compare myself to people all the time and then just go to that loop of like you're not enough um and i really did that and you're in la so that's a very difficult place to be exactly yeah and i and i just didn't really understand that like i didn't understand like what i was saying to myself um and then i um actually did this thing called the hoffman process which is like you guys know that yeah where you go off the grid for seven days you know your phone and like books or any music and it's a pretty intense process and in that in that there was a moment where they said something like do you ever hold grudges and i said no i always forget people like yeah but you ever hold grudges against yourself and i was like there should i have forgiven myself that i did like 10 years ago you know and and that just like opened up a whole new thing like god i i do not treat myself internally the way that i treat others um and that that whole near-death experience triggered that and then now as a result i think i'm able to i share love more i spread love more i send messages like whatever i think of somebody i'll like send them a little video be like hey i'm thinking of you and this is why I'm so grateful to have you in my life you know and I just try to spread that as much as I can wow it's amazing because it sounds like the which to be fair is similar to a psychedelic trip that um it can give you insight and it can totally change your life and change your mind but Monday morning comes and you still have to do some behaviors and you still have to make some changes and you still have to do the things otherwise you know you had some insight and then you can just choose to not act on it and so this sounds really similar in the sense that yeah the near-death experiment changed your life but you chose you know then as a series of choices choosing to do Hoffman process is a big step and and then after that it creates another big step and another big step and it sets you in a direction so it's more like you know an amazing door that opens for you but you still have to like walk through it and still take loads of steps in that direction as well to continue it it's a great point i think we think that there's these moments in our life that like are before and after we love the story of that you know and near-death experience is almost like the quintessential version yeah of that you must be different on the other side yeah but it's a lot of pressure on you right because you're a lot of people have done psychedelics not many people have done a new death experiment experience so people are like so what did you feel yeah where's your enlightenment yeah but you're right all it all is a halo yeah exactly all it is is it it just became an excuse to be curious and like start a daily practice and that's the actual life change the moment itself isn't and it was just you know we're all just looking for these reasons to start afresh but it could start tomorrow you could do it could be the psychedelic experience it could just it could be like you know what it could be a book yeah yeah so you would recommend to everyone do the hoffman experience a hundred percent most life-changing experience of my life for someone i mean i'm i'm not as you know into this stuff as much as dan is and so i don't actually know what that is yeah do you explain what the hoffman process is yeah um so it's one of those things i explained it i've never i can never truly capture like what makes it amazing but i think it's truly a work of genius that you so you're out you're they do it in california connecticut there's one here and you basically are you go there and it's about it's there's basically four stages you kind of identify the patterns that you have in your life that could you know cause suffering basically one of mine was like the constant feeling of like i'm not enough you know like i'm not worthy of this room i'm not worthy to be on this podcast i'm not like that kind of imposter syndrome but i had others too anyway so you identify your patterns and then you process through those and a lot of it comes from your parents and so it's like processing through that relationship with your parents making a recognition of they were doing the best that they could the recognition with their parents and so you kind of go through all that you identify it and then there's like this whole pretty intense like physical process of like working through and letting those out and kind of forgiving that and then you go through some other processes where you're rewiring your brain to like develop new patterns and it totally changes you it's because if you think about it you're there for eight days you're there with 30 other people everyone's going through their own kind of intense process and it breaks you down for a couple days it's like a tony robbins but like a much more uh practical real thing yeah it's yeah it's i mean people leave they don't make it through um but if everybody comes out the other side is like different yeah and and the class is amazing it's people you have like super famous tech CEOs or celebrities you have kindergarten teachers you have flight attendants you have you know but when you're there like you know no one knows each other's name you do your childhood name like so I was my childhood name was Tiger it's everyone thought my name was Tiger you know but like it's good name yeah two days into it I was like this is so dumb and I'm so mad at the person who sent me there these people have no idea what they're doing and then by day three i was like these people know exactly what they're doing um and it's and it's like you know there's i don't want to give away too much more but there's a lot of like the way that they reinforce the loop and they arrange it it's like none of the stuff you hear is like oh i've never heard that before but the way they arrange it and reinforce it it sticks with you it gets like into your subconscious and so now those those patterns still pop up i still like have the oh you're not a nothing but i move through it so much faster now and it's it was truly life-changing i sent my sister i've sent like a bunch of friends and they've all had that experience wow amazing yeah thank you for sharing that i really want to go do you do it i do i mean that's like a that's like a full ad you're not like you're not the thing is you're not someone who i wouldn't say right because the back to our literally our chat before this most people want to get is up here most people want to get to where chris is which is like accidentally present all the time well I actually the mindless mindful yeah it's more like ignorance rather than like enlightenment Chris does not have any clue what's going on right you totally don't have wait are we on the pod now yeah but you don't have those sort of anxious patterns and stuff that others do just like you're just in it I've certainly been through anxious patterns in my life but I mean I can say wholeheartedly that these days none at all that's amazing like at all but then i i would say like outside of work hours like i'm just never on my phone anymore and that was quite intentional um so i mean it's accidental buddha so triggering i'm like i have to stick myself in a cabin i kind of lost my phone and then i have to spend a lot of money to do these things to just not be on my phone chris is like just don't look at it yeah well jesus i mean i can't totally next to me it's pretty he's pretty spot on isn't he um okay so um thank you for sharing your near-death experience with us um i want to get onto the business of amaze so you guys literally give millions away so can you tell us the story of how you actually started amaze yeah i um i was a filmmaker yeah before amaze and I was doing cause content, like trying to use storytelling to inspire action.

23:12And we did a bunch of different projects. We did this thing called the Live Earth Concert. If you remember that, it was the biggest concert we were thrown on seven continents one night. We had a bunch of crazy stars do that. We did a documentary called Girl Rising. It was funded by Oprah, Queen Rony of Jordan, Meryl Streep as narrator. Did all these things. We had Bono and Bill Gates and Beyonce and all these fancy people. I've heard of some of them. Huh? I've heard of some of them. You've heard of some of them? Exactly. Huge name dropping. And we were doing these big projects and just realized that these people authentically wanted to do good, but we weren't doing that much good.

23:47We were creating awareness, but we weren't really creating any impact. I felt like it was kind of endemic to the space. So I went to business school and tried to surround myself with new ways of thinking. I'd never even opened Excel before I got to school. I was purely on the creative side. and then i still haven't if it makes you feel better yeah i mean i haven't opened it since then and then when i was in school i went to this event that magic johnson the basketball player was hosting where he was auctioning off the chance to play basketball with him and go to a lakers game but it was one of those things was only available to the high net worth individuals in the room and we were in the room but not high net worth individuals we're like the guys who get invited last minute to fill the table yeah and come for the drinks um and and so we sat and watch as the auction went up to 15 000 and magic was my childhood hero like there's nothing i'd rather do than play basketball with magic but i couldn't afford to participate we were in grad school and so when you're driving home like that doesn't make any sense he has fans around the world not just in that room celebrities weren't really on social media then or like they're gonna be and they're gonna be able to reach their fans in a whole new way so if we make it so anybody can donate ten dollars for the chance to win you could raise so much more money so much more awareness opened up a whole new donor base so that's where the idea came from initially that is very cool that's very cool yeah so i mean you almost predicted social media's you know ultimate success yeah i mean that's a little strong words about but we did we saw that the fans were going to engage did you think mobile was going to be big like you know what people are going to be on their phones yeah yeah yeah i know that because you have one in your hand right now yeah um okay so you guys as a as a business you give millions away to charity every single year so how does the business side of that actually work like how do you make money how did they make money how does how's the whole thing fit together yeah so the the easiest way to think about it is kind of in thirds so we go buy a house we then offer it out to people people enter a third of their entries goes to vat and to charity um 17 of that is charity 60 is vat but a third go to the prizing so the cost of the house all the sub prizes we give people if they win 250 000 pounds to move in we cover all their taxes we make it so anybody can afford to have a house for at least five years and then the rest is our marketing operating expenses and then our profit so third third third and you share this all sort of transparently like everywhere or is this more just like in the weeds of the information no we're very overt about it yeah like we we want you know we're we're an entertainment company we're not a fundraising company that's what people are buying from us they're they want the chance to dream about the house that's really fun to do but we have a social purpose and so we really are have always been very like up front like we are for profit where we believe you're often told that you have to choose between making money and helping people and we think that's a false choice yeah i was a couple of years ago but i was uh 4 a.m with my daughter who wasn't sleeping watching tv and an amaze ad came on and let me just say i'm still angry with you that i didn't win that incredible house in the cotswolds i'm sorry but i was i that that was a great like for your target customer i was just literally i was sitting there watching this unbelievable ad suck me in with this incredible life that wasn't right now and i was like and i was like i wonder if this is like the if i'm the perfect type of customer like a sleep deprived parent who's like that could be me yeah we have a persona up on our right i felt like it at the time and i was like this is totally working on me i'm i'm all in can i understand the like the the uh the size and scope of these things so like what's an ordinary buy-in what's an ordinary house worth you know just to get a sense of like the ordinary like how much do people contribute i mean the house that i wanted to uh that i played was like unreal it was like a few million quid for sure beautiful is that standard or is that yeah um yeah they're they're anywhere from three to six oh wow the one we're doing now we built actually oh that's cool in the lake district a part of our team yeah our nushka who runs our property and partnerships like she got this house built on time under budget and it's amazing we couldn't find we couldn't find we know what our you know our community likes and it was really hard to find that in the lake district so we built it which is cool it's a big deal for us that's that's unbelievable yeah yeah we're really we're really excited because just to be clear to do to basically serve your community you basically change your model enough as a team to build a property that you're just going to put and advertise and give away anyway yeah yes but it's like it's going to be someone's dream house so what does someone contribute to get the chance to get their dream house so the lowest is 10 pounds the average person puts in 18 like the average about like yeah the vast majority of our winners are under 20 pounds um wow 20 pounds entry and you can win a pre-built as a purpose built house yeah on the lake district it's amazing wow do you guys get to stay in them before you give them away no that's ridiculous i know why i don't know it's just we're moving so we do a house a month so like the team is moving so fast yeah and there's constantly you know they're on to produce the next house and design the next house and all that stuff so we just like don't we don't have time to do that is really like truly life-changing if you want that so cool do you guys have investors yeah okay so tell us a little bit about that we raised venture capital at the very beginning when we were doing celebrities so we just did celebrities for seven years that was all all it was it wasn't until after my near-death experience that we switched to prizes um and so we we raised money during for that model which was just not as it was tough because you're constantly having to get you know the pope or arnold schwarzenegger or uh messy or whatever like try to do stuff the pope arnold schwarzenegger messy whatever yeah whatever i know i'm such a name dropper that's insane um tell us about the pope yeah both interests the same thing so this story is this was a while this is a very wild inspiring story for us so there's this it starts with there's this girl her name was chloe she was 15 years old living in northern california and chloe was born with a clubbed foot and she was went to high school and this group of mean girls started picking on her and one day they pinned her down on the lunch table in front of the whole school during lunch and like six girls held her down and pulled off her shoe to show the school like what that foot looks like it was obviously very traumatizing and chloe went home and she locked herself in a room and her dad this guy dane is like a lovely person was really worried he didn't know what to do and he's a huge youtube fan so he shares with her like some of her his favorite songs and she gravitates to this song called invisible which basically is this anthemic song that says like you can't see me but i'm here and she starts listening to it on loop every single day let's all come back to the pope um and it and it helps her get through what she was going through and the then at the same time her dad had entered to win a backstage to meet bono backstage at a concert to benefit his charity red and he won randomly and so i this is where like five people at the time so i have to go to these experiences and like make sure it happens so i get there i don't know any of this i'm there and i'm in a very small room like half the size with dane chloe and this red guitar which was part of the prize for the the cherry red and and we're just sitting there and i can tell like something's going on with her but i like i don't know any of the story so then bono comes in he's like full of light the most charismatic person that you've ever met you know and he's and he's he shakes dane's hand he's like tell me your story and he's like look i'm your biggest fan your music has been the soundtrack to my life but this is about my daughter chloe's story and so he turns to chloe and says what's your story chloe and she said well i was assaulted and your song invisible helped me get through it he said you were insulted like they called you names she goes no i was assaulted and you could tell like the way she said it something very serious had happened he's obviously a very emotionally intelligent guy and he turns to her he says well how did invisible help you and she said it gave me the strength to stand up for myself it gave me the strength to stand up to these girls who did this to me it gave me the strength to stand up to my school for letting this happen he says you know why you're able to do that right because of the arc of the universe bends towards justice and love and when you have right on your side it's like this big fist not to hurt people but to fight for what's right and you could see her in this moment taking this in and he says what's your passion chloe and all of a sudden she gotta get embarrassed again and he says she's like i don't know i haven't figured it out he goes that's okay we have a prayer in my family and we're not a righteous family we say this prayer in church but we also say this prayer in the pub but the prayer is i'm available for work he said make yourself available for work and your passion will be revealed to you and i've never seen a moment like this in my life you could literally see this girl transforming before your eyes like obviously bono can say this stuff much more poetically than i can but it was like it was magic it was i was watching magic happen she leaves that room she goes home and she decides she's going to start telling this story to other girls who've been bullied another mom hears about it asked to come to her school where there's girls who've been bullied another school another school she keeps getting asked to come speak to other girls finally they start to turn this into a movement called stand beautiful she gets invited to do a tedx talk She goes and does the TEDx talk.

34:13There's a publisher from Penguin Random House there. She gets a book deal. She starts traveling around the world, helping girls like stand beautiful, embrace their differences. She's doing a speech in Ghana. And this guy named Cardinal Turkson, who's like the number two to Pope Francis, hears the speech and goes up to her afterwards and says, hey, can you introduce me to the Omaze thing? Like, I want to do an experience with Pope Francis. So then she reaches out to me and says, can I connect you with Pope Francis? And I was like, sure. Okay. So then I had to go to the Vatican and pitch Pope Francis on why he should do an experience with Omaze.

34:54What was the Pope Francis experience? Win a Lamborghini where he hands you the keys. Were you just like, what's something else Italian? No, that was coincidental because pizza with a pizza with a lamborghini ah we'll do the lamborghini i don't believe they went for it as well it was so random that was so random yeah well because what that the way that happened was lamborghini made this special car for pope francis then they auctioned it what the potemobile no it wasn't a potemobile it's actually is that made by lamborghini no it's a yacht that's yeah okay fine fine and uh that was our original idea is like riding the potemobile and then um that would have been much more like yeah it makes sense yeah yeah it was like more on brand for sure what happened was the they made this car they auctioned it and this guy bid 700 000 euros for it and then he backed out and then lamborghini called a guy who worked with us who like had relationships in the cars like hey can you can you sell this to one of your high-end donors and he's like that's literally the exact opposite of what we do we like people put in 10 bucks for the chance to win um and and they're like well yeah we just we can't tell the vatican about this you know so if you can hide it from them then like we can make it do it and i was like we're not hiding anything from the vatican like that's not a good strategy yeah but i randomly am going to meet pope francis like charles yeah by chance like i can ask like we'll buy it if he'll promise to give it away and that's what happened.

36:33That is fantastic. Yeah, that's wild. Is that your favourite Amaze story? I'm quite interested to hear about the Messi story though. It's like getting to Messi must be as hard as getting to the Pope. Well, I don't know about that. I don't know. Getting to the Pope? Have you seen Messi's bodyguard? Yeah, for sure. You know, the guy who's like famous. We did one with Ronaldo too where you got to get your hair cut with Ronaldo. and he had also agreed to um he had also agreed to like sign shirts as like a donor reward if like you donated more you got like a signer and all the thing and then we we finished he didn't want to do it um and we're like shit like we have all these shirts like we promised to be when he didn't want to do it and and my buddy who was with me was like you know we did this with kobe and he was able to sign 200 shirts in 15 minutes it's a record he's like really oh amazing so he just so he just all you wanted to do is no to beat kobe bright amazing genius by the way that's so good yeah brutally how'd you get to messi then is that a good thing through charity like always it's always like through like these guys care a lot about their yeah causes so we would always just go to like go to their charity and say hey instead of him meeting one high-end donor you could make it so anybody can meet him it's a marketing opportunity you can get the word out you know so we would do like be in star wars and do it with disney so you could be in the movie and it was a marketing thing and so it was always through their charity and just kind of hustling what's your favorite amaze story that one's pretty good because chloe like that was just it was a moment of transformation trying to think of well before you do that actually chris did ask about messy go on he was great like they were um he was kind of a shy guy a little bit like you see he seems so nice but he's super friendly like super engaging like very present yeah yeah what does someone like pay to get the opportunity to you know engage with messy it's it's 10 bucks just it's a random it was wow yeah that winner was 10 bucks about that that one went like a big yes that was a big one bang yeah yeah we've had a lot of that that was a popular one um i'm not even into football but like i just know the way that people think about football yeah it's like a religion oh for sure it's pretty it is religion yeah yeah for sure yeah there's a lot of overlap between pope francis um that was one we did we spent send someone to space with richard branson that was crazy it's his mother this mother one and christ that's very nice of richard branson because you can't get out of that it was just a lot of time you're spending in a capsule with someone yeah good marketing for well it's gone under now hasn't it uh yeah but good marketing for that it was at the time yeah this mother wanted she about her daughter so their first mother-daughter combo in space which was pretty crazy but i suppose before you did all these crazy things you had to obviously originally have the idea which turned out to be a brilliant one but before you had these like crazy names and so forth like how did you convince investors to go for it like i'm just trying to think about the pitch because you're like okay we're like give away all this stuff but like we're gonna get all these amazing contacts like yeah was there quite a lot of like hope and prayer there was yeah you know i think i think the most underrated skill in entrepreneurship is storytelling and you guys are both storytellers right like you've told a story with your bottle like you understood like a psychology talking about heights yeah yeah i took my moment yeah but like we i think we really understood how to craft the story to investors and and i think they could see that we cared a lot about this um and even though we were wholly unqualified to do it that like we were really passionate and then we were able to obama had just done something with george clooney where he'd raised like eight million doing this in a night and we're like see we look look how great this can be we can do that you know and and we could show how it scaled out um and that was you know and that was basically yeah yeah right this could be really big i suppose the key insight for you from your background was like the kind of diffusing of entertainment and effectively like odds based yeah and the recognizing that we were in a whole new world with social were you were you first to do that we like the first player to do like talent-based like entertainment-based experience we were in that model there was there was a company that was doing auctions where one wealthy person could pay online to like meet these people but we were the first to make it available for anybody to have that experience wow yeah phenomenal how much did you raise for what as in just in general from investors how much have you raised from investors we've raised 110 million okay yeah and i guess you hear the story and it's so exciting because it's full of amazing stories most importantly right like makes you the most interesting person in any room because you just have a collection of these phenomenal stories like inherently viral it's inherently viral it's totally fascinating it plays into every personal fascination or curiosity someone could have when they meet someone um and you know it's in the land of go hard or go home usa you've got the celebrities you've got the you know the the venture capital you've got this like really exciting model and yet here you are in the uk and you're doing homes i guess i'm wondering what what moment what moment would stop like the fascination you know something i guess has to happen for you to be like that's actually probably not the model for us it's this over here because you must have been loving that the opportunity to meet all these incredible people as incredible as what you do now which is with homes you're not going to meet the pope doing that right so like on a personal level as a human being there's actually a big sacrifice moving from one model to the other about what kind of interesting turns your life could take yeah it's a great question it was the near-death experience so when when i was leaving in the hospital a couple weeks later the doctor sat down at the edge of my bed and he said look when i finish my career 30 years from now and i'm talking about the most extraordinary case i've ever seen this is going to be it well six months before i went into the hospital we had done this campaign with daniel craig where you got to go to new york you got to go to the aston martin track bond yeah the bond you got to ride around in a one-of-a-kind may i just say how insulting it is you did that in new york but whatever back to your story before you wanted to do it yeah um you got to ride around in one of a kind aston martin and then you got to keep the aston martin and it was supposed to raise 300 000 for the united nations and it raised 2.1 million wow so then i went to our cfo her name was nina and said hey i think we should buy a 250 000 mclaren but do it with just omaze no talent and if we could raise 500 000 on our own like that would change everything and it was a big bet for us we only had 900 000 in the bank at that point right so um but she agreed to do it and then that car coincidentally launched the day before i unexpectedly went into the hospital wow so when i came back all those months later and i was sitting down with her and i said you know by the way like whatever happened with the mclaren did we raise the 500 000 and she said i raised 1.9 million and i was like that changes everything and then i went to the board and the team i was like look we'll be able to control our supply raise more like way way bigger leverage we can go from we can do cars and holidays and watches and one day we'll do houses um that's that's how it came so that's how i pitched it more of a bad element it's it's really interesting isn't it because um there is an aspect of you know working with celebrities especially at the level you're talking about as well really challenging because uh they're human beings they've got teams around them they've got shoot schedules all of this stuff and then they can you really genuinely control, like you say, your supply and therefore your size of how hard and big you can go?

44:53It's impossible versus commodities, where obviously a car, a house, you can always go bigger. You can always dream bigger and be more imaginative about it. And then I suppose the other side of it is you've got the classic question of what's more meaningful to someone. Is it an incredible life-changing experience or is it like actually giving them a home to live in? Yeah. yeah the craziest one we ever had like to your point about like not being able to control is we were supposed to do this big campaign with arnold schwarzenegger we had this whole shoot day set with him and it was like it was going to be this like crazy prank where you thought you were doing your driver's test and he was like arnold was the instructor yeah instructor and then yeah um is he known for driving i mean what's the irrelevant mate you'd be so excited yeah we had done a bunch of we had done some like a bunch of videos with it and we did like one where so good if it was in a mini i know right yeah it was gonna be in a hummer um but we did one with him you know the wax museums yeah like we had him actually stand there and then people came up and he was like you know he said hello and like they lost their mind um and that went like so we had done a bunch of stuff with him i think i've seen that actually yeah it was that one's big we did like riding a tank with him and crush things and we showed you what it was like to ride in a tank with our anyway we're gonna do this thing and it was gonna be a meaningful part of our sales and then the morning of his guy calls he's like sorry arnold can't do the shoot today we'd invest all this money in it and i was like why he's like he's getting his haircut with sylvester stallone right i was like what no he's yeah like if they're ever in town they got to get their haircut together and he's in town i was like this thing i'm up with sylvester stallone insurance yeah i was like they should have done it together i know i was like can we do that can we make it this we'll go there and film they're like no so that like we missed like our month yeah yeah yeah arnold and sylvester sloan would give their haircut to you there that i suppose that's probably also like indicative of of that business model like what were the other really difficult celebrity experiences because i used to a lot of work with celebrities in my previous company and they just like influencer and celebrity they just ended up being fundamentally very unreliable yeah it's challenging we just had a shoot last week with a celebrity and she has pulled out she pulled her shoulder and like we we know it from running couldn't do the shoot yeah we know it from running podcasts like the amount of people who don't show up like on the day and they're like sick or this happened yeah absolute emergency that you can't argue it's like when you you know you're at school and like if you're like a few minutes late you're like oh yeah no it was traffic but if you're like 10 minutes late you're like oh it's something kind of important but if you're gonna be half an hour late it's like someone's died you know like someone has died and i feel like whenever someone can't make a podcast the reason is so severe but it happens so regularly that you're like i don't know we're just bad luck chumps yeah exactly otherwise we're so many people dying but for like i think from a celebrity like what was the most difficult celebrity experience outside of arnold and sylvester i mean i have to say arnold was overall was amazing to work with like he was so fun i'll come to your question but there's one where we were doing the filming with Arnold in this tank, and he was driving around crushing things.

48:03It was the tank that he had that he used to drive in the Austrian Army. That's so cool. Yeah. And so we were doing the filming, and we just needed to get a half hour of him driving it to cut it, and then we were going to have someone else do the rest of the stunts. And so I text the guy that's in the front seat with Arnold saying, hey, we've got it with Arnold. He can leave. and he types back arnold says he likes crushing things so we just stayed around and like drove like drove over stuff for like off camera yeah for like hours oh yeah um you know honestly like i don't have like i think we got the best of people because of what they were doing like we didn't have any because it's related to their causes yeah like you know i think like look they're pulled in a million directions like they're normal people they are like with extraordinary jobs yeah yeah you know and so and and they you know the bigger they are the more pulled around that they get the more like just like the amount of things that are huge coming their way every single day just makes it difficult before before we sort of go into the the i suppose the business and how it works in more detail like obviously you pivoted away from that model but what was the most viral moment that you had in the celebrity in the celebrity model like what was the thing that like really put you on the map the thing that put it on us on the map was breaking bad you guys ever watch that show yeah so many times yeah oh really yeah so that that put us on the map we were almost out of business we would have been out of business if it weren't for breaking bad um we had done like as in you were making heroin we were making heroin and they were competing with us yeah heroin was better and so um you know if you don't have the best product exactly um yeah exactly you know that from um we yeah we had we literally like like two months of cash left when we got brian cranston to do something um is he as fucking cool as he seems he's so cool yeah yeah he's an air paul is so cool um and yeah you got to basically ride in a Winnebago with them to the final episode of Breaking Bad.

50:16Wow. And cook meth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And hazmat suits with them. That's amazing. And then watch it with the rest of the cast and randomly Warren Buffett. Christ alive. He's in the Winnebago. He's there, yeah. He's a big Breaking Bad fan. It was all crazy. I love that your side gift is to get to be with the world's richest man. We didn't even market that. We couldn't market that. He just came. Is that how Warren Buffett operates? He's like, I want to do Thing. And everyone's like, yeah, please do Thing with us. Yeah, exactly. He was just like, I had literally no warning. All of a sudden, he was just there.

50:52And I was like, so good. Are you sure it was him? What's that? Are you sure it was him or just some guy who looks similar? No, I'm positive it was him. I'm positive it was him. That reminds me of a funny story, though. uh i can definitely come back to it yeah we will not anyway go and finish this one yeah um anyway so that uh yeah and you got to and brian cranson was like hey we like we want you guys to make it so the blue smoke is coming out of the yeah thing and we're like oh man we don't know how to do that and but we he really wanted it so we're like we'll do whatever he needs and so we like we're supposed to get like a permit and all this stuff we just totally jerry-rigged this thing and like and i'm like we could blow up this entire but like this is gonna be make or break for us as a company so we just figured it out and you're like they pulled up and the smoke came out and it was awesome oh so cool yeah but it raised it proved the model because they had done something similar in an auction and it had raised forty thousand dollars for the charity and with us it raised 1.7 million wow yeah that's so great yeah and so they went to the filming of the last episode of breaking bad no the watch the last episode right yeah would be and like the one with the machine gun i think so yeah yeah because you remember like the whole that was like the last like monoculture yeah moment not the last one but like everybody because basically it was the first netflix yeah yeah because they picked it back up didn't they yeah it had done well on amc and then they put it on netflix and people binged it and then the whole like everybody like tv almost changed afterwards like yeah yeah wow what's the other story that you just remembered oh do you guys know travis kelsey is yeah yeah football player yeah um he's he's an awesome guy and he we had done something with him and then i like he's now dating taylor swift yeah makes him super famous i guess but we were we were at a concert and he's he's standing there um talking to uh to jimmy buffett for like a half an hour um and then jimmy buffett walks out on stage to like play like you know just like to do a couple songs it wasn't his concert but he walks out on stage and try and i and then travis um comes back to me and um he like all of a sudden jimmy starts playing goes oh my god he's amazing he can really sing he's like yeah he's like this is he's the world's richest man and he can sing like this oh my god that's unbelievable like he's like what like and i'm like that's not warren buffett that's jimmy buffett dude i've just been asking him business advice

53:49must have been really confused yeah well he was he's he was a billionaire too but still yeah yeah it was amazing okay all right we're gonna bring you back into the business side now it's too enjoyable yeah it's your fault really um okay what is the what is the psychological trick that you need to get consumers to like sort of buy into to make the whole model essentially work because there's a lot of hype that needs to happen yeah to build up this sort of demand um i don't i wouldn't it's really just storytelling like we're just it's not necessarily a trick like we all want to believe things can change and that's what we're offering because it can't like every brand is basically at some level selling the promise yeah transformation right like nike's like put a bunch of rubber on your feet and you will transform in an athlete or gatorade was like drink this sugar water and you'll transform into michael jordan like we actually offer it's real transformation like you can win and have a new life the charities like you know we're raising massive money for this charity so like that's that is what what it we're offering so and i think people want that right and that's exciting and it's exciting to dream about that So that's really, it's just telling that story well.

55:09Do you think the fact that you personally, obviously your previous career, like so relevant for all of this, you know, it's so interesting because there's that whole, everything makes sense looking backwards. Right. And obviously you're building this business, but like your actual career history, you know, as a film producer, director, that is so relevant to this ability to sell, not just the story and the dream, but even the moments with the, you know, breaking bad and we want the blue smoke. well if anyone could do that someone with your background would know how to make that happen in a last minute thing right whereas a typical ceo would not actually yeah they'd be able to make things happen but this is such relevant expertise totally and i yeah like you said looking back it makes sense but while i was going through i had no idea this is where it would end up you're just following your nose yeah basically yeah but we take storytelling really seriously like we teach i teach classes to the company on storytelling like we follow like very specific fundamentals in everything we do.

56:03So for the founder watching, if they're to try and understand a bit more about how they do storytelling for their company, what would you say? There's a book called Building a Story Brand. That's what I use at Heights. Do you? I use the exact framework. It makes sense. I use the exact framework, Building a Story Brand, Seven Steps. Yeah. Amazing. It's all about like, so I would read that book. And yeah, that's one of the reasons Heights works, right? It's literally step by step. You'd love it actually, Chris. Tell us the steps. So you basically like you have to the kind of overall biggest thing is basically that is about understanding the human brain first and foremost.

56:41Right. And understand like kind of what we're talking about earlier. The brain is just constantly looking for things to make it survive. Right. And so if it has to use a lot of calories to figure something out, then it shuts down. Right. So if you like you almost picture like the brain on a treadmill running, if like if your message is like confusing, like it's you're just going to stop right so that's like the first thing if you confuse you lose right so like how do you make it as simple as possible second is make the customer the hero too often brands make themselves the hero and like the the customer doesn't care about the brand's benefit it cares about their own benefit and right so it's like make sure that you frame things in a way that makes the customer the hero like a good example that is is spotify versus title you guys remember title that was like beyonce jay-z it was all about the celebrities yeah it was all it was this stream platform the tech was actually as good as spotify but they made all the advertisements about them and like these musicians were bringing you this thing from a mountaintop where spotify is like here's your rap you're the hero like you are like so make the customer the hero um and then and then basically help them participate in their transformation like show why whatever you're offering can get them to a different place in their life um and then if you do those things like it'll and you missed a step which is provide a bit of jeopardy provide a bit yes yeah yeah that's true yeah so you've got to basically um you've got to demonstrate that there's something at risk yes and that you might not get there but in the storytelling you can always overcome it yes it's very like once you once you've read that book or once you've done story brand and you watch a pixar movie you can see every single pixar movie looks the same yeah yeah they break down like the fundamentals like people don't realize there's a lot of math to a story like every every single movie script has this like the inciting incident happens on the same page like the irretrievable journey happens on the same page the moment of of doubt and looks like they're not going to come back is page 45 like it's like every single movie i've literally just started i just did a book deal and i've just started the process of working with my editor and they are uh mel robbins editor and so we had this like whole thing where like mel robbins does so well we and i was i was asking the question why and she was saying well fundamentally follows an incredibly standard well-received format for delivering a book and i was like tell me more and she was like well all books follow the same format fundamentally the arc is the same and it's the same thing you're just you're just telling the story you're introducing a bit of jeopardy which is like if you don't do these things where we end up you're making the person the hero of their own story as it's fascinating that most of all marketing it's just the same thing yeah but often it's not told very clearly and they don't do like it's amazing how much doesn't do it you know like how many people don't do it there's a quote in there where they say words are to stories as noise is to music right like music is just a series of noises but when it's arranged in a certain way it goes from this thing that could be incredibly stress inducing which noise can be to something that like can create emotion create connection create memories it's the same thing with words and stories like if you don't organize words in the right way like it loses all their power yeah you said that the correlation between making money and doing good is like a false dichotomy so what do you mean by that we're taught especially in american society but i think here too you're you're taught that if you want to help people like the first of all like charity and and for-profits should not be the same thing and like that comes from like basically the puritan origins of charity in the u.s was like people came over from here started making a lot of money in the new world but they were their religion taught them that like anything in their self-interest was bad and would send them to hell and so they didn't want to go to hell but they didn't want to stop making money so they created the concept of charity to basically like make it so they don't go to hell to wash away their sins yeah exactly yeah that was literally where it came from and so now so then it came up to our culture like we were told at the beginning you're never going to raise venture money if you give money to charity like no nobody will ever invest in that um we're like people amazing people who run charities are told like they can't be paid their market value like they're told they're not allowed to invest in marketing in general like we want 100 of the money to go impact or like well if i can make more money by marketing it isn't that better for the impact like so there's all these like rules that like for whatever reason we've settled on of like how charity should work um and we're fine with you know people doing bad in the world running banks that yeah or something like oil or whatever yeah we can pay them so true we're totally fine them making we don't compare those two things yeah but if you're doing good you better not also make money yeah yeah you don't get to do both those things it's like why it's so true it's like so i spent years building a social care health tech business with my brother and it's not a charity it's a full-profit business that does something great for the world but the amount of shit you get when you're like in a space that you know it's social care etc the amount of shit that you get about trying to like do something good and make money is wild and it's like look at all the businesses around that are doing nothing good for the world and making an extraordinary amount of money and then even on a consumer side this is so basically simple but like one of my biggest triggers at heights the amount of people that will just go after you because you're selling health supplements and tell you that like you're doing all this terrible shit and they don't bother with alcohol secret companies they just those those people yeah don't bother slagging off people that are creating products that are designed to make you worse designed to hurt you those people are nowhere to be seen coco if you fine absolutely i always i always say coca-cola is an example you're completely right i'm like where are you in their advertisers doesn't matter but if you create something that's good for health they'll just go after you it's so i think it must be that people it's maybe they're all coca-cola employees it's almost like the trump effect right because he just does whatever he wants people like well that's fine like he wasn't trying to be good yeah sure so yeah um yeah i think it's maybe like they try to sense hypocrisy in companies that are trying to do both or they think you know there's something not upfront about it i don't know i'm gonna ask you a question which we were asked a lot which is like how do you make your profit and the reason i ask it is like we got that question so much and i always think to myself like how often does coca-cola get that question like how often does a bank get that question and it's like what they're making way more profit the way no one gives a shit they're like yeah where are you making your money from and it's like well we make it from lots of places but we provide an excellent service that didn't exist before right so like we we had to continuously justify ourselves yeah which i imagine is the same with you yeah we um not so much now at the beginning we definitely did you know like bono was like i'm never gonna partner with a company that makes money in and also is in the charity space you know and then which makes sense bono is famous he makes no money but then yeah but then he was amazing and and then he became an investor you know like um he but yeah the i don't know the yeah we had to justify a lot at the beginning now i think you know we we're just very overt like this is an entertainment product that is what we're offering we will also give a lot of our sales to charity does that annoy you does that annoy you that you've had to reposition you're repositioning yourself from a storytelling point of view and because it's better for clearing up everything but does it annoy you that you have to say we're an entertainment company and we give money to charity versus saying actually we're a for good social enterprise etc like the way that you'd like to ideally position yourself no i because i think it's it is what we are right like it's a and for our it's also important for our company to to understand like our team like if the more fun the more exciting that you make this the more magic that has like the better impact will have but you need to think about that first okay so i so i'm i'm i'm good with it um because again that's like that is the product that we and presumably then it helps you hiring culturally internally like exactly stuff okay interesting yeah but i do think i do you think this double standard is would like to help change that i mean what you guys have talked about yeah and then you move to england my god yeah i mean we get just a success no exactly that's interesting so what have you found culturally about this this this dichotomy and this challenge from uk culture versus us culture i yeah i've heard this but i haven't experienced it like i've heard people say it um but i yeah i've found you know most of the people in our company are from the uk like and they're very they're like you guys like driven and like we can do it and like celebratory of success so like that's my experience i keep i keep hearing about the tall poppy syndrome or you're you're not taught that same thing here it's harder to be but i just haven't i haven't experienced it good yeah good we'll keep you away from it then yeah i mean i i moved after doing the health company to effectively helping entrepreneurs build better businesses so like fundamentally like coaching i suppose yeah um and the amount of shit that i have got since doing that as well is wild really yeah just about like like sellout scam artists con artists and i find it for helping entrepreneurs yeah but do you think that's because you do a course because i do it online coaching as i reckon if it's all coaching do you know there's probably like a there's a thing isn't there like people seem to be accepting of coaches and not accepting of courses yeah or group coaching or they don't think they're accepting a group coaching well that's fundamentally what i do right i mean like this there's some like wrap around it but fundamentally i coach people in groups to like at a fundamental level like achieve their potential and there's a lot of stuff about marketing is often the thing that's the thread um but yeah the amount of shit I've got is crazy.

1:06:59And yet in some ways I've had to, a bit like my new zen-ness, I've had to be like, whatever. You and I wouldn't survive a moment with this, Matthew. I've got loads of shit today. Just relaxing with it. I'd be like, I'm a nervous wreck and I'm not going to bear someone was mean to me on the internet. I took a view of not looking at the comments of anything recently. And again, imagine again, imagine not looking at comments, having that kind of discipline. Yeah, so like no news, no comments, no like TV really. our brains aren't set up to take in this much stimuli no totally i do really believe that yeah i do really really believe that oh it's the truth yeah we're you know like we we went from like 13 on the food chain to number one and like way faster than evolution wanted us to and so now we have like you know we we get the same stress from like the saber-toothed tiger coming that we do from like the like you know yeah the stress responses yeah totally so our not sure how to differentiate it's like that's why you got to do that like that's so funny as it as if people had more you know like actual existential threats in their life the other stuff that bothers them today wouldn't bother them absolutely i mean you look at the the people who've had severe adversity are the happiest in the world like you can't like you literally like can't you can't get to levels of happiness and gratitude without trauma totally i mean and your story is a really good example of that and fundamentally story brand right but yeah story brand but genuinely on a human level you find this so often when you understand our job is interviewing entrepreneurs they all have not death experiences but you have the the you know the absolute worst thing in your life and then the recovery afterwards it's so common and i would always say like the the zenness that i feel i would say it's because for a few years i feel like i was going through a real version of trauma yeah and then when that cleared up i felt like everything else was by a great magnitude of order like less important do you guys know jonathan hate the yeah i mean i'm obsessed with that book yeah it's just generation he his first book was called the happiness hypothesis yeah i've read it yeah you have you yeah yeah yeah so he he talks about that that like it's literally impossible to feel that zenness that you experience without the stress or the trauma before like you just can't get there so you almost want to invite you want to seek experiences that will make we say this is so interesting though because um it's hard to say that to a normal person like go seek something painful a good example is though you know when people do uh like tough mud or high rocks or like marathons whatever is a good example of putting your body through physical stress and you can't come through like that as a form of adversity at the end of the day um but a great training ground for any of this stuff is just entrepreneurship because you do just get smashed in the face all the time it's literally what it is you're just taking punches you're guaranteed for some trauma the the best advice i think across all our interviews ever is like take action and life will just reveal itself yeah and i feel like whether it's entrepreneurship or taking on something else in your life those things lead to like micro versions of trauma and challenge all the time and that your your life and character are revealed in those moments and it's quite hard when people are i feel like people are terrified of life these days yes of you know revealing themselves to life and so you have to start people small on you know the the journey to take more action in their lives because you will find so much more fun in all these the crazy shit that happens to you right they you are obviously a filmmaker um and uh and the early in content uh early incarnation of amaze is in a sort of celebrity theatrical kind of dynamic world and it sounds like something you're really really passionate about this feels to me to be the evolution of it more purposeful and there's the idea that you know your passion is something you do for yourself and your purpose is something that you do for others do you feel like you're living your purpose now do you think there's another business in you after a maze or is this like you're just i hope i get to do this the rest of my life yeah i really wow that would be my dream that i'm like continued to be good enough at the job to to warrant it um yeah i really you know this feels both like my business but also my art um and there's so much more we have coming that like we'll hopefully get to be able to express that even more but no i i'm incredibly grateful that it even works yeah it's an amazing model yeah i mean if you yeah i mean that is there any challenges of the fact that you might not have started the business in such a mindset that you know you have investors and all the rest of it can this be a lifelong business business slash passion or like do you have any baggage from the fact that the company's like quite old and you've got investors and so forth i think we can still exit in ways that can get them their money back i think it's a big opportunity we have a chance to be like a really big business i i definitely think that i more meant like uh would you ever try and buy the investors out would you like is this a long long-term business for you i hope it's a long long-term but we could go public there's other ways to you know i think that's on the path for us um and then hopefully i'm good enough at running a public company that i can kill still keep the job yeah so that's a very obvious way for us to do it and to get the investors you know our investors have been amazing they've been with us for a long time very patient so i'd be very excited for them to do very well and want that for the team and everything too but my dream is that we do that and then i can keep running it oh i can sincerely say that i a believe that you can yeah hope that you do and uh just thank you for your time because it's been such an inspiring one of my favorite stories ever had on the show so thank you so much oh thank you guys and he's been doing it for seven years yeah really this is one of the best yeah oh wow amazing i mean i've been doing it for about six months and i would say the same thing it's less meaningful i think the last one was better i've had seven better than this yeah yeah and you're like number 10 yeah i've done 10 and you're i guess 10 yeah yeah well thank you guys this is this is amazing you guys are awesome at this thanks very much for coming on yeah thank you for putting out your wisdom in the world and inspiring others to do this it's really it's really cool and zen boy and zen boy