Jeff Harmon

29:07What was happening with this TV series, there has never been an independent TV show industry. It's never happened. And so we were pioneering independent TV. And that meant we had a show that was unencumbered by all these big studios that had already bought up all the rights and tied it up in these massive contracts. And we were able to play and mold and try and test until we came up with this crazy idea. I think it was inspiration where we were like, wait, every single person who asked for it free has somebody pay for them. What if we just make that the model? You get to watch it for free and then pay it forward to somebody who wants it right now, today, but can't watch it unless you pay it for them.

30:03And we call it pay it forward. And the reason for that was, is I was giving the show away to my neighbors and they weren't watching it. I knew every single person who watched it because everyone who watched it would come up and talk to me afterwards and say, that was a really good series. Whether they were faith people or not faith people, they just loved it after they watched it. And so what I did with my wife, Annie Ellie, is I said, I don't know why people aren't watching this show, but let's start inviting everyone over for Sunday dinner. And then as soon as we finish dinner, I'm going to sit them down in front of the TV and I'm going to make them watch two or three episodes.

30:40And they would finish Sunday dinner and I'd bait and switch them and I'd sit them in front of the team and they'd be like, no, I got to go. And I'd be like, nope, I've spent two and a half years of my life working on this. Sit down, watch this show. And inevitably they loved it. 100 % of the time, they loved it. If they could get three episodes in, they were hooked. And so I was like, if we could just get people to watch it. And then I realized there were people that wanted to watch it. They're just not the people. The people I'm sharing with are not ready to watch it. And then I realized that's what everybody is.

31:13Everybody's trying to reach out to their friends and say, I watched this amazing TV series. And then they get totally dejected when nobody will watch the TV series, even if they give it to them for free, even if they buy it for them. But there's this other group of people who are ready, but they're disconnected from the people who are ready to share. And so if we could just connect the strangers together. And so we set up a system called Pay It Forward where, and this is an evolution to where we're at now with the Angel Guild, but to where when I'm watching The Chosen, I could watch it for free.

31:46But when it comes up and the episode starts, it says, Gary from Virginia paid for this episode so you could watch it. And then at the end, it says, pay it forward for someone else to watch. And we figured if we did the math, if one in 20 people paid it forward, we got averages and we were like, it actually starts to math. And so we started optimizing and we hit Thanksgiving of that year. And by December 31st, we had to make this successful or else the company wasn't going to make it. And on December 31st, we got, you figured it out. amazing yeah it also feels somehow related to the audience who paid laughed more yes there's some incentive built into it i don't really understand it yes but there's something there there is something there and i actually think you you have a point and one of our investors the guys at gigafund they're big one of the biggest investors in spacex i think they might be the biggest luke Nosek and Steve Ascui.

32:49Luke is a co-founder of PayPal with Elon. They've invested in us, in Angel. And they said, I think the magic is the person paying it forward voluntarily, like a Starbucks coffee or whatever, is now invested enough that the movement works, that it doesn't fizzle. It gives it enough fuel and commitment that the movement is... And it probably also adds to the word of mouth somehow. Yes. Yeah. In unmeasurable ways. But the show grew and it became the top five most searched show on Roku for years. Unbelievable. Until, and then eventually the show moved on to Amazon because they wanted more money than we had at the time.

33:36Are you still involved in the Amazon show? No, we're not. We're not involved. Oh, really? Yeah. This is typical Hollywood. is that, or I think it's typical across the board, is that sometimes you make something really big and you end up building something that moves away from you just because you made it so big, right? That the bigger players come in and pull it out. How long did that whole chosen story take? For us, I think ours was about five years. Five years. Five years of Angel's involvement. During that time, were you developing other projects? Yes. Yeah. So we started developing a show called Tuttle Twins.

34:15Also, we helped them crowdfund. And Tuttle Twins is a TV series. It's a cartoon TV series based on this bestselling book called Tuttle Twins. They sold nine, I think it's nine million copies worldwide. And they just teach Austrian economics and freedom to kids, like to teach kids. How did that come to you? So I, I'm on the board of a organization in Utah, a think tank called the Bertus Network. and the Libertas Network does these books. They do, I don't know if you've ever heard of the lemonade stand laws. So lemonade stand laws are Libertas looked at all these different states where kids were popping up lemonade stands and the police would show up and tell them they couldn't run their lemonade stand because they didn't have licenses.

34:59They didn't have food permits. They didn't have - This is real? This was happening all over the country. Wow. And so Libertas, this was quite a while ago. They went and made, in Utah it was the first one, the Lemonade Stand Law, where a kid can make their own business and no city or state or police can come in and tell them they can't do their business. Great. And Libertas has literally millions of kids all over the country now. They go pop up in these parks. Everybody buys a 10 by 10 foot space. They set up their own business, whatever it is. My kids sell flowers. My wife's Brazilian, so they've sold Brazilian food.

35:35And they don't have food permits, which is pretty awesome. But they just sell like these different things, their own businesses. And then they invite, what they encourage everybody to do is they say all the kids should invite their parents, their uncles, their aunts, their cousins to show up and have enough money to support them and a few other kids. Great. And so these lemonade stand businesses are popping up all over the country. Libertas Network was also involved in making Utah one of the very first states to have medical marijuana, which was a shock to the country is that that was one of the first.

36:06So this is what this think tank does. And they had built this book series to teach kids about basic things like lemonade stands and how civil disobedience is one of the ones that I thought was really interesting that they talk about like what Harriet Tubman was doing or, you know, just different historical characters. So all of these principles are things that historically we would think of as mainstream liberal ideas. Yeah, just classical liberalism, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's what it is. It's classical liberalism. And so Libertas had built this book series. I was telling Connor, I said, I want this in a TV series for my kids.

36:48And my brother, who's a director, Daniel, he's a director, he said, I want to make the series. So early on - So the books already existed. Yep. So this is a TV series based on a kid's book series. Loosely based on book series. Educational. Yes, yes. Yes. Now the book series is like 80 or 90 % education, 10 or 20 % entertainment. The idea behind the TV series was it's going to be 90 % entertainment with 10 % education. But it's still educational. Yes. And so it's these two twins who have a Cuban grandma. She's in a wheelchair, but it happens to be an interdimensional time traveling wheelchair that she's made.

37:28And she's like friends with Nikola Tesla, who also time travels. and she takes the kids they're in like a lower middle class neighborhood in the united states and they have mixed parents and she takes these kids throughout history to meet harriet tubman to meet benjamin franklin to meet frederick bastier to meet carl marx they go meet all these different characters from history and then learn principles of austrian economics and liberty they learn about the pencil they learn it from adam smith who he gets the pencil and then he's before the pencil's time and then he's like teaching about the pencil it's a really funny episode because he actually comes before the pencil and then from there on he steals one of the pencils in the episode he takes it home with him after the time travel and they get back and every single episode in tuttle twins from then on they're called adam smith he's instead of pencils.

38:27That's really funny. Because he's now the inventor of the Adam Smithies. And we actually sell the merchandise, Adam Smithies. Great. Kids can buy a whole bunch of Adam Smithies and they take them to school and they're riding with their Adam Smithies because they're a part of the show. Right. So Tuttle Twins was a series that we took and we raised a few hundred thousand dollars, built an animatic, put together a team. They had done all the poopery ads and the squatty potty ads and all these super funny ads, comedians, and then took the Libertas Network experts, put them together in a room, wrote out scripts, built this series, and then put it in front of the crowd and the crowd invested in it and built.

39:08It's now on season four. It's cash flowing series, 12 episodes per season, four seasons. And what's the age group that it's aimed at? It's aimed at 8 to 15, but two-thirds of the jokes are adult jokes. They're jokes that adults are going to laugh at. One-third is kids' jokes. The best cartoons always work on different levels. Well, and Tuttle Twins is built for a co-viewing. It's completely built for co-viewing. And in fact, Angel's entire philosophy is that no parent ever should be turning their kids over to a channel just to watch whatever. That parents should be co-viewing with their kids, having discussions with their kids.

39:54Everything on Angel is co-viewing. Beautiful.

40:05The End

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42:19What was Angel's business model prior to comedy? So it was called VidAngel. VidAngel. Before original content. And the concept there was, once again, user method, is the idea was, is we can't watch most of the shows. But Neil had, he loved the movie Cinderella Man. And there's a scene in it where the trainer just goes off on a rant and he's using a bunch of language that he didn't want his, I don't remember how old his son was, eight years old or something to see that language. Cause he's like, I don't want you to do this with my siblings. And so he went in and he built a plugin for the browser that would just, it was like an automatic remote control that would just skip and mute words that he didn't want.

43:12So when I was growing up, if we were watching TV, my mom would just like run up and turn off the TV or, you know, lots of people say their parents would like cover their eyes. And so basically the concept was, is what if we could just make that automatic, an automatic remote control that skips and mutes scenes in movies so that parents can watch with their kids? An example would be at that time, Game of Thrones was the biggest TV series in the world. What people don't know is that there were tens of millions of downloads on the torrents. Within 24 hours after Game of Thrones would launch an episode, there'd be an alternate version of Game of Thrones uploaded on the torrents without any nudity or sex.

43:57So that all these kids around the world that had parents that said, you cannot watch this. It's got soft porn in it. those kids would go online and get the torrented version without those scenes. Which in the music business, there are the clean versions, but it doesn't seem to exist in film and television. That's right. And so we started there and he made Cinderella Man so his son could watch it. And then it went really big with Game of Thrones because like I said, there was tens of millions of downloads on these torrents of version, plain versions. But the studios didn't like it. In particular, Disney didn't like it because my theory is, is that Disney saw it and said, we're the family audience.

44:47We own 50, at the time, they were over 50 % of the box office. And if all of the other studios' movies become more family friendly through this system, then it dilutes our audience. So Disney is the one who came after us initially. Did they ever tell you that's why? No, they didn't. But it didn't make any sense otherwise because why would they care? It's not like... I would think that the model that you're building is the Disney of today. We call it the values-based audience. Yeah. Yep. Disney is the values-based audience. It was. It was. And we're trying to build the new values-based audience.

45:25But at the time, we were just the remote control. Yeah. So they went after that. They said that we were infringing on copyright, had a big, long battle. This is VidAngel. And then we settled it out. VidAngel was a streaming platform? Wasn't a streaming platform. What was it? It was an automatic remote control platform, parental controls. So you just, if you bought. It didn't have content in it. No, you watch the content on other streamers or movies you purchased, like a DVD or a Blu-ray. If you owned a Blu-ray or a DVD, then we would say we can stream you that with the automatic remote control.

46:08Oh, it would know the content and just, it would know all the timings and... Yeah, it's all tagged with the timings inside of it. So the audience could dial it back as much as they wanted. Yep, yep. every single person on the service was watching a different version of the movie. Yeah. Like there were tens of thousands of different versions. But they're all watching the content from the original content provider. Well, in order to do that technologically, we did have to go capture the content. But there was a law that said you could transmit a piece of content that somebody had the legal right to watch to transmit it to allow people to watch it with these skips and mutes.

46:50It was called the Family Movie Act of 2005. And at that point, we had The Chosen was starting to take off and Dry Bar Comedy was taking off. And we went to our audience and said, our promise to you, our brand promise was that we were going to protect the home through this automatic remote control. Would you be interested in us shifting to do original content like The Chosen and Dry Bar? and the vast majority of the audience said, we prefer just go after the original content. And so we settled with Disney, sold off Fit Angel, and then focused on original content. Did you sell it to Disney? No, that's funny.

47:34It would be, the funny thing is they've actually done a bunch of this kind of stuff. You showed that there's a need for the model. Yeah. Is there an Angel Studios mission statement? Angel Studios mission is to tell stories that amplify light. We think that there's enough nihilism in the world. There's enough of these like cynical stories. And we are picking stories that, and our audience is picking stories. Even when you sign up as a guild member and you vote on the content, the first time you vote, it comes up and says, I pledge that I will strive to vote for content that amplifies light or that is true, honest, noble, just, authentic, lovely, admirable, and excellent.

48:17So those are the words. Those words mean totally different things to over 2 million members. But in the aggregate, just getting them to pledge to that puts them in the community. And that's going to adjust over time as the community grows, but that is our mission. Has the community only grown? Over time, it just has continued to grow. Like a year ago, it's only a couple years old. So the Guild itself, that's an iteration after Pay It Forward. Because you can crowdfund a project at a time. And that's how you started was crowdfunding a project. Yes, and then figuring out business models around it.

48:52But when we united it all into one where we just said, we're not just doing The Chosen. We're not just doing Drybar. We're not just doing Tuttle Twins. We're doing an entire movement around content that amplifies light for our community. And we're going to support these filmmakers. This community has paid out$210 million so far to filmmakers. And we're going to support filmmakers who support what we want for our families. So once you do that, then you have everybody saying, it isn't about one film. It's about all of them. So I'm going to pay a monthly payment of$20 a month. And that goes to help you make films.

49:28And then I'm going to watch them. and I'm going to give feedback to the filmmakers. And, you know, we have hundreds of projects just piling through and they're getting feedback from these millions of Guild members. And then the filmmakers can take it home, re-edit, come back, do it again. We have filmmakers that'll come through 10 times before their film is ready and they get feedback and they develop. It's a development process. That's amazing. Tell me about when it went from project to project to the Guild. How did that happen? that transition? Basically, everything great at Angel has come out of an existential threat.

50:07So when Amazon came to get The Chosen, we were very reliant on our top TV series because we were like, wait, this is, we have an agreement here. This is our show. That's what we were thinking. If there's a big, huge studio coming in to get your show and the filmmakers want to go to that studio, you understand. Yeah. And so we're looking at this and saying, we have to reinvent ourselves again. And so every great moment in our company comes out of some existential moment. The pay it forwards came because that show was failing. And so we figured it out. And so we were looking at it and I had been working on a system I called the jury for years where we would take our crowd investors and we would ask them, which movies do you want us to take to the streaming platform?

51:05And then it clicked for me. We were really struggling to get people to engage and actually vote. And I was like, what if they pay for it, maybe they'll vote more. So we started testing. It's like Polymarket. Yes. There's something about it. When people pay for it, they're invested in it. Yes. And we said, okay, they're going to pay for it. And then tons of team members said, that's a crazy idea. So I just got two team members that believed in it, started working on it. And the theory was, imagine for all the people who were just saying, you're asking them to do our workforce. You're asking our customers to do our workforce.

51:45They're not going to want to do our workforce. We're the ones who have to sift through all the shows. And now I would say to them and say, no, no, think about this. If I came to you and said, I'm going to manufacture a toy and I'm going to get the manufacturing process about half done. And then I'm going to hand you a bunch of bags of pieces and then you assemble it for the final piece. And I'm going to give you instructions. And the more time it takes you to assemble it, the more money you have to pay for that product. You're going to want to do that. And they're like, no, but that's Legos. Legos just gives you the final part of the manufacturing process.

52:19And people love it. And I was like, that's what's going to happen here is that people in our family as Harmons, my kids in particular, we say to our kids when they're watching too much screen time, we say, Harmons live on the other side of the screen. We create the stuff that everybody else watches. Yeah. We don't just consume it. And so live on the other side of the screen. Love it. And there is a joy in living in the creation world. and every single billionaire I have ever met, and I've had a chance to meet a lot now, every single hundred millionaire, every single billionaire, they all want to make movies.

52:56A hundred percent of them. I have not met one that doesn't want to make movies. So the question is, is that unique to billionaires? Does something change in your DNA when you become a billionaire? Like, no, everybody wants to tell stories. It's just the average person is working in the garage on cars or at the checkout, at the grocery counter, or driving school buses or whatever it is. It's too far away. It's too far away. They can't even think about it. I didn't even know movie making as a kid. I was working on potato farms, hauling pipe, moving water, hoeing beets, like doing menial tasks. Yes.

53:35It didn't even occur to me until I was in school that there was actually a profession of making movies. Didn't know it existed, even though I was watching movies. It just didn't connect. But people want to be a part of it. Not everybody can do that. And so when you put together over 2 million people at$12 to$20 a month, all contributing the same cause to make movies, they're becoming the equivalent of many billionaires. But they get a vote on it. And they get to decide. And as founders, I cannot pick a movie and bring it into Angel unless they pass it. They actually have veto power. What do you present them with to decide?

54:13What we decided is that a script is too difficult. Agreed. And so we said, at this point, it is five minutes of a finished prototype of the film. And we don't want a sizzle reel. People send in sizzle reels. It has to be content you own or have license to. And the filmmaker can submit at least five minutes. They can submit a whole movie. They can submit a pilot. They can submit, but it has to be at least five minutes. And then as a guild member, you get on, you watch the five minutes, You get a random selection because it's a sample. It has to follow the rules of wisdom of crowds so that they don't get bias.

54:50Also, it's going to account for your age, and it's going to account for all kinds of things to make sure we get statistical sample sizes. And then you get asked two questions. The first one is a calibrating question. Does this project amplify light? Does this film amplify light? And then they can click on it, whatever is true, honest, noble, just, authentic, lovely, admirable, and excellent. Whatever that means to them, they say whether or not it amplifies light. The second question is a negative question, which is really interesting. It comes from the Sean Ellis test. I don't know what that is.

55:21Sean Ellis built this test to try to figure out if Slack was viable. And he asked people, how would you feel if you could never use Slack again? Very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed. It's not that good. Those were the three answers. and he got most people said very disappointed and he said he recommended to vcs this has product market fit so i took that concept and said considering the fact that you're trying to find stuff that amplifies light how would you feel if this movie never came to angel studios how would you feel if this never went to theaters that type of question very disappointed somewhat disappointed not disappointed it's not that good those are two questions everybody gets asked and then they have a free form they can just put in feedback to the filmmakers the filmmakers get hundreds of feedback and then they get a score based on all those answers that says zero to 100 and if they give above a 70 they pass and they can be considered to be taken into angel there still has to be some due diligence, but, or like the most recent movie released, David, it scored 98 in the Guild, which is the highest score we'd ever seen.

56:36It scored 98 on Rotten Tomatoes. We have the movie Sketch that came out earlier this year. It scored in the 80s in the Guild. It scored in the 80s on Rotten Tomatoes audience score. She is connected to the audience. Yes. If you look at Angel's Rotten Tomatoes popcorn meter, which is the audience, Angel has the single highest score in the industry. We're at 93%. Across the board. Across the board. Unbelievable. Highest average score. We can predict the Rotten Tomatoes scores long before the movies come out within points. And then when you look at the box office, Evan Shapiro, recently, he's a big industry guy, came out with a blog where he pointed out that Angel's average, this was as of October of last year before David, but he said Angel's average box office is$34 million.

57:32And he's like, all the other independents are lower, including Focus, which is not owned by an independent, but it's an independent that got picked up. And A24 and all of them. We're the highest box office. Of any independent. Yes. Amazing. And so Evan Shapiro had pointed that out, that like this model's working. And on top of that, not only as a guild member do you get to pick the movie, and veto the movies. Like, if you veto a movie as a guild member, it can't go on Angel. There's movies I wish made it sometimes. They just got to adjust it to make it work. But you also get to support the movie because if you take the highest level of guild membership, you actually get two movie tickets to every movie.

58:08So it's like a movie pass. And so there's built-in millions of dollars for every single movie to go to theaters that they have an automatic group of people who just buy tickets. Tell me what it's like as a guild member. How many things do you get to look at? as many as you want. I mean, I don't think any... Like, tell me what the flow is. Like, if you went in right now, there's probably over 50 projects to go about. And are those things that you put into it, or can people just upload stuff? Anybody can go to angel.com slash filmmakers and upload. Wow. And so we've had films, like, here's a really good example.

58:41His Only Son. It's a little movie made by, it's about the story of Abraham in the wilderness for three days. He's been commanded to sacrifice his son, Isaac. and it's just three days in the wilderness with Abraham and his son and his servants, super low budget. He made it for$250 ,000. He hired a Lebanese, a famous Lebanese actor, very wealthy guy, but he said he liked the project. So he took it on and came out to California, worked for like$150 a day. And he got these good actors, one from Israel, one from Lebanon, one from Iran, and they put together this movie. And this is a filmmaker who was reading the Bible, read Abraham's story in Saddam Hussein's bunker, decided he was going to be a filmmaker, grew up with nothing, comes back, uses a GI Bill to go to film school in San Francisco, and then makes this movie during the COVID lockdowns, and then brings it to the Guild.

59:43It scores high in the Angel Guild. And we paid attention. We watched it. And then we took it to theaters. And it did$12 million in the box office. Tell me about taking it to theaters. When did that begin, the idea of going beyond streaming? So that originally started with Dallas Jenkins, actually, with The Chosen. He said, I want to take my episodes to theaters. And I was like, Dallas, I don't know about theaters. Was this after they had already streamed or no? No, this was for like season three, I think. Before it streamed. Yes. He wanted to take like, he made another Christmas episode. He wanted to take it to theaters.

1:00:20And we said, we'll test it. We'll see. And then I told my team, I was like, if we're going to do this, because Dallas wants to do it, just gather every bit of data you can to see if theatrical is viable. So we went through, gathered the data. And when we crunched the data afterwards, we're like, it seems like we could actually fix this model, the theatrical model, because it's broken. Yeah. And then we took His Only Son to theaters. That was the first one. And we did$12 million in the box office. And then we took Sound of Freedom and did$250 million in the box office. And that's a breakout that's, like, beyond our control.

1:00:55Like, when movies go crazy like that, that's not really, like, you couldn't even stop it if you wanted to. And then we did another$10 million movie, another$12 million.

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1:02:42Tell me the story of Sound of Freedom. Sound of Freedom. It's wild. How did it come to you first? Yul, my brother, was on a panel in Mexico with the producer. And they were talking. And then Jim Caviezel later shows up at our office and says, I'm just curious about what you guys are doing. And by the time we get done talking to him, he says, I can feel in my heart that our movie is supposed to be with you guys. And he didn't own the movie. He was just an actor in it. And he's like, I'm going to go figure out how to get this movie to be with you guys. And then over a short period of time, we got a contract with them.

1:03:15They had been working, trying to get that thing out for eight years. They'd been stuck on the shelf for eight movies. Tons of movies are stuck on the shelf. Because it had originally been produced by Fox. And then Fox got bought by Disney. And then Disney shelved the movie. And then according to Eduardo, this isn't my firsthand experience, so I don't. But Eduardo said that Disney shelved the movie. He asked if he could buy it. They wouldn't sell it to him until he went to them and said, because of my connections in the anti-sex trafficking world, I have some dirt on some people that you don't.

1:03:47Like, it's not a good thing for you to hide this movie, is what he was saying. I don't have all the, that's Eduardo's story. And so he, they sold him the movie. Then the pandemic hit, it didn't work out. and then finally we came along and he said that just before we came along he was actually called his attorney and was like maybe i'll just publish this movie to youtube like we've just wasted the money and i'm going to publish it to youtube and then did you present that to the guild yeah we put it to the guild they voted super high score and then we went to take it to the box office and we picked a date of September 15th and then my brother Neil and some other employees all came back on the same day and said I'm just feeling like deep deep feelings that this is not supposed to go out that way it needs to move up like sooner yeah like like that they were receiving inspiration it's supposed to go sooner and they all agreed and we agreed to try for July 4th which is the hardest time of the year to release a movie and we'd only released a couple movies in theater so this is kind of crazy and i was pushing back on neil and i said i don't like unless the theaters give us the space we can't go on july 4th because we don't have the space and neil said well give me 10 days i'm gonna go meet with the theaters with brandon the head of theatrical and if the theaters like it and they say they'll give us space then let's try it and i said okay Would you go to independent theaters?

1:05:19All of them. All of them. Mm-hmm. So this is another thing we learned. The movie space, in most people's mind, is the theaters and Hollywood are the same thing. But when you go to CinemaCon, which is the big event where the theaters and the studios meet, you realize that there's 3 ,000 independent theater owners. And they're middle Americans. and they have a really stressed relationship with the big studios. They actually have a very conflicted relationship with them. And they love stories, but they don't like the way they're treated by the big studios. And so I was walking with an angel shirt.

1:05:59And we had just done one theatrical release at this point. We hadn't even done Sound of Freedom yet, I don't think. And as I'm walking around with the angel shirt, people would stop me in the hallways of CinemaCon and be like, hey hey hey and they'd like reach down in their shirt and pull out a cross and be like i'm on your side they're like they would say i have a family and you guys i love what you're doing i could not walk through the event without theater owners saying we're on your side and then it clicked for me the studios don't own the hardware this is what google realized with the android phone they needed to own the hardware and i realized they don't own the whole stack yeah They used to.

1:06:38They used to. But it was made illegal. It was made illegal and they don't own the whole stack. And I was like, if they don't own the whole stack and we make our own apps and we get direct relationships with the theaters, then they have no control to cancel us whatsoever. And so that's what we're doing. You can buy tickets on angel.com. You don't have to go to Fandango. You don't have to go to the movie theaters directly. You don't have to go through any studio or any theater. You have a whole alternative network. Yes. Outside of the mainstream. Well, you have to. Like anybody who's going to disrupt a lot needs to own the stack.

1:07:13Yeah. Eventually, they're going to put pressure on you where they can put pressure on you if you don't own the whole stack. So we've got an entire engineering team. We've built all our own TV apps. You can actually, with a remote control, you can get on your TV and check out with your movie tickets, select seats, buy your seats, and get a text message on your phone with your QR code from your couch sitting on it, like, after you watch a trailer. Wow. You can do this kind of stuff because we've built the whole stack. And it's a massive effort, but we realized halfway through, it's like you kind of have to redo the whole thing.

1:07:49And I think we're at the perfect timing because AI is going to flatten the world of creativity. Like, it's no longer going to be the rich kid's sport. The creative class is growing so fast and being democratized so fast by AI that there's going to be a hundred times as many movies made. And Hollywood's big problem right now is not that there's not enough revenues. They have more revenues than they've ever had. they have a cost problem. And that cost problem is existential. Yeah. And so it's really ironic to actually see them freaking out about AI at the exact same time that they're like having struggles with costs and everybody's in so much debt.

1:08:34But it's really exciting because these everyday filmmakers like David Helling, who did His Only Son, this Marine who comes from lower class, making his own movie can now be done by lots of people because of the way the tools are no longer out of reach. The way I look at it is that matters in a big way for the curators. So if you're going to have 10 times or 100 times as many movies made every year that are equal quality, the quality of movies is going to go up. There's going to be a lot that has to be sorted through. Angel's job is to build a community that everybody trusts inside that community and says, we know that this community will sort through as a group, we'll sort through it all.

1:09:25Which none of the studios have. The studios have an expert opinion. Yep. That's all. They have a tiny group of executives. There's like a couple dozen people in Hollywood that make all of the decisions for 90 plus percent of everything that goes to the box office. We're flipping that on its head and saying, no, we have a group of people. If they veto it, it never comes. Like they can choose. And then if they vote it really high, it gets considered to go to theaters. And it's really good for the audience. They get to see things they want to see. That's right. I can't walk through the airport with an angel shirt and not get stopped.

1:10:08We actually made it to where if you're not a guild member, you can't buy Angel merch. Because I realized as I walked through the airports, I get stopped. And it's this really nice experience when somebody says, Angel Studios, I love Angel. And I was like, that needs to be unique. That needs to stay unique. You're a representative of Angel. Yes. Every guild member is part of that group. Yeah. And so when they get stopped in the airport, we can't dilute that by letting everybody buy Angel shirts. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Because you need to have that experience of walking through an airport or just at a checkout.

1:10:42One cool thing about wearing an angel shirt is I get free stuff every once in a while. I think people are like, it's on the house because you're an angel fan. It's such a passionate community. Two Decembers ago, we were at a half million members in 2024. 2025 December, 2 million members. Wow. This community is growing. Unbelievable. Yeah. Now, with the first series, your brother was wary because it was faith-based. Yes. Well, he was wary about making money off of preaching, which we still worry about that. Is there a requirement for things to be faith-based or no? Because it's just about light.

1:11:26Yeah, it's just about amplifying light. Faith-based is a subcategory of the values audience. we will always be the best at faith-based movies we are believers but it like people called sound of freedom face-based it literally the only thing that was faith-based in the whole movie is he said god's children are not for sale so like if that's the case then every single martin scorsese movie is a faith-based movie yeah and if you watch our movies like sketch if you watch we have a movie coming out with kevin james it's just a rom-com that it's not a faith-based movie at all yeah These are values-based movies.

1:12:02Is it about what they're not, or is it about what they are? It's about what they are. Yeah. These movies, like, we're not worried about what Hollywood's making. We're just worried about what we want for our families. But in the case of comedy... None of that's faith-based. No. And you're only saying what it's not. It's not cursing. But we say it's funny for everyone. Yeah. That's what we say. It's funny for everyone. So a movie like Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, which was a really hard movie. Yeah. Could that have been an angel movie? Yeah. So it's not unicorns and rainbows. No, no. We actually, we get hit.

1:12:46So people who start assuming that we're faith-based and then we release Sketch. Sketch is a movie about this family who's lost their mother. One of the kids is drawing out her feelings in these little monsters. They're like monsters on a sheet of paper. And then the dad's trying to stop her because he's worried about her health because she's like drawing these really disturbing monsters. And then they find a magic pond. It goes in the magic pond and all the monsters come to life and torment the town. It's got like a horror feel to it or like a Jurassic Park feel. It's really actually quite intense movie.

1:13:18Yeah. But a tremendous ending because it's how to deal with grief. It's how to deal with loss. They lost their mom. this movie is one of the highest rated movies by both critics and audience last year it didn't do super well in the box office but part of that was is there was a group a small cohort of our audience that were like wait i thought you were faith because the only movie maybe they watched was a faith-based one right and then you got other people that are so thrilled to have it is there a way to make that clear to everyone so that no one feels bad about it one thing i've decided 100 100%, we're never, ever going to please everybody.

1:13:54The way we know is if there's a high enough score in the Guild, we know it's a general audience. And people who voted against it, they might get really loud. But we know most people, it's a general audience. Are you actively looking for films? Or now is it basically the whole model is crowdsourced? We do. We have a whole team that talks to filmmakers, builds relationships with filmmakers. but the way that you the primary like every film even if we went and built a relationship with a filmmaker even if it was steven spielberg they'd have to send it through the guild and if they say no we can't take it and we actually don't put the names of the people who made the movie this is really really important the actors that like if it's an animated one we don't put the names of the actors in the movie.

1:14:43It's all merit-based. So the viewer doesn't know if the director, they don't know their gender, they don't know their race, they don't know their religious beliefs, they don't know their politics. Then they vote, then we get a movie and we release the movie trailer and it has all the actors' names on it and some people lose it every once in a like there was a movie that had mark hamill in it and a bunch of republicans were upset about that or there's other the same happens the other way but like the politics mark hamill handled it like champ he just got on social media and was like i like this movie and i don't care what anybody thinks yeah but you're basically looking at a situation where the vote is done and we don't care about the outrage after if we release the movie decide to release it and the guilds backed it we're going to back the film has there ever been any uh attempted cancellations or anything like that yeah like mark hamill was one people were really upset he played harrod in a movie about it's called the king of kings and people were really upset when you get two million people you got all stripes but there's a small group who were very upset the market like why would you let mark hamill in a movie another one is there's a movie coming out called animal farm andy circus directed it based on the book animal farm yeah and some people are not happy that seth rogan's in it they don't agree with some stuff about seth rogan i actually don't fully understand it all but you know when they voted they voted based on the content that's right that's beautiful does the audience always know most of the time our bet is so hollywood right now 80 of their movies fail we want to flip that our model will miss some things there's going to be some movies that it misses but i think it will hit have a higher hit rate than any i actually had a filmmaker who said no you don't want to use wisdom of crowds with filmmaking because the artist knows like they need to be able i think he brought up he brought up steve jobs this was at a debate I was at on a panel at a private event.

1:16:56He brought up Steve Jobs and I said, well, Steve Jobs didn't finish that way. He started that way. He started as the dictator. And he said, this is the product we need. And then they got to a plastic screen versus a glass screen. And they were user testing it. And the last minute he had to switch to glass, even though he didn't want it because it breaks easy. because as they user tested it, they realized it wasn't working, but they had enough user testing to realize they had got it right before they launched that product. And in our case, if you're coming with an idea to the Guild, I agree that the audience is not going to know what to do with that idea.

1:17:44But we require that you have at least five minutes as a filmmaker of a completed prototype. Demonstration. of a demonstration that shows what the product's going to look like. Great. What it's going to feel like, what it's going to act like, and they can vote on that. That's the best. There's no fantasy involved of I'm describing something and you think it means one thing and I think it means something else. That's right. You're voting on what it is. What it is. This is what it is. They're voting on your execution of it. Exactly. And maybe your execution doesn't fit our community. That's okay.

1:18:19the question is is as an artist people bring up steve jobs they don't realize when he got to a prototype he was testing it and so our model is you have to get to a prototype and that prototype getting that prototype is just a hundred percent from you you're not asking anybody anything to get to that prototype and then you take that to the audience and then you just see do they accept it do they reject it and if they reject it did they give feedback that you're willing to go within that box as an artist or are you not willing to go within that box and that's up to the artist.

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1:20:32Tell me about the advertising business. How did you get into it? There was a little startup company, Neil and I helped co-found. I was a student at university of my last day of my last class. And I was one of those students who went to school and just like sat in the back of the class and read Mashable and Inside Facebook and all these different blogs while I wasn't paying attention in class. And so I'm sitting in my last day of my last class and a 72-year-old guy comes in. He has this little tongue cleaner called Fora Brush. And if you scrape your tongue, it cleans off the bad breath. And he invented a very specific one.

1:21:12And the student group that did his project, because these inventors would come in and say, can you help me market my product to students? they got up and they said you need to partner with procter and gamble or a big brand and that's the only way you're going to be able to market this tongue cleaner they said only eight percent of people say they'd buy this online and i put up my hand in the back of the class and said eight percent millions of people like tens of millions why wouldn't you market to them it's way harder to get a contract with a proctor and gamble why sell to the eight percent yes sell to 28%.

1:21:48That's a lot of people. And they argued with me. And then Dr. Bob is his name. He came up to me afterwards and said, Jeff, I loved your comments. Can you come work on this product with me? And I said, yeah, I can. He said, well, come over to my house. And I said, well, I just have a bicycle. I was a student. And I was like, and I'm not going to buy a car until I get out of student debt. I had a little bit of debt. And so he would come pick me up, take me over to his house. We We would once a week sit down and try to figure out how to market this thing. And we tried all kinds of stuff. Like the first thing I did is I went and found all these Facebook pages that they had just made a Facebook page called Kisses in different languages.

1:22:30And then millions of people would just click, I like this page. I'll follow this page. Just random pages on Facebook. And so I just messaged the guy who had built that page and said, can we buy this for a few thousand dollars? and he said yeah because he didn't have any like he just made it and it just grew it was just fun so we bought it and then we spammed him with or brush ads didn't work good idea great idea just trying trying different stuff yeah and then one day i was pretty discouraged about it and dr bob comes up to me he's like come outside and he showed me this old motorcycle actually it's a relatively new motorcycle but this motorcycle and he said if you promise me eight months he's like i'm tired of driving over and picking you up and taking you home it's like if you give me eight months of one day a week you can have this motorcycle it's a deal and we kept working on it and then my brother neil came in and he helped and uh youtube just launched its ad platform like weeks before and my roommate was a filmmaker so i asked my roommate and then my other co-worker at my day job was a network broadcaster major guy so he could talk really well in front of the camera so i just pulled them all together and i said let's make a and then in my other room it was a writer for film and so i asked him to write a two-minute commercial i gave the bones of the commercial it was like an infomercial kind of and then i took this youtube video from a channel called Howcast way back, this is many, many years ago.

1:24:06And they had a tutorial that said how to tell if you have bad breath. It had 400 ,000 views on it. And it was, you take a spoon and you turn it upside down and you scrape the back of your tongue and then you let it dry for a second and you smell it. And if it smells bad, you have bad breath. And if it smells fine, neutral, then you have good breath. And we did the how to tell if you have bad breath test and then said, and here's the solution. Yeah. So we made kind of like a higher quality version and funny version of how to tell if you have bad breath with a spoon. And then we introduced the ore brush to people.

1:24:42We started buying ads on the YouTube platform. Google puts out a press release and says, our ad platform's revenues jumped by 70 % or some huge number. But we were brand new. And so we were just the first ones to figure out how to do it. And I found out later from an engineer inside of YouTube, they said, we were asked to make it toward no single advertiser could buy more than 70 % of the inventory because you were buying all of it. And we built a$10 million company off of it. Yeah, but you were the only person buying anything. Well, everybody else was dabbling with it. I mean, there were thousands of advertisers buying just a little bit.

1:25:20You went all in. And we figured out how to print money. I see. They cost less than a penny of you at the time. Yeah. It was like the early days of AdSense. And so because we were early adopters, we got in when it's a penny of you, and we could spend a dollar and get$2 back. And so we just cranked it to the moon. And so we built a$10 million company off of that. That one sold to Dentech. And then we went and built Poopery. So we went from bad breath to poop. And it's this little spray that you spray on the top of the water, and then you go to the bathroom, and it traps the odors under the thing.

1:25:54And we made this ad with a British girl, same writer as the Aura Brush One, different film guy. Put it together. That blew up. The advertising agency really was based on YouTube at a time when they just started having ads. That's right. So you didn't change the kind of ads you were doing to then figure out how to do it for YouTube. You're a YouTube-centric advertising company. Yes, at that time. And then YouTube flew a whole team to Utah. and they're meeting with us for a couple of days and they're like what can we do to make it to where more companies can do what you're doing because you're all of our revenue yeah yeah and and i was like give me because they were talking about how they're going to do pre-rolls and they're going to be 15 or 30 seconds i was like do not do 15 or 30 second pre-rolls that will not work for us that is a different game than we're playing i said give us five seconds and then give us as long as we hold them and have a skip button.

1:26:56And so they built the skip button based on that meeting. Wow. And we built an ad agency. A skip button that still exists today. Yes. And we built a big ad agency based on that relationship where we were doing skippable ads that were two or three or four minutes long, as long as we earned the customer and we could just sell them long-term on that ad campaign. Did you do any research to decide on the five seconds? No. At the time, I was just asking them for the smallest time, I thought. Yeah. It was a gut. But it's interesting that you believed that in five seconds was enough. Actually, there is data.

1:27:34The reason why, because intuition is just like, intuition is not just your brain intuition. You're always taking in all the data around you. And intuition is just like, your brain is a supercomputer. It's like a big AI. And it's just sucking in all this information. And when you pump out intuition that's really good, it's because your brain did that. the work of all of the inputs you have around you from the way people are reacting to the little things you're reading that seem completely unrelated and intuition comes out of that when i did this it was because we had been running tests on aura brush where we would test the beginning of the video to see if we get cheaper cost per click right can we hook people to the end of the video better if we change the first five seconds and so we were just adjusting the first five seconds first five seconds and now that's a rule in the film industry those five seconds are what you test and then you test the call to actions.

1:28:25So you test the first five seconds and you test your call to actions and then you run 20, 30 tests at a time, then run them again and then run them again. And eventually like with the chosen, we tested that first five seconds and then we tested the end and after about a thousand tests, we figured out how to raise$10 million for the chosen. Do you keep the ad company going as well? Yes, but all the focus now has moved. We have other partners at the ad company, but yeah, it did. We did Poopery, then we did Squatty Potty, which is even deeper, that's the colon. And then we did Lumi deodorant, kind of taboo topics that you, bad breath, smelly topics that you can make a lot of fun with.

1:29:03And we did a lot of other campaigns too, but those were the most like the big, huge, turning them into household names. So then you go from that to comedy. Yep. And it already sounds like the ads had a sense of humor about them. Yes, that's right. here's what I learned very early on in the ad agency. It is easier to take a comedian because the ad agency and the standup comedy were happening together. So I was actually using comedians that we found through Drybar and then I was taking them over and turning them into writers for the ad agency. And so it's easier to turn a comedian into a marketer.

1:29:40That takes about six months of work than turning a marketer into a comedian, which takes a lifetime because they haven't been through enough trauma in their life to actually be funny. And, you know, comedians have always been through something. Like whatever really, really bad experiences make great stories and great comedians. And so if you train the comedians to be marketers, that's just a lot more effective than training marketers to be funny. So the whole agency was based on that idea. Tell me about your philosophy in general as it relates to word of mouth versus marketing. word of mouth when we looked at products to take to market with the agency or with angel if the company without any marketing whatsoever the product itself grows a little tiny bit even if it's one percent a year organically on its own without any fake or inflated growth if it can grow that way, then you can take and dump ads into it and you can accelerate it into a exponential curve.

1:30:50And so word of mouth is the foundational piece to make a decision to go after the product. The marketing is the accelerant. How has fatherhood influenced your creative output? I think that my kids are part of my creative output. Meaning my wife, Annie Ellie is her name. She was at an event the other day that was a lot of entrepreneurs and they asked her to get up and speak. And she said, everybody praises somebody who burns the boats and goes after their business idea. Like that's a big deal. And she's like, we praise it because they're changing the world. They're making a business. But she's like, children change the world.

1:31:43And she said, it's time to start praising parents who burn the ships to have kids. We're having our seventh right now. And she's like, we should go out of our way to hero these mothers who go and have a child before they have enough money. because they're burning the boats to change the world. Yeah. And they're creating the future. And so I think my kids are the creative output, the best creative output I could possibly do. And like one of my daughters just came up to me and was just like, I was watching Wayfinders. It's a TV series on Angel. And she's like, I was watching the intro. And I think if I use my Barbie dolls in the right way and you let me use some of these AI tools, I can create something like that.

1:32:36And she's 10 years old. Yeah, it's amazing. Living on the other side of the screen. But I think I wish people would give as much praise or we could change the culture to give as much praise to a mother who has burned the boats and made a decision to have kids at a young age when she actually has the ability to stay up with the kid, but she doesn't have the money. and taking that leap of faith the way that entrepreneurs are praised for taking the leap of faith of going after this crazy business idea and then succeeding. How have you incorporated AI at Angel? Well, the primary way we're using it is for engineering.

1:33:20But we basically told the company everybody needs to 10x their output using AI tools. like that's just expected now has there been any pushback from that or people excited by it well there's a couple different kinds there's people that get super excited they jump on board then there's engineers that push back then there's on the art side there's there's editors and filmmaker types that are inside the company they're building all the ad campaigns and stuff and some of them get really on board and some are like i like it for these tools but i hate it for these tools and there's there's really big debates and there's you know a lot of anxiety about it but we're just saying these are tools you're not dictating how they use the tools though no no we're not dictating how they use the tools just just 10x your output with these tools i think worldwide there's a lot of concerns about what does this mean how big is the staff now it's 300 people That's great.

1:34:18It's a good size. Yeah, it is a good size. For me, it's like I work really well with small teams. So I tend to work with a smaller part of the company that's doing kind of the crazy new ideas. And if you can have your 300 doing the work of 3 ,000, then you may not need to grow too much. yeah well every time you use a tool to increase output it creates a whole tree of new ideas that you need to pick a few and execute on so it's like exponentially changing how much capacity a company can do and it does not decrease the need for new people it just increases the total output and increases the need for new people even though you're exponentially picking up speed so now you're making tv series you're still doing the comedy shows you're making films do you see it growing into something beyond what it is or is it just going to be more of what it is i think that like there's a lot of interesting things you can do with the guild long term you know the beginning of this started when when i was calling to the jury back in the day yeah the the The idea came from when I read the book by James Sirwicky called The Wisdom of Crowds.

1:35:41And in it, he goes back to 1906, and there's a statistician called Francis Galton. He's Darwin's cousin. Really strongly believes in Darwin's ideas. Brilliant guy, but an elitist. And he believes that the elite should govern the world, and he's trying to get statistics to show that. So one of the things he does, he's at a fair, and they have an ox, and they're guessing in a raffle what the weight of the ox is. And his theory is that the butchers and the ranchers and the people who work with cattle are going to get way better guesses than the average person. So he tabulates the 800 votes and gets the average of those 800 votes.

1:36:22The average guess was 1 ,197 pounds and the weight of the ox was 1 ,198 pounds. There's the wisdom of all of them that brought in an average that was closer than any single guess. And he said, this doesn't support my hypothesis. He also talks about who wants to be a millionaire and how you have the three lifelines. You have phone a friend, 50-50, and ask the audience. When you phone a friend, you're just calling the expert. And you ask the audience, it's wisdom of crowds. Experts get it right 60 % of the time. The crowd gets it right 91 % of the time. Wow. And so these ideas were in my head. But there's another book, which I don't think has as good of statistical rigor as Wisdom of Crowds, but it has an idea that I think is really interesting.

1:37:10It's called Superforecasters. It's another interesting book. And they went through and did a study where they show people predicting thingy world events. And they basically come to the conclusion that there's like, I don't remember if it's 1 % or 3 % of the population. if you have a crowd to be able to measure them against, then there's 1 % to 3 % of the population that will pop out and they can forecast. And they can consistently forecast and they have a gift. I don't think they had a large enough sample size to know that that's true, but I believe that theory is right in that once we get enough data, you actually might be able to look at super forecasters inside of our system and do some fun things around that.

1:37:53there's just so much you can do once you have lots of data. I mean, when you look at AI, everything, everything around the AI is doing is just training off of human data. So as you have a lot of human data, you can make really interesting things, tools with AI. How do you personally use AI? I use it in my Tesla a lot to eat while I'm driving. It's not good enough yet to like, maybe it's because I have an older Tesla, but it allows me to just eat while I'm driving. And that's amazing. Like if you can eat while you're driving comfortably without spilling on yourself, because all it carries is your eyes are on the road and you can eat while your eyes are on the road.

1:38:35Won't let you text while you're driving, but it will let you eat. We are seeing a lot of interesting stuff from filmmakers. Tons of people are concerned that AI is going to take away creative jobs what are your thoughts first off i don't know for sure but i have some theories and i think i hope it puts filmmakers to rest or artists to rest a little bit on on what's happening i think we're entering the greatest creative period in the history of the world i think that machine jobs are going to be taken by the robots and that's okay and okay a couple of different analogies. One would be chess. 1996, computers start beating humans at chess.

1:39:22Grandmasters start losing. Now there's not a single grandmaster that can beat AI. But chess is bigger than it has ever been. Chess is a monster business right now and it's growing. But here's the other really interesting thing is if you pair a grandmaster with an AI, they beat the ai consistently that's interesting and so that i think that's the lesson because in chess ai is about as developed as it's going to get now you take that and put that into the creative world yes ai may get to the point where it already is to the point where it's going to outperform a vfx artist who's doing it by hand just like vfx artists using computers can outdo a hand-drawn person but if that vfx artist embraces and teams up with the ai i think they're going to beat the ais every time in art for sure yes it seems obvious that that's the case it does until like you listen to elon saying oh no it's going to replace you know like i think elon's overconfident on this because he's not an artist like i mean he has art artistic sensibilities and stuff but he's a business guy yeah and when he says oh this looks almost real i look at it i go Oh, that looks like slop still.

1:40:41But there's stuff that's really good and is going to get more and more real. And that's their idea is that it's going to get realer and realer. But there's also this concept, you know, of course you would know, like namaste. The soul in me sees the soul in you. I think that's one of the translations for that, the word namaste. If you look back at Star Wars Episode I, when it came out, after all these years of waiting for Star Wars to come out, and George Lucas had gone to the forefront, the very edge of what computers could do. And he built things. And when we walked out of the theater, we're like, I couldn't even tell that was a computer.

1:41:18I had no idea it was a computer. It looks so real. And we look back at it now with like more mature brains and we're like, that looks like crap. It looks so bad compared to practical effects from the originals. Two years ago, people were saying, I can't tell the difference between this AI. photo and a real photo two years later you look at all of those and a hundred percent of people can go that's ai even though at the time you couldn't yes and so our brains are keeping up at a little bit of lag that doesn't have the soul and maybe it gets to the point where it's such a good imitator that the just the visual alone like a single image you can't tell the difference right and maybe the video gets to where it can do that but when you get to storytelling like James Cameron took and he maps their faces and their bodies so that there's a soul underneath the alien body and it has the right soul and you can feel it and the voices and everything feels real and it feels totally different than Star Wars episode one and then you go AI that's what it's doing is it's rapping and so every time somebody freaks out about something that shows up on X and goes super viral or on Facebook and go super viral.

1:42:33And they're like, we're doomed. If you go look at the way that filmmaker or that creator made that, they always have a real face behind it. They just wrapped it. They have a real voice behind it. They just wrapped it in a new thing. And then they said it was all AI. They just don't, they don't talk about that process of making sure that it was real humans. And so it goes viral. Everybody's saying, this is scary. And then the other piece, every piece of great art that stood the test of time, when you go back through history and you look at the ones that we have the history of the artist, those artists have gone through tremendous pain and suffering.

1:43:13to get to a point where they were able to take their life experience and all the pain and suffering that they have transcended and then put it into that piece of art or that film to the point that that film transcends space and time they all have pain and suffering behind them and then ai is only a derivative of that output unless ai can get to the point where it can feel pain and suffering, it will not be able to make art that stands the test of time. And you can see this in Genesis 3.22. If you look in like ancient scripture, Adam and Eve have taken of the fruit, they're cast out of the garden.

1:43:57And God's like, you're now going to, for your benefit, you're now going to feel pain and suffering. And 3.22, it says, and God looked at them and said, they have become as one of us. So there's something divine about this process of pain and suffering that allows us to reach through time and space. I think it's uniquely human. And I don't believe that AI is going to be able to feel that at least anytime soon. Yeah. That you have to, that unique element is what is going to make it so that your art transcends. And there's things I'm really scared about with AI, but they're not art. I love the idea of humans leveling up because of AI.

1:44:50I've never heard that idea before. That's a really beautiful idea. Yeah. I mean, you're seeing it. And I think in my faith tradition, our belief is that we're divine, that everybody has divinity within them. And so a tool to allow us to just progress is fine. Now, there's the other argument, which I think is really interesting. and a friend told me, they said, what if in Revelation, the book of Revelation, it talks about the two-headed beast or the multi-headed beast. And she said, it's the second head AI that when you hook a second brain into your brain, you're the two-headed beast. Now it's not saying that the two heads are the problem.

1:45:39It's just saying that it has two heads, but is the reason why it has so much power over the world because it's a person with a second brain that's connected into an AI world. I thought that was a really interesting theory. Do you think that your faith gives you the humility to allow the Guild to make the decisions for the company? I don't know. I've always looked at it and just said, like I told Neil early on with the company, I said, well, there's two conflicting theories. One is, I said, we got to throw the ring of power into Mount Doom before it gets too much control over us. Yeah. Because everybody wants to choose what's best for everybody else.

1:46:24And it's a huge pressure on us as brothers, from people, from board members to investors, to outsiders saying, but what about when they make the wrong decisions? When the guild makes the wrong decision. And I said, we need to throw that ring into Mount Doom and get this system set up and get it to where it has an economic, it shows its economic value before the market tells us we can't do it or else it just isn't going to happen because everybody wants the power. Yeah. Everybody wants that. Like the problem in Game of Thrones is not everybody wants the throne, it's the throne itself. Right. The problem in Lord of the Rings is not everybody wants the ring, it's the ring itself.

1:47:06It's that concentrated power. But on the other side, if you look at history and you look at free societies where they truly like broke away and became free, you only have a few examples. You got the president of Singapore built out of free economic freedom, George Washington. He had the power of a king when he did that and he gave it up. You've got an example in the Book of Mormon actually, which is the King Mosiah in the Book of Mormon. He gives up his power and they have like kind of like a semi-free society for a while because he gives up power and right now in el salvador you got bukele which is yet to know if he gives true economic freedom and freedom to his people but but we don't like the french revolution they fail and it's a ground up thing we don't have an example of the crowd coming up and establishing freedom without a leader that supports them in it that has the ability to give up that power And so there's this balance for us where we're saying, how do we make sure we use the shareholder control that we have right now to get things in place, but also give it up in a way that this company can last for 100 plus years?

1:48:28Yeah. And it's something we wrestle with. Because if you do it too early, you might become like the French Revolution and they just destroy the system that you built.

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1:50:57Have you had an angel fest yet? Yeah, every year we have what's called Illuminate. we're going to change it probably to Amplify just because the autocorrect on keyboards when you type Illuminate almost like regularly types in Illuminati. And I was like, it's funny. Yeah. And so Amplify and currently it's a small thing. Like it's filmmakers are invited. We do what we call the Torch Awards where we give away the single best voted projects in each category and they get an award and we announce a whole bunch of like announcements for the company. Do you see open to the audience type of events? Yeah, so we've been playing with this idea.

1:51:50We believe that in-person events are really important. Yeah. Especially in the world of AI. If you look at the YouTube channel Dude Perfect, or some other YouTube channels that figured out how to do in-person events. Until they started doing their stadium events, their brand didn't elevate. And so what we've been doing, the way that we look at it, is we say, when we do a movie premiere, those are in-person events. We release a lot of movies every year. And so, for example, as a Guild member, Kevin James' new movie, Solo Mio, the end of this month in Miami, only Guild members are allowed to go, and we've rented out an entire theater.

1:52:35And then the Guild gets to show up, they get to walk the red carpet, they get to go to the Q &A afterwards, they get to ride in limos, and we set up almost like a, you get to be a celebrity for a day or you get to be an executive movie producer for a day when you show up to an angel movie premiere global movie premiere and so we have thousands of guild members come and i mean when we were at the last rodeo one i think 50 percent of all of the people who showed up were from out of town they flew in they came in from all over great to go to neil mcdonough's big event And then as a guild member, you get to go and then only a guild member.

1:53:21And then you park in like a place pretty close by. And then there's just limos like circling and you get to ride in a limo for a few minutes. Then you pull up and you step out on the red carpet and all the lights are there and you get to get pictures with your family. And then you go in and anyway, we've turned them into, it's like a Disneyland attraction exclusive to the guild. and the filmmakers love it because there's these huge crowds of fans that are all guild members and the guild members love it because they get to be an executive for a day where do you see angel studios in 10 years let me let me take it even further so first phase is i want to build something that my kids and my family always have something to watch and they don't need to be on these channels where they're exposed to some pretty heinous stuff.

1:54:16Like Amazon and Netflix have amazing shows on them, but they're mixed in and it's impossible as a parent to sort it out. It's just all in front of you all the time, even Apple TV. So I want a place where they don't need to go anywhere else. So that's step one and winning over the values audience. The step two, probably as important to me, is like I said, we say, Harman's live on the other side of the screen. And I think parents are rightfully concerned worldwide. Parents get very concerned when their kids say, I'm going to go be in Hollywood because of the amount of suicide, the amount of drug abuse, the amount of sexual abuse that happens, the amount of all of that That world is like so intertwined with these vices and the percentage of people who come out that aren't nihilist is low.

1:55:14So if we can make a world where a parent can be proud that their kids are going into film and storytelling and that their kids can come out better people rather than just surviving a fire. And if you come out with a family at the other end, you're the 0.1%. Because that's what it is. Like, the stats are insane. Then we have really succeeded if my grandkids and my kids can get into filmmaking without having to worry about them losing themselves. What other ways does the community of Angel interact beyond the guild picking the projects? Well, they interact with filmmakers a ton. Meaning they write comments.

1:56:08The filmmakers actually comment back to them. They have ongoing communication. So if you get into a voting group in one of the films, then you're part of that little community, a micro community. And it's an ongoing relationship? They can come and re-ask questions. The filmmaker, it's up to them to go and ask more. And then you watch the projects progress as a guild member. where you get to see a film that you got to see as a rough cut or an animatic progress or a pilot progress to entire full season. That's a really cool experience. And they get to go to the premieres, the ones that want to. And just going to theaters, like in-person events are so important.

1:56:50A lot of people think theatrical is dying, but if you look at the mean age for theatrical, compared to even Instagram and YouTube and all these social media platforms. It's 31 years old is the mean age of the theatrical goer, which is a year younger than Instagram. That's younger than YouTube. Like it's one of the youngest demographics is theatrical goers. Wow. And this surprises people. Young people are tired of the screen. and there's a really great blog post on the rabbit room where he talks about the sacrament of the cinema. That's kind of a secular sacrament. When you go to church, you choose voluntarily to give up your distractions.

1:57:42You set down your phone, you turn off things, and then everyone together through a ritual worships together and you have the the sacrament you can have a life changing experience about the blood and the body of jesus christ that can be a life-changing experience everybody's doing it together everybody's in sync and it's a time to disconnect from whatever your work is whatever it is the cinema is similar in that in a secular way where everybody gives up their phones voluntarily and you truly disconnect from this like massive doom scrolling environment and you can just sit back and go oh I get to enjoy what this director gave me and I get to do it with a whole bunch of other people and it's an extension of the dinner table and it's really the last we've got and the young people are showing up because they can go to them out to get some solitude.

1:58:39They can go to other events, but the cinema is the easiest, most accessible, affordable place to go have an in-person moment. And you can have life-changing moments. Like in Sound of Freedom, Sound of Freedom had sold-out theaters, standing ovations, people hugging and crying afterwards, total strangers. And it was across like thousands of comments on social media about it happening all over the country. It was just this incredible incredible experience that I would compare to a kind of a sacramental experience. Beautiful. Tell me a little bit about your spiritual life. So I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is commonly called Mormon.

1:59:22I am a faithful member, and my friend Matthew, who introduced us to the Chosen, he calls us the new Jews. He's like, you're the same size of population. You're like 16 to 18 million people. You're kicked out of everywhere you go. And the joke is he took me, I was in, I was in Israel and he took me to Shabbat dinner. And at Shabbat dinner, one of the guys there, he was, they love telling jokes. They're just telling jokes all around the dinner table. And one of the guys was like, I've got a joke about Mormons and I've never been able to tell And he's like, here's the joke. He's like, why did God make Mormons?

2:00:01And he's like, so Christians could know what Jews feel like. Because we were, I mean, we were kicked out of New York, then kicked out of Ohio, then kicked out of Missouri. They just burned out of our houses and then kicked out of Illinois and kicked out of the United States. And we came to Utah where. There was nothing. There was nothing, and it was Mexico at the time. And there was a law until the 1970s that you could kill a Mormon in Missouri. Wow. It was an executive order from the governor that wasn't taken off the book until the 1970s. And a lot of Mormons were killed. That's unbelievable.

2:00:41Yeah. But this hasn't changed. It's actually a little bit scary, but if you go to a BYU, that's my alma mater, a BYU football game, regularly you will hear the audience chanting F the Mormons, F the Mormons, but with the real word. Yeah. And like nobody's stopping them, but we're not really like, we came to Utah, we built up a community, we rejoined the United States and we love the United States, even though we were kicked out of our own country. And we're just not really a victim culture. But for some reason, And it's okay, culturally right now, to chant that. Can you imagine any other faith if you chanted that?

2:01:27What would happen on social media? What would happen when the Michigan shooting happened at the church? You know, where that guy ran into the church, crazy guy, went in, shot up a whole bunch of people, killed a bunch of people, and then burned down the church? And we see ourselves as Christians. But there's a big group of people who, like, the first thing they said is Mormons aren't Christians. tens of thousands of comments came out and said, Mormons aren't Christians. Mormons aren't Christians. They're very insistent that we're not Christians because we aren't creedal Christians. We don't believe in the creeds.

2:02:00And it's very inside baseball between the Christian denominations about why they don't believe that we're Christians. I believe we're Christians. It doesn't really bother me. I know my relationship with God. And so I'm kind of like, Why do we care about the ones, what they think? But it has created a very interesting element where if Catholics had created Angel Studios, I think it would have caused a lot of problems for other denominations. If Protestants had created it, it would have caused a lot of problems, especially there's something unique. If you look at the history of Hollywood, thomas edison was so anti-semitic and he invented all the first camera equipment and he went after the jews who were using it he didn't want to license it to them and they moved to california to go and make films to get away from thomas edison wow like there's a huge battle between thomas edison and the jewish filmmakers i didn't know that yes but jews were the ones who were able to establish Hollywood and tons of faith films at the beginning and great movies and world changing stuff.

2:03:19And even though I think Hollywood's lost its way, it has this like tremendous rich history. But I think there's something similar where maybe I was telling my wife, I was like, maybe we were supposed to be the ones who did this. I don't know. Like I just doing this for my kids. Like we're in this to help our kids. But looking back, I'm like, maybe we because of our faith tradition are able to assemble a group of people that is so diverse executives on our team we have tremendous diversity from orthodox jews to hindu to evangelicals to catholics on our team and i think it's because of coming from a faith tradition that is pretty universally hated without reason.

2:04:07You're an outsider. We're an outsider. And maybe it's just because we're outsiders. I don't know. Yeah. I love being the contrarian, so it doesn't bother me. Yeah. How do you think Hollywood lost its way? They stopped listening to the audience. They stopped listening to their viewer. growing up i just remember my mom coming home from movies or watching it actually was usually just watching it and she'd get done and she would say 90 of that movie was really good but that one part or that one thing ruined that movie for me like that movie would be like one of my favorite movies but they ruined it and it was a visceral reaction to movies that it's what The Critical Drinker.

2:04:55He's a big YouTuber that does movie reviews. Huge. He was like one of the top two in the world. And he always talks about it as the message. He's like, and whenever a movie comes out that doesn't have the message, is what he calls it. And it's just kind of the woke, kind of universal woke message. You start to realize as a family, you're like, oh, these people are ideologically opposed to our worldview. They oppose marriage. They oppose having children. They oppose energy. Like they don't like energy, meaning like electricity, which is the source of wealth. They oppose our ideas of the American idea, which is a free society and you start to realize these people are so opposed to what we're doing and they're not going to stop just shoving it down our throats.

2:05:55And so as they became more and more powerful and more monopolistic, an example would be one of our board members was at a meeting where they were talking about the state of the industry and he was asked to come speak as a board member of Angel. And he got up and said, look at the statistics. You guys are not putting faith in almost anything. angel's putting just some faith in because it represents the population 70 percent of people are religious and they would like to see their lives represented and you guys are just like censoring out faith if you just even go back to home alone home alone had faith in it like it would be considered a faith movie today because it's like he's in a church praying and but that's not the way we saw it back then it was just part of life and as we get further along they edited it out.

2:06:42And so he says to this group, we need to listen to the audience. And everybody started saying, yes, yes, yes. And then the last guy gets up and he's a very powerful person in Hollywood. And he says, no, we are the gods here. He's like, we choose what people like. We set the culture. We set the framing. And it was like the group split where half of them were like, yes, he's right. And the other half were like, no, he's right. Listen to the audience. And so that's part of this culture that has developed over time. And you see some of it in like novice filmmakers where they're like, no, don't touch my art.

2:07:24And I'm always trying to explain to a filmmaker, there's art. Art is for the people. There's like little neighborhoods in Seattle, little neighborhoods in New York, where you can go and just do art to your heart's will. then there's entertainment and entertainment is art plus business because you have to raise millions of dollars and you have to get a return like you can't just throw it away you need to give them a return so entertainment is art within the box of business and so one of the stats in hollywood that's really interesting is almost all of the movie like 75 of all the money in hollywood is made off of PG and PG-13 movies, but 70-plus percent of the movies are R-rated.

2:08:12That's interesting. So they're just, they're not connecting. Does that make sense? Yeah, they're not serving the audience. They're not serving the audience. And I think they live in a bubble. Everyone around them is divorced, so why would you push on marriage? Did you get to do a mission? Yes. I served two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ireland. that's where you were sent. What was the experience like? It's incredible. You pay for it yourself, so you don't get to choose where you're going. I feel like I got to choose where I was going because I told God when I put in my papers, we call it putting in your papers to go on a mission, I told God, I said, if I had a choice, I'd like to go somewhere foreign that doesn't speak a language different than English and is green because Idaho is so brown.

2:09:06and I wanted to go somewhere green. I didn't even know Ireland existed, but I was kind of contrarian. I was asking for the impossible. Yeah, 40 shades of green. Yes. Wow. Yeah, and I got exactly what I asked for, even though I didn't know that was actually possible. I remember when I opened up the call, it said Ireland Dublin Mission. I was like, where is that? And I'm looking it up, and I was like, this is what I asked for. Yeah, and then in Ireland, the people there are so warm when you ask for directions or they'll jump in their car and drive you to wherever you need to go and then you want to talk about the gospel and they're like no no no no don't want to talk about that but i'm happy to help you yeah but you pay for yourself so i earned up i was earning up i never would have been able to earn enough money to go on my mission because it was about at the time, I think it was$10 ,000 for a missionary to go out for two years.

2:10:02And my grandpa, I found out what he would do is he would, if you saved the money towards either college or mission, every dollar you saved, he would double it. And so that was his deal. So I only had to pay for half. So that was really great. And we arrive in Ireland and the first four and a half months of going out and teaching the gospel, you're knocking on doors and you're saying, would you like to hear a message about Jesus Christ? And then they slam the door in your face. And it rained for four and a half months straight. I didn't see the sun for four and a half months. There was water up to our knees from flooding and you would knock for 12 hours a day.

2:10:48You're just going and going and going. and I remember the first day that sun came out like I hadn't seen the sun for months and just going I feel so happy so happy and I didn't realize because I grew up in Idaho you'll have four months with no clouds and we're in Ireland you don't see the sun for weeks and weeks and weeks but yeah that's the Ireland experience was life-changing going out and just serving anybody but yourself for two years is a big deal. Do you feel like it made you who you are? Huge contributor. Yeah. My relationship with God is what makes me who I am. So swinging back around to this reporter that was talking to us about Angel, and she gets to the end, and I was already getting hints that she was probably writing a hit piece.

2:11:38And then she says, how does your Mormon faith dictate your business decisions? and what content you do. And I was like, we just explained the whole guild to her. We don't dictate anything. My only response was, I guess it makes us honest business people.

2:12:01Not the answer she wanted. Yeah, it didn't get published. But yeah, I think it's, for me, it's really, really important that Angel represents all of the people who are watching and it actually means that the vast majority of anything that's kind of like albeit a latter-day saint has that taste to it doesn't pass the guild and sometimes unfairly so because there are such a minority inside the guild yeah so when when latter-day saint filmmakers come to me and they say you're discriminating against our stuff because you built a system that doesn't want our content. I'm like, no, it does if you make it good enough.

2:12:46You have to overcome the bigotry. You have to overcome the bias. And there's guys who have done it. Like the Truth and Treason movie that just came out this year. It's about a Helmut Huberner, 16-year-old German kid in World War II. And it passed the Guild with a good score because it's just great filmmaking. And so that's what I point to. When Latter-day Saint filmmakers come to me and say, it just won't let my stuff through, I'm like, your bar is higher. You're just going to have to make better stuff. Do most of the filmmakers come from a traditional Hollywood background? The majority do, actually.

2:13:24The ones that are coming to us, like you've got Kevin James, Rob Schneider. They're comedians. You've got Jim Caviezel. You've got Andy Serkis. These are directors that are coming to us. And they're coming to us because they're in the system and they're tired of it. And they want a new model and they're interested in what we're doing. I thought that Angel was going to be built off of filmmakers who were outcasts. Yes. And what the majority of it's being built off of is filmmakers who are tired and they're leaving. So it's being built off the defectors. and the outcasts have spent their whole life wanting to be inside of Hollywood and they just haven't yet got that mental switch and going, oh, the cool kids are over here.

2:14:17The cool filmmakers are actually going over to Angel and it's taking them longer. And so it's surprising to watch how the indie filmmakers are taking longer to jump on board than the experienced ones that were working at DreamWorks or Pixar or whatever. They're the ones that are billing. Is Angel content available globally? It is. Not all of it. Some of it we don't have rights to globally, but you can watch basically all our TV shows and a lot of the movies. And once the movies have been through the theatrical system in their country, then they're available too. We have guild members in 160 plus countries.

2:14:51After the U.S., what's your next biggest market? I think it's Brazil. Where would you say you are in the journey of Angel Studios now? If it's a book, what chapter are you on? our entire team so we were at the new york stock exchange we had this huge event and this guy from i don't remember which major bank it was came up to me and he said i have been to so many ipo events so i can i chat with everybody and he said a normal ipo event everyone is saying i'm gonna buy a new house i'm gonna go move to a beach i'm gonna you know because you got a bunch of millionaires coming out at the other end of an IPO.

2:15:33And he's like, and I've been talking to your employees. He's like, not once have they talked about what they're going to do with the money that they're going to make. Every single one of them is talking about your mission and saying they're at the starting line. And these are guys who've been with us for a decade. A lot of them. That's amazing. and i think if you take the wisdom of the team that's where the team feels like going on the new york stock exchange is the starting line of this company and when was that it was in september wow congratulations yeah has anything changed since going public i mean it's it's a pain not to be able to talk about forward-facing things having strangers try to get information out of you like i've had that a few times where people are like can't you just tell me like about this and i'm like oh they're looking for like insider information i've had people approach me and i was like i can't tell you that so that's a little weird yeah to just tell people like i can't talk about that thing because the lawyers they drill it into you they're like this is not a joke you do not you can't share certain information how do you see being public changing things from your perspective i think it gives us access to capital that we need for the next phase i love the fact that anyone in the world can now buy into Angel and be part of the mission.

2:17:14Before, it was people who got into some crowdfunding rounds and then big venture funds. And now anyone worldwide, as long as they have a stock exchange that has it, which New York Stock Exchange is pretty much everywhere, can just buy into the mission, hold the stock, and vote on Angel's future. And so that's really exciting, is that the average person can now just participate. It's odd in today's culture words like wholesome and virtue are viewed negatively. Yeah, it is. I don't know when that happened. Bizarre. I think maybe there's an element of like, they don't seem as fun. adam carolla great guy was on his podcast and then after the podcast got off and said i want to do a dry bar special he's like i don't ever do clean stuff but he's like i think it sounds like a fun challenge he's like doing clean stand-up is harder he's like it is so much hard it's always easy to go to the crass and he's like and i have been doing that and he's like i want to go do the harder stuff and so he came and did a couple specials on dry bar comedy and he crushed it super good specials but he and it's called adam comes clean but i think that that's the case across the board is that it's easier to make a raunchy comedy it's easier to make a a film that relies on sexual content it's easier to make a film that relies on violence rather than getting deep and in things that actually matter one filmmaker described it to this way he said he said there's poison food and then there's junk food and then there's fast food and then there's healthy food hollywood is full of junk food and fast food yeah and then they have some poison food and hollywood every once in a while would bring out the healthy plate the delicious food that you wanted but most of the time they're just bringing out junk food and he's like until we own the kitchen it's not going to change long term he's like you have to own the kitchen.

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