Matt Pohlson, Founder of Omaze

0:00Joe Bullmore:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Gentleman's Journal podcast. I'm Joe, I'm the editor of Gentleman's Journal and our guest on today's episode is Matt Pohlson, who's the founder of Amaze. You'll know them for their incredible million pound house draws, but also all the wonderful work that they do raising money for charity. And Matt today is going to tell us about his early career in filmmaking and acting, his near death experience that changed his life as they tend to, and why storytelling is at the heart of everything Amaze does. Enjoy.

0:41Joe Bullmore:okay here we go we've been shut behind some curtains oh wow it's kind of ominous i know um matt polson how are you i'm good welcome to the gentleman's journal podcast this is my living room um it's beautifully soundproof i like the cart of the curtain you have right yeah it's good no windows yes i think windows are overrated i would agree we'll get on to your own your next amaze house is just a bunker isn't windowless is our that's the next brand we're launching everyone wants it's a it's a hell of a pivot it's really interesting stuff we did a lot of customer research and that's what people want that's it wow okay well i wanted i believe it yeah um before we talk about your new bunker project um i wanted i'm so intrigued to talk about amaze because um as was proved just before this amaze is like a brand that has sort of seeped into the collective consciousness there are brands that are household names obviously there are tech brands we all know about but there are a few i can think of when you're sitting at the pub and someone sort of makes an off-hand reference going oh well when i win that house on amaze you can all come to my big 40th there or people saying i've just entered this amaze house why don't we go in a syndicate and do it and then suddenly for the next half an hour you're sort of dreaming that you too could live in a beautiful house in bath that was the one that hooked me by the way the one in bath do you remember that one the one that just happened the one that was it was about two two years yes yeah and i've been in ever since yeah but anyway there's no question there but to say it's such an intriguing brand and it taps into so many different parts of business but also culture i guess and of the idea of aspiration and buying a house and also charity so there's a lot to talk about yeah um but you'd but the more interesting thing almost is that you didn't even start out necessarily as an entrepreneur you were a filmmaker many many years ago correct tell us a little bit about your sort of your backstory up to this point sure i was a filmmaker that was really passionate and i am really passionate about using storytelling telling to inspire action yeah right stories help people believe that transformation is possible and you know when you think about what omaze is it's really the business of transformation like we transform people's lives when they win dream houses we transform people's lives through the charities that we work with like that's that's what we're trying to do so um we before omaze I was doing that, doing big documentaries with people like Oprah or Bono or Jay-Z doing these global concerts like Live Earth, which was the biggest concert ever thrown.

3:14And so we were working with these really influential people who really wanted to do good. And we realized we just weren't doing that much good. We were raising a lot of awareness with these massive projects, but not a lot of impact. And what were you doing?

3:29Joe Bullmore:Were you a producer? I was a writer, producer, director. Wow. kind of trying to do it all really yeah did you ever do sort of scripted projects yes i did sold a sold a show to fox called prius and leo world savers about two stoners who accidentally watched the inconvenient truth and decide they have to save the world from so there was like a comedy in it okay there was a kernel of kind of transformative activism even there yeah exactly yeah i was always trying to use comedy to like inspire action storytelling to inspire action. Yeah. And were you ever an actor? I'm thinking of you in L.A. doing everything.

4:04Joe Bullmore:I was. I was an actor. I wasn't very good at it, but I was doing it. I was on a show called Scrubs. You were Scrubs? Played a guy in a coma with two lines. Do people in comas have lines? When you come out of the coma, you have lines. But I was such a bad actor that I kept, I was in the scene with Colin Farrell. The idea was like, he was my brother who knocked me out. And then I come to and tell him it's okay. But he was so funny when I was in the coma that I kept laughing. And the director was like, hey, you're in a coma. You can't be laughing. I was on a show called Everwood where Chris Pratt was the star.

4:41Joe Bullmore:I had more of an arc on that show. But yeah, I did a bunch of it. I had a theater company. I was in a bunch of movies. Wow. So you were sort of living the L.A. dream. I was living the L.A. dream. Yeah. And it's interesting. a maze popped up fairly organically. I believe one of the sparks was a sort of charity auction with Magic Johnson. Is that right? That's right. Yeah, me and my friend were at an auction where Magic was offering the chance to play basketball with him and go to a Lakers game. But it was one of those things that was only available to the high net worth individuals. Oh, people were bidding 10 ,000, 20 ,000?

5:20Exactly, exactly. And you didn't have that? We were not high net worth individuals. yes we we did not last very long in the auction um and so we we sat there and watched as it went up to 15 000 yeah magic was our childhood hero yeah there's nothing that i would rather do than play basketball with magic even today um and so we're driving home like god that makes no sense he has fans around the world yeah not just in that room celebrities weren't really on social media yet but we said they're gonna be they're gonna be able to reach their fans in a whole new way so if we make it to anybody donates ten dollars for the chance to raise so much more money so

5:57Joe Bullmore:much more awareness and more people would have a chance to have a dream come true yeah yeah that's pretty good was there anything out there like that before that used that mechanism or was that pretty pretty unique it was pretty unique um there right as we were launching president obama did a thing where you got to meet him and george clooney okay to raise money for his campaign okay and that was really good because it got a lot of awareness or like see this is what we're doing but we were we were the first to do it as a business yeah okay and what was the very first prize that you offered it was to be a guest judge on a show called cupcake wars cupcake wars how can we forget yes uh raised seven hundred and eighty four dollars okay yeah so it was inauspicious beginning we have a conference room in our in our office now called cupcake to remind that's where we started um but then yeah then we started like doing like fun stuff it kind of built from there we did uh you know riding the tank with arnold schwarzenegger and really things or or riding a winnebago to the finale of breaking bad and cook if you don't know if you've seen the show yeah like cook eggs and hazmat suits with brian and aaron and watch the very last episode before anyone else yeah we did a lot of crazy stuff and how were you attaching charities that Was it the same charity every time?

7:18Joe Bullmore:Was it a different charity based on? The talent got to choose the charity. Okay. Right. That's what got them to buy it. Got them to do it. Exactly. So they would, Brian and Aaron had done something similar at an auction, and it had raised$40 ,000, some wealthy person in the room, you know,$40 ,000. But with us, it raised$1.7 million from people doing$10 entries. And so that was kind of the proof point at the beginning. I mean, that's staggering. Was your sort of Hollywood-ish background, was that how you, did you have a good network to go and approach these guys? Yeah, that's how we got the initial work to do it.

7:54Yeah, very interesting.

7:55Joe Bullmore:Well, I mean, that alone, you could see you just doing that forever, riding out your days in LA and keeping on that mechanism. But you didn't. Amaze has changed since that, those early days. And I'm all right to say that a near-death experience, to put it bluntly was kind of a big pivot point for you in the business it was i mean they always are big pivot points so far in the experience tell us about that it sounds extraordinary yeah so when i was we're seven years into a maze um i had i basically flatlined for four and a half minutes and they brought me back to life um kind of miraculously out of nowhere yeah i had basically when I was born, my stomach was twisted in a knot.

8:43And so I was supposed to die when I was born. And the scar tissue from that surgery broke off all these years later in like a freakish way. And you had no idea? I had no idea. I was just sitting there over the course of a couple of days. My stomach was just getting bigger. It looked like I was two months pregnant and five months pregnant and seven months pregnant. And then I called my buddy who's a doctor and said, Hey, I look like I'm seven months pregnant, but I'm also throwing a party tonight. And I want to make sure that like i can go to that do i need to go to the hospital he's like yeah you should you should go to the hospital so i went to the hospital and i missed it um i told them this it still went on oh good because i thought i was gonna be back in time for it so i told my friend like co-hosted and everyone had it they still went and then and then i was like guys in the hospital i can't come um but the yeah and once i got to the hospital they couldn't figure out going on they did all these tests um they basically said to my mom and rco helen who's there we're going to hold him overnight if he's not better by the morning then we'll do surgery then and then helen goes home drives her house she's been in the hospital all day it's like midnight at this point she goes to pull out of her driveway pulling her driveway and get out of the car and she's about to get out and something tells her to go back to the hospital and she's British and a COO and very serious she's not like a Venice Beach right listen to the cosmos type person yeah you know but the even though it was out of character the voice was undeniable so she drove back and if she hadn't driven back I would have died like 45 minutes later because my blood pressure had plummeted and the machines had not alerted the nurses so only by her being that did she say something's not right and exactly she came back and said wait this doesn't look right she had been in the hospital with her grandmother and she had she kind of could read the machines like his blood pressure looks really low and the nurse came in he's like that can't be right he wouldn't be getting oxygen to his brain so they ended up rushing me down into surgery are you Unconscious at this point?

10:45I'm fading out. I'm in and out. I remember as I was going out of there, like I said to her, I was like, this would be a crazy story. You should take a picture of this. And then I went unconscious again, what she said. And then I come out of surgery. They say to my mom, the good news is we figured out what it is. It's a bowel obstruction. The bad news is his heart rate is continuing to plummet. and we don't know why, and he's in critical condition. So then my mom goes downstairs to get my dad and my brother. She's coming back up the elevator, and she hears over the loudspeaker code blue in room 437.

11:29And my mom worked in a hospital, so she knows that means flatline, and she knows that's my room. So she rushes down the hall, gets to the door. The nurse says, I'm sorry. You can't come in. This is really serious. and she says look i was there when he came in this world he's leaving this world right now i'm going to be in that room wow so they let her in the room and she came in and here's her son flatlined and they're doing the compressions the and they're doing the um the defibrillator and i'm bouncing up and down but i'm not responding so you know she starts to crumble i mean it's one thing to lose a child it's another thing if it's happening jesus yeah right right in front of you you have kids no yeah yeah but if yeah this this story hits when you have like yeah if you go kids see mothers i don't not yet um and anyway so she she kind of goes into that state my dad was outside with my brother and this doctor came out and said to another doctor in front of my brother, not knowing my brother, hey, I think we lost this guy.

12:37I think he's gone. And so my brother pushed my dad in the room. He came from kind of like my mom is faced this way. He kind of came from this side. And he's crying so loudly, she turns to him to say, Gary, you need to be quiet. Are they going to kick us out of this room? And when she did that, she saw something that just transformed her. she said that every nurse every staff member every doctor in the icu had just gravitated outside the window they were like right where that camera is basically and there was 40 of them watching yeah why is that what what is that why they she didn't they didn't have an explanation it just some something energetically just kind of attracted them over and i think they have a natural instinctive can i help yeah i help and someone's dying you know like that's a big deal like and and they just kind of like they were looking at the window and she said they look like this silent church choir wow just sending in positive energy what does your mom do by the way

13:46Joe Bullmore:i mean this is an amazing is she is she a nurse no she's not a nurse she works in a blood bank okay yeah or she did she she's hired right yeah she yeah she's she is she's superhuman moms are superhuman i mean like the power that they can unlock to protect their children is truly like one of the beautiful mysteries of the universe yeah um but anyway so she sees these people and she was so moved that people were sending love to her son that they didn't even know and that just filled her up with strength bloody hell um and she started coaching me she just took a deep breath and she started coaching me and she just said matthew david polson these people are fighting to save your life but you're not fighting hard enough you need to fight harder you need to fight to come back to us matthew david polson and they said that was a surreal experience because here's this you know 65 year old mom in the operating room in like the icu you never you know you watch gray's anatomy like they're not that's not they're not in there um why did they let her stay there do you think i don't know man at some point you can't yeah i think it's like a force of nature and like here's a mother fighting for her son's life yeah you know um and they were fighting so hard and i was gone four and a half minutes yeah and you know i was in their words gone gone like there was nothing but something made them keep going as well yeah they kept fighting i think because she was in there yeah because you know they don't usually fight that long they usually after two minutes it's kind of if there's no point and but because she kept fighting they kept fighting um and again there was some energy in that room that like you know even the doctors would say we don't really know how to explain um but you know at one point my mom started to think oh this has gone on too long like i'm gonna i'm gonna lose my son if i lose my son i think my husband's gonna die of a broken heart wow you know that's where her mind went and right as her mind went there the the main doctor kind of almost turned away like to say like this is over and she grabbed his arm and she said please please don't call it yet and then he turned back and he said wait a second and then something happened that they said they had never seen before in a hospital that they even presented to the u.s surgeon general because it was so extraordinary but basically what happened was the you know you can picture those lines that you see in the movies they kind of go across right like and you're just waiting for it to tick up and usually if a patient's saved that that will tick up but the patient won't move but in this situation that didn't happen the line is just going flat and before that ticks up all of a sudden i just pop up conscious yeah totally awake and and everyone in the room kind of steps back like their mouth open like oh my god and i wake up and now I'm in this room and I see the first people I see are the church choir, you know?

17:06And I'm like, and then I look over and I see my, what are you guys doing? Yeah, exactly. And then I see my mom and then I, and like the kind of the first movement was like, I just kind of like slowly lifted my right arm and like give a thumbs up.

17:22Joe Bullmore:But your, your brain's been salved of oxygen, right? I don't, how does it work each? Yeah. They, I mean, I had a respirator in. Okay. from before so they think that contributes they don't really know like they there's one thing surviving that and there's one thing being okay yeah when i left the hospital the doctor was like when i finished my career he said on my bed and he's like look when i finished my career 30 years from now and i'm talking about the most extraordinary case i've ever seen like this is gonna be it wow we had you had less than one percent chance of survival and the fact that we have you going home with your full faculties we have no medical explanation for that how did you how do you think about that now like what did you i mean do you talk words like miracles or like are you spiritual about it or is it just do you just think it was a quirk of statistics or what what what do you think about that extraordinary thing his answer when i said like what he said we have no medical explanation i said do you have any kind of explanation and he said it was love that brought you back wow and that's my best explanation there was a moment when i was on the other side where i felt like i had a choice to like go back or stay on this other side um and it was really the love i felt from my mom and my family and like other friends who were sending it that like i think helped bring me back i know that sounds like very california hippy dippy but like a lot of doctors will say like after experience after being in these rooms for a long time you start to realize there's things that we can't explain medically or scientifically maybe we will be able to one day but well that's it how old were you then 40 okay and how long were you out of the game for out of work for a long time um took me i mean i was there's a whole like there's a whole other second part of the story after that where i was like i was in a coma and like i wasn't out of the woods for a long time i was connected to this thing called an ecmo machine which like takes over the beating of your heart it was a long long journey okay and you when you touch wood yeah i'm good now yeah you look very well thank you this is now an entirely different podcast yeah it's amazing yeah i mean it seems now silly to go back to the business in a way but it is connected isn't it sure you did you changed the way you thought about the business and and the things that were important in it i suppose yeah yeah we had been doing celebrities the whole time um and then it was just clear that that was never going to be like truly world changing um and you know when you go through something like that you just you become very clear how short your time is okay and before I left we had done a campaign with Daniel Craig we got to go to New York you got to go to Aston Martin track you got to ride around in a one-of-a-kind Aston Martin and then you got to keep fast Martin hmm and we thought it would raise you know 300 ,000 for the United Nations and it raised 2.1 million and so I talked to our CFO Nina before and said hey I think we should go buy a$250 ,000 on mclaren offer it with just a maze distribution no talent and see what we could do on our own because if we could raise 500 000 then we would like really have something we only had like 900 000 in the bank at that time so 350 was a big bet but we took it and then that car coincidentally launched the day before i unexpectedly went into the hospital wow so when i came back all those months later and said you know to me i was like hey whatever happened with uh mclaren did it raise the 500 000 she said it raised 1.9 million wow i was like that changes everything so we then we started i said we're going all in on stuff we control we start with holidays and that worked really well then we started doing more cars and that worked really well and then we decided to launch houses and we decided to launch that in the uk um and just kind of took off yeah that's that's super interesting because you hear lots of entrepreneurs going the other way from london or europe to to silicon valley or new york to come to to london i mean i love london but people are down on london i'm sometimes down on london that's the thing to do as a londoner but you came over here um what what was it about that and is it simply that in the uk we have a really interesting relationship with property and housing in a way that i'd love to talk about with you what was the reason though for coming over here it was a couple reasons um one team we had there was a guy on our team named james oaks who's a really good operator and thought he'd be really good to start that here um two we had a business going in the uk with the cars and the celebrities and we didn't want to necessarily disrupt that yeah okay um and we had a vision for you know could it just be houses and could be a house every single month and like what would that look like but we want to kind of test it and then the uk is a smaller country yeah a little bit less expensive house in the us but mostly mostly it was smaller so we thought the houses could be relevant to everybody yeah and we thought the market was big enough so we thought we'd test that here um and if it worked well we would bring it around the world yeah okay interesting and there there is there is something unique in the psyche perhaps about British home ownership.

23:05Joe Bullmore:Do you think we have a... I think we connect so much of our success and worth perhaps, perhaps more than other countries, maybe in Europe certainly, to having those four walls. An Englishman's home is his castle is the quote that gets thrown around. What do you think about that? Do you think there's a unique dynamic here or does everyone want a house everywhere? I think there's a really interesting culture and a love of design and that kind of ethos in the UK that is special. But it's not unique to the UK. Australia, for example, I don't know how much time it's been there. The property obsession in Australia is even another level.

23:47The US, it's very much also part of the American dream is symbolized by a home. um so but it's you know the home like that is a fundamental yeah human thing right like what we're offering hits all of maslow's hierarchy of need for its safety it's it's security its status its relationships its self-actualization so you know we launched in germany last year germany has the lowest home ownership of any g20 country and it's working in germany yeah that's really really

24:20Joe Bullmore:interesting so your first house was in cheshire yes what how much research did you put into that first property because that sort of could be a make or break if that that flops then maybe you lose confidence in the whole thing maybe other people don't get behind it why cheshire what what was it about that particular property or was it just this is a nice house um no we put a ton of research into it and and james and and ollie and mike and kat and the and the very first team like really sweated all the details of this. And Anushka, who continues to be in charge of choosing the properties now. Cheshire was only a million-pound house.

25:01Our houses now are three to six million pounds.

25:05Joe Bullmore:This was a million-pound house. It was in the Golden Triangle. It's a lovely part of the world. Yes, and we felt like we couldn't afford that kind of house in London for a million pounds. We didn't have much to spend, but we thought, still a big city it was a beautiful house we thought it it was the right area to do that we could you know attract people from around initially we thought it would just be people from that area that entered but people from all over the country yeah yeah interesting i guess it's right in the middle of things yeah yeah and the genius of the million pound house that phrase i mean that's incredibly sticky and i know i mean just from talking to you how important storytelling is to you and obviously in your past life that was pretty crucial as well but that as a phrase that just sort of sticks right in your a million pound house you start to do the maths on it you know you think how much is it to enter it's it sticks with you did was that was that like a phrase that happened by chance or was that a really deliberate thing very deliberate thing that was um a guy named mike longden who ran marketing for a very long time for us to help like something's gonna be more than a million yeah um there's a show in the u.s called million dollar listing right that showed listings that were much more than a million dollars and like look at that so that was how it started yeah yeah and what was do you remember the day that went live what was that i do nervous day oh yeah oh yeah i mean because it was during lockdown yeah so i was i couldn't be here i was in the u.s okay um so i just remember sitting there on our shopify just like refreshing and it was ticking up pretty good and i was like wow yeah look at this i guess you had a captive audience everyone was yeah dreaming of escaping in some way yeah yes um that definitely helped but this yeah this is kind of like a fundamental human thing yes and that these things had existed in various forms before the idea of raffling a house or lotteries for houses or there's always quirky press stories of some guys I didn't want to use a state agent so yeah I said one pound to buy a ticket and I sold four million tickets or whatever but it never been codified really was it was it a regulatory headache to get this kind of thing done it's it seems like something which the authorities might be like hold on this is I mean was it like that at all there's a very clear regulatory framework called a prize draw that we work that has been used in the UK for a long time and everybody from itv to the torian labor parties have used yeah okay hundreds of charities so that was that was pretty straightforward the hard part is getting houses and making them high quality and and purchasing them and designing them yeah doing it every single month creating content around that capturing the winners and the charity story every single month like that's that's hard to do on repeat you can do one of them you can do your one-off but like the on a monthly basis is really challenging yeah what's the process for sourcing are you constantly looking for houses yeah yeah you are um we we have a team whose job it is to go out and find them all over yeah it's a lot of fun yeah um that's like the best bit of house hunting but it's not your budget yes exactly yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah their job is to look all over the country for amazing houses that are dream-worthy houses you know houses that symbolize the transformation in someone's life and we also build some of them like we'll find where we built some in the lake district we're doing more there the one we have in cornwall we we didn't build from the ground up but we totally got it and redone and so yes we either we either go buy them and and kind of redesign or we build them and it's quite an operation yeah i can imagine are there any that haven't gone well that you've been really far down the line and discovered, I don't know, dry rot, all the problems that usually...

29:00Oh, yeah, there's so many. Yeah, we have a higher bar than others because we've got to make sure everything is exactly to... All the boxes are incredibly conservative in how we do stuff. And so we've had a lot that we've had to walk away from at the end because they didn't meet that diligence. Yeah, I can imagine. then there's also funny stuff you get in the uk that you don't get anywhere else for like some lord has rights on the property from 600 years ago to like throw a carnival and you're

29:32Joe Bullmore:like what like this could be a plus a bonus i know i know you get to host a festival exactly yeah in the ruins yeah um well i mean as i said before right from the start and i remember that first rule uh it sort of captured the imagination of so many people and i think that's not by and everything from the yellow color to the amazing videos and promos you guys put together, they really stick with you. What is your overarching marketing communication strategy? Can you sum it up in a few sentences? I mean, it all starts with storytelling for us, like the fundamentals of storytelling. Everybody at the company takes storytelling classes, no matter what team you're on, whether you're on marketing or accounting.

30:21Joe Bullmore:It's a storytelling class. I need one of those. Yeah. We have a lot of amazing storytellers in the company. It's really just understanding the fundamentals of what makes stories work. All change, all transformation in the world starts with a story, whether it's been political transformation or the transformation of a sports team or the building of a business. It's all just a story at the beginning that people then can buy onto. The creation of countries, It all starts with stories, right? And the way that you, you know, some of the principles of telling good stories is one, you got to make the customer the hero, right?

31:01Everything we do is about how the winner's life will transform and then also how they can help others as a result, right? So that's really, some brands make themselves the hero. The second thing that you have to do is you got to keep it really simple, right? Like humans do not want to use a lot of calories to understand what you're offering them, right? Like we just like our brains are scanning for things that will help them survive and thrive. If you ask it to use a lot of calories, it won't it won't engage. So you got to do that. You got to make sure you're the guide that exudes authority, but also empathy.

31:33You got to meet people where they are. So we try to be funny. We try to be fun loving. We try to transmit emotion because that makes people engage. A lot of times, especially when you're talking about charity, people can be pretty dry in the way they present that. and then therefore people don't engage so like you know we've we've raised over 150 million pounds for charities in the uk um and we try to make it in a way that's really fun yeah and then again it comes back to transformation you got to see what's the before and the after right um and you'll see those kind of winter stories for us all the time right you know lorry driver now has a new car milkman now yeah yeah but like you know like like the you know that happens almost yeah and the

32:18Joe Bullmore:houses in a way are a hero as well to a lesser extent have you found that certain things in houses people really respond to are there some houses that just for some reason capture the imagination more than others there's a swimming pool yeah the dial yeah there's a lot of we're constantly we have a bunch of really smart data scientists who help predict what the right house is going to be yeah so you could kind of engineer the most desirable house in the uk with all your insights yes that's what we aim to do i mean we're constantly trying to bring the the best version of the houses to our that our customers want that's why we started building is to be able to bring stuff to people like it's hard to find inventory in the lake district that is also modern and has a sauna and yeah and has a gym and has a beautiful office view where you're looking out the water and like you know and but people would want through the kitchen yeah yeah yeah so like that's where we started building stuff and like district and yeah that kind of stuff amazing is there anything that hasn't really worked not houses so much but i guess marketing initiatives or ways of talking about it that have just sort of not cut through or fallen flat oh yeah we've had plenty of mistakes along the way so many back in the celebrity days too where you think you realize not all social followers are created equal you know like people go god that person's gonna be huge and then it doesn't work out that way um we made some mistakes early like where we did too many houses in the same area that looked a little bit too similar and so it was hard for customers to differentiate we take you know we take bets on new locations that are less proven in the Cornwall, Lake Districts, London, Hotswolds of the world.

34:02And sometimes those really work and sometimes those don't. So we're constantly learning from that.

34:08Joe Bullmore:Yeah. It's so interesting. Which houses attracted, can you say, which houses attracted the most entries? Well, we have a subscriber base that grows every single month, right? So it's always going to be the most recent ones. But you can one-off entry. Yeah, you can one-off entry. but we carry a subscriber base yeah so like one now is always going to do better than one in the past some are like some of the the first lake district house that we yeah built was a real standout a woman named hannah one who's an opera singer and there's this video of her standing with her husband on the deck singing opera out to the lake and that was pretty that was pretty good that was that was one of my favorite um but yeah we did a london house in victoria park to benefit London air ambulance those helicopters the service hall insane that there's no official funding for those I was blown away absolutely man blown away it's an amazing service it literally it's the only charity that serves everyone yeah right no matter who you are no matter how much money you have no matter how little money you have no matter where you live in London like this this service is protecting you right like I know someone who was saved her life was saved by like one of my Yeah.

35:24One of my friend's sisters was saved because they got there in time. So that's like, that's an amazing service. And we did that with David Beckham and Prince William is a patron of the charity. And so he, you know, he was, he went to his support. And so like that was a, that was a standout, but there's been a, there's been so many. Yeah. And do you, have you met, do you ever meet the winners? Oh yeah. Every time? Yeah. Yeah. What's that like? It's amazing. It's amazing. I mean, they come in. Yeah, we have a whole team whose job it is to make their experience great and tell their story and tell about their transformation.

36:02And so, yeah, we do it every single time. It's a big deal. And then they'll come in after a year or two and come to our all-hands meetings and tell their story, which is also just, like, beautiful. I mean, it really is, like, heartwarming. Again, it's like transformation. You get to see someone's whole life.

36:23Joe Bullmore:And it's such a different thing just to winning a bunch of money. Yeah. We always hear about curses of lottery winners because money is abstract and sort of, I don't know, there is something dangerous sometimes about having so much money from nothing. But a house, as you say, is so fundamental that it seems to always turn out okay. Yeah, it is. There's something about it. It's kind of at the right level. Yeah. Right. yeah there's hilarious stories like there was a our most recent winner of our last lake district house she had been a subscriber for a couple years her husband every month was like when are you gonna stop this omaze subscription yeah and then she wins the house really so she's like now he's in the boathouse and i stay in the main house you know but their whole family's life has transformed as a result like they were able to like totally you know there's so many stories of like people who whose children were gonna like have to move away and then they were able to buy them a house like so they could be together like there's people one woman who won who's like sleeping on friends couches there was a couple that was engaged that was in their early 20s that but had to live in different their parents house they weren't even living together even they were engaged in the one house like there's just kind of endless of these stories it's incredible and And I mean, those are obviously the obvious winners.

37:45Joe Bullmore:And the charity is obviously huge winners as well. But there's also like a kind of odd, tangential pleasure just to being entered into it because you get the five-minute daydream where you're thinking, what would I do with that place? And one of my favorite hobbies on a Sunday afternoon is just to look at sort of abstract, amazing properties in Tuscany or the South of France and think, okay, and do the sort of mental maths and imagine, you know, my life there. But the maze does the same thing. and it's kind of it doesn't seem to have this sort of the tinge of envy of so many other things we see on social media glamour and luxury it seems to have a kind of wholesome sunniness to it i don't know what it is oh thank you it's good that's our that's our team deserves i mean that's the spirit of the company yeah that's maybe it's the charity thing there's a you know that it's a at heart there's a benevolence to it yeah absolutely you know we're trying to prove that you don't have to choose between making money and helping people yeah you know we are we are we are as you said we are an entertainment company that's first and foremost what we're offering people we're offering them the chance to dream think about a better life have a chance at that better life um but then also know when they do that someone else's life yeah so we're an entertainment company with a social purpose and what's the talk about the money then what what is the the business model do you do you ever do you how do you break down between operating costs and giving to charity what's the sort of split there yeah it's kind of the easiest way to explain it is it kind of is a third a third a third so a third goes to vat and to charity right off the top um and then about a third goes to the prizing so all the houses plus there's cash prizes and cars and we cover the taxes for the winter and furniture and all these things and then a third goes to our operating expenses marketing and then profit from there yeah and do you have investors or is it still going organically from the we do we have investors because when you're in the beginning of the market and you have zero subscribers you're buying houses like you're you're yeah you're losing money you know so so we invest in markets when we go in for the first time yes we've had investors that have been with us for a long time rick heights been at first opened in Germany last year is that right correct last year uh did you speak German zero do you know Germany do I know Germany did you have you spent time there I mean I haven't but um I had been there for Oktoberfest like every time so I don't think that's probably knowing Germany uh I have German roots I have German roots I'm half German I still don't speak German are you yeah yeah Polson that occurred my mom's side okay yeah what's Polson Norway it's uh it's weirdish but like where all of our tracings is Irish.

40:34We don't even know where we picked that name up. We're actually doing an investigation now. That's good.

40:40Joe Bullmore:Bedica, isn't that the sort of guidebook? Yeah, that's my great, great grandfather. Really? Great thing. Yeah, storytelling. Yeah, there you go. I'm impressed you know that. Yeah. But why Germany, I guess, is my question. It seems like an interesting place to go next. Biggest market in Europe. Yeah. An hour away. and there was a it's a there's a regulatory structure there there's only a couple people who can do this we wanted one of them and so we wanted to take advantage we want to do it all over the world really yeah would it work all over the world do you think we think so we think so i mean everybody wants a better house yeah it's so interesting when i speak to you it was source of you seem to have an innate understanding of human psychology at the basis of all of it we've just spoke about maslow's hierarchy of needs but there's also something really interesting about status isn't there that it seems to me which is one of the the rungs on that right yeah well i we have an advisor his name's adam grant who's a now become like a well-known author you know him he was like a teacher of mine in business school before he was yeah who he is now but he always said there's nothing worse than success when you don't know how you got it like you have to understand the fundamental human motives that you're serving right like in order to entertain someone you have to understand like what you're offering to them that they want um you have to understand tap into like the part of us that wants to win and transform our house for our family but also the part of us that wants to feel good that they get to help someone else's life yeah transform you need to serve that um or else you can't do your job well yeah have you studied psychology i haven't i haven't i mean i've read a bunch of it but i didn't study in school i studied economics which has some psychology in it and i studied political science which has some psychology but as an actor and a writer like your job is to like see the world through the eyes of other people right and and so i work really hard to do that um i love people i love i want to connect with them i believe we're all in this together i think we all are connected at some fundamental level my experience my near-death experience solidified in that that in me even in a more profound way yeah um so i you know i care deeply about trying to connect with people and helping other people connect with others and trying to you know remind ourselves that we're again this is like uh this is something we're all into yeah yeah and what about your own psychology I wonder, are you aware of your own motivations for doing all of this?

43:21Joe Bullmore:Is it as simple as what you've just said, do you think? My own motivations for doing the maze? Because, I mean, there's a school of thought when, I don't know, if you had such an experience like that, you might just decide, I'm just going to live a simple life and swim in the sea. I don't know. Other people might have done something different. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.

43:46I think love and optimism saved my life, and I want to spread love and optimism. But I also want a better life for my family. I also want to make money. We are a business, for sure. But I don't think you have to choose between doing that and also helping people. I'd like to do both with my life. Some people make a lot of money, and then when they're in their 60s, they give it back. I don't think you have to wait. why can't you have that experience as you're going through life um so that really motivates me um deep connection is like is really motivating to me like deep connection to your work deep connection to your friends your family deep connection to a purpose um and i feel that

44:32Joe Bullmore:yeah that's pretty good that's pretty good that's a pretty good reason what's your own house like um i live i rent i live in a place like 50 minutes walk from work yeah i rent so um i have a place back in la but it's just a just a place that i rent out there okay yeah i can't imagine you're someone who drives a flashy car i don't own a car do you not yeah do you drive yeah i mean you've got to drive right i know actually i gave him a car in la like when uber came to la i was like oh this is like public transportation i love public transportation like i love i do well in london you've got to i mean you know i love the tube i love i mean biking isn't public transportation but i like i love yeah flying bikes but yeah i don't know the car do you have any things that you spend you know that you're inordinately excited about you you know do you buy this is very very boring for a gentleman's journal audience um um I love travel.