Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Jeff Harmon

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Jeff Harmon is the Co-Founder and Chief Content Officer of Angel Studios, the media company behind Sound of Freedom, His Only Son, After Death, and Dry Bar Comedy. He has played a key role in shaping Angel’s audience-driven approach to entertainment, including the Pay It Forward ticketing model and the Angel Guild, a community comprising over 2 million members which helps decide the films and shows that the company will distribute. His career, spanning 17 years, has centered on connecting creators directly with audiences through innovative digital distribution. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Anthropic https://Claude.com/tetra ------ AG1 https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 https://Lectio365.com ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetrogrammitten. The entire premise of Angel is that Hollywood is in a bubble. And they're out of touch, and they don't understand what regular people want, and they're making what they want. And the artist class is the vast, vast, vast, majority of filmmakers are the children of very wealthy families. And so they go into filmmaking,

and they're just a little out of touch with mainstream families. And so they create a little bit of touch with mainstream families. stuff that mainstream America doesn't want and a mainstream worldwide doesn't want. And so the premise is that we use the audience to decide what type of films we're going to produce. And as founders, we're trying to build a community where we have what's called the Angel Guild. And the Angel Guild is made up of two million people, just regular everyday people that are voting on to decide which movies will come into Angel Studios and nothing can go into Angel Studios unless they vote first. And this community is paying a monthly fee as a member that funds the filmmakers.

So it's the largest filmmaking crowdfunding project in the history of film. Wow. So you've got two million people all paying between $12 and $20 a month. month, and their money is going in to fund filmmakers and help them make money on their projects as long as they're making the projects that our community wants. That's amazing. Now, how did the guild come to exist? Have you ever heard the book, The User Method?

It's by Jeff Schwarting. And then the user method, he goes through and he does research on all the different unicorn companies. And I don't remember the number. I think it's like three out of five companies, their unicorns, were just made by somebody who was solving a problem for themselves. So Steve Wozniak just didn't, he's fed up with the computers that existed and he made the computer he liked. And now we have Apple. You've got Airbnb founders were just trying to pay their rent in San Francisco. One of them was a graphic designer and there's

a graphic design convention. And he said, why don't we just rent our floor with an air mattress to the convention, helped them pay their rent that month, and then they thought, what if we create air B&B as an air mattress B&B? And so they built something to solve their problem. Yes. And then it morphed into what it is today. And if you look at all these different companies where they're solving a problem for themselves, they end up making a solution that resonates with way more than themselves. Because people are like people. Or like other people. And, and And so I come from a family. There's four brothers and a cousin who helped found Angel Studios.

And in our family, I have six brothers. We have three sisters, so nine kids. I'm in the middle of nine. And we come from a family that didn't get served by Hollywood. And as we got older and we have our own kids, I've got six kids and one on the way, a seventh kid. And each one of us have a lot of kids. And we're looking at what Hollywood is produced.

for our kids. And I know a lot of people say, like, everything's going to short form social media, but I think that that causes a lot of brain rot. But for the long form content, which even Jonathan Haidt, you know, who did The Anxious Generation, he's saying long form is where the safer content is, meaning it's better for the brain. And so for long form content, how do we get the type of content we want for our families? That's how this started. We grew up on potato Farms in Idaho. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. We had three TV stations and we watched almost no movies. I could count the number of times I went to the theater. Tell he's 18, probably on two hands. Can you remember your media diet as a child? I mean, we had, we had three stations. And if you

used the, like if you, if you pulled out one of the wire, old wired hangers and then wrapped it around the TV antenna and then hung it up on the curtain, then we could get PBS on top of the three, like CBS, ABC. So terrestrial television. Yes. And then we had VHS. And so we watched Star Wars. You know, we watched all the old Disney classics. But it was generally

the stuff that got big enough to reach to Burley, Idaho, which is where we grew up. Declough, Idaho, actually. Burley's the biggest city close by, which is still tiny. But Declos was like 250 people when we were going up.

And that's technically where we were in that. area. And so, but farmers, and so our media consumption, like, the very first movie I ever went and saw in theaters was Aladdin. And I watched it in the Dollar Show. So it was like six months, eight months after it had gone to theaters. And back then, the reason why I went to the Dollar Show is because you used actual film. So you had these film roles. And they, when they started wearing down because they had run them so many times, the quality had degraded. And then they'd ship them off to the Dollar theaters. So you had a lower quality picture. for the dollar theater.

So that's the only kind of movies I ever watched growing up because we were very poor. Yeah. But I went to it, watched the Cave of Wonders, and I remember watching the magic carpet going through the Cave of Wonders and just being like, this is amazing, you know. Even then, I did not know that there was a job behind that. I thought, you know, I might be an attorney because attorneys were wealthy in the area. I didn't want to be a farmer because farmers were poor. And I thought maybe I'd be a dentist, maybe a doctor.

I don't know. something, because those were the rich people in the area. And so we're very unlikely studio executives, especially the top 10 studio. But Philo Farmsworth, who created the television, he came from just a couple hours away from us, an Idaho farmer too. And he figured out how to build the television

while he was in the potato fields and seen all the lines of the rows of potatoes. I've never heard that. And then he actually had a vision where he saw the way that the lines and the TV and he figured out how to build the television. Amazing. Yeah, Idaho Farmer.

So back to, if you create something that you want, oftentimes that will work with many, many other people. And in our case, it's hundreds of millions. And so then you take the user method and you expand it out. So the first few TV shows and movies we did were just ones we loved. So we... What was first? Dry Bar Comedy was the very first one we did on our own.

We basically said, we love Brian Regan, we love Jim Gaffigan, we love Jerry Seinfeld, we love Cosby, what with an asterisk. But these are all the family safe comedians. And we're like, these are the biggest comedians. So why aren't there more of them? And then we started digging into them. We're like, well, if we could just get normal comedians that are funny to come and do something that is family safe, then there might be a business there.

Yeah, and you weren't telling them what to do outside of what you were creating. No, not at all. So they can do whatever they want. If they did something for HBO, that would be their HBO show. And then if they did a show for you, it would be specific to your audience. That's right. Well, actually, at first we went and got, like, we were like, who does clean comedy? And we were starting to look for them.

And we found, like, there's this Christian circuit, these guys that would go around to churches. And we hired them to come in and do shows. And we're like, they're not actually very good. And they're not as funny as the guys who are doing the general circuit, the comedian circuit. And so we went to the other guys and said, look, normally you do, you have hours and hours of content. Do you have 40 minutes that you can just take out the profanities, take out the innuendos, make it family safe? Not to where a kid understands it, but to where a mom can listen while she does her laundry or a dad can be driving the minivan and doesn't have to worry about turning. it off and they can enjoy it and they don't have to like, do I have to put on earphones?

They have to cover the kids' ears. And if they can make that for us, then we have a home for that type of a show. And the vast majority of comedians on Dry Bar comedy normally just do standard comedy, blue comedy. When they come to Dry Bar, they do clean and the family safe. And then those have blown up. We've filmed over 750 comedians now. Wow. Yeah. Next year we'll be the 10th anniversary of Drybar. So it's been 10 years of comedy. Yep. 150 million viewers worldwide.

Billions of views. Silver, six billion views. Has it been global from the beginning? No, it took like when we first did it, we almost went bankrupt doing it. So we invested in season one, and then we didn't get any traction, and we invested in season two. And we didn't get any traction. And we were doing about 50 comedians a season trying to moneyball it, just saying, if we get

enough, we'll find the winners. And then we got to season three and it finally took off. And I remember we were, there was a point where we were like six weeks. We had like six weeks of payroll, you know. And but Drybar took off and retroactively, we didn't know this right at the time. I wish I was this smart, but HBO started with stand-up. That was their whole entire model was they put stand-up comedians on TV and that's how they got their foothold in the marketplace. And so that was our first show was create stand-up comedy.

At that point in time, how would people see it? At the beginning, it was YouTube channels, Facebook. The video system had just started launching with Facebook. It was ad platforms with like Samsung with XM Radio. And we were just going broad and wide. And then when we started, we bought an old bar that was selling. And we bought the bar and I had a stage. and I had these little go-go dancer girl little things

and we redid it to look like a stand-up stage, like an old school stand-up stage, and that's Dry Bar Comedy. And we called it Dry Bar because we didn't buy the liquor license to the bar, and we just kept it for a Comedy Center. And then we did the name Dry Bar Comedy, and we went to comedians and said, just do 40 minutes of clean.

They get up, they do their clean set. We put them in Provo, Utah, because there's clean comedy, and then there's like Provo Clean Comedy. And then we labeled the brand funny for everyone. And if you go on YouTube and you see the comments, you'll see people saying, I've been watching this for six months.

I've been watching this for a year. And I just realized that this is actually a clean brand. This is a, because they're so funny. Yeah, you don't realize it. Yeah, yeah. One of the big comedians who's had hundreds of millions of views, Jeff Allen, he comes on there, or Leanne Morgan, and they're like, this is like Johnny Carson.

Yeah. They're like, I went on Drybar, and now Leanne Morgan got Netflix specials. And so we're money-balling these comedians, bringing them in, and you go out and find the ones who are undiscovered, super funny, and then we elevate them through our marketing. There was a time when every great thinker had a confidant,

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rather than thinking for. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at clod.a.ai slash tetra. Try it today. How do you decide on comedy to start with? Affordable. Inexensive to produce. Yes, yeah.

You could bring in a comedian and we can bring down the cost to be maybe one-fifteenth of what Netflix would film a special for, a comedy special or HBO. And because they're all in the same location, all the cameras are set up the exact same way. It's literally just turn it on and go.

And then we bring in 300 people to watch it. We learned something very early on. If you make them pay, they laugh better. So at first we did it for free. And then we realized, no, if they're paying, they actually laugh. So we charge tickets, put in 300 people. Because at the beginning, we were just doing it free. And then I said, maybe we could help cover some of our costs.

That was the first thought. I see. As I was just being a business person and saying, we're losing money. How are we going to cover the cost of this? So let's just charge $10 a ticket or $20 a ticket and see if people will buy tickets. They were buying tickets to the early show, but we couldn't sell the late shows. And so I would watch, and the early shows, just as soon as we were charging, laugh super hard. Late shows were hit and miss.

Because the audience was invested in the show. Yes. They paid for it. You have a bias to say, I'm going to have a good time because I paid for this. Yes. If you give a free ticket, they're like folding their arms, like, make me laugh. Show me. And then as soon as we got it big enough to where we actually got paid people in both early and lay show, they equaled out.

And so you had just better laughs all the way around. And we need those audience laughs because we're not, it's not like an old sitcom. And this is an ongoing thing. You still do this. Yes. Yeah, yeah, we're at our 10th anniversary next year. Amazing. Are you still in the same venue?

Yeah, same venue. Yeah, 6 billion views, 150 million viewers. What was your first series? So the first series that we did was called The Chosen, and my job was to go figure out. We had come up with this idea of crowdfunding, and we were going to use Obama's new law, the Jobs Act, where you could crowd fund with people who aren't worth over a million dollars. they weren't accredited investors. And we were like, if we use that,

we should be able to crowdfund TV shows that can compete, at least on the lower end, with the Hollywood shows. So from the inception, crowdfunding was part of the model. For original TV, yes. Yes. Yeah.

With the Drybar one, we funded it from crowdfunding for Angel directly. And then the Chosen comes along. And I've been looking for a TV series to launch the, crowdfunding concept on. That's what I was looking for. I've been talking to all kinds of filmmakers. And then we get to, I have a friend, he's an Orthodox Jew, currently he lives in Israel. He sends me this clip that is a nativity of Jesus being born. And he's like, this is pretty good.

You just watch it. And it's this really low budget, less than a hundred thousand dollar film, short film on the birth of Jesus. I didn't realize that until I was halfway through it. And I was watching in September. And as I'm finishing it, it was like this flood of inspiration came for like hours, where I knew this could be a pilot for a TV series. Which it was not pitched to you as. No, it wasn't at all. It was just watched this. It was just, this is a cool 20-minute short film. And luckily, the filmmaker had the idea of doing a TV series around this concept, not this is a pilot. He actually fought this idea as it being a pilot. And then it was just like a flood of information just coming in and

we're going to post the entire short film 20 minutes as an ad on YouTube with the skippable format. And we'll just hook him in the first five seconds. And then we're going to hold him for 20 minutes. And then we're going to do it on Facebook as well where we just run the entire 20 minutes as an ad. And at the end of the 20 minutes, we get the director on and he says, would you like to see a TV series like this? And so this was all coming together. And it was as brothers, we had created an ad agency years before called Harmon Brothers. It sounds like a car dealership. And we had done poopery campaigns, squatty potty campaigns, purple mattress, these super viral internet ads that had built household brands, loamy deodorant.

And the idea was, is I can take everything we've learned about marketing CPG products like Squatty Potty and Pooery and Purple Mattress and Loomy Deodorant. And then we can take this pilot episode as a little taste of what the product's like. And then we pitch people and we use all the tracking skills and technology we've used over the years to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of product. and we put that all together and we see if we can't fund a $10 million season for the first season of what later became a chosen. And I called my friend Matthew and I said, hey, could he make a series out of this?

And he said, I don't know. Let's talk to him. And then I talked to my brother Neil, he's co-founder, and said, I think I found what we should make our first TV series with. And he said, what is it? And that's like, it's a biblical series. And he's like, no, that's for churches. In our culture, we have like a really, really strong belief that you shouldn't go try to profit off of preaching, right? And so he's like, no, can't do that.

I was like, wait, just watch it. This is an entertainment property. You know, like there's a difference between building a church and building an entertainment property that happens to be about historical Jesus. He watched it, took off his headphones, he had tears in his eyes, and he said, this is why we made Angel to be able to do this. Beautiful. Yeah. And I called the director and he, after a couple hours, he got on board and he came out and

we met and we built out a crowdfunding campaign that was really challenging. It took us 18 months, super hard. It was like crawling on glass. We helped them fund $10 million. We set it up as a different entity as its own show, brought the entire way to of our base of followers behind it and then brought him more through the marketing and eventually launched the largest crowdfunded TV series of all time largest crowdfunded media project of all time at the time we've actually beat that record now well multiple

times and and then launched this TV series the chosen and long story short and after a huge grind and thinking it's going to die over and over again it'd be becomes one of the top five TV series in the world. Unbelievable. And now it's on Amazon with season five. It's moved over to Amazon. Do you build the whole crowdfunding campaign before you air the pilot?

Yeah, well, we built the, like, we built specialized websites just to take in the crowdfunding. We had to do a bunch of regulatory work with the SEC and FINRA. So there was a lot of overhead to build this out, but we were thinking, because I mean, by the time we got done, We had spent a lot of money on doing this, but it was to build a model for the future. And we launched the pilot episode, this short film, to crowd fund, meaning they needed to see it to believe that the show was good enough. Basically what we learned, if they watched the pilot, if we can get them to watch 20, it was 19 minutes.

If we can give them to watch that 19 minutes, they invest. And so our job was just get people to watch it. And you do that on YouTube. We did that on YouTube, on Facebook, and across social media. And then live streams was a big, big piece of it. It was Dallas, the director, getting on live streams and explaining his vision to people. And then we had technology that allowed Dallas to put up these little things that said, like Jeff from Idaho invested $100.

George from Kansas invested this much. this person from this. And so the whole time he's on the live stream that's like popping up saying it's all the stuff that TikTok does. How many people watch that first episode before the rest of the series came? Before the rest of the series, I'm sure it was 50 million plus. Wow. Yeah. And then we raised $10 million from 17,000, 17,000 investors and tremendous success. I think there was the way we brought everything we had to bear on trying to get that to go. But there were so many things that happened while we were doing that, that we have to credit divine intervention, like, meant to happen. And we learned later, Dallas had pitched everybody on the idea of doing a biblical series.

And then we kind of came in and said, hey, you've already done this little short film. Let's just call it a pilot. But we bet the farm on that series. What were the things that you feel like, beyond it being good, leading to 50 million people, watching it on YouTube. So I think the way that we had to do it is we just said, okay, we're going to start out with our user base, the angel user base.

We've been working on Drybar. We have this big group. How big was the group at that time? Just less than a million people that are not paid necessarily, but people that are following. Viewers. Viewers. And you call them subscribers?

Because if it's on YouTube. Subscribers. Today we call them memberships. I see. But we had like Drybar had, many, many people on Drybar. We published it there, which was kind of out of context for them, but it actually worked okay. And then we sent out to our email lists. And so we got this initial group in and got the initial few million dollars of funding. But we had to get to 10 million.

So then the next step was, is you take the pilot, you run ads on it, and then when people finish, you hope they invest at a high enough rate to be able to reinvest in ads. And so you're taking a small portion of the investment, which ended up being about 8%. So some of the money that you were hoping to use for production, we needed to use for assets. You're reinvesting for marketing to build the pot essentially. To build the pot. The way I looked at it at the time is I was like, and I tried to explain this to Dallas,

is if you go and you raise money with a bank, they're going to end up taking 8 to 12 percent, some margin that ends up coming out through fees and attorneys and all this stuff. If we can come away with a similar margin spent on our marketing, our attorneys, everything for you to raise this money, we're in a good spot. And we ended up at the end being around 8%. 8% of the 10 million was spent on getting the 10 million. And then how long was it between the pilot showing and then starting production? So when we got to three point something million, Dallas said, okay, I'm going to start the first four episodes. Great.

That was about a year in. And then over the next six months, we raised the next part. We helped them raise the next part. The reason why I say help is because it's a separate company. So our company is helping their company market their offering. And then we raise the next part over the next six months. and then Dallas was able to film the next four episodes, so they were filmed in two chunks.

One was filmed in the dead of winter, and every single actor was freezing, and the next four were filmed in the middle of summer where everybody was boiling hot. But you can't really tell you, if you watch it, you can't tell that much. And then how was the first episode post-pilot received? It was slow. It was super slow.

So Dallas gets us on a phone call and he says, guys, we've gone through the desert like Moses for 40 years in Joshua. And now we're entering the Promise Land. We're finally launching these. There's a really good episodes. And if we just launch them, it's going to happen.

So we get off the phone and I'm a little worried because I've done marketing campaigns before and I'm like, this is going to be a heavier lift than he realizes. And we launch them and people are not watching them. And we spend, in the first six months, we spend about $700,000 marketing them,

and we only bring in about $700,000 in revenue, which is actually okay, the fact you're breaking even, but it wasn't enough. Yeah. This is episodes one through four. And so I'm sitting there with a pile of papers and just like sketching out models. That's what I do is I'm just like, what if we did it this way? What if we gave away episode one and then we charge for the next episodes? What if we give away two episodes in charge for that episodes? What if we just give away a few seconds or just a trailer? What if we rent them? What if we do this?

You know, just modeling out all kinds of models. Lots of them have been tried in Hollywood. And I had this pile of papers and I was working with a team. And then we're getting towards the middle. And we noticed that on our Facebook fan page, people would get on and they would say, I really want to watch this, but I can't afford to pay for it. And 100% of the time when they said that, somebody would chime in underneath and say,

I love the series, send me your email, I will buy it for you and send it to you because we had built this little gifting system. Beautiful. There was without fail. People were just saying, I need it, I want it, and then somebody would come in and pay for it. When those first four came out, did you put them out individually

or as a group of four? We put them out as a group of four, but we tested different models to see like, oh, do we, Oh, do we get more people to finish or to pay if we give away one episode, if we give away two episodes, if we give away three? You know, like we're testing the data on everything. I think we ran in those first six months, we ran over a thousand tests.

Would you run those tests yourself or would you hire an outside group to do the testing? No, we have an engineering team. Like right now, we have, like Neil's an engineer. One, my brother is an engineer. But we have, I think, almost 100 engineers. on the Angel team. Back then it was much less, but we build our own product. And so we were building out the funnel and then watching and seeing the data and then

tweaking and then tweaking and tweaking. And here's what's interesting. Every single IP that you've ever watched in Hollywood, because it's this huge heritage, has all of the decisions about when it's going to theaters, when it's going to streaming, who is going to stream through for five to ten years are already done. The rights are tied up. They're tied up worldwide. What 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. And 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 finished 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. And they would finish Sunday dinner and I'd bait and switch them and sit them in front of the TV and they'd be like, no, I've 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 I'm sharing with are not ready to watch it. And then I realized that's what everybody is. Everybody's trying to reach out to their friends and say, I watch 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 these 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 can watch it for free, but 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 and 20 people paid it forward, we got averages and we were like, it actually starts to math. And so we started optimizing, then 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 Lafmore. 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 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 Nosec and Steve.

Buscoe. Luke is a co-founder of PayPal with Elon. They've invested in us and 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. Yeah. It gives it enough fuel and commitment that the movement is. And it probably also adds to the word and mouth. somehow. Yes. Yeah, in an 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. Are you still involved in the Amazon show? No, we're not. We're not alone. 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? 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 angels involvement. During that time, we're developing other projects or no?

Yes, yeah. So we started developing a show called Tuttle Twins. Also, we helped them crowd fund. and Tuttle Twins is a TV series. It's a cartoon TV series based on this best-selling book called Tuttle Twins. They're sold, I think, is 9 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'm on the board of a organization in Utah think tank called the Berthas Network. And the LaBertes 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,

Labertas 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, they didn't have food permits, they didn't have... This is real? This was happening all over the country. Wow.

And so LaBertes, 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 Labertas 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 sell Brazilian food, and they don't have food permits, which is pretty awesome. But they just sell 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. LaBertes 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. So 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 Libertus had built this book series.

I was telling Connor, I said, I want this in a TV series for my kids. And 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 kids book series. Lusely based on a book series. Educational.

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. And she's like friends with Nicola Tesla and 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 Karl 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 Smithies instead of pencils. That's really funny. Because he's now the inventor, the Adam Smithies. And we actually sell the merchandise, Adam Smithies. Great. Kids can buy a whole bunch of Adam Smithies and they take him to school and they're writing with they're Adam Smithies because they're 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 that had done all the poopery ads and the Squatty potty ads and all these super funny ads, a comedians, and then took the Libertus 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. It'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' shows. 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, everything on Angels co-viewing.

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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 because he's like, I don't want to you do this with my, like, your siblings. And so he went in and he built a plug in 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. So 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 and 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 Torrance. Within 24 hours after Game of Thrones would launch an episode, there'd be an alternate version of Game of Thrones uploaded on the Torrance without any nudity or sex. So 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 were tens of millions of downloads on these torrents of clean versions. But the studios didn't like it, in particular Disney, didn't like it. because my theory is that Disney saw it and said, we're the family audience. We 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 the values-based audience. Yeah. Yeah. Disney is the values-based audience. It was. It was. And we're trying to build the new values-based audience.

But 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 set up. It's settled it out.

Dane Tool was a streaming platform? It wasn't a streaming platform. What was it? It was an automatic remote control platform. Parent tool controls. So you just, if you bought... It didn't have content in it. No, well, you watch the content on other streamers or movies you purchased, like a DVD

or a Blu-ray. If you could, if you owned a Blu-ray or a DVD, then we would say we can stream you that with the automatic remote control. Oh, 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. It was called the Family Movie Act of 2005.

And at that point, we had the Chosen, was starting to take off and drive our 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. The funny thing is they've actually done a bunch of things. 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 to 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, in 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. So those are the words. Those words are being totally different things to over two 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 a, that's an iteration after pay it forward. Because you can crowd fund a project at a time. And that's how you started was crowdfunding a project. Yes. And then figuring out business models around it. But when we united it all under one where we just said, we're not just doing the chosen,

we're not just doing dry bar. We're not just doing tunnel 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. And 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 things.

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 will come through 10 times before their film is ready. And they get feedback and they develop to develop them 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 exes.

So 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 react.

invent 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? And 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 Polly Market. 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. They're not going to want to do our workforce. We're the ones you 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. No, but that's Legos. Legos just gives you the final part of the manufacturing process. Yeah.

And 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, show too much screen time, we say Harman's 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've 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. A 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 moving making as a kid.

I was working on potato farms, hauling pipe, moving water, hoeing beats, like doing menial tasks. Yes. It 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 two 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 a side. 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?

What 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 that 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. Also, like, 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's true, honest, noble, just, authentic, globally, admirable, and excellent. Whatever that means to them, they say whether or not 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. Sean 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 0 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, or like the most recent movie released, David, it scored 98 in the Guild, which is the highest score we'd ever seen. It 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 Angels, Rotten Tomatoes, Popcorn Meter, which is the audience, Yeah. 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 tomato scores within, one 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. And he's like, all of 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 an average. Yes. Amazing.

And so Evan Shapiro had pointed that out that like this model's working. And on top of that, not only is a guild member, you get to pick the movies and veto the movies. Like, if you veto a movie as a guild member, it can't go into 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.

So it's like a movie pass. And so there's built in millions of dollars for every single movie to go to theaters. 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 in 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. His 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 and 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 the 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, it 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. And we said, we'll test it, we'll see. And then I told my team, I was like, if we're gonna 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. the Freedom, it did $250 million in the box office. And that's a breakout that's like beyond our control. Like 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. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is something different, something clean, something precise, athletic nicotine,

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Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Tell me the story of Sound of Freedom. Sound of Freedom. It's wild. How did it come to you first? Neil, my brother, was on a panel in the Mexico. with the producer and they were talking and then Jim Kivisel 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 the 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 they had been working trying to get that thing out for eight years they've been stuck on the shelf for eight movies tons of movies are stuck on the shelf because it originally been produced by fox and fox got bought by disney and then disney shelved the movie and then according to edwardo this isn't my first-hand experience so i don't but edwardo 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 like 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, just before we came along, he was actually called its attorney and was like, maybe I'll just publish this movie to YouTube. 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 the 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. And he needs to move up. Like sooner. Yeah. Like that they were receiving inspiration. They're 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 theaters. 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 going to 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. And would you go to independent theaters? All 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 in Hollywood are the same thing. But when you go to Cinemacom, 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. And 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. They 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 app, 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... So 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. Yeah. 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 half of the time. it's like you you kind of have to redo the whole thing and I think we're at the perfect timing because AI is going to make it's going to flatten the world of creativity like it's no longer

going to be the rich kids sport the creative class is growing so fast and be 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. 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. But it's really exciting because these everyday filmmakers, like David Hellen, 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 a 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, will sort through it all. 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 slipping 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 Naga stops. We actually made it to where if you're not a guild member, you can't buy angel merch. Because I realized as I walk 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. out. One thing, cool thing about wearing an angel shirt is I get free stuff every once in a while. Like, people are like, it's on the house because you're, you're an angel fan. It's such a passionate community. Two december's ago, we were to half million members in 2024. 2025 December, two 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 worried 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 it's about light. Yeah, 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 people called Sound of Freedom face-based. It's literally the only thing that was faith-based in the whole movie is he said, God's children or not for sale. So like, if that's the case, then every single Martin Scorsese movie is a faith-based movie. 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. It's not a faith-based movie at all. These are values-based movies. Is 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. So 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. 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. Yeah. 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%, we're never ever going to please everybody. The way we know is if there's a high enough score in the guild, we know it's a general audience.

Yeah. And people who voted against it, they might get really loud. But we know most people, it's 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, it like, if it's an animated one. We don't put the names of the actors in the movie. It'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 while. 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 attempted campaign?

cancellations or anything like that? Yeah, like Mark Hamill was one. People were really upset. He played Herod in a movie about, it's called the King of Kings. And people are really upset. When you get two million people, you got all strikes. There are a small group who were very upset at Mark. 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. Yep. And some people are not happy that Seth Rogen's in it. They don't agree with some stuff about Seth Rogen. I actually don't fully understand it all. But, you know, when they voted, they didn't know.

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 motto will miss some things. There's going to be some movies that it misses.

But I think it will 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 in a debate I was at on a panel. Yeah. At a private event.

He 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. agree that the audience is not going to know what to do with that idea. But 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. The question is, as an artist, people who 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 100% 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? LMNT, Element Electrolites. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best?

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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 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 Bora Brush, and if you scrape your tongue, it cleans off the bad breath. And he invented a very specific one. And 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 & Gamble or a big brand. And that's the only way you're going to be able to market this. Tung Cleaner. They said only 8% of people say they'd buy this online. And I put up my hand in the back of a class and said, 8%'s 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 it will sell to the 8%? Yeah, sell to the 8%. That's a lot of people. Yeah. 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 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. And 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 warbrush ads.

Didn't work. Good idea, that. Great idea. Just trying different stuff. And then one day I was pretty discouraged about it, and Dr. Bob comes up to me, and 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 promised me eight months, he's like, I'm tired of driving over and picking you up and taking you home.

He'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 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 my other roommate was a writer for film. And so I asked him to write a two-minute commercial. I gave it 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. And 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 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 had bad breath with a spoon. And then we introduced the or brush to people.

We started buying ads on the YouTube platform. Google puts out a press release and says, our ad platforms revenues jump 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 at all?

Buy anything. Well, everybody else was dabbling with it. I mean, there were thousands of advertisers buying just a little bit. You 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 the Dentech. And then we went and built poopery. So 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. And we made the, this ad with a British girl, same writer as the ORABrus 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. 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, yeah. 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. And so they built the skip button based on that meeting. Wow. And we built an ad agency. The 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 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. The reason why, because intuition is just like, intuition is not just your brilliant 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 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 hard 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.

So you test the first five seconds and you test your call to actions. And then you run 20, 30 tests at the 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 loomy deodorant, kind of taboo topics that you, bad breath, smelly topics that you can make a lot of fun with. And 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 stand-up 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.

That takes about six months of work, then 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 that 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

adds into it, and you can accelerate it into a exponential curve. And so word of the 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. And 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. 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.

And she's 10 years old. Yeah, it's amazing. Living on the other side of the screen. Yeah. 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 where you're, using it is for engineering.

But 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 and they jump on board. Then there's engineers that push back. Then there's on the art side, 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 really big debates. And there's 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 10x your output with these tools. I think worldwide is a lot of concerns about what does this mean. How big is the staff now? 300 people. That's great. It'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 3000, 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 the company can do. And it does not decrease the need from 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 there's a lot of interesting things you can do with the Guild long term. You know, the beginning of this started when I was calling to the jury back in the day,

the idea came from when I read the book by James Sirwiki called the wisdom of crowds. And 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. The average guess was 1197 pounds, and the weight of the ox was 1198 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 is 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

and 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. It's called Super Forecasters. It's another interesting book. And they went through into a study

where they show people predicting the gaming world events. And they basically come to the conclusion that there's like, I don't remember if it's one or three percent of the population. If you have a crowd to be able to measure them against, then there's one to three percent of the population

that will pop out and they can forecast. And they can 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're actually,

we might be able to look at super forecasters inside of our system and do some fun things around that. There's just so much you can do once you have lots of data. I mean, when you look at AI, 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 spealing on yourself, because all it cares is your eyes are on the road. And you can eat while your eyes are on the road. It won'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 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. Grandmasters 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 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.

I mean, he has artistic sensibilities and stuff, but he's a business guy. And when he says, oh, this looks almost real, I look at it and I go, no, that looks like slop, still. But there's stuff that's really good and it's 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 one, 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. I had no idea it as 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. Yeah. 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 100% of people can go, that's AI. Even though at the time, you couldn't.

Yes. And so our brains are keeping up with 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, 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 to Star Wars episode one. And then you go AI, that's what it's doing, is rapping. And so every time somebody freaks out, about something that shows up on X and goes super viral or on Facebook and goes super viral. And 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 talk about that process of making sure that it was real humans. And so it goes viral.

everybody 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 to 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 322, if you look in like ancient scripture, Adam and Eve have taken to the fruit. They're cast out of the garden. And God's like, you're now going to, for your benefit, you're now going to feel pain and suffering. And 32, 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, in space, I think it's uniquely human, and I don't believe that AI is going to be able to feel that, at least any time soon, 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. I'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. It's just saying that 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 in a mountain doom before it gets too much control over us. Yeah.

Because everybody wants to choose what's best for everybody else. And 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 in a 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 of self. Right. The problem in Lord of the Rings is not everybody wants the ring. It's the ring itself. It'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 know, 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 Buckele, which is yet,

to know if he gives true economic freedom and freedom to his people, 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. Yeah. 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. There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo. and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used

to stay close to wisdom, not by studying words as information, but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again. This tradition is known as Lectio Divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements, reading, reflection, repetition, and rest. A short passage is read, a single phrase is held.

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Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at Lectio 365.com. Have 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 announcements for the company. Do you see open to the audience type of events? Yeah.

So we've been playing with this idea. We believe that in-person events are really important, especially in the world of AI. if you look at the YouTube channel Dude Perfect or some other YouTube channels that have figured out 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, Solomio, the end of this month in Miami, only guild members are allowed to go, and we've rented out an entire theater.

And 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 move 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% 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 McDonagh's big event. And then as a guild member, you get to go. And then only a guild member. And then you park in like a place pretty close by, and then there's just limos like circling.

And you get a 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 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. Like 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, it's 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 world is like so intertwined with these vices and the percentage of people who come out that aren't nihilist is low. So 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 percent, 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 the filmmakers a ton, meaning they write comments. The filmmakers actually comment back to them.

They have ongoing communication. So if you get into a voting group in one of the films, Yeah. Then you're part of that little community, a micro community. And it's an ongoing relationship? Mm-hmm. They can come and ask, 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. You get to see a film that you've got to see as a rough cut or an animatic progress or a pilot progressed 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. A 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.

It's 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. You set down your phone.

you turn off things and then everyone together through a ritual worships together and you have the sacrament you can have a life-changing experience about the blood and the body of Jesus Christ. That can be in 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 us. 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 yeah 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 the mouths to get some solitude they can go to other events but the cinema is the easiest most accessible of 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 thousands of comments on social media about happening all over the country. It was just this 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. I am a faithful member. And my friend Matthew, who introduces 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 Israel,

and he took me to Shabbat dinner. And at Shabbat dinner, one of the guys there, 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 it. And he's like, here's the joke.

He's like, why did God make Mormons? And 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. Yeah. But this hasn't changed. Like, it's actually a little bit scary, but like if you go to a BYU, I'm a, that's my alma martyr, a BYU football game, regularly, you will heal the audience chanting, F the Mormons, but what's the real word? 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, 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. 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, it's okay culturally right now to chant that. Can you imagine any other faith if you chanted that? What 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 and shot up a whole bunch of people, killed a bunch of people, and then burned down the church. And we see ourselves. is 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. And it's very inside baseball between the Christian denominations about why they don't believe that we're Christians. I believe were 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 was 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. And 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, but... You'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 contrarians, so it doesn't bother me.

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, it 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, uh, the critical drinker. He'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 to, 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. And 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. Angels putting just some faith in because it represents the population. 70% 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 edit it out. And so he says to this group, we need to listen to the audience. And everybody starts 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. And 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 movies, 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. That'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 divorce. 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 a Latter-day Saint. 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 it's green because Idaho is so brown and I wanted to go somewhere green. I didn't even know Ireland existed. But, you know, I was kind of contrary and 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 and it said Ireland double admission. I was like, where is that? And I'm like looking it up and I was like,

this is what I asked for. Yeah, and then in Ireland, And then 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. 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 years. And my grandpa, I found out what he would do is he would, if you saved 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 in 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 slammed 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. You're just going and going and going. And I remember the first day that sun came out. 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 is probably writing a hit piece. And 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. Not the answer she wanted. Yeah, it didn't get published. 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 Latter-day Saint, has that taste to it, doesn't pass the yield.

and sometimes unfairly so, because there are such a minority inside the guild. So 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. And like, no, it does if you make it good enough. You 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 Hubiner, 16-year-old, German kid in World War II, and it passed the Guild with a good score because it's just great filmmaking. Great. 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.

The ones that are coming to us, like you've got Kevin James, Rob Schneider. They're comedians. You've got Jim Caviesel. You've got Andy Circus. 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 to 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. The 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. 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. After the U.S., what's your next biggest market? I think it's Brazil.

Where would you say you are in the general? 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. He's like, and I chat with everybody. And he said, at a normal IPO event, everyone is saying, I'm going to buy a new house. I'm going to to go move to a beach, I'm going to, you know, because you got a bunch of millionaires coming out at the other end of an IPO. And 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. 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 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 an angel and be part of the mission. Before it was people 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.

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. It's 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 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 me 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.

And then they have some poison food. And Hollywood every once in a while will 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. is that you have to own the kitchen Tetragrammatin is a podcast Tetragrammatin is a website Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge

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