The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 378: Jeff Harmon & Neal Harmon—Surviving Disney

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

The serial entrepreneurs and founders of Angel Studios talk about growing up poor in a family of eleven, how they went from selling potatoes door to door to being the ad agency of record for Poo-Pourri, Squatty Potty, and Orabrush, how they survived a $62 million lawsuit from four of the biggest studios in Hollywood, and how their Angel Guild is cracking the code to finding the next big film.        

It's the way I heard at episode number 378, I believe, Chuck. Is that right, 378? That's correct. Not that anyone cares, but you'll care about this. It's called Surviving Disney with the Harmon Brothers. Yes. Oh, man, what a great conversation this is with a couple of guys. They are the most unlikely studio heads I've ever met,

and I've met a couple studio heads, Chuck. But these two, a couple of nice Mormon kids from Utah. Mm-hmm. Potato salesman. Yeah. Homestchooled, aspiring entrepreneurs. Oh, but they were like born entrepreneurs. They were entrepreneurial when they were kids.

They were entrepreneurial before they could pronounce or spell entrepreneurial. They just didn't know it. What they've done with Angel Studios is amazing. If you've been under Iraq for the last few years, you may have missed the chosen, which has completely changed the notion of crowdfunding and Hollywood production. and what's possible with tech, frankly. Yeah. But it's also all fueled and funded by a level of storytelling.

You're just not going to find it in the traditional studios, not just chosen. This is the sound of freedom and shift and say some other movies. Cabrini, which is out right now. Yeah. They're making movies that their audience genuinely and maybe even desperately wants, and now they're making money at it. it like grown-up money. And the fact that they survived, the Walt Disney company, is incredible.

They crowdsourced to pay for that lawsuit. Yes, for their defense. Yeah. If you didn't read about it in the papers, well, you don't need to because we talk about it now. But we talk about a lot of other stuff, too. It's just a lot of fun life lessons from a couple of soft-spoken guys who have flown all the way down here to Sodom and Gomorrah, where I'm sitting, to rattle the cage. of the city of angels. And essentially the whole angel investor kind of thing that the guild is based upon. Well, the guild is kind of a city of angels.

These are the people who are not only benefactors for the endeavor, but they also vote on the projects, and it's the wisdom of the crowd that really comes up with the winners and the losers, or at least the winners that they put money into and actually make. If you like good TV,

and if you love great movies, you'll be interested in this, because it's a completely different way to make them. We call it Surviving Disney, because Neil and Jeff Harmon did exactly that. They're up right after this. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Rowe, my mom was Peggy Noble,

daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation. that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you

that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at microwworks.org. We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants. Thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers,

including the one with my grandfather's name, on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble Tennessee whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com. In fact, if you spend 100 bucks and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast.

Pick up a bottle at noblespirates.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. This is an embarrassment of riches, everybody. The Harmon brothers are here. Neil and Jeff. That's Neil.

That's Jeff. Wearing a Tuttle Twins. Yeah. Yeah, I wore this because you're in a future episode. And I'm very excited. I sang a song and everything. Have you heard it? I have not heard it yet.

Dan's your brother, right? Yeah, he's a brother. He's between us. He's actually the brother between us. How many are you, total? We're nine, six boys and three girls. Who's the oldest? Theron?

Theron. Yeah, so Theron, then Michelle, then me. But he's the oldest of the ones you know. Right. So Theron, Michelle, Neil. Yes. Daniel. Daniel.

Jeff. I'm the middle. I'm the middle of nine kids. You're the middle of nine, Jeff. And then Dan. No, no, Daniel's between us. Oh, Daniel's between you. Okay. Who's after Dan?

The me. Then Jeffrey, then. Jenny. Jenny. Then Dalland, then Jordan. And then Kalisha. And Jordan's the other one on our team. And he's the youngest boy.

I just love that Neil's already forgotten. the names of your brothers and sisters. Watching you struggle. I mean, there are nine of you. You're from Utah. I just forget the order. I don't forget their names. I don't know, man.

The look on your face was the decided expression of, could be Frank, Sam, Biff, was it? Who knows? The obvious challenge, or maybe it's not so obvious for me anyway, is where to begin. You're not only making movies about David and Goliath. You're living David and Goliath. You're living David and Goliath.

I'm up to speed. I think with the incredible crucible that was your great Disney adventure. Oh, yeah, that was fun. Which makes me think like a whole new meaning for you must be this tall to get on the ride, man, because you picked a fight and I need to understand. I want people to understand just how bizarre all of that was where Vid Angel led to Angel Studios, which of course led to the Chosen, which led to the Sound of Freedom, which led to what, a dozen projects currently in production, TV, the Tuttle Twins, the Guild, the way you guys vet your ideas. All of this is super interesting to me because back in the day, on dirty jobs, all the ideas for that show came from the viewer.

And the same thing on somebody's got to do it and returning the favor. And I just felt that that was such an interesting way to program a show, but I never imagined anybody would ever build a studio around that same MO. But before we get to all that, I really want to talk about feces from every species. I want to talk about advertising. And I want to understand, like the Harmon Brothers Advertising Agency and Poo-Pri and Squatty-Potty and those videos that so many millions of people have seen. Neil, how many people have seen those videos and know it was you guys behind it? a couple of nice Mormon kids from Utah, dragging potty conversations into the dinner. I think zero until there was an article done by a lady from the Washington Post.

She wrote an article on us and... She was trying to figure out why the New York ad agencies seem to jump over the line when they hit these issues. Yeah. And they fell. Right. And we held the line and succeeded. For a broad audience.

people are behind this to be able to find that line. And she came to the conclusion in this Washington Post Magazine article, she says, maybe it takes people who are acutely aware of the line and stay off the edge to know where that line is. Oh, man. Meaning because we're Latter-day Saints and we have pretty strong. Lines. There are lines in the doctrine. Yes. Yes. That's right.

But you guys have clearly put up a big. tent and the things you did in advertising that were just straight up entertaining and also effective yes I think are really instructive to what you've done with movie making so maybe I'm starting in the wrong place maybe it's before that maybe like what happened to two of nine kids to sort of inculcate this advertising mindset because I just don't think of great advertising and Mormons in the same sentence with great respect. Yeah, that's fair. We grew up as entrepreneurs because we grew up very, very poor. And nine kids, our nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away. Our dad had lost his farm when we were little. What kind of farm?

Potatoes, grain, farms. Beats, sugar beets, sugar beets, grain, and potatoes, and they'd take turns. All your basic tubers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he had lost his farm. We struggled financially a lot during our growing up years. We didn't know that.

But our parents were very aware of that to the point that cheese was like maybe a few times a year inside of our fridge. That was a luxury item. And it wouldn't make it 24 hours. Yeah. With nine, you know, famished kids. just prowling around. Yeah, well, we had lots of lentils. And my dad invented what he called wheat mush, which he just took buckets of wheat, just normal weed, ground them into flour, and then would boil it in water. And if you just eat it before it turns into glue,

it sticks to your ribs. It's pretty good. Like, you just stick a lot of butter in it and eat it before it, like, for it solidifies. Did they call it wheat mush? We called it wheat mush, yeah. It was homemade cream of wheat. It was what we, So you're poor, and there's almost not quite enough to eat. How did your parents fool you into thinking that you weren't? I don't think they fooled us. It's just that we grew up in the country in Idaho. So we would go out in the field and tie sticks to our bikes and make masks.

And then put sheets on them. And then when the winds would hit 70 miles an hour in Idaho, off you go. Off we go as fast as we can burn through the fields. We build tree houses. houses in our backyard. Food was the least of our worries. We were just having fun. Lots of trees, lots of farms. Do you think that informed not just your entrepreneurial spirit, but just your imagination, figuring out how to make the best of a 70 mile an hour wind? So when we were young,

our friends would have toys for Christmas. Legos or Transformers, and we couldn't afford them. So Christmas for us was when our grandma, from you, Utah, her husband taught at a university. They'd bring home all the term papers that were just printed on one side and then give us the paper and had a blank white boxes of paper and a roll of masking tape. And if we could have a box of one-sided paper with a rolling masking tape. And then crayons. We would build like Galilean ships, castles, whole entire armies of both sides. We build aircraft carriers, all these things. We just build and build and build our own toys.

Or build airplanes that are used tubes and then you get the paper and then you get up on the roof of the house and throw the airplane off. Like big huge six foot wingspan airplanes and throw them off. That coast for like a minute. Yeah, yeah. See how far we can make them coast. Sometimes they just. So that's what they did. They gave you permission.

Yeah. That's right. That's right. And our mom was one of the early homeschoolers. She decided to pull us out of school. When? When? Do homeschooling.

I was in fifth grade. Was there an inciting incident? Did something happen in the schools that made her go, no, we can do, we can do better here? Good question. I have never asked her. So there, can we get her on the phone? Yeah. Well, surprise, surprise.

Come on in, Miss Harvey. We got some questions. Maybe, maybe Neil can answer. He's older than me. So there was a sex education program that was proposed. that had come from California. And our mother, she got onto the news. We were very embarrassed.

I wasn't. I didn't know about it. Because she was out fighting this program saying, you know, where I've seen this program spread, there have been more sexually transmitted diseases, there's more promiscuity, all these things. Talking about this stuff was actually detrimental to... She was probably concerned about if the state is educating your kids on sex, what happens if their morals change from...

That's right. So she was worried about this. I remember this was probably... So the first one she tried doing homeschool was my oldest brother and oldest sister. And she did it for one year, and she tried to do it like the public school system where she went. And she taught an hour of each subject. And they rejected it, went back to school. and then by the time it got to me

and I left right after seventh grade, I think. She just let me do whatever I wanted to do. And she tried to encourage me to read. In other words, she was tired. Yeah. She must have been. Well, I mean, it's kind of amazing. I mean, a lot of parents have that same concern,

but very, very few take that sort of affirmative step. I mean, get nine kids to homeschool. That's a colossal decision. And you said she was on the news railing about this, like the local news? That was when I was younger. I remember it very well. But I got... Hold on, hold on, Jeff.

So there you are home. I'm assuming you're watching the TV or listening to the radio and you see your mom. Yeah, I saw my mom on the news station talking about the sex education program and how it shouldn't be in our school system. I do that makes her awesome Yeah and I do today Like today but when I was in seventh grade I was you know when you're What am I missing? Is that what you were thinking?

I'm just like mom I'm kind of curious about some of this Well look I'm just I mean I don't want to belabor the point But I just think that for every significant thing That winds up happening later in life There's almost something that rhymes from the old days And when I think about sound of freedom And when I think about some of the other

films you're working on and when I think about your own passion for overhauling the foster care system where so much sex trafficking happens today it does seem like there's a line that can go back to poor Neil sitting there in the living room and seeing his mom on TV railing against which he sees is the proximate cause of a lot of these same problems yeah and if you think about the selling side learning sales skills I got sick of homeschooling and I decided to try to go to private school our uncle had started a private school during this period and there was a girl I had a crush on

and she went to the school and I wanted to go to the school and in order to do that I went up to my grandparents' farm got potatoes, bought potatoes out of their potato cellar got simplot boxes from the local place for like 50 cents put the two together

and then would take them down to Utah when my dad would drive down for work and sell them door to doors an 11 year old. What part of Utah? It was Provo, Utah, right next to where my grandpa, who was a professor at the university there,

I would go in his neighborhood. And I'd be like, hi, I'm Frank Harmon's grandson, and I'm selling fresh Idaho potatoes to pay for my schooling, private schooling. And if an 11-year-old knocks on your door and says that, it works. Yeah. And I would sell.

over $100 an hour of potatoes. And I was like, oh, this is pretty good. Wait a minute. And you're how old, 11? 11, yeah. So you're making, well, you're selling $100 an hour. Yeah. And I'm imagining there's a fair amount of profit in the spud market.

Well, I would buy the potato boxes. I think it was about less than $3 to get. For costs. For costs. Then I bummed a ride from my dad would load up 600 pounds of potatoes in his Fort Torres wagon. And then when he was working down and, Utah, I would just ride my grandpa's 21-inch bike, which was way too big for me around his

neighborhood, and then deliver potatoes. Hawking potatoes. Yeah. That's amazing. So this is your younger brother, Neil, and you got a front row seat to this. I don't actually remember this. You remember the sex ed thing. Yeah, you remember the sex ed pretty well.

That's seared into your own. I don't know about that part. I'm too young for that part. I went to the same school. I would go to the. Costco and buy a bunch of bulk Costco goods and then go sell them at school to pay for my But our parents couldn't pay for schooling. Yeah.

So we either had to have scholarships or go get jobs. So did you do both? Yeah, I had some scholarships. There were some people that I don't know who they were that would help pay for school to. Through the church or through? I don't know. What did you major it? Where'd you go?

That was private school. That's why I was during high school. And then I went to a community college at night, got enough credits, and then went to university at Brigham Young University, and studied marketing. Same path, more or less for you? No. I went to BYU right, or like 17 or 18, which is an interesting story because I couldn't get in

because I didn't have a high school diploma. Because you were homeschooled. I was homeschooled, but I'd done this private school, and it wasn't accredited. So they said, you've got to get above a 28 on the ACT to even be considered. And so I went and started taking the test, and I took practice tests at different colleges. And then I came to BYU to take the test, and it ended up being the same test that I took at another college, which helped me get over the hump to get the 28 on the ACT. So, yeah, I went to BYU, and I.

I'm kind of a jack of all trades master of none. So I just, super liberal arts. Like I did computer science, you did humanities and English and math or whatever. I just did everything. Then I found a degree where I could just do whatever I wanted. It was called American Studies.

And then I did a master's degree in instructional psychology and technology and then learned a code, kind of taught myself to code. How many languages do you do? I don't know. But I got pretty proficient in a half a dozen languages or so. And so I got to entrepreneurship. Built the first vid angel.

Yeah, I coded the first version of VidAngel. And built the Orrbrush site. Yeah. Okay. Do we want to go to Vid. I don't want to get to Vid Angel yet, but I don't want people to be confused. Vid Angel, as I understand it, was really a software program of sorts. that allowed parents to essentially take inappropriate parts out of movies

or parts they didn't want their kids to see. Right. Okay. We'll get to that. But I got to better understand what we do with this weird mix of entrepreneurship, potato selling, homeschooled, with really no sexual education to speak up. It's absolutely no idea what's going on. Well, if you count the number of kids we have,

they know somebody somewhere in the Harmon household has figured something out. And so, yeah, I mean, look, I don't know anybody who grew up on any farm anywhere who doesn't understand the basics. Yes. But everything you've said so far kind of lays the groundwork for what feels like a big reverse commute. And it seems like all of that, somehow your marketing background combined with your technology and you mentioned some psychiatric studies, right?

It's an instructional site. psychology and technology. Okay. Yeah. So it's science of how people learn and how to use modern technology to facilitate learning. Or, as we like to say, how to sell them stuff. Yeah. Okay.

So these two skill sets combine. And so let's just at least spend a couple of minutes where our paths truly do intersect. Because not to make this crass, but it was a certain eight-year-old fascination with bodily functions that put dirty jobs on the map. you know i mean there were some big themes around the show and a lot of universal things but fundamentally it's just a grown man making poop jokes in a septic tank and kids laughing with the light and when i saw that unicorn one of you geniuses dreamed up pooping out would appear to be orange sherbert yeah in an attempt to sell i just yeah um so we went from potato cells to uh my um i'm gonna have to jumped to warbrush first.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I've had the war brush. We've got to talk about different bad smells. Yeah, so I was in my last day of my last class at school, and I'm in the back, and I'm sitting there not paying attention reading like Mashable and TechCrunch blogs because I didn't pay much attention in school. And later Nightline came out to Utah. I was the second time they'd ever been to Utah just to talk about Warbrush.

And they were on BYU campus with me. saying, so did you learn everything you need to know to do marketing while you're at university? And I said, well, actually, I learned everything I do for work while I wasn't paying attention in school. So I was in the back of the class and this guy named Dr. Bob came and he was 72 year old man who had invented this tongue cleaner called Orabrush. And this student group was saying, you need to partner with Procter & Gamble or Colgate or somebody other than trying to sell this yourself because only 8% of people would want to buy this on the internet. And I said 8% of people steal tens of millions of people.

Chunk of people. Why wouldn't you just sell it online? And he came up to me after class and said, can you come work with me to sell this product? I said, okay. And he traded me a motorcycle because he saw that I was still riding a bicycle. I didn't want to get a car until I paid off my debt. And he gave me a motorcycle. motorcycle and we just worked on this project and I had a roommate that was in film and we wrote a

script and I got this co-worker from my day job that would rant about things and everybody would just his name's Austin Craig and everybody would just coerce him into ranting about politics or about anything is very entertaining and I just said one day Austin can you do what you're doing right now but about bad breath on video and he was like yeah and so we wrote up the script and he gets on and he rants about bad breath and teaches about the or brush and teaches that if you take a spoon and you scrape the back of your tongue and then let it dry for just a second and smell it then you can know if you have bad breath and a spoiler alert you do right yeah do do do do do do do do do dumb well people are still raving raving i tell you

about my mother's performance in the latest pure talk commercial and if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Row gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues, you'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see why I love these guys. If, on the other hand, you have better things to do with your time than watch my mom and me be impossibly charming together, than allow me to remind you here, without all the cleverness and charm, that unlimited talk,

text and data on a blazing fast network for just $3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless company that keeps all their customer service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the MicroWorks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just $34.99 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row.

Pure talk. Yeah, yeah, you can. Well, sometimes you don't. If you've used a tongue cleaner, you don't. but if you a 90% of bad breath comes from the back of your tongue not from your teeth and the other 10% of the 9% comes from flossing and brushing is actually like 1% of the problem so clean the back of your tongue that commercial goes big um eric smit CEO of google at the time finds out that we did this on youtube he talks to new york times about us new york times calls

us do a big story on Orrbrush. We meet the co-founders of YouTube because we're the first company to ever monetize YouTube. And then they fly out a team to Utah. We together with that team, we invent the skip ad button. That's a big one. Can't overstate that, man. Yeah, it's a big one, right? I mean, that's just huge. Because among all of its many benefits, it doesn't punish great advertised. That's exactly right. That's right. I told him, I said, look, I don't want 15 seconds. When we first came up with this concept, they were like, well, let's just give them 30 seconds and they can skip it. And I was like, no, no, no, no. If I can keep them on my ad and I earn their attention, let me go for as long as I want. Give me 20 minutes if I can keep them. Right.

And they were like, okay, let's try it. And we have built four minute ads, 10 minute ads, very long ads. I mean, we did the Chosen. We launched with a, I think it was 19 minute, 22 minute ad to sell the investment. The movie itself. Yeah, the movie. Oh, yeah, 19 minutes plus the act called action.

But we invented that skip ad button. And then we built an entire agency around this concept. We sold Aura Brush eventually. It became a pretty big product. It's still in Walmarts. And it's the predominant tongue cleaner in the United States. And then we did poopery. And then we did squatty potty.

Was poopery the woman with like the British accent? Yeah, the British accent. Also during that time, we were like the first sponsor of VidCon. So we got to know all of the influencers. Yeah, Hank and John John. In the close friends. YouTube and kind of grew up with new media. And it seems like, I mean, just to kind of condense it,

there's really no difference in good content. call in an ad or call it a film or call it a TV show or call it an infomercial. If it's entertaining in and of itself, the internet doesn't care. They don't care. I spent, well, I flew down here today like you guys did and I was on YouTube and I can think of two ads that were four minutes long that I watched in their entirety because they were interesting and relevant and really well done. But that, all of that was heretical back then.

both to the ad agency and to this whole new frontier you're on. So, you know, who actually sold it, Neil? Who sold the idea? Did the two of you do it together? I sold to the retailers and Jeffrey did the actual, like the marketing videos. Jeffrey led that. And I went and met with all the retailers throughout the world and built the technology to sell it. Neil was doing technology and business relationships.

And then I recruited Daniel, who does Tuttle Twil. who you know. Yeah. And he came in and he did creative directing. And I came up with concepts. I like Daniel, by the way. Daniel's very good.

I mean, I've only experienced them over the internet. As a kid, he had a photographic memory for ads. He could watch an ad on TV and he would remember every single word, all the inflections, and he could repeat them

while we were working on the farm. He would repeat ads. He was like a dictionary or like a, just like, just like you could just be like you remember this ad and then he'll repeat the ad so and he could do the lines from films too if he went to the movie if he went to a movie which we barely ever did um just to the dollars a show one time he could come back and he would be quoting lines from whatever film and he'd get in trouble if he swore while quoting the line interesting

kind of lays the groundwork for some of what's coming but let's say so you've got or a brush you've got poopery you got squatty potty these are all getting pushed out more or less sequentially and you're developing a reputation for being a very very good ad it if you look at all the top viral video ads social video ads of like the top 25 of the last two decades we've done more of them than any other agency and is it the same sort of template that inspired like was it dollar shave club yes yes dollar shave club long walk-and-talks they actually said that our ads were one of their inspirations for the way they did things.

Mr. Dublin, he called this on the phone once and he was like, yeah, this is you guys and then Old Spice. And he said, I just kind of took them and smash them together. Yeah. So how does advertising morph into whatever's next? We started the agency when Poo-Pourri asked us to leave orebrush and help market Poo-Pourri. and at the same time when the founder of Poopery invited us out to Hawaii, we, you're laughing. I'm just sorry, man, you're just so soft-spoken and it's just so matter of fact.

Sentences a lot of people haven't heard before. When the founder of Poopery invited us out to have a serious conversation about, we love what you did with the bad breath. And, you know, the whole farting thing we think is super universal. So we just want to talk about what's next. Well, we had this spreadsheet of business ideas and what we wanted to do next, and one of them was Vid Angel. And we decided to do Vid Angel because we had young children and we loved great storytelling. And to be honest, my nine-year-old was learning the principle of honesty.

I wanted to share with him Cinderella Man. Great movie. Amazing movie. But he had little sisters, and I didn't want him repeating all the words from the coach. His coach, his trainer. Yes. his trainer. He had a mouth on it.

Which, that was it. So I went and coated up some software to make it so he could watch that scene where Russell Crow takes the boy back to the butcher's office, butcher's shop, returns the salami. They come out on the sidewalk and then he bends down and he says, son, we don't steal. That's what I wanted to see, that moment. And that's the reason I made the technology. And then this year later, we were evaluating our options and decided to do some research and said there's about half of American parents

who would want this kind of tech. And so we were debating whether to make this the next business. Jeffrey wasn't interested. He's like, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's like, hey, Neil, did it occur to you that directors might not be down with a couple of potato salesmen rewriting their movies? Turns out Jeffrey was on to something.

Yep, he had the most accurate prediction of that business. But I told him, hey, there's something to change. A family movie act got passed since the 12 companies were put out of business. All the ones that had tried to pretty much been sued. So other companies had tried to implement. On DVDs and Blu-rays and-Barrays and-HS. They got sued by a bunch of directors and put out of business. So you knew this as you jumped into it?

But one of those companies went and at, Congress to make a law, to make an exception to copyright, and it was called the Family Movie Act. It was passed in 2005. But by the time it was passed, like all those companies were already in the graveyard. Right. So now we fast forward, and we've got young children. It's 2012 when I wrote the software, 2013, when we decided to start the business, there was this law. And then I said to Jeffrey, hey, I've had this idea or this vision that if we, you, build this technology and we attract those parents who care about great storytelling but also care about the values their kids have in the home, then we're going to have a group of people

for whom we can actually do better storytelling maybe than even Hollywood could. And Jeffrey's like, oh, I love this idea. That's interesting. And children are terrific, but please tell me you also have a lawyer at this point. Yes. Yeah. Neil actually, through some different connections, we eventually found this attorney who had been the Oscars attorney for 26 years. Yeah, and he had represented Disney. He was the co-founder of the second largest firm in the world, Quinn Emmanuel. And he worked for Disney, Warner Brothers, and he was 60 at the time. And he said, you know what? I want to end my career doing something really good. As opposed to just, I want to end my career. And he started counseling us. And, and, um,

helped us figure out how to use the Family Movie Act with modern streaming technology, and then had us ride all the studios and ask for their feedback. You said this is super interesting. This law has never been litigated. Yep. Not permission. Feedback. Yes.

So you ask Warner Brothers. You asked Disney. Sent everybody a letter. He sent everybody a letter. It was very clear the Family Movie Act wasn't about permission. The reason that existed was because they would never give permission. It was an exception to copyright. exemption is what it was called and so we gave them the chance to give us feedback they didn't

and about a year after when our service was taken off and we were growing about twice the speed of Netflix at the same age uh Disney Warner brothers and Fox sued us and uh yeah so yeah okay Jeff they didn't just sue you they came after you with a hatchet yes they weren't trying to recover some modest loss or they weren't trying to send a message. They were trying to crush you. And they want to send a message to the industry to never do this. But everything you had done up to that point had to be under the umbrella of advice of counsel, right? I mean, that's what we were told. Yeah. But in the actual trial, the judge threw out that defense. There was actually a situation where Neil's on the stand testifying. They said, why did you make this decision?

And Neil said, well, I was meditating, trying to figure out what to do, and I wrote down in my journal, what I should do is follow the advice of my counsel. After the judge had told you, you can't invoke those words. And then they were just like, objection. You cannot use advice of counsel. He's like, you ask me the question. This is what I wrote. And then they chewed out Neil in front of the jury. Oh, man.

That's brilliant, though. That's like my grandmother, who never said a bad word in her life. unless she was quoting someone, in which case, like, she really leaned into it. Uh-huh. So you did what the judge affirmatively told you not to do under the guys. Except it was what he was telling me to do. It wasn't under the guys. It's like, how do you even tell the truth? Right.

But they asked the question. They opened the door. Yeah. That's right. Okay. So at this point, the case is getting a fair amount of press, right? Oh, yeah. Okay.

And this is, I'm assuming, an L.A. courtroom? Yes. They call it the bank. Yeah. We learned. later that the attorneys in that area called this courthouse is in downtown LA just close to here the bank because if you take a lawsuit if a Hollywood studio takes a lawsuit to that location they get a check oh man okay so it's one big happy sort of family obviously in this town

everybody knows where and how the bread is buttered and at this point do you realize that you've truly picked a fight with not just one but a couple of Goliath's? Yeah, so we thought we were going to do well. Because Quinto, we've got David Quinto, David versus Gwinter. David. David.

David Quinto is your lawyer. Yes, he's our lawyer. Oh, this really is David versus Goliath. Oh my gosh, perfect. And there's all kinds of news articles about him switching sides. That's right. They said it was one of the most interesting moves in the last decade in Hollywood was when he switched sides. So Quinto has been... The Oscar attorney for 27 years.

Right. So friend of the court. He worked for Disney, worked for Pixar, worked for Warner. He worked for these companies. And now he's representing you guys. Yeah. And he says, you know what?

I wouldn't necessarily use your tech, but he's like a classical liberal. Like he says, my daughter watched Gings of New York with me when she was like five or six. Like, I wouldn't use your tech. but this law is clear, you should have the right to do this. Instead, I believe in your right to do this. Yeah, and so I'm going to fight for your right to do this.

Classic lawyer, right? The good old-fashioned kind of lawyer. Clarence Darrow. Yes. And so when the jury, the jury basically split, they were asking for $120 million in damages, and they got 60. We were making them money that they wanted.

Yeah, so they got 60. Their attorney said it was the highest per-title copyright damages. award in history, worse than pirates. Oh my God. These farm boys from Idaho trying to make a tech for their kids and making the studio's money

get worse than pirates. It wasn't about the money for them, right? It was about the example. It was about the example. Well, and it's also, I mean, just the cognitive dissonance that surrounds a brand like Disney. And we all know how radically

the perceptions, you know, it's no longer Walt Disney sitting on the corner of the desk, welcoming the country to the wonderful world of, right? Most people are realizing that. But for you guys to come along and say, we need to make Disney family friendly. I think every single movie I watched as a kid was a Disney movie.

Me too. Every single one. I can't think of an exception. We built tree houses like playing out Swiss family Robinson. Raffs. We'd play out in the fields like we were like the empire was coming to attack us. Like this was our childhood, was Disney childhood. Please don't tell me there's a sad old yeller story in this.

Because that one... There is, but I won't get into that because our dog, the way you went. Oh, no. All right, well, we'll circle back to that. Okay, so you are literally, what year are we in now when you get dinged for 60-some million dollars? It was 2019 when we got hit with the judgment. Man, but that's four and a half years into it. Before that, we had to figure out of fund fighting the lawsuit because even though you have David

Quinto, there was this new law Obama had passed or signed that was called the Jobs Act. And it allowed not just millionaires to invest in new projects, but allowed common people to invest. So we took this law and said, do you guys want to fund a lawsuit to our customers? Oh, wow. Are these the people who are essentially the guild today? Oh, yeah. They're the beginning of the guild. The beginning of the guild.

They're the beginning of the guild. We didn't know that at the time. Just sidebars so people understand. Angel Studios uses the guild, which is basically a bunch of people who affirmatively pay money to, in essence, crowdsource or crowd fund ideas that they collectively agree upon. Yes. Right? So these are people who affirmatively want to see a certain kind of programming. But before you proved yourselves to them, with the programming, they're just here around this concept.

So the first thing you do is go to them and say, do you want to fight a lawsuit with us? Yeah, we go to the customers of Vitting. Angel and we said nobody's ever had the money to fight a lawsuit around this law. And if you fund it, we'll fight it. And we think it'll take at least $5 million to fight this up the courts. And they turned around and 8,000 people, families from all over the world invested $11 million in five days. Unbelievable. To fight a court case.

And we capped it at $25,000. You couldn't invest more than $25,000. Wow. Because we didn't want anybody to, like, throw too much out of it. And we said, if we win, there's good upside. But this is probably suicide, right? This is a- People don't win.

Nobody beats Disney. Nobody beats Disney. Yeah, and no one's ever tested this all before. Surviving Disney is beating them. Surviving Disney. There you go. Yeah. So we were, 2016 is when they sued us.

We raised the money by November of 2016. And then Daniel calls. Daniel calls and says, Hey, this chicken and egg problem we've been facing on you can't have great content unless you have great distribution and vice versa.

Maybe we can solve that with the same law that we can raise the money for a show, make a great show, and then go and get the distribution. So that's where the idea was born for the crowdfunding component of what we've done. December 12th of 2016, we were having a company party, two-day party.

One day was just strategy celebration. The next day was all the families were coming for dinner. The night of the 12th, the judge says, you got to shut down your company. So we stay up all night long and strategize how we're going to take, because we're being shut down. We're going to have zero income. But we have $10 million. But we raised $10 million.

But zero income. And so we went to that Christmas party that following day, invited all the press in, and announced we were starting a studio. Oh, my God of me. Yeah. So, and we announced Drive Our Comedy. And we also said we were going to distribute the abolitionist, which was Tim Ballard's story at the time.

And after we announced it, the author. author of the book from Poop to Gold, which is the story of Harmon Brothers, the agency, Chris Jones, he came up to us and he said, I have a feeling that tonight, that Disney made the biggest mistake, we're gonna look back decades from now and say, Disney made the biggest mistake

by shutting you down because they created their competitor. And they did you the biggest favor. Yeah, well, they put us into a lot of pain and pain creates innovation. Wherever there's comfort, there's pain. Crowd-in-house, four seasons in one day. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being

deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high quality American grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. And Ben's absolute determination to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meat eaters like me that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to Good Ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the

quality not been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from Good Ranchers has been straight up delicious, and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch. Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40 off your first order. Just use Code Mike at Good Ranch. dot com free meat for life 40 bucks off your first order good ranchers dot com American meat delivered if you could eat a steer if you could eat a cow don't take a chance on a foreign ranch get good ranchers now so what a moment though man when they make the movie about your life that's going to be the company party it's a two-day affair halfway through you got the worst news and then you make the

I mean, it's a balsy announcement at a very difficult time. You're launching a studio. It's just, I mean, we just said, hey, if they're not going to play ball, we're just going to compete with them. And we'll see how this goes. And we knew that because we had planned to start the storytelling part when we got to a million paying customers. That month that we got shut down,

I think that month we had around 200,000 people who paid us. And we're like, we're not going to have another chance. Let's just go for the content or the storytelling phase. We have the money in the bank. Yeah. So you were being advised, Jeff, by someone smart said, don't go into production until you get a million people standing by. People here in Hollywood saying that's the time.

You need a million subscribers before you can launch. So that's what we were building up to before they shut us down. Yep. We start Drybar. We start the Chosen. All in bankruptcy. We filed bankruptcy because the studios were threatening to sue us personally and because a guy from the East Coast told us if we filed bankruptcy,

we could shield ourselves from a predator who wants to put us out of business. So we did that. That bought us some more time so that trial ended up being 2019. Oh, wait. So you're in Chapter 11 then? Yes. We did it intentionally. Okay.

Yes. There was a New York attorney that reached out to us and said, I've been following your case. You're in L.A. If you use Chapter 11, you can actually shield these, like, Clearly they're predatory. So shield yourself using the law of chapter 11. It doesn't mean you're going to go bankrupt.

Like you're bankrupt, but it's not the way you think of it. Yeah, you're doing business. And then you shield yourselves from the predator. And when you file, it will automatically move the case to Utah. Like under federal law.

That's a friendly revenue for some potato salesman. Yeah. Yeah. Get out of Sodom and Gimorra. Yeah. Get back to Provo. Yeah. So we brought it back to Utah, at least the bankruptcy case stayed in Utah.

And that allowed us to, in the end, that allowed us to survive. Wow. So if you hadn't filed for 11, you'd have wound up in seven, I suppose. Seven in California. Yes. And that's that. Game over. It would have been over.

So you go back to the guild. When does the first project come beyond just the- Yeah. So we did dry bar comedy. Oh, I'm sorry. Got it. Explain what that is real quick. Dry bar comedy is just, the concept is we looked at Jim Gaffigan, Brian Regan, Cosby with an asterisk.

But these clean comedians were the biggest comedians. They're the biggest. And it was like, well, what if we took and built a brand around comedians that are clean so that people can discover more than just Brian and Jim Gaffigan? And when we first started, we hired Christian comedians. or like clean comedians, and they turned out to not be very funny. That's a problem. Yeah. Yeah.

And then the realization hit at the ad agency, I would always hire comedians and train them to be marketers because it was easier to take a comedian and train them to be a marketer than it is to take a marketer and make them funny. In fact, it's impossible the other way around it. The comedians can be marketers. So the concept was, what if we take funny comedians and just teach them to be clean? And so we would get, we moneyballed it and got all these up and coming comedians who hadn't made it yet, brought them in and said, you just need to do 40 minutes of clean content. That's it.

40 minutes of content that's safe for a mom to listen to in her house while she does laundry with the kids around. That's the use case. Like mom in a minivan, mom in her house doing laundry. Kids don't have to understand it. It's not necessarily like family comedy. It's just funny and it's safe for your home. Sure. And we did three seasons, invested in three seasons, finally got dry bar comedy off the ground.

And now it has over five billion views worldwide. And we've done over 600 comedians. So that show's been very successful. Then we were trying, because Daniel had come up with that idea. He said we can fund a show with crowdfunding. And I was looking for the show. And Disney's bearing down on us. we are we're in bankrupt

we're about to file bankruptcy at this point and a friend of ours and colleague Matthew Farachi he's an orthodox Jew sends me an email that says short film there's a little v-meal link I click on it open it and it's this short film

of a shepherd boy meeting Jesus as a baby in the nativity and for the next few hours after watching this short film it was like a flood of ideas and information just came where it was like we can take these skip ad button concept we can take the crowdfunding that we did for angel studios we can take all the advertising that we've done over the years and we can mash this all together in one big 20 minute ad and then we'll crowd

fund 10 million dollars for a series around the Bible that was the concept and I called Matthew, after a few hours of just like these ideas flooding in and said, Matthew, tell me this guy, like this guy Dallas can make him series. Like he said, and I sent it to you because he's got a series idea. Dallas Jenkins. Dallas Jenkins. And I set up a meeting with Dallas. Then I told Neil, I think I found the show.

I found the show that we're going to launch Angel like the crowdfunding Angel Studios platform on. And you'll say, oh, great, what is it? And I was like, it's a biblical show. Yeah. And he's picturing bath robes and, you know. Yeah, yeah. Or just this is what churches do. Right.

Right. We really don't want to be in that church world. Churches can do this a good job. I said, Neil just watch it. So Neil, he picked it up, put on earphones, and he watched the short film. Yeah. And like I said earlier, I had this vision of collecting a group of people and then being able to tell stories better for them than,

Hollywood and I finished this short film and I took off my head the headphones and Jeff was waiting for me. The shepherd reminds us of us. Right. We were farm boys and I was there. I was there for Jesus's birth. That's what it felt like for me in that moment. And I also realized at that moment no church committee is ever going to be able to create this kind of storytelling. So I took off my headphones and said to Jeff, this is why we created a Vindangel. This is the reason. Right. And I told Neil, I was like, well, we got our work cut out for us because Dallas Jenkins is a Hollywood director. Not super successful, but he cares deeply about not skipping and muting his content. Yeah.

Which, by the way, I mean, devil's advocate, you can understand the creative pushback behind the suit. Yeah. I mean, there is something, I would think especially for a director to think that some entity is out there taking what might be his favorite part out of Cinderella man. Just because blah, blah, blah, right? And I mean, yeah, that's tricky. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, totally get it.

So Dallas is against it. We sold them on it later. The second thing is we're being sued by the biggest studio in the world, two biggest studios. Third thing is we are about to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Four thing, we're Latter-day Saints. We're members of the Church of Jesus Christ, the Latter-day Saints. or Mormons. And Dallas is a Baptist.

And he's not just a Baptist. He's like Baptist royalty. Oh, is he? His dad is Jerry B. Jenkins, the author of the Left Behind series. Oh. Yeah. Left behind. Yes.

Yeah. Sure. Which is one of the best selling book series of all time. Yeah. So he's like super Baptist. And- So wait a minute. This guy, what's his name?

Matt. Matthew Farachi. Orthodox Jew. So you got an Orthodox Jew, a super Baptist, a couple of Mormons. Two Mormon farm boys. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. All walking to a bar. Or the end of one.

Yeah, a couple of Mormons, a Jew and a Baptist, walk into Hollywood. Right. What could possibly go wrong. Yeah. And then the final thing is we were crowdfunding and Dallas did not like the idea of crowdfunding. So I said, Neil just pray for me because I'm going to get on this phone call. I spent two hours on the phone with him telling him like, this is a remote troll. Like you choose.

I don't want rape scenes in Game of Thrones, but my teenager wants to watch Game of Thrones. So I'm going to pull out the rape scenes. And he got that. He said, oh, if the end user is the one doing it, rather than you as a company, you're just like the control. On the downside, Game of Thrones is now six minutes long. That's what I was thinking. I was saying. That's right.

Yeah. You could sit down with your family and watch the credits together. Right. Maybe. So, but he got sold on that. And at the end, he was like, okay. my wife and I will come out and meet you guys. I said if we're going to get married essentially,

like building a multi-season TV series is a big, big project. Then you need to come out here and meet us and get to know us because our doctrines are different. It's a movie about Jesus, series about Jesus. We're not going to try to control anything about the series. Like that's not our model. The filmmaker makes the creative decisions,

but you still need to meet us and get to know us. He comes out, watches a baby blessing from Jordan, his wife. And then we pitched him. We said, look, let's build a flagship series together that can launch a streaming platform. And let's make it this TV series. You didn't have a name for it yet. And they said yes.

And then after they said yes, we were like, and we're filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. You still want to do it. You guys just like double, triple dog dare. Everybody getting in business. And Amanda was just like, sure, let's do it. And we started crowdfunding, and it was the hardest 18 months. It took us 18 months. It wasn't five days.

Like, Vet Angel was five days to raise $10 million. This one was 18 months of grueling, grinding difficulty. And coming within weeks of the bottom of our cash. Yeah. We bet the company on it. We put over half of all our employees on building technologies around the crowdfunding, building technologies around distribution, lending them money to be able to crowd fund. At the beginning, actually, the very first step was after that meeting is Matthew Farachi,

Neil and I in Dallas. We're like, let's buy the film. Let's buy the film from the church that made it, this little church in Chicago. What was the film called? The Shepherd. The Shepherd. It was called The Shepherd. It's called the shepherd.

And we quickly decided Angel Studios. This is the soundtrack of the podcast, by the way. Yeah. It's just like every episode there's at least one giant. I think it adds a certain verisimilitude. Right. I mean, a story like this with some first responder just driving like the wind through Santa Monica in the distance, I just think it rhymes.

It's awesome. It's great. Go ahead. So we're, now I lost my train of thought, Neil, if you remember where I was. The Shepherd. Yeah, so we were shopping around the Shepherd and the fact that we were going to buy it back from the church. Then David Quinto says to, because we said, how do we structure this so that Disney can't get their hands on it if they win? Because we hadn't been to trial yet.

Right. And he said, you know, created it as a separate entity. we said, we're doing that. He said, since you've been threatened personally, you probably shouldn't be the ones to put up the money. Like you and Jeffrey.

Disney was saying they were going to sue us personally. Oh. Yes. And you got to understand, like during this period of time, my wife had to deal with, coming outside, there would be cars with California plates

sitting outside of our house regularly. And outside of our offices. Yeah, outside of our offices. Private investigators, just watching, trying to look for, anything. Anything. And so there was a, there was an element.

The attorney said, well, if you want to keep this show safe from Disney, you guys can't invest. So the next task was, six weeks later, we're trying to find investors. And Dallas went and found one named Earl Seals. Matthew Farachi invested. And then there was, I got Darle Eve's and Ricky Ray Baller, two of my friends. And they put together the initial money to buy the show out of the church. and then we work together hand in hand but two different companies to raise the money and we put 57% of our company's resources at this thing for two years over two years and millions of dollars

of capital going into this and Dallas is working his I mean he's just answering every single message he went to the mat for it and I get this message and I get this message as we're starting to see as successful, Dallas text this message. He says, earlier this year, I was faced with the biggest disappointment of my career. I went from a hot director with three successful companies wanting to make movies with me to Hollywood irrelevant in about three hours. That was when his movie, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, flopped to the box office. And if you haven't heard of it, that's why.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. And Amanda and I were home alone, shell-shocked, and God showed himself to us in many. ways I'll tell you about sometime. But the two clearest messages we got were one, you're responsible to bring your loaves and fish and God feeds the 5,000. Number two, and Amanda felt God say to her, and she had no idea what it meant, I work in an impossible math. She thought that might mean a box

office turnaround and a miracle for my film, but that didn't happen. And she still wondered what it meant until tonight when it's becoming clear that God is taking the loaves and fishes of this texturing and doing impossible math. Amanda said to me, that is what he was referring to. Grateful for you guys. And we raised between, we helped the chosen raise 10 million dollars to do season one. In chunks. He filmed episodes of one through four in Texas in the cold and then, or was that in the heat? That was in the cold. That was in the cold. Later one thing. And then we finished raising the money in early 2019, January of 2019. Yes.

And then we launched episodes one through four on streaming. I remember Dallas calling us and being like, guys, you remember how they were in the wilderness for 40 years? And then Joshua takes them across and they go to the promised land. He's like, that's where we're at. Because it felt like 18 months of wilderness. When was it called the Chosen? So between the time we met Dallas.

and brought in Ricky and Daryl. I remember we named it The Chosen. We were in an Airbnb going over branding and ideas and decided on the name The Chosen. Frotchi, I think, had come up with the idea with Dallas. Yeah. Yeah, so we named the show together, The Chosen. And then we didn't want any control.

The one thing we asked for is we said, you've got to get a biblical scholar from every major faith group. We don't count, Latter-day Saints. We're not major faith group, but you need a Catholic, you need a Protestant, you need a biblical scholar from every single major. Because this is going to be personal through a lot of people and a lot of different ways. Yeah, this is your governance.

There's different levels of like, I disagree with it or I will not support. I won't watch the show if you have this in the script or I will fight against the show. And so basically it was if they're in these like extreme categories, you need to go back and rewrite the scripts. And we're not going to govern you beyond that. You just got to agree. that every faith group has a say, and if they get really vehemently against it, you need to just tweak the script. And there were a few times that he's... So what kind of pushback did you get from your own doctrine?

From the Church of Latter-day Saints? When we launched the show, the church never had an issue. It was the people... The community. I'd go tell them, like, I want you to watch this show I've been working on for two years, and they'd be like, I don't want to watch that. You gave a Baptist control over the message. Right.

there's no way I'm going to like like trust that message trust that message and when they watched it turned out they really love it but it took a while like within our own community it was really hard to get people to watch sorry Neil but that is the most interesting thing to me it's like the internecine fights and the squabbles over doctrine I mean because it just seems to exist no matter how granular it gets you know Presbyterian I mean you just down the list of goes different fights. Right. And basically, you're talking about a group of people that probably agree on 75% of everything, but they can't come together to affirmatively get done what you got did. Yes.

Which is an awful way to... Well, in the way, I feel like looking backwards, God helped put to orchestrate this. He brought us to the lowest point in our company. And then he brought Dallas James. the Super Baptist to the lowest point in his life, his career, and then brought us together. And without that, it would... What about this Jewish guy? What's waiting for him? Farati. Yeah. What's the... I know that question is going.

Oh, that's great. He must be walking around looking over his shoulder. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. So the... And then we were able to come together, and then we didn't take any control over the message. We just said, get major, major scholars from every major religion and make sure you don't offend any of them. As long as you don't offend them, it'll be the broadest audience possible. We need the commercially broadest audience possible.

And there were definitely, there have been fights between Dallas and those biblical scholars where they go at it and the movie's better for it. The series is way better for it. Yep. Let them work it out. The audience doesn't care. You know, make whatever sauces you have to make. but just show me a good movie.

I confess, I don't about you, Chuck. I think you told me about this. The Chosen? I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. I heard about it from Bill Marcily. Do you know him? He wrote the movie Deja Vu.

Okay. And it was like at the end of COVID. He called me up and said, hey, man, I got to get out. Let's go have lunch. It'll be fun, right? Because nobody had gone to a restaurant in a while. And of course, you ask somebody, well, so what are you watching? And he said, The Chosen.

And I'm like, great. Yeah, it's about the disciples. And it's very, very real. It's like Jesus is a human. He has a sense of humor. And I'm like, oh, that sounds interesting. What network? And he goes, that's the weird thing.

He goes, you got to Google, how do I watch the Chosen? That's what he told me. Yeah. You have to download an app. Yeah. And that's actually what got me. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure.

But if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA, making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades.

They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see, too, how easy it is to get involved.

Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, US, Skills, USA.

You know, I was like, what do you mean? So content on an app. Now, being a rapacious capitalist, you know, my partner and I, we're like, maybe we should have an app. Maybe. What is this? But I watched it mostly out of a sense of curiosity because I figured all of the stuff going on with Disney and Warner

and all the content battles in this crazy town are going to be informed by the tech. The tech is eventually going to hop over all of it and in some crazy way bring an egalitarian sensibility to this that we haven't seen. I mean, the hair went up on my arms when I watched this because to your point, Chuck, I was relieved that it was good. Yes. I didn't want it to suck with such great tech.

Like I didn't want the first thing into this amazing new world to be some spoon-fed do afternoon stuff. Some preachies. That's right. I didn't want a lecture and I sure as heck didn't want a sermon. And I didn't get either. And so I became, you know, I'm in business with the guys over at TBN to a certain degree. I know some shared real estate.

I was talking to Matt Crouch and somebody's like, oh, yeah. We're talking. So I just felt and still feel like all of the stuff we're talking about now you just kind of slipped in COVID and that matter too, right? All of a sudden people are home, Neil. They're home. Yeah. Yeah. We launch episodes 1 through 4, 2019.

This April 2019. Easter. Dallas is saying we're crossing into the promised land. It does not work. And we are trying to test out if they watch one episode and then they pay. And if they watch two episodes and then they pay. And then if we sell DVDs and if we sell Blu-rays and we were just testing everything, I had this stack of papers that was model after model after model,

the concept of building an app specifically for. it came up we had and then the middle of that is when we went to trial with disney and got the judgment and so now Dallas is all shaken up because we just lost and he was thinking oh these guys are probably going to win this lawsuit so he's all shaken up and then we move into he's filming season one episodes five through eight yeah and it's the middle of the summer and we're trying to figure out models and i finally just told my wife i was like let's just annie lealie that let's just invite people from church over to Sunday dinner. And then I'm going to tell them they have to watch the show.

And so we would do Sunday dinner and I'd be like, okay, come watch three episodes of the show. And they'd be like, no, we got to go. It's Amway. It's Amway. It's Amway. It's just totally forced gunked them into a multi-level sales pitch. Yes. It's not dinner.

It's a show. Yeah. It's dinner and a show. Yeah. So I would sit them down on my couch and be like, they'd be like, no, we got to go. And I'd be like, nope. I spent the last two years of my show. my life working on this. You're going to sit down and watch this. If you're my friend, you're just watching

this show. And they would watch it. And they loved it every time. And I was desperately trying to figure out, how do you overcome this problem that everybody assumes is bad? Everyone. It doesn't matter how many people say it's good. They just don't believe it. And so we even created this technology where you could buy the whole seasons and send off a link to your friends that would give them a free season just to watch it. Yeah. You pay for it for them. People would buy, after they saw the show, they'd buy 100 copies of the season, send them out to all their friends, and 3% would watch. Right.

They just wouldn't watch. Right. And it's so dejecting. And so, but then on Facebook and the groups, we saw this behavior where people would come on and say, I really want to watch this series, but I can't afford it. And then immediately within minutes, there would always be somebody come in and say,

and always different people say, send me your email address. I'll send you a free call. copy every time. And this sparked an idea where we said, maybe if we take the people who have watched it and want people to watch it really badly and take the people who want to watch it but can't afford it and just connect them and make a what we call the pay it forward model. Yep.

Where you just pay for a stranger to watch. And look, if you haven't seen this in action, folks, it's kind of alarming only because it's just so different. But I watched one of your films just the other day after death. Yeah. Which, by the way, is amazing. I mean, stunningly well shot. Yes.

Right? And you'll hear from people who went through these NDEs near death experiences. Some saw something that looks a lot like heaven. Some saw something that does not. And when you hear their stories all stacked up, it's super powerful. And then at the end of the movie during the credits, the director comes out and thanks you for watching and invites you. They put a QR code on the screen.

Right. Yeah. By the way, Mike, that's Stephen Gray, right? We got our picture taken with he and Joe somebody who's an executive producer on the show. Oh, a movie guy. Yeah. Yeah. And Stephen's a phenomenal filmmaker.

Well, that film is fantastic. For sure. Chuck remembers because he doesn't get a lot of photos taken with him, but I get quite a few. So I can't be expected to remember all of the people who stand in line for a photo. But I do remember the guy at the end of the movie. movie saying, hey, if you liked it and you want somebody else to see it and you want to buy them a ticket, here's your chance. And again, I know I started this conversation with two things that we have in common.

The first is an eight-year-old fixation with our lower GI tracks. And I love the fact that I get to say that to a couple of fairly upright Mormons. And the second is, you don't think of your audience as a, group of people you need to entertain, you kind of think of them as your boss. Yes. You work for your audience. So you might as well engage them. I was always nervous about the crowdfunding, and I still am for a couple of reasons,

but I was never nervous about using social media to ask them what they want and ask them where they think I should go. And do you know somebody I should meet? My whole operating model has been, you know, call the shows, whatever you want. They're all really in my head called people. people you should know. And who better to send me to meet those people than the people who want to see people that they wish they had for neighbors, right? I get all that. But what are you going to do, Neil, to make sure that this model doesn't grow into its own version of Hollywood? What are you going to,

how do you keep some semblance of parameters on it? We thought about this a lot going through the Disney Battle because when we were young, when we were young, our mom shared with us stories. We had books about the Disney brothers. We had about their father who was a preacher. And these guys were American entrepreneurial heroes to us. And so now going through this experience with the most formidable legal team in the world on copyright law and getting our clock cleaned in the bank. Sidebar. People need to know.

Disney's lawyers, $1,000, $2,000 an hour. Yes. And they're endless. It's an army. Yes. Yes. It's a literal army.

When we were in the courtroom, there's two sides. There's two different P-Wiles. It's almost like a church, kind of. And the one side is all suits from Disney. And they're all paid attorneys. The entire side is filled up and they got boxes passing. Including number two.

The number two guy at Disney was there. And then you've got, But on our side, we have our like five attorneys. And they're working their butts off. And then we got a bunch of little Jewish families and some other like Christian families all kind of filtering in and out to watch the trial to support us. People we've never met before just showing up randomly. That was the picture. Every day, day every single day for weeks.

For seven days, I think it was. I think it was long. I bet it fell longer. Sorry, I totally derailed your. No, you're good. So we are thinking about this, and what we landed on is we needed to come up with something that would outlive the founders. And so that ended up becoming the guild, that the guild would be the best way to identify winning stories, to refine stories so that they would be better, but also just build a system that had an economic incentive. to survive past the founders.

We think it's going to be successful. So far, we've released five movies in the theaters, and we think we can flip the success rate, like four out of five movies fail at the box office. We think we can flip that to where four out of five succeed with the power of the guild. And we're on pace to do that. And we're on pace to do that.

So with the guild, being economically successful, then it doesn't matter if we're gone. It doesn't matter who the board is. The economics will be in place for that, company to stay closer to the lifeblood of the audience. And the Angel Guild is 250,000 plus people growing every single day from 155 countries around the world who are paying a membership where they've invested in a project and they are the gatekeepers.

It's a governance system. I'm the chief content officer and I cannot take a project into Angel Studios. There's one movie I really wish I could get in right now. it's just not quite passing. I cannot take a film into the system without the Angel Guild approving it. Not allowed. They have to approve it for us to consider it. So it's a focus group with a vested interest.

That's right. They are economically vested in what's going on here. They care about the culture for their kids and their grandkids. Do they make money if the project is successful? The ones who are investors, yes. So we've paid off. profits to the chosen

Sound of Freedom investors his only son investors and the ship. They paid back their investors. That's true. The legal term is the Sound of Freedom LLC or the chosen Inc. paid off their investors. But the model, the ecosystem that we've created

it is providing a return to those who are actually investing. And if you've, just to understand where the guild concept came from three, over three years ago, was reading the wisdom of crowds by by James Sirwick. Right. Phenomenal book.

He opens it up talking about this British scientist named Francis Galton, 1906, goes to a fair. Francis Galton is the cousin of Darwin. Mm-hmm. Okay. And he totally believes in elitism because he believes in this Darwinism that there's elites and they need to run the world. And he's trying to find data on that. And he goes to this fair and they've got this raffle where 800 different people had

bought raffle tickets. to guess the weight of an ox. And so he just asked for the tally of all these guesses. He wanted all the papers. And he tabulated them throughout the ones that were junk. And he was going to prove that the butchers and the farmers and the people that were close to cattle were better than the crowd. Except when he averaged it, they'd get. guessed 1197 pounds on average and the actual weight was 1198 pounds which means the average was

closer by far than any expert guess. He said, well, this doesn't really fit my model. My thesis. And if you look at who wants to be a millionaire, they have three different things you can do when you're up. Do you know the three? Phone a friend. Pull the crowd. Yep. And I forget what the third one is. Right. Phoneing the friend is the equivalent of an expert. Right. You're the smartest person you know.

Smartest person you know. Yeah. It's an expert. So this guy ultimately learned that the best feedback is going to be when you ask the crowd. 91% correct when you do the crowd. And when you phone a friend? 60. 60%.

And when you go 50-50? It's just. 50-50. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right?

And then so there's that example. And then the other one is the U.S. Navy Scorpion crashes. in the 70s or sinks in the 70s, it's a submarine out in the Pacific, and they have a 20-mile radius to try to find this thing, and they can't figure out where this is at. And so the guy in charge of the rescue operation or the recovery operation goes, and he gets 150 different people from mechanics to people that work in different areas of the Navy, that might have some different view of this and ask them to look at the same box of documents and then make their own independent guess of where that is and they got within 500 feet and he couldn't figure it out before but all these

random people found it within 500 feet and so the concept was what if we took this Francis Galton's discovery and you put an actual not just a script or something but you actually put like a five minute we call them a torch but you put a torch in front or a feature length film like Cabrini or Sound of Freedom, and you actually let people watch the whole thing, and then they get a vote on whether or not they like it. And if you get enough people, and we have 250,000 now.

155 countries. 155 countries. They're going to make better bets because they're voting on what they like, and then we get the average, we've created a score, it's three years in the process now, to where those people are making better guesses

than elites in Hollywood, would in boardrooms. Sure, because in the end, if your guild gets big enough, they're not just your focus group, they're your audience. That's right. That's exactly. And then you just have to reach statistical significance, right? Well, or not, because if that thing's big enough, it'll be its own ecosystem. But as an indicator of what the masses truly want, well, that's just super interesting, you know? I mean, super interesting. But look, that book, the wisdom, The wisdom of crowds. The wisdom of crowds. James Seawicki. There's another book, Google this, Chuck, see if I'm imagining things.

But I think there's one called The Madness of Crowds. Oh, I should read that one. And if I remember, well, my question to you earlier, Neil, really has to do with managing this Borg. Because they are, you know. They can be your friends. They can be your audience. They can be an idea generator. They can be all of these things.

But all I know for sure is that Dirty Jobs went on the shelf for a year after it premiered because it was considered off-brand. It wasn't until it wound up through a very weird set of circumstances in a focus group that the network wound up getting feedback that they didn't expect or want, frankly. And so the show got dragged back on the air because... And it's huge. Because the Guild wanted something. And I think what super...

Star Trek did this, right? They were going to cancel Star Trek, and then they got 100,000 letters. Right. Yeah. It wasn't the size of the audience. It was the level of... It was the engagement. That's it, Neil.

It's the engagement. So I don't know how to think about... Because I have this other belief, and it's a general belief about focus groups, not guilds, but focus groups are really good at getting rid of horrible ideas. They're just red flag indicators. And really great ideas. too. Yes. The scary ideas sometimes. Right. So that's fair. What are you guys going to do to make sure you're not caught with the squishy middle that is so often the result? We focus on passion.

The guild measurement, there's a score one to a hundred. That score tells you how passionate the group is about your show or your movie. And we're looking for product market fit for the passionate group. Yeah. And we are going to miss some. There will be things that other people people, other studios will pick up, that we won't be able to pick up. There's a movie I really, really wish the guild would pass. And they haven't. They haven't on this one. And maybe one day they're going to really want to do one you don't want to do.

It's possible. One thing is, for example, there's a filmmaker that we don't feel like there's a great partnership with. We don't have to take it if the guild passes it because there's other elements that have to work. It has to work on a business level. It has to work on a business level as well. Sure.

But we can't take it unless the guild passes it. His only son had no name director. The actors weren't known. It was a $250,000 budget. It's a Marine. It had none of the markings of a theatrical release. None. It's this Marine that read the Bible for the first time while he was in Saddam Hussein's bunker,

converted, came back, used the GI bill to go to film school in San Francisco. He's from Louisiana, Texas. I don't remember exactly. He's from the South. And sorry, David, that I didn't remember. He lives in Texas right now. Yeah. And he built this film for $250,000 that people love. He showed up at a, the feeding of the 5,000 filming for the Chosen.

He was in the very back during the photo, pointed this out to us later. He was back there praying that he would have the chance that Dallas did to distribute through Angel Studios. So we put his film in front of the guild and it gets a really high. high score. And we're like, whoa, this is the highest score. We, you know, see. Better than $10 million films. Yes. And we're like, I guess if we believe in what we say we do, let's go release this in

theaters. It opens number three against Mario Brothers, John W. Four, Dungeons and Dragons, like big, huge major projects. Yeah. And it was a super risky film to take the theaters. The Shift was super risky film. So you ask a valid question, a good question, but I think in practice, like the... Philmakers should like it because we're taking bigger risks. That's right. But what we're doing is we're taking calculated risks. So people can take really risky moves into the market, get enough feedback to just kind of get them ready for market

release, and it allows you more creativity to get the project to hit mainstream, but at the same time taking on a big risk. And we did a co-exclusive release of his only son and Sound of Freedom with the Guild. So Guild has it and Amazon Prime has it. And his only son, which they just kind of tacked on. They didn't think much of it, ended up in the top 10 movies on Amazon for three weeks straight. It was beating out the Flash and all these other major. It made it to number four. Yeah, it made it to number four on Amazon Prime. One Sound of Freedom was number one. Yeah. Like the Guild got it right and found a movie no one else could have found. And it was a super risky movie. I mean, we're telling a story of a guy who's going to kill his son, right? You're spending three days

in the wilderness with Abraham and his brain. Yeah. It's a risky movie. It's a little bit like, the summer. Get in here. He's got a knife. But it does super well at Easter because it's all symbolic of Easter. But he's, he's, he're in his head. And it's almost like it's slower moving. it's a meditative experience that you can only, like it's just not something an executive would pick. Now, the other hand, if somebody brings something really risky and the guild says no,

and they give good feedback, that filmmaker can take that film wherever they want, or they could take the feedback and say, hey, maybe I'll have a better chance with my project if I just tweak a couple of things. Right, right. Was that right? Manus of Crowds? Yes, it's called The Manus of Crowds by Douglas Murray.

Okay, I need to read that. Yes, of course. Not to oversimplify it because it's a big book, but it's my concern, and it's not really a concern, but it's, I'm always fascinated by the evolution of a gathering that becomes a crowd that becomes a mob that becomes a mess. And whether that group winds up buying a bunch of bad stocks and losing their retirement because they followed the tulip craze or the internet crail. Right? So crowds are not inherently wise, but when the engagement- That's right. Give that, that's what I meant by parameters.

We don't call it a crowd on purpose. It's the Angel Guild. These people are making their decision independently. Yeah, we follow the same rules that James Sirwiki figured out. We fall all those rules. The moment it becomes a Kickstarter, kickstarters can be like, just because of momentum, a strange idea will get traction

and it's not a good idea. Right. Just because of momentum. That can't happen inside the Angel Guild. That's what I was getting at. Yes. That the internal governors that keep the inertia of bad enthusiasm

from metastasizing. Yes. That's the trick. They can't. They can't. It's also random sampled. We have 250,000 people. You're only going to have one to 2,000

of those watch each project. There's 550 films submitted last year. one to two thousand watch each project make their votes scores once we get to statistical significance we move on to the next project so not to make this about me but since we're nearly at the end of the show we're at the end of the show we're going to run out of media soon so how do i get a show so i come up with a show i get it in front of the guild if they like it we talk yep and then we have a new platform that's right figure it out yep when does the total twins episode that i'm in come on i think it's this late summer, maybe early school year.

Can't wait, Chuck. Let me sing a song and everything. I know, I heard it. It's going to be great. By the way, anybody who hasn't seen Tuttle Twins, it's the same writers as the people did it, poopery and squatty potty and purple mattress and loomy deodorant. Well, you know what?

I can tell. It's just the right amount of subversion. Yes, with a lot of education, but it's like 90% fun. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. Those ads were in on the joke.

That show is sort of in on the joke. We know we're making a show, right? We know we have an agenda. We're not ashamed of it, but we don't want to club you to death with it. But we're not going to hide it either. Yep. It's always there. We'll make fun of the fact that we have an agenda.

Exactly. Making fun of our agenda. We finally got to the title with the Harmon Brothers. Real quick, what should people know if they want to get involved in the guild? They want to pitch a show. What's the... That's great. So if you want to pitch a show, angel.com slash create.

That's where you can submit a torch, which is a five-minute prototype or a full length film. We get full length film submitted all the time. And then you'll start getting scores back and feedback. If you want to join the guild, you go to angel.com slash guild. And there you can join the guild and you'll get two complimentary movie tickets to every single angel release. So you never have to pay to go to the movies if you're part of the guild. You vote on them. You get to get two free tickets to every single movie. It's like a movie pass kind of thing for the guild. And so you get two free movie tickets to Cabrini that's out right now, or you get two free movie tickets to site, which comes out on Memorial Day, or you get two free movie tickets to Possum Trot,

which is the follow-up to Sound of Freedom that comes out on July 4th, or two free movie tickets to Homestead, which has Neil McDonough that comes out at Christmas time, or Bonhofer, which comes out at Thanksgiving. That's going to be a big one. Yeah, I think Bonhofer, it's got a good shot of being big. You never know until... You don't know until the guild tells you. Neil sat right there, by the way, and said,

some really complimentary things about both of you. Oh, thank you. He's a, I mean, he's such a good actor. Neil's a great guy. He is. He's such a great villain and he's such a great guy. And he's just a good role model, too, for people to, like, that guy's doing good things. So are you.

I don't have a crystal ball, but I think we're in the very early stages of a level of upheaval. It's going to change the way people digest their entertainment, access their entertainment, and maybe even make it. So thanks for letting me be a problem. part of it. Yeah, I tell my kids, talking about the Angel Guild, I tell my kids, when they're watching too much TV, I say Harman's live on the other side of the screen. We make the content that other people get to watch. And the Guild, when you join the Angel Guild, you get a chance to live on the other side of the screen. You get to watch early cuts. You get to give feedback to the filmmakers. You get to

have live streams with the directors and do Q&A and stuff. Like, you're part of the process of making the content that will change the world. Yes. You get to help make this. Yeah. And think about it. Legos, fun as toys,

because you're making them. Minecraft, one of the biggest games, Roblox, one of the biggest games, just because you're making stuff. Or one-sided college term papers. Which you can now write with chat GPT,

so that's another story. Thank you for all the time. How long did this go, Chuck? I'm curious. Over an hour and a half. Yeah, well, you know, I had two of them. I had two of them.

So it could have been twice as long. Could have been. going for two hours. All right, you guys want to go get some dinner? Yeah. Thank you for coming by our humble studios. We appreciate it. What's the website again?

Shirley doesn't website. There you go. Angel.com. See you next week. If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe? If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe?

If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you... Go. Could you please subscribe? When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly.

Call 1-800-Grangeur, click granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. The ocean moves us, whether that's surfing a wave or taking in an inspiring view. The ocean feeds us. Sustainable seafood practices bring the ocean's bounty to our plates. The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices, big and small, make an impact. The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean connects us.

Find your connection at Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects.