Jeff Harmon

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  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, 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 stuff that mainstream America doesn't want. And 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.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  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 2 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.

• 1:42Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  So you've got 2 million people, all paying between $12 and $20 a 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.

• 1:59Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing. Now, how did the Guild come to exist?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Have you ever read the book The User Method? Uh-uh. It's by Jeff Schording. And in The User Method, he goes through and he does a 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 was 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? Help them pay their rent that month. And then they thought,

• 2:48Speaker 00

  what if we create Airbnb as an air mattress? Wow. 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. Yeah, we're like other people. 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.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  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 producing 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.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  We had three TV stations. And we watched almost no movies. I could count the number of times I went to the theater till I was 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 use the, like, if you, if you pulled out one of the wired, all the 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, it was generally the stuff that got big enough to reach to Burley, Idaho, which is where we grew up.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Deklo, Idaho, actually. Burley's the biggest city close by, which is still tiny, but Deklo was like 250 people when we were growing up. And that's technically where we, 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 rolls 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.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  So I, that's, that's the only kind of movies I ever watched growing up because we, 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 Farnsworth, who created the television, he came from just a couple hours away from us. An Idaho farmer too. And he figured out how to

• 6:26Speaker 00

  build the television while he was in the potato fields and seeing 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 in the TV and he figured out how to build. The television.

• 6:41Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:02Rick Rubin?

  What was first?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Drybar 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, but with an asterisk.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and you weren't telling them what to do outside of what you were creating?

• 7:40Speaker 00

  No, not at all.

• 7:41Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  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 of these guys that 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, 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?

• 8:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  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, stuff 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 Drybar Comedy normally just do standard comedy, blue comedy. But when they come to Drybar, they do clean. And the family's safe. And then those have blown up. We've filmed over seven hundred and fifty comedians. Wow. Yeah. Next year will 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. Has it been global from the beginning?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  No, it took like, when we first did it, we almost went bankrupt doing it. So we, we invested in season one and then we didn't get any traction and we invested in season two. Then 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 right, 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 standup. That was their whole entire model was they put standup comedians on TV. And that's how they got their foothold in the marketplace.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  And so that was, that was our first show was great standup 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, we bought an old bar that was selling. And we bought the bar and it had a stage. And it had these little go-go dancer girl, little things. And we re, redid it to look like a standup stage, like an old school standup stage. And that's Drybar Comedy.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  And we called it Drybar 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 Drybar Comedy and we went to comedians and said, just, 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, we labeled the, the brand Funny For Everyone. And if you, if you go on YouTube and you see the comments, you'll see people saying, I didn't, 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.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. One of, 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. Like, I went on Drybar, and now, like, Leanne Morgan got Netflix specials. And so, so we're moneyballing 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.

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• 13:48Rick Rubin?

  How do you decide on comedy to start with?

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Affordable.

• 13:52Rick Rubin?

  Inexpensive to produce?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, you could 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.

• 14:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  And then we realized, no, if they're paying, they actually laugh. So we charged tickets, put in 300 people. Because at the beginning,

• 14:30Speaker 00

  we were just doing it free. And then I said, maybe we could help cover some of our costs. That was the first thought.

• 14:35Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  As I was just being a business person and saying, we're losing money.

• 14:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  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, laughed super hard. Late shows were hit and miss.

• 15:02Rick Rubin?

  Because the audience was invested in the show?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Yes. They paid for it. You have a bias to say, I'm gonna have a good time because I paid for this.

• 15:11Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  If you give a free ticket, they're like folding their arms like, make me laugh.

• 15:15Rick Rubin?

  Show me.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And then as soon as we got it big enough to where we actually got paid people in both early and late 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, we'd come up with this idea of crowdfunding. And we were going to use Obama's new law, the Jobs Act, where you could crowdfund with people who aren't worth over a million dollars.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  They weren't accredited investors. And we were like, if we use that, we should be able to crowdfund TV shows that are, 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. Yep. Yeah. With the Drybar one, we funded it from crowdfunding for Angel directly. And then The Chosen comes along and I'm, 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.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  He sends me this clip that is a nativity of Jesus being born. And he's like, this is pretty good. You should 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 till I was halfway through it and I was watching in September. And as I'm finishing it, it was like this flood of inspiration.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  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 watch 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.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  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, that sounds like a car dealership, but, and we had done Poopery campaigns, Squatty Potty campaigns, Purple Mattress, these super viral internet ads that had built household brands, Lume deodorant. And the idea was, is I can take everything we've learned about marketing CPG products like Squatty Potty and Poopery and Purple Mattress and Lume deodorant.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  And then we can take this pilot episode as a little taste of what the product's like. And then we pitched 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 The 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, his co-founder, and said, I think I found what we should make our first TV series with. And he said, what is it? And I was like, it's a biblical series. And he's like, no, that's for churches.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  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. And 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 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.

• 19:53Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I called the director and he, after a couple of 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. And we helped them fund $10 million. We set it up as a different entity, as its own show. Brought the entire weight of our base of followers behind it and then brought in more through the marketing. And eventually launched the largest crowdfunding TV series of all time, largest crowdfunding media project of all time. At the time, we've actually beat that record now.

• 20:35Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  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 becomes one of the top five TV series in the world.

• 20:51Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  And now it's on Amazon with season five. It's moved over to Amazon.

• 20:56Rick Rubin?

  Do you build the whole crowdfunding campaign before you air the pilot?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  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. And 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 we had spent a lot of money on doing this, but but it was to build a model for the future. And we launched the pilot episode, this short film, to crowdfund. Meaning they needed to see it to believe that the show was good enough. Basically, what we learned, if they watch the pilot, if we can get them to watch twenty, it was nineteen minutes. Yep. If we can get them to watch that nineteen minutes, they invest.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  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 is 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 a hundred dollars. George from Kansas invested this much, this person from this. And so the whole time he's on the live stream, it's like popping up saying, it's all the stuff that TikTok does. How many people watched that first episode before the rest of the series came? Before the rest of the series, I'm sure it was fifty million plus. Wow.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then we raised ten million dollars from seventeen thousand, seventeen thousand investors. And tremendous success. I 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 that series. What were the things that you feel like beyond it being good, leading to fifty million people watching it on YouTube?

• 23:17Speaker 00

  So I, I think the way that we, 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 and

• 23:29Rick Rubin?

  How big was the group at that time?

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Just less than a million people that are not paid necessarily, but people that are following us.

• 23:37Rick Rubin?

  Viewers.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Viewers and

• 23:39Rick Rubin?

  You call them subscribers? Cause if it's on YouTube.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Today, we call them memberships.

• 23:43Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  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 list. 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 eight percent.

• 24:17Rick Rubin?

  So some of the money that you were hoping to use for production.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  We needed to use for ads.

• 24:22Rick Rubin?

  You're reinvesting

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:23Rick Rubin?

  For marketing.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:25Rick Rubin?

  To build the pot essentially.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  To build the pot. The way I looked at it at the time is I was like, try, 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 eight to 12%. 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 eight percent. Eight percent of the 10 million was spent on getting the 10 million.

• 25:00Rick Rubin?

  And then how long was it between the pilot showing and then starting production?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  So when we got to three point something million, Dallas said, okay, I'm gonna start the first four episodes.

• 25:15Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  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. 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 raised 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, I mean, if you watch it, you can't tell that much.

• 25:54Rick Rubin?

  And then how was the first episode post pilot received?

• 26:00Speaker 00

  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 forty years and Joshua. And now we're entering the promised land. We're finally launching these. There's a really good episodes. And if we just launch them, it's gonna happen. So we, we get off the phone. I'm a little worried because I've done marketing campaigns before. And I'm like, this is gonna 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.

• 26:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  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 and charge for the next 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, 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,

• 27:27Speaker 00

  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 the person, somebody 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 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 were testing the data on everything.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  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, Juan, my brother is an engineer. But we have, I think, almost a hundred engineers on the angel team. Uh, 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,

• 28:53Speaker 00

  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 10 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.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  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, Fanny Ellie, is I said, I don't know why people aren't watching this show, but let's start inviting everyone over for Sunday dinner. And then as soon as we finish dinner, I'm gonna sit them down in front of the TV and I'm gonna make them watch two or three episodes. And they would finish Sunday dinner and bait and switch them and I'd sit them in front of the TV and they'd be like, no, I gotta go. And I'd be like, nope, I've spent two and a half years of my life working on this.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Sit down, watch this show, and inevitably they loved it. 100% of the time they loved it. If they could get three episodes in, they were hooked. And so I was like, if we could just get people to watch it. And then I realized there were people that wanted to watch it. They're just not the people, the people I'm sharing with are not ready to watch it. And then I realized that's what everybody is.

• 31:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Everybody's trying to reach out to their friends and say, I watched this amazing TV series. And then they get totally dejected when nobody will watch the TV series, even if they give it to them for free, even if they buy it for them. But there's this other group of people who are ready. But they're disconnected from the people who are ready to share. And so if we could just connect the, 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 could 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.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  And we figured if we did the math, if one in 20 people paid it forward, we got averages and we were like, it actually starts to math. And so we, we started optimizing and we hit Thanksgiving of that year. And by December 31st, we had to make this successful or else the company wasn't going to make it. And on December 31st, we got, we figured it out.

• 32:20Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:22Rick Rubin?

  It also feels somehow related to the audience who paid laughed more.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:29Rick Rubin?

  There's some incentive built into it. I don't really understand it.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:34Rick Rubin?

  But there's something there.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  There is something there and I actually think you, you have a point. And one of our investors, the guys at GigaFund, they're big, one of the biggest investors in SpaceX. I think they might be the biggest, Luke Nosick and Steve Asquith. Luke is a co-founder of PayPal with Elon. They've invested in us, an 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.

• 33:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  It gives it enough fuel and commitment that the movement is.

• 33:15Rick Rubin?

  And it probably also adds to the word of mouth somehow.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. In unmeasurable ways. But the show grew and it became the top five most searched show on Roku for years.

• 33:29Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Until, and then eventually the show moved on to Amazon because they, they wanted more money than we had at the time, but.

• 33:36Rick Rubin?

  Are you still involved in the Amazon show?

• 33:38Speaker 00

  No, we're not. We're not.

• 33:39Rick Rubin?

  Oh, really?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Building something that moves away from you just because you made it so big, right? That the bigger players come in and pull it out. How long did that whole chosen story take? For us, I think ours was about five years. Five years. Five years of Angel's involvement. During that time, were you developing other projects or no? Yes, yeah. So we started developing a show called Tuttle Twins. Also, we helped them crowdfund. And Tuttle Twins is a TV, it's a cartoon TV series based on this bestselling book called Tuttle Twins. There's sold nine, I think it's nine million copies worldwide. And they just teach Austrian economics and freedom to kids, like to teach kids. How did that come to you?

• 34:34Speaker 00

  So I, I'm on the board of a organization in Utah, a think tank called the Bertus Network. And the Libertas Network does these books, they do, I don't know if you've ever heard of the lemonade stand laws? So lemonade stand laws are Libertas looked at all these different states where kids were popping up lemonade stands and the police would show up and tell them they couldn't run their lemonade stand because they didn't have licenses, they didn't have food permits, they didn't have. This is real? This was happening all over the country. Wow. And so Libertas, this was quite a while ago, they went and made, in Utah, it was the first one, the lemonade stand law where a kid can make their own business and no city or state or police can come in and tell them they can't do their business. Great.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  And Libertas has literally millions of kids all over the country now. They go pop up in these parks, everybody buys a ten by ten foot space. They set up their own business, whatever it is. My kids sell flowers. My wife's Brazilian, so they've sold Brazilian food and they don't have food permits, which is pretty awesome. But they, they just sell like these different things, their own businesses. And then they invite, what they encourage everybody to do is they say all the kids should invite their parents, their uncles, their aunts, their cousins to show up and have enough money to support them and a few other kids. Great. And so these lemonade stand businesses are popping up all over the country. Libertas Network was also involved in making Utah one of the very first states to have medical marijuana.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  And which was a shock to the country is that that was one of the first. So this is, 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, they talk about like what Harriet Tubman was doing or, you know, just different historical characters.

• 36:27Rick Rubin?

  So all of these principles are things that historically we would think of as mainstream liberal ideas.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, just classical liberalism, right? Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. It's classical liberalism. And so, so Libertas 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.

• 36:57Rick Rubin?

  So the books already existed.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:59Rick Rubin?

  So this is a TV series based on a kids' book series.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Loosely based.

• 37:03Rick Rubin?

  Educational.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Now, the book series is like eighty or ninety percent education, ten or twenty percent entertainment. The idea behind the TV series was it's going to be ninety percent entertainment with ten percent education.

• 37:17Rick Rubin?

  But it's still educational.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  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 Nikola Tesla and who also time travels. And she takes the kids, they, 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 Bastiat, to meet Karl Marx.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  They, 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.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Kids can buy a whole bunch of Adam Smithies and they take them to school. And they're riding with their Adam Smithies because they're a part of the show, right? So Tuttle Twins was a series that we took and we raised a few hundred thousand dollars, built an animatic, put together a team that had done all the Poopery ads and the Squatty Potty ads and all these super funny ads, the comedians. And then took the Libertas Network experts, put them together in a room, wrote out scripts, built the 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?

• 39:19Speaker 00

  It's aimed at eight to 15, but two thirds of the jokes are adult jokes. They're jokes that adults are gonna laugh at. Yeah. One third is kids jokes. The best cartoons always work on different levels. Well, and Tuttle Twins is built for a co-viewing. It's completely built for co-viewing. And in fact, Angels' 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. Beautiful.

• 40:05Speaker 03

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• 42:19Rick Rubin?

  What was Angel's business model prior to comedy?

• 42:26Speaker 00

  So it was it was called VidAngel.

• 42:29Rick Rubin?

  VidAngel.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Before original content. And the concept there was, once again, user method, is the idea was is we can't watch most of the shows, but Neil had, he 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 you to use this with my your siblings. And so he went in and he built a plugin for the browser that would just, it was like an automatic remote control that would just skip and mute words that he didn't want. So when I was growing up, if we were watching TV, my mom

• 43:16Speaker 00

  would just like run up and turn off the TV. Or, you know, lots of people say their parents would like cover their eyes. And so basically, the concept was is what if we could just make that automatic? An automatic remote control that skips and mutes scenes in movies so that parents can watch with their kids. An example would be at that time, Game of Thrones was the biggest TV series in the world. What people don't know is that there were tens of millions of downloads on the torrents. Within 24 hours after Game of Thrones would launch an episode, there'd be an alternate version of Game of Thrones uploaded on the torrents

• 43:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 44:13Rick Rubin?

  Which in the music business, there are the clean versions. But it doesn't seem to exist in film and television.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  That's right. And so we started there. And he made Cinderella Man so his son could watch it. And then it went really big with Game of Thrones, because like I said, there was tens of millions of downloads on these torrents of version, clean versions. But the studios didn't like it, in particular Disney, didn't like it. Because my theory is, is that Disney saw it and said, we're the family audience. We own fifty, they, at the time, they were over fifty percent 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.

• 45:03Rick Rubin?

  Did they ever tell you that's why?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  No, they didn't. But it didn't make any sense otherwise, because why would they care? It's not like.

• 45:10Rick Rubin?

  I would think that the model that you're building is the Disney of today.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  We call the values-based audience.

• 45:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yep. Disney is the values-based audience.

• 45:20Rick Rubin?

  It was.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  It was. And we're trying to build the new values-based audience. But at the time, we were just the remote control.

• 45:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  So they went after that. They said that we were infringing on copyright. Had a big, long battle. This is VidAngel. And then we settled it out.

• 45:39Rick Rubin?

  VidAngel was a streaming platform?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Wasn't a streaming platform.

• 45:43Rick Rubin?

  What was it?

• 45:44Speaker 00

  It was an automatic remote control platform, parental controls. So you just, if you bought.

• 45:50Rick Rubin?

  It didn't have content in it?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  No, well, you, 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.

• 46:08Rick Rubin?

  Oh, it would know the content and just, it would know all the timings and?

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all tagged with the timings inside of it.

• 46:15Rick Rubin?

  So the audience could dial it back as much as they wanted?

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Yep. Yep. Every single person on the service was watching a different version of the movie.

• 46:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Right? There were tens of thousands of different versions.

• 46:26Rick Rubin?

  They're all watching.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  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 Drybar 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 Drybar?

• 47:13Speaker 00

  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?

• 47:30Speaker 00

  No, that's funny.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  It would be, the funny thing is they've actually done a bunch of this kind of stuff. You showed that there's a need for the model. Yeah. Is there an Angel Studios' mission statement? Angel Studios' mission is to tell stories that amplify light. We think that there's enough nihilism in the world, there's enough of these like cynical stories. And we are picking stories that, and our audience is picking stories, even 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.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  Those words mean totally different things to over 2 million members. But in the aggregate, just getting them to pledge to that puts them in the community. And that's going to adjust over time as the community grows, but that is, 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 of years old. So the Guild itself, that's an iteration after Pay It Forward. Because you can crowdfund a project at a time. And that's how you started, was crowdfunding a project? Yes, and then figuring out business models around it. But when we united it all into one, where we just said, we're not just doing The Chosen, we're not just doing Drybar, we're not just doing Tuttle Twins.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  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 through and they're getting feedback from these millions of guild members. And then the filmmakers can take it home, re-edit, come back, do it again.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  We have filmmakers that'll come through 10 times before their film is ready. And they get feedback and they develop. It's a development process.

• 49:51Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing. Tell me about when it went from project to project to the guild. How did that happen, that transition?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Basically, everything great at Angel has come out of an existential threat. 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.

• 50:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  And so, we're looking at this and saying, we have to reinvent ourselves again. And so, every great moment in our company comes out of some existential moment. The Pay It Forwards came because that show was failing. And so, we figured it out. And so, we were looking at it and I had been working on a system I called the jury for years, where we would take our crowd investors and we would ask them, which movies do you want us to take to the streaming platform?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  And then it clicked for me. We were really struggling to get people to engage and actually vote. And I was like, what if, if they pay for it, maybe they'll vote more. So we started testing. It's like polymarket. Yes. There's something about it. Yeah. When people pay for it, they're invested in it. Yes, and, and we said, okay, they're gonna 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 are just saying, you're asking them to do our workforce. You're asking our customers to do our workforce. They're not gonna wanna do our workforce. We, we're the ones who have to sift through all the shows.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  And now, I would say to them, I'd say, no, no, think about this. If I came to you and said, I'm gonna manufacture a toy. And I'm gonna get the manufacturing process about half done. And then I'm gonna hand you a bunch of bags of pieces, and then you assemble it for the final piece. And I'm gonna 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 gonna wanna do that. And they're like, no, but that's Legos. Legos just gives you the final part of the manufacturing process. Yeah. And people love it. I was like, that's what's gonna happen here, is that people in our family, as Harman's, my kids in particular, we say to our kids when they're watching too much screen time, we say, Harman's live on the other side of the screen.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  We create the stuff that everybody else watches. Yeah. We don't just consume it. And so, live on the other side of the screen. Love it. And there is a joy in living in the creation world. And every single billionaire I have ever met, and I've had a chance to meet a lot now, every single hundred millionaire, every single billionaire, they all wanna make movies. A hundred percent of them. I have not met one that doesn't wanna 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

• 53:15Speaker 00

  or at the checkout, at the grocery counter, or driving school buses, or whatever it is. Too far away. It's too far away. They can't even think about. I didn't even know movie making as a kid. I was working on potato farms, hauling pipe, moving water, hoeing beets, like, doing menial tasks. Yes. 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 2 million people at $12 to $20 a month, all contributing to the same cause to make movies, they're becoming the equivalent of many billionaires.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  But they get a vote on it and they get to decide. And as founders, I cannot pick a movie and bring it into Angel unless they pass it. They actually have veto power. What do you present them with to decide? 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, but it has to be at least five minutes. And then as a guild member, you get on, you watch the five minutes. You get a random selection because it's a sample.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  It has to be, has to follow the rules of wisdom of crowds so that they don't get biased. 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 could click on it, whatever's true, honest, noble, just, authentic, globally admirable and excellent. Whatever that means to them, they say whether or not it amplifies light. The second question is a negative question, which is really interesting. It comes from the Sean Ellis test. I don't know what that is. 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?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed, it's not that good. Those were the three answers.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  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,

• 55:49Speaker 00

  considering the fact that you're trying to find stuff that amplifies light,

• 55:53Speaker 00

  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 the two questions everybody gets asked. And then they have a free form, they can just put in feedback to the filmmakers. The filmmakers get hundreds of feedback. And then they get a score based on all those answers that says zero to 100. And if they give above a 70, they pass and they can be considered to be taken into Angel. There still has to be some due diligence, but, or like the most recent movie released, David, it scored 98 in the Guild, which is the highest score we'd ever seen. It scored 98 on Rotten Tomatoes.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  We have the movie Sketch that came out earlier this year. It scored in the eighties in the Guild, it scored in the eighties on Rotten Tomatoes' audience score.

• 56:47Rick Rubin?

  She is connected to the audience.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Yes. If you look at Angel's Rotten Tomatoes popcorn meter, which is the audience.

• 56:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Angel has the single highest score in the industry. We're at 93%.

• 57:03Rick Rubin?

  Across the board.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Across the board.

• 57:05Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:43Rick Rubin?

  Of any independent?

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:45Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  And so Evan Shapiro had pointed that out, that like this model's working. And on top of that, not only as a guild member, do you get to pick the movies and veto the movies? Like if you veto a movie as a guild member, it can't go on Angel. There's movies I wish made it sometimes. They just gotta 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 that they have an automatic group of people who just buy tickets.

• 58:18Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what it's like as a guild member. How many things do you get to look at?

• 58:23Speaker 00

  As many as you want. I mean, I don't think any-

• 58:25Rick Rubin?

  Like, tell me what the flow is.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Like, if you went in right now, there's probably over 50 projects to go vote on.

• 58:31Rick Rubin?

  And are those things that you put into it, or can people just upload stuff?

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Anybody can go to angel.com/filmakers and upload.

• 58:37Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  And this is a filmmaker who was reading the Bible, read Abraham's story in Saddam Hussein's bunker. Decided he was gonna be a filmmaker. Grew up with nothing. Comes back, uses a GI bill to go to film school in San Francisco. And then makes this movie during the COVID lockdowns. And then brings it to the guild, 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 dollars in the box office.

• 59:52Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about taking it to theaters. When did that begin, the idea of going beyond streaming?

• 59:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:07Rick Rubin?

  Was this after they had already streamed or no?

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  No, this was for like season three, I think.

• 1:00:14Rick Rubin?

  Before it streamed?

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  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, that seems like we could actually fix this model, the theatrical model, because it's broken.

• 1:00:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  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, it did 250 million dollars in the box office. And that, 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 dollar movie, another 12 million dollars.

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• 1:02:42Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story of Sound of Freedom.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  Sound of Freedom, it's wild.

• 1:02:46Rick Rubin?

  How did it come to you first?

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Gil, my brother, was on a panel in Mexico with a producer. And they were talking. And then Jim Caviezel later shows up at our office and says, I'm just curious about what you guys are doing. And by the time we get done talking to him, he says, I can feel in my heart that our movie is supposed to be with you guys. And he didn't own the movie. He was just an actor in it. And he's like, I'm going to go figure out how to get this movie to be with you guys. And then over a short period of time, we got a contract with them. They had been working, trying to get that thing out for eight years. They'd been stuck on the shelf for eight movies. Tons of movies are stuck on the shelf. Because it had originally been produced by Fox. And then Fox got bought by Disney. And then Disney shelved the movie. And then according to Eduardo, this isn't my firsthand experience, so I don't.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  But Eduardo said that Disney shelved the movie. He asked if he could buy it. They wouldn't sell it to him until he went to them and said, because of my connections in the anti-sex trafficking world, I have some dirt on some people that you don't. 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 his attorney and was like, maybe I'll just publish this movie to YouTube. We've just wasted the money and I'm gonna 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.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  And then we went to take it to the box office and we picked the date of September fifteenth. 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 needs to move up. Like, sooner. Yeah, like, that they were receiving inspiration, it's supposed to go sooner. And they all agreed and we agreed to try for July fourth, which is the hardest time of the year to release a movie and we'd only released a couple of 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,

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  we can't go on July fourth because we don't have the space. And Neil said, well, give me ten days, I'm gonna go meet with the theaters, with Brandon, the head of theatrical. And if the theaters like it and they say they'll give us space, then let's try it. And 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 and Hollywood are the same thing. But when you go to CinemaCon, which is the big event where the theaters and the studios meet, you realize that there's three thousand independent theater owners. And they're middle Americans.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  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's 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's 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.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  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 apps and we get direct relationships with the theaters, then they have no control to cancel us whatsoever. And so that's what we're doing. You can buy tickets on angel.com. You don't have to go to Fandango. You don't have to go to the movie theaters directly. You don't have to go through any studio or any. 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.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  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, it's a massive effort, but we realized halfway through, 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, is going to flatten the world of creativity. Like it's no longer going to be the rich kid's sport.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  The creative class is growing so fast and being democratized so fast by AI that there's going to be a hundred times as many movies made. And Hollywood's big problem right now is not that there's not enough revenues. They have more revenues than they've ever had. They have a cost problem. And that cost problem is existential.

• 1:08:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  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 Helling, who did His Only Son, this marine who comes from lower class, making his own movie can now be done by lots of people because of the way the tools are no longer out of reach. The way I look at it is that matters in a big way for the curators. So if you're going to have 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.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  There's going to be a lot that has to be sorted through. Angel's job is to build a community.

• 1:09:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  That everybody trusts inside that community and says, we know that this community will sort through. As a group, we'll sort through it all.

• 1:09:25Rick Rubin?

  None of the studios have. The studios have an expert opinion.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:09:30Rick Rubin?

  That's all.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  They have a tiny group of executives. There's like a couple dozen people in Hollywood that make all of the decisions for 90 plus percent of everything that goes to the box office. We're flipping that on its head and saying, no, we have a group of people. If they veto it, it never comes. Like they can choose. And then if they vote it really high, it gets considered to go to theaters.

• 1:09:57Rick Rubin?

  And it's really good for the audience. They get to see things they want to see.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  That's right. I can't walk through the airport with an Angel shirt and not get stopped. We actually made it to where if you're not a Guild member, you can't buy Angel merch. Because I realized as I walked through the airports, I get stopped. And it's this really nice experience when somebody says, Angel Studios. I love Angel. And I was like, that needs to be unique. That needs to stay unique.

• 1:10:25Rick Rubin?

  You're a representative of Angel.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  Yes, every Guild member is part of that group.

• 1:10:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  And so when they get stopped in the airport, we can't dilute that by letting everybody buy Angel shirts.

• 1:10:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz cuz you need to have that experience of walking through an airport or just at a checkout. One thing, cool thing about wearing an Angel shirt is I get free stuff every once in a while, like.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  I think people are like, it's on the house cuz you're you're Angel fan. It's such a passionate community. Two Decembers ago, we were at a half million members in 2024. 2025 December, two million members.

• 1:11:01Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  This community is growing.

• 1:11:04Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Rick Rubin?

  Now, with the first series, your brother was wary because it was faith-based.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, he was wary about making money off of preaching, which we still worry about that.

• 1:11:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Is there a requirement for things to be faith-based or no? Because it's just, it's about light.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  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 it like, people called Sound of Freedom faith-based. It's literally the only thing that was faith-based in the whole movie is he said, God's children are not for sale. So like, if that's the case, then every single Martin Scorsese movie is a faith-based movie.

• 1:11:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:11:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  These are values-based movies.

• 1:12:02Rick Rubin?

  Is it about what they're not, or is it about what they are?

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:12:15Rick Rubin?

  But in the case of comedy.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  None of that's faith-based.

• 1:12:19Rick Rubin?

  No, and you're only saying what it's not. It's not cursing.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Well, we say it's funny for everyone.

• 1:12:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  That's what we say. It's funny for everyone.

• 1:12:30Rick Rubin?

  So a movie like Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, which was a really hard movie.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Rick Rubin?

  Could that have been an angel movie?

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Rick Rubin?

  So it's not unicorns and rainbows?

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  No, no, we actually, we get hit. So people who start assuming that we're faith-based and then we really sketch. Sketch is a movie about this family who's lost their mother. One of the kids is drawing out her feelings in these little monsters. They're like monsters on a sheet of paper. And then the dad's trying to stop her because he's worried about her health because she's like drawing these really disturbing monsters. And then they find a magic pond. It goes in the magic pond and all the monsters come to life and torment the town. It's got like a horror feel to it or like a Jurassic Park feel. It's really actually quite intense movie.

• 1:13:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:13:41Rick Rubin?

  Right.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  And then you got other people that are so thrilled to have it.

• 1:13:44Rick Rubin?

  Is there a way to make that clear to everyone so that no one feels bad about it?

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  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. And the people who voted against it, they might get really loud. But we know most people, it's general audience.

• 1:14:06Rick Rubin?

  Are you actively looking for films? Or now is it basically the whole model is crowdsourced?

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:14:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  And we actually don't put the names of the people who made the movie. This is really, really important. The actors that like, if it's an animated one, we don't put the names of the actors in the movie. 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.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:15:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:15:37Rick Rubin?

  Has there ever been any attempted cancellations or anything like that?

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  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 were really upset. When you get two million people, you got all strikes. But there are small groups who are very upset that Mark, like, why would you let Mark Hamill in a movie? Another one is there's a movie coming out called Animal Farm. Andy Serkis directed it.

• 1:16:04Rick Rubin?

  Based on the book Animal Farm?

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:16:16Rick Rubin?

  They voted based on the content.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:16:18Rick Rubin?

  That's beautiful. Does the audience always know?

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  Most of the time, our bet is, so Hollywood right now, eighty percent of their movies fail. We want to flip that. Our model will miss some things. There's going to be some movies that it misses. But I think it will hit, have a higher hit rate than any. I actually had a filmmaker who said, no, you don't want to use wisdom of crowds with filmmaking because the artist knows, like, they need to be able, I think you brought up, he brought up Steve Jobs. This was in a debate I was at on a panel.

• 1:16:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  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 at 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

• 1:17:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:17:50Rick Rubin?

  Demonstration.

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  Of a demonstration that shows what the product's going to look like.

• 1:17:54Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  What it's going to feel like, what it's going to act like, and they can vote on that.

• 1:18:00Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:18:09Rick Rubin?

  You're voting on what it is.

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  What it is.

• 1:18:12Rick Rubin?

  This is what it is.

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  They're voting on your execution of it.

• 1:18:15Rick Rubin?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  And your, and maybe your execution doesn't fit our community. That's okay. The question is, 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.

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• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  Tell me about the advertising business. How did you get into it? There was a little startup company, Neil, and I helped cofound. I was a student at university of my last day of my last class. And I was one of those students who went to school and just like sat in the back of the class and read Mashable and Inside Facebook and all these different blogs while I wasn't paying attention in class. And so I'm sitting in my last day of my last class and a 72-year-old guy comes in. He has this little tongue cleaner called Cora 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,

• 1:21:13Speaker 00

  because these inventors would come in and say, can you help me market my product? His 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 tongue cleaner. They said only 8% of people say they'd buy this online. And I put up my hand in the back of the class and said, 8% is millions of people, like tens of millions. Why wouldn't you market to them? It's way harder to get a contract with a Procter & Gamble. Why? 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?

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  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 till 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?

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  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 war brush ads. Didn't work. Good idea, though. Great idea. Just trying, trying different stuff. Yeah. And then one day I was pretty discouraged about it and Dr. Bob comes up to me and he's like, "Come outside." And he showed me this old motorcycle. Actually, it's relatively new motorcycle, but this motorcycle and he said, "If you promise me eight months," he's like, "I'm tired of driving over and picking you up and taking you home." He's like, "If you give me eight months of one day a week, you can have this motorcycle." I said, "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.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  And my roommate was a filmmaker. So I asked my roommate and then my other coworker 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 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.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  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 have bad breath with a spoon. And then we introduced the war brush to people. We started buying ads on the YouTube platform. Google puts out a press release and says, "Our ad platform's revenues jumped by 70% or some huge number."

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  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 to where no single advertiser could buy more than 70% of the inventory because you were buying all of it." And we built a ten million dollar company off of it.

• 1:25:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but you were the only person at all.

• 1:25:12Speaker 00

  Buy anything. Well, everybody else was dabbling with it. I mean, there were thousands of advertisers buying just a little bit.

• 1:25:18Rick Rubin?

  You went all in.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  And we figured out how to print money.

• 1:25:21Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  They cost less than a penny of you at the time.

• 1:25:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  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 two dollars back. And so we just cranked it to the moon. And so we built a ten million dollar company off of that. That one sold to Dentec. And then we went and built Poopery. So we went from bad breath to poop. And it's this little spray that you spray on the top of the water and then you go to the bathroom and it traps the odors under the thing. And we made this ad with a British girl, same writer as the Aura Brush one, different film guy. Put it together, that blew up.

• 1:26:01Rick Rubin?

  The advertising agency really was based on YouTube at a time when.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:26:07Rick Rubin?

  They just started having ads. So.

• 1:26:09Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:26:09Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:26:18Speaker 00

  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? Cause you're all of our revenue.

• 1:26:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  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 fifteen or thirty seconds. I was like, do not do fifteen or thirty 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.

• 1:26:57Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  And we built an ad agency.

• 1:26:59Rick Rubin?

  Skip button that still exists today.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:27:16Rick Rubin?

  Did you do any research to decide on the five seconds?

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  No, at the time I was just asking them for the smallest time I thought.

• 1:27:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  It was a gut.

• 1:27:26Rick Rubin?

  But it's interesting that you believed that in five seconds was enough.

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  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, it'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 could cheaper cost per click, right? Can we hook people to the end of the video better if we change the first five seconds?

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  And so we were just adjusting the first five seconds. And now that's a rule in the film industry. Those five seconds are what you test. And then you test the call to actions. So you test the first five seconds and you test your call to actions. And then you run 20, 30 tests at a time, then run them again, and then run them again. And eventually, like with The Chosen, we tested that first five seconds and then we tested the end. And after about a thousand tests, we figured out how to raise $10 million for The Chosen.

• 1:28:40Rick Rubin?

  Do you keep the ad company going as well?

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:29:08Rick Rubin?

  So then you go from that to comedy?

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:29:11Rick Rubin?

  And it already sounds like the ads had a sense of humor about them.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  Yes, that's right. Here's what I learned very early on in the ad agency.

• 1:29:20Speaker 00

  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 than turning a marketer into a comedian, which takes a lifetime, because they haven't been through enough trauma in their life to actually be funny. You know comedians have always been through something like whatever really, really bad experiences make great stories and great comedians. And so if you train the comedians to be marketers, that's just a lot more effective than training marketers to be funny.

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  So the whole agency was based on that idea.

• 1:30:07Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your philosophy in general as it relates to word of mouth versus marketing.

• 1:30:15Speaker 00

  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 1% a year organically, on its own, without any fake or inflated growth. If it can grow that way, then you can take and dump ads into it. And you can accelerate it into a exponential curve. And so word of mouth is the foundational piece to make a decision to go after the product. The marketing is the accelerant.

• 1:30:59Rick Rubin?

  How has fatherhood influenced your creative output?

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  I think that my kids are part of my creative output.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  Meaning

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:31:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:32:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  Living on the other side of the screen. But I think I wish people would give as much praise, or we could change the culture, to give as much praise to a mother who has burned the boats and made a decision to have kids at a young age, when she actually has the ability to stay up with the kid, but she doesn't have the money. And taking that leap of faith, the way that entrepreneurs are praised for taking the leap of faith of going after this crazy business idea and then succeeding.

• 1:33:10Rick Rubin?

  How have you incorporated AI at Angel?

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  Well, the the primary way we're using it is for engineering. But we've basically told the company, everybody needs to 10x their output using AI tools. Like, that's just expected now.

• 1:33:29Rick Rubin?

  Has there been any pushback from that? Or are people excited by it?

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  Well, there's a couple of different kinds. There's people that are 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, you know, a lot of anxiety about it. But we're just saying, these are tools.

• 1:33:59Rick Rubin?

  You're not dictating how they use the tools, though.

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  No, no, we're not dictating how they use the tools. Just 10x your output with these tools. I think worldwide, there's a lot of concerns about. What does this mean?

• 1:34:13Rick Rubin?

  How big is the staff now?

• 1:34:14Speaker 00

  It's 300 people.

• 1:34:16Rick Rubin?

  That's great. It's a good size.

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:34:29Rick Rubin?

  And if you can have your 300 doing the work of 3,000, then you may not need to probe too much.

• 1:34:35Speaker 00

  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 for new people. It just increases the total output and increases the need for new people, even though you're exponentially picking up speed.

• 1:35:05Rick Rubin?

  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?

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  I think that like there's a lot of interesting things you can do with the yield long term. You know, the the beginning of this started when when I was calling to the jury back in the day.

• 1:35:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:31Speaker 00

  The the idea came from when I read the book by James Serwick 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, is that the butchers and the the ranchers and the people who work with cattle are going to get way better guesses than the average person.

• 1:36:13Speaker 00

  So he tabulates the 800 votes and gets the average of those 800 votes. The the average guess was 1,197 pounds. And the weight of the ox was 1,198 pounds. There's the wisdom of all of them that brought in an average that was closer than any single guess. And he said, this doesn't support my hypothesis.

• 1:36:36Speaker 00

  He also talks about who wants to be a millionaire and how you have the three lifelines. You have phone a friend fifty fifty and ask the audience. When you phone a friend, you're just calling the expert. And you ask the audience, his wisdom of crowds. Experts get it right sixty percent of the time. The crowd gets it right ninety one percent of the time. Wow. And so these ideas were in my head. 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 and did a study where they show people predicting the world events. And they basically come to the conclusion that there's like, I don't remember if it's one

• 1:37:21Speaker 00

  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 consistently forecast and they have a gift. I don't think they had a large enough sample size to know that that's true, but I believe that theory is right in that once we get enough data, you actually might be able to look at super forecasters inside of our system and do some fun things around that. There's just so much you can do once you have lots of data. I mean, when you look at AI, everything, everything around the AI is doing is just training off of human data.

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  So if 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 I, it allows me to just eat while I'm driving. And that's amazing. Like if you can eat while you're driving comfortably without spilling on yourself, because all, all it cares is your eyes are on the road and you can eat while your eyes are on the road. 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 the AI is going to take away creative jobs. What are your thoughts?

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  First off, I don't know for sure, but I have some theories. And I think, I hope it puts filmmakers to rest or artists to rest a little bit on, on what's happening. I think we're entering the greatest creative period in the history of the world. I think that machine jobs are going to be taken by the robots. And that's okay. And, okay, a couple of different analogies. One would be chess. 1996, computers start beating humans at chess. 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.

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  But here's the other really interesting thing is, if you pair a grandmaster with an AI, they beat the AI consistently. That's interesting. And so that, I think that's the lesson because in chess, AI is about as developed as it's gonna 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 gonna beat the AIs every time in art. For sure. Yes.

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  It seems obvious that that's the case. It does. Until like, you listen to Elon saying, oh no, it's gonna, you know, like, I think Elon's overconfident on this because he's not an artist. Like, I mean, he has artistic sensibilities and stuff, but he's a business guy. Yeah. 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 gonna get more and more real. And that's their idea is that it's gonna 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,

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  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 was a computer. It looks so real. And we look back at it now with like more mature brains, and we're like, that looks like crap. It looks so bad compared to practical effects from the originals. Two years ago, people were saying, I can't tell the difference between this AI photo and a real photo. Two years later, you look at all of those, and a hundred percent of people can go, that's AI. Even though at the time you couldn't. Yes. And so our brains are keeping up, and 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,

• 1:41:50Speaker 00

  that just the visual alone, like a single image, you can't tell the difference, right? And maybe the video gets to where it can do that, but when you get to storytelling, like James Cameron took, and he maps their faces and their bodies, so that there's a soul underneath the alien body. And it has the right soul, and you can feel it, and the voices, and everything feels real. And it feels totally different than Star Wars Episode One. And then you go, AI, that's what it's doing, is wrapping. 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.

• 1:42:33Speaker 00

  If you go look at the way that filmmaker or that creator made that, they always have a real face behind it. They just wrapped it. They have a real voice behind it. They just wrapped it in a new thing, and then they said it was all AI. They just don't, they don't talk about that process of making sure that it was real humans. And so it goes viral, everybody 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.

• 1:43:08Speaker 00

  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,

• 1:43:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Speaker 00

  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 of 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 322, it says, and God looked at them and said, they have become as one of us. So there's something divine about this process of pain and suffering that allows us to reach through time and space. I think it's uniquely human. And I don't believe that AI is

• 1:44:24Speaker 00

  going to be able to feel that, at least anytime soon.

• 1:44:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Speaker 00

  That you have to, that 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.

• 1:44:41Rick Rubin?

  I love the idea of humans leveling up because of AI. I've never heard that idea before. That's a really beautiful idea.

• 1:44:51Speaker 00

  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, is, is fine. Now, there's the other argument, which I think is really interesting. 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, is the second head AI?

• 1:45:30Speaker 00

  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 it has two heads. But is the reason why it has so much power over the world? Because it's a person with a second brain that's connected into an AI world? I thought that was a really interesting theory.

• 1:45:49Rick Rubin?

  Do you think that your faith gives you the humility to allow the Guild to make the decisions for the company?

• 1:46:01Speaker 00

  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 gotta throw the Ring of Power into Mount Doom before it gets too much control over us."

• 1:46:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Speaker 00

  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 into Mount Doom and get this system set up and get it to where it has an economic, it shows its economic value before the market tells us we can't do it, or else it just isn't going to happen, because everybody wants the power."

• 1:46:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 00

  Everybody wants that. Like, the problem in Game of Thrones is not everybody wants the throne, it's the throne itself. Right? The problem in Lord of the Rings is not everybody wants the ring, it's the ring itself. 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 have the President of Singapore, built out of 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.

• 1:47:35Speaker 00

  He gives up his power and they have a kind of like a semi-free society for a while because he gives up power. And right now in El Salvador, you've got Bukele, which is yet to know if he gives true economic freedom and freedom to his people. But, but we don't like the French Revolution, they fail. And it's a ground up thing. We don't have an example of the crowd coming up and establishing freedom without a leader that supports them in it, that has the ability to give up that power. And so there's this balance for us where we're saying, how do we make sure we use the shareholder control that we have right now to get things in place,

• 1:48:20Speaker 00

  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.

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• 1:50:55Rick Rubin?

  Have you had an angel fest yet?

• 1:50:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we did. 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, that just...

• 1:51:15Rick Rubin?

  Funny.

• 1:51:15Speaker 00

  It's funny. Yeah. And so "amplify," and currently it's a small thing. Like it's... Filmmakers are invited. We do what we call the "torch awards," where we give away the single best voted projects in each category, and they get an award. And we announce a whole bunch of like announcements for the company.

• 1:51:41Rick Rubin?

  Do you see open to the audience type of events?

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we 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 how to do in-person events, until they started doing their stadium events, their brand didn't elevate. And so what we've been doing, the way that we look at it is we say, when we do a movie premiere, that those are in-person events. We release a lot of movies every year. And so, for example, as a guild member, Kevin James's new movie, Solo Mio, the end of this month in Miami,

• 1:52:27Speaker 00

  only guild members are allowed to go, and we've rented out an entire theater.

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  And then the guild gets to show up, they get to walk the red carpet, they get to go to the Q and A afterwards, they get to ride in limos. And we set up almost like a, you get to be a celebrity for a day, or you get to be an executive movie producer for a day when you show up to an Angel movie premiere, global movie premiere. And so we have thousands of guild members come. And I mean, when we were at the last rodeo one, I think 50% of all of the people who showed up were from out of town. They flew in, they came in from all over

• 1:53:11Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:53:12Speaker 00

  to go to Neil McDonough'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 to ride in a limo for a few minutes. Then you pull up, then 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.

• 1:53:52Rick Rubin?

  Where do you see Angel Studios in 10 years?

• 1:53:57Speaker 00

  Let me, let me take it even further. So first phase is I want to build something that my kids and my family always have something to watch and they don't need to be on these channels where they're exposed to some pretty heinous stuff. 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, that's step one, and, and winning over the values audience. The step two, probably as important to me, is like I said, we say, Harman's live on the other side of the screen.

• 1:54:42Speaker 00

  And I think parents are rightfully concerned. Worldwide, parents get very concerned when their kids say, "I'm gonna go be in Hollywood." Because of the amount of suicide, the amount of drug abuse, the amount of sexual abuse that happens, the amount, 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,

• 1:55:26Speaker 00

  rather than just surviving a fire, and if you come out with a family at the other end, you're the 0.1%, because that's what it is, like the stats are insane. Then we have really succeeded if my grandkids and my kids can get into filmmaking without having to worry about them losing themselves.

• 1:55:48Rick Rubin?

  What other ways does the community of Angel interact beyond the guild picking the projects?

• 1:56:02Speaker 00

  Well, they interact with 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.

• 1:56:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:14Speaker 00

  Then you're part of that little community, a micro-community.

• 1:56:17Rick Rubin?

  And it's an ongoing relationship?

• 1:56:18Speaker 00

  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, as a guild member. You get to see a film that you got to see as a rough cut or an animatic progress or a pilot progress to entire full season. That's a really cool experience. And they get to go to the premieres, the ones that want to. And just going to theaters, like in-person events are so important. 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.

• 1:57:02Speaker 00

  It's 31 years old is the mean age of the theatrical goer, which is a year younger than Instagram. That's younger than YouTube. Like, it's one of the youngest demographics is theatrical goers.

• 1:57:15Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:57:16Speaker 00

  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. It'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.

• 1:57:57Speaker 00

  That can be a life-changing experience. Everybody's doing it together. Everybody's in sync and it's a time to disconnect from whatever your work is, whatever it is. The cinema is similar in that, in a secular way, where everybody gives up their phones voluntarily and you truly disconnect from this like massive doom scrolling environment. And you can just sit back and go, oh, I get to enjoy what this director gave me and I get to do it with a whole bunch of other people. And it's an extension of the dinner table. And it's really the last we've got. And the young people are showing up because they can go to the mountains to get some solitude. They can go to other events, but the cinema is the easiest,

• 1:58:39Speaker 00

  most accessible, affordable place to go have an in-person moment. And you can have life-changing moments. Like in Sound of Freedom, that, Sound of Freedom had sold-out theaters, standing ovations, people hugging and crying afterwards, total strangers, and it was across like thousands of comments on social media about 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,

• 1:59:24Speaker 00

  who introduced us to The Chosen, he calls us the New Jews. He's like, you're the same size of population. You're like 16 to 18 million people. You're kicked out of everywhere you go. And the joke is, he took me, I was in, I was in Israel and he took me to Shabbat dinner. And at Shabbat dinner, one of the guys there, he loved 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, here's a joke. He's like, why did God make Mormons? And he's like, so Christians could know what Jews feel like.

• 2:00:05Speaker 00

  Because we were, I mean, we were kicked out of New York, then kicked out of Ohio, then kicked out of Missouri, then 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, 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, and, but this hasn't changed. Like, it's actually a little bit scary, but like, if you go to a BYU,

• 2:00:45Speaker 00

  I'm in a, that's my alma mater, a BYU football game, regularly, you will hear the audience chanting, "F the Mormons", "F the Mormons", but what's the real word? Yeah. And, like, nobody's stopping them. But we're not really, like, we, we came to Utah, we built up a community, we rejoined the United States, and we love the United States, even though we were kicked out of our own country. And we're just not really a victim culture. But for some reason, 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,

• 2:01:30Speaker 00

  you know, where they burnt, that guy ran into the church, crazy guy went in, shot up a whole bunch of people, killed a bunch of people, and then burned down the church? And we see ourselves as Christians. But there's a big group of people who, like, the first thing they said is Mormons aren't Christians. Tens of thousands of comments came out and said Mormons aren't Christians, Mormons aren't Christians, they're very insistent that we're not Christians because we aren't creedal Christians. We don't believe in the creeds. And it's very inside baseball between the Christian denominations about why they don't believe that we're Christians. I believe we're Christians. It doesn't really bother me, I know my relationship with God. And so, I'm kind of like, why do we care about the ones, what they think?

• 2:02:15Speaker 00

  But it has created a very interesting element where if Catholics had created Angel Studios...

• 2:02:25Speaker 00

  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, if you look at the history of Hollywood. Thomas Edison was so anti-Semitic and he invented all the first camera equipment. And he went after the Jews who were using it. He didn't want to license it to them. And they moved to California to go and make films to get away from Thomas Edison. Wow. Like, there's a huge battle between Thomas Edison and the Jewish filmmakers. I didn't know that.

• 2:03:06Speaker 00

  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'm 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.

• 2:03:44Speaker 00

  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 contrarian, so it doesn't bother me. Yeah. How do you think Hollywood lost its way?

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  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, I 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, Critical Drinker, he's a big YouTuber that does movie reviews. Huge, huge, like, one of the top two in the world. And he always talks about it as "the message."

• 2:05:01Speaker 00

  He's like, and whenever a movie comes out that doesn't have "the message," that's what he calls it. And, 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

• 2:05:46Speaker 00

  and they're not going to stop just shoving it down our throats. And so, as they became more and more powerful, 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. Seventy percent of people are religious and they would like to see their lives represented. And you guys are just like censoring out faith. If you just even go back to Home Alone, Home Alone had faith in it. Like it would be considered a faith movie today because it's like he's in a church praying.

• 2:06:32Speaker 00

  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 started saying, yes, yes, yes. And then the last guy gets up and he's a very powerful person in Hollywood. And he says, no, we are the gods here. He's like, we choose what people like. We set the culture. We set the framing. And it was like the group split where half of them were like, yes, he's right. And the other half were like, no, he's right. Listen to the audience. And so that's part of this culture that has developed over time.

• 2:07:16Speaker 00

  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 the 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. And so entertainment is art within the box of business. And so one of the stats in Hollywood that's really interesting is

• 2:07:59Speaker 00

  almost all of the movie, like seventy five percent of all the money in Hollywood is made off of PG and PG thirteen movies. But seventy 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 divorced. So why would you push on marriage?

• 2:08:24Speaker 00

  Did you get to do a mission? Yes, I served two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ireland. That's where you were sent. Uh huh. What was the experience like? It's incredible. You you pay for it yourself. So you don't get to choose where you're going. I I feel like I got to choose where I was going because I told God. When I put in my papers, we call it putting in your papers to go on a mission. I told God, I said, if I had a choice, I'd like to go somewhere foreign that doesn't speak a language different than English and is green because Idaho is so brown. And I wanted to go somewhere green. I didn't even know Ireland existed.

• 2:09:08Speaker 00

  But, you know, I was kind of contrarian. I was asking for the impossible. Yeah, forty shades of green. Yes. Wow. Yeah, 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 Dublin Mission, 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, 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.

• 2:09:43Speaker 00

  Don't want to talk about that, but I'm happy to help you. Yeah. But you pay for yourself. So I earned up. I was earning up. I never would have been able to earn enough money to go on my mission. Because it was about, at the time, I think it was ten thousand dollars for a missionary to go out for two years. And my grandpa, I found out what he would do is he would. If you saved money towards either college or a mission, every dollar you saved, he would double it.

• 2:10:16Speaker 00

  And so that was his deal. So I only had to pay for half. So that was really great. And we arrive in Ireland and the first four and a half months of going out and teaching the gospel, you're knocking on doors and you're saying, would you like to hear a message about Jesus Christ? And then they slam the door in your face. And it rained for four and a half months straight. I didn't see the sun for four and a half months. There was water up to our knees from flooding. And you would knock for 12 hours a day. You're just going and going and going. And I remember the first day that sun came out. Like I hadn't seen the sun for months. And just going, I feel so happy, so happy.

• 2:10:59Speaker 00

  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. It's a big deal. Do you feel like it made you who you are? Huge contributor. Yeah. My relationship with God is what makes me who I am. So swinging back around to this reporter that was talking to us about Angel. And she gets to the end. And I was already getting hints that she was probably writing a hit piece. And then she says, how does your Mormon faith dictate your business decisions?

• 2:11:44Speaker 00

  And what content you do?

• 2:11:47Speaker 00

  And I was like, we just explained the whole guilt to her. We don't dictate anything. My only response was, I guess it makes us honest business people?

• 2:11:59Speaker 00

  Not the answer she wanted. Yeah, it didn't get published, but.

• 2:12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it's, for me, it's really, really important that Angel represents.

• 2:12:12Speaker 00

  All of the people who are watching and it actually means that the vast majority of anything that's kind of like L B Latter Day Saint has that taste to it doesn't pass the Guild and sometimes unfairly so because there is such a minority inside the Guild.

• 2:12:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:12:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:41Speaker 00

  I'm like, no, it does if you make it good enough. You have to overcome the bigotry.

• 2:12:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:46Speaker 00

  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 Hubener, 16 year old German kid in World War II and it passed the Guild with a good score because it's just great filmmaking.

• 2:13:05Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 2:13:06Speaker 00

  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 gonna have to make better stuff.

• 2:13:15Rick Rubin?

  Do most of the filmmakers come from a traditional Hollywood background?

• 2:13:20Speaker 00

  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 Caviezel, you've got Andy Serkis. These are directors that are coming to us and they're coming to us because they're in the system and they're tired of it and they want a new model and they're interested in what we're doing. I thought that Angel was gonna be built off of filmmakers who were outcasts.

• 2:13:50Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 2:13:52Speaker 00

  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 going.

• 2:14:31Rick Rubin?

  Is Angel content available globally?

• 2:14:34Speaker 00

  It is. Not all of it, some of it we don't have rights to globally, but you can watch basically all our TV shows and a lot of the movies. And once the movies have been through the theatrical system in their country, then they're available too. We have guild members in 160 plus countries.

• 2:14:48Rick Rubin?

  After the US, what's your next biggest market?

• 2:14:50Speaker 00

  I think it's Brazil.

• 2:14:52Rick Rubin?

  Where would you say you are in the journey of Angel Studios now? If it's a book, what chapter are you on?

• 2:15:01Speaker 00

  Our entire team. So we were at the New York Stock Exchange and we had this huge event. And this guy from, I don't remember which major bank it was, came up to me. And he said, I have been to so many IPO events. So can I chat with everybody? And he said, at a normal IPO event, everyone is saying, I'm gonna buy a new house. I'm gonna go move to a beach. I'm gonna, you know, because you got a bunch of millionaires coming out at the other end of an IPO. 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 gonna make.

• 2:15:42Speaker 00

  Every single one of them is talking about your mission and saying they're 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.

• 2:16:04Rick Rubin?

  And when was that?

• 2:16:05Speaker 00

  It was in September.

• 2:16:06Rick Rubin?

  Wow, congratulations.

• 2:16:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09Rick Rubin?

  Has anything changed since going public?

• 2:16:12Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's a pain not to be able to talk about forward-facing things. Having

• 2:16:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:16:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:16:52Rick Rubin?

  How do you see being public changing things from your perspective?

• 2:16:57Speaker 00

  I think it gives us access to capital. That we need for the next phase. I love the fact that anyone in the world can now buy into Angel and be part of the mission. 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.

• 2:17:38Rick Rubin?

  Participate.

• 2:17:39Speaker 00

  Participate.

• 2:17:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:42Rick Rubin?

  It's odd in today's culture, words like wholesome and virtue are viewed negatively.

• 2:17:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:17:53Speaker 00

  I don't know when that happened.

• 2:17:55Rick Rubin?

  Bizarre.

• 2:17:56Speaker 00

  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, he got off and said, I want to do a drybar special. And 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 harder. 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 of specials on drybar comedy. And he crushed it. Super good specials, but he, and it's called Adam Comes Clean. But I think that that's the case across the board. Is that it's easier to make a raunchy comedy.

• 2:18:38Speaker 00

  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. Yeah. 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. He's like, you have to own the kitchen.

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