Two Mormons, Jeff and Neal Harmon, and an orthodox Jew, Matthew Faraci, stop by The Babylon Bee to tell the story about Angel Studios. Angel Studios was sued by Disney and ordered to pay a company-crushing $62 million judgment to Disney over its VidAngel service. That should have been the end of them. Then they went on to produce Dry Bar Comedy and The Chosen, which is the top crowd-funded film project of all time and has been seen by hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide. Check out The Chosen on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/The-Chosen-season-1/dp/B091D6KCBS The Chosen App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vidangel.thechosen&hl=en_US&gl=US Angel Studios: https://www.angel.com/
Hello friends, Kyle Mann here at the Babylon Bee Podcast.
Just hanging out in my living room today, as one does.
I heard a rumor that there's a couple of Latter-day Saints wandering around the neighborhood here.
So I'm trying to be quiet and lay low so that they don't catch me.
I think one of them's named Jeff Harmon and one of them is named Neil Harmon.
And I have their Jewish friend Matt with them.
So I'm kind of looking out the window here and crap.
They saw me.
Yeah.
Hi there.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?
He's also your Lord and Savior.
No, that's not the same thing.
But we can, I would love to have a discussion with you about this over a cup of water.
Why don't you come on in, the Harmon Brothers of Angel Studios?
Well, welcome everyone to the Babylon Bee Interviews show today.
Today, it's not so much an interview show as it is a sitcom.
This is the new sitcom known as a Jew, an evangelical, and hold on now, take a breath.
Two members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latin America.
That would have been much shorter to say a few years ago, but we're going with that.
So we're here to talk about a crazy story of how Angel Studios came to be and how you guys survived many, many crazy things that happened to you.
But first, I mean, you guys, the chosen, you know, that's obviously the massive hit that got the ball rolling for everything.
So where are you guys at right now?
Production of the Chosen.
We had Dallas Jenkins on, I don't know, a few months ago, and that was, of course, a great time.
But I don't know, spilled the beans.
What's going on with The Chosen right now?
Yeah, well, Jeffrey just got back from Brazil.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Last week I got back from Brazil.
I moved my family down there in February for five months.
We've got five kids because we realized in order to bring the chosen worldwide, you have to dig in and get into the countries.
My wife's Brazilian, so we moved down there, put our kids in school, and then I just dug in and built a team there.
So Chosen's exploding.
Brazil now has more daily active users than the U.S. for the Chosen.
Just got back from that.
We just finished filming while I was in Brazil, The Feeding of the 5,000.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I went down for the feeding to 5,000.
We had 9,000 people show up.
It was so many people they did it in two days.
And honestly, Kyle, if I hadn't been part of this story, then I wouldn't believe it.
Yeah.
10,000 people from 36 countries show up in Texas to reenact The Feeding of the 5,000.
Like a really, really, really miserably hot comic-con in a field.
They clearly didn't come for the food.
Yeah, how'd you guys feed them all?
Cosplay event.
Well, one of the angel engineers was down there with his team.
And he said to his team, just when you see all these people coming, for them, this is like coming to Disneyland, but better.
And they were confused.
And then as they showed up and saw people's faces, they were like, you weren't kidding.
This is a huge deal in everybody's life.
And so the Chosen, You joked at the beginning about a Jew, Matthew connected Jeffrey and me with Dallas many years ago.
And it was, like I said, I wouldn't believe this story if I hadn't been part of it.
But we were trying to survive a huge multi-million dollar battle with Disney.
Dallas was the son of a famous evangelical author.
who had just come out of a, you know, a terrible theatrical release.
And then we set out to make this show.
And we wanted to make the flagship show for Angel Studios.
You guys didn't go with Left Behind Four as the project to launch this whole thing.
No, no, we did not.
We did not.
And it's working.
Like, it's truly blazing the trail for all the creators who want to do something.
Yeah.
Tell a story.
The goal was when we met with Dallas is we're going to create the House of Cards for Angel Studios.
House of Cards is Netflix series, their original, like the very first one that they did.
And it is what gave Netflix the foothold they needed in order to become a studio, to launch original content.
And so when we met with Dallas and Amanda, that's the goal we embarked on was just, can we take this concept of the chosen and turn it into a trailblazer for a lot of other content for decades and hopefully over a century to come?
Way, way more behind the story.
Yeah, this is, and it's really important.
Like HBO, I don't know if you know this, HBO got its start with stand-up.
That's how they got their start in the early days.
But then, you know, these huge shows are what make this possible.
So for HBO, that was Game of Thrones.
Netflix, they were in the DVD and then streaming business, but they weren't in the creative business.
And then House of Cards put them on the map.
So we said to Dallas and Amanda, and they said to us, let's do this.
Like, we'll build the Angel Network.
And you guys will make an amazing show.
And now it's happening.
So it's pretty exciting.
It's incredible.
Now, who are you?
Who's the Jewish guy?
Yeah.
So this is Matthew Ferrell.
So I will never forget.
I will never forget, as long as I live the day I met Dallas.
It was this studio that was putting together his movie, The Resurrection.
Did you ever see Gavin Stone, Resurrection of Gavin Stone?
I watched approximately 12 minutes of it.
Okay.
So I got instantalled.
I told him as much when he was on the show.
I got brought in and they had this conga line of different consultants coming through.
And I just decided, I was so fed up with Hollywood, I was just going to express how stupid I thought everybody was.
And I sort of said that, like, nobody knows how to market these movies, blah, blah, blah.
And there was all these consultants in the room.
And Dallas was sitting like right here.
And he just, he was, you know how he's very intent.
He was looking at me.
And I could just tell that we both felt the same way.
So anyway, we ended up working on that movie together, which was how we met, which was how we intersected with the Babylon B because Adam was, Ford was running it in those days.
And Dallas was very impressed with the Babylon B from the very beginning.
We all connected and tried to do something for that project.
It didn't work out.
And Dallas told me, let's save it for a big project.
I had no idea how big he meant that next project was going to be.
But when Gavin Stone failed, I remember because I was standing at the Beverly Center on the phone with him and he was just, he was done.
He just said, I'm done.
I don't even know if I'm going to make any movies anymore.
I'm just, I'm just finished.
And then I don't know how long the gap was, but he sent me the, I guess what became the shepherd.
I don't even know if it had a name.
Did you see the original video?
A little pilot or whatever you want to call it.
So I called him and I said, well, it's interesting that you said you're done because this is the best thing I've ever seen you do.
I mean, this is incredible.
And then I hunted these two guys down and said, you got, you got to watch this thing.
This is this is something.
And he made it for his church.
So I don't even know.
Do you guys remember?
Was there a, aside from the fact that he made it for his church, was there a design behind?
I think maybe he wanted to make it into a show, but I don't know.
So you sent it to me.
I looked at it and I had this like feeling like this could be a TV series.
And I called you and I was like, Matthew, can this be a TV series?
And you're like, I think it could be a TV series.
I think he's thought of some stuff like that.
Yeah.
And then you connected to me in Dallas.
Said, yeah, I've got a TV series in mind.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I was like, this could be the pilot, Dallas.
And he's like, it's not a pilot.
It's a Christmas special.
And I'm like, just call it a pilot.
Anyway, but I think the story up until that moment is so critical to understand how big of a moment that is for English.
Oh, it was huge.
It was huge.
We grew up in Idaho.
Neil and I did.
We were from nine kids.
So I'm the middle of nine.
Neil's a little older than me.
And yeah, the third.
And we grew up poor on this little farm in Idaho.
Our nearest neighbors are a quarter mile away.
Like, for example, my wife's from the third largest city in the world, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
And we arrive in Utah and Provo.
And she's like, it's so nice to live in the country.
And I'm like, this is the city.
And she's like, no, this isn't the city.
This is the country.
And I'm like, it has sidewalks.
It's the city.
I was like, if I can't walk out in the backyard and relieve myself without neighbors seeing me, this is the city.
And so that's the kind of world that we came from.
And then our family was very, I mean, just scraping by, just scraping by.
And Neil came up.
I mean, we, we, we were a little entrepreneurs from the time we were little kids.
So Neil, uh, he's had a little potato stand out on the sidewalk and I, I did, yeah, yeah, yeah.
At 11 years old, I took potatoes from my grandpa's farm in Idaho, loaded them up in my dad's car when he would drive down to Utah, and I would set up potato stands and sell potatoes on the side of the road.
All right.
You really nailed it, David.
You nailed it.
You were kidding?
That was joking.
No, no, for real.
I did that.
He was being prophetic.
Yeah, so I took, I took a small-sizing potatoes in this room.
I'm smelling maybe some vinegar here in your past.
Yeah, so, so, yeah.
So I took down 600 pounds of potatoes to my grandpa's neighborhood.
He's a professor at a university in Utah.
And he is, and I go to his neighbors and I would, I would first I knocked on their doors and I would say, hi, I'm Frank Carmen's grandson, 11-year-old.
I'm selling fresh Idaho potatoes to pay for school.
And I was trying to go to a private school that this girl I liked was in.
As one does.
Yeah.
And then, and then I sold $110 an hour that first time.
And I was an 11-year-old.
And I was like, oh, this is way better than anything else I can do, which, I mean, technically, I'm probably not even supposed to work under labor laws.
And then I just started doing it.
And then eventually I set it up in the streets where I had like little potato stands and I would sell.
I mean, my first vehicle was with my older brother Daniel.
We bought a 15-passenger.
Well, you got to tell him why.
Yeah, okay.
So on the farm, I went to my uncle and I would borrow his vehicles and drive potatoes down to Utah.
I'd just be like, can I buy, this is when I'm 15, when we could get a driver's license in Idaho.
It's 15 years old.
So I go borrow a vehicle from him.
I'm still selling potatoes because it works well.
And I drive his vehicles down and I'm putting tons of miles on him.
And so one day he shows up with this 15-passenger van that he bought from a copper mine on auction that's falling apart.
It has two, 300,000 miles on it.
He's like, here's your new potato vehicle.
You owe me $900.
Stop driving my vehicle.
So we pay him.
I'm leeching.
Yeah, we pay him $900.
And we've got this huge 15-passenger 40 Connell line van and a 15 and a 17-year-old driving down to Utah selling potatoes.
And we paid, that was our living.
That was our business.
But Neil's story.
Oh, you're good.
You're good.
I started a cow farm for my sensing cow farm.
Yes.
And then I also sold, like, I buy Costco goods and sell them in my school in order to pay for my schooling.
So we all did stuff.
Neil had like a little sheet of paper that he had written out, the probability of a cow having twins.
He knew the probability.
He said, I will get that probability.
My cow will have twins.
And then those cows will have twin females.
Those cows, and I will be a millionaire off of one cow by the time I'm in.
And by the way, this is the marketing plan for the chosen.
Just so you know.
Yeah, there was a farmer who had.
There's a farmer I was sharing my plan with, and he said, you're going to be the next J.R. Simplot of Idaho.
And I said, J.R. Simplot's the only Idaho billionaire.
Yeah, I know who that is.
And actually, Kyle, how I met these guys, which is kind of hilarious, is I was working with all the studios to try to get them to do in LA to try to get them to, well, not only make more family-friendly content, but they had existing family-friendly content that they weren't really marketing very well.
And you know, this, is a Hobson's choice the right?
It's that choice where you can either watch, like you get your kids, and you can either watch something with them and it's clean, but it's probably 50 years old, or you see something you really want to watch, but you can't because it's got stuff you don't want your kids to see in it.
Right.
So some pastor, Brian Schwartz, who's a former Jaguars linebacker, actually, and he has lots of kids, called me one day and he goes, bro, you got to see this thing called VidAngel.
It's the best.
So I went, I checked it out, and I saw that you could pull up a movie and take out the bad words and take out the sex scenes.
And it was like a whole new, I was like, there's so many things I can show my kids.
They can see back to the future now.
They can see, you know, all these movies that I loved as a kid, but didn't realize how much bad stuff was in them.
And so I called Neil, what, totally out of the blue, right?
And just said, I want you to know you're going to change the world.
Whatever you're doing, I want to be a part of what you guys are doing.
We don't need Hollywood with what you guys have.
And that's how we first connected however many years ago, six years ago or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we'll take us back to the beginning of VidAngel.
Yeah, we were just trying to tell you a couple of stories because entrepreneurism is kind of in our blood growing up on farms and being part of a large poor family.
And so we have had a string of entrepreneurial experiences.
And we finished a company called Aura Brush.
And after that, Jeffrey and I were wait a minute.
You got to tell Kyle what Aura Brush did.
So Aura Brush was a tongue cleaner that helped get rid of bad breath.
And it was the first company that made money on YouTube.
And to the point that Google invited us out to speak at YouTube.
And they also came out to visit us.
And Jeffrey helped them develop the skippable pre-roll ad, which we all love.
So you can skip your ads.
And just the advertisers that are really successful don't get skipped.
We love that too.
And we'd built an ad agency.
And Jeffrey was like 16 at the time, right?
No, it's just Domas.
And coming out of that, we did an ad agency.
And then after the ad agency, we started VidAngel for our own kids.
Well, and I had read Creativity Inc. and realized that Pixar was an ad agency before they were in studio.
So that was intriguing.
It was like, huh, is it possible that we could, I mean, it was weird that we were even in an ad agency because we grew up with three, three TV stations.
We didn't watch a lot of content.
I mean, I went to the theater maybe, I could count the number of times I went to the theater growing up on one hand.
But we had ended up in the ad agency world, which was a mixture of potato sales for me, plus having a roommate who was a filmmaker.
It looks good on your LinkedIn profile.
Yeah.
So my roommate was a film major and he introduced me to film.
And so we were making stuff that sold things.
And we made this commercial for a tongue cleaner called Orbrush.
That blew up.
Then we built an ad agency and then we end up doing Poopery, Squatty Potty, Purple Mattress, Lumi Deodorant.
These are unicorn type projects.
I mean, one of them is literally a unicorn project, but they're these massive, massive campaigns.
And so we built this ad agency.
And during that time, just reading Creativity, Inc. made me go, oh, Ed Catmull's from my culture.
He's from, I think he grew up in.
He went to the University of Utah.
Yeah, so he went to the University of Utah.
And so he inspired me to think, maybe we could do more than this.
And Neil, you can tell about what you were thinking.
Well, when we grew up on a farm, our parents were very strict about content.
Like, we weren't allowed to watch a PG-13 movie in our home.
And so when we started having, and we thought that was a real drag and embarrassing.
But then when we had our own young children, we said, you know, we love good storytelling, but, you know, I don't want my 10-year-old son repeating some of the words to his younger sisters.
And so I started tinkering and figured out how to make a streaming movie, skip those words.
And the first movie I did was Cinderella Man, which is a favorite movie of mine.
You just mute the words, right?
Yeah, just mute the words.
And we could watch the story and teach the principles of the story without him repeating those words to his kids.
About a year after doing that with Cinderella Man, there were a bunch of changes in the market, technologies that became available.
And we were trying to think, what are we going to do beyond this ad agency?
And we talked about making a streaming app that would allow you to skip over stuff you didn't want to see.
Like an automatic remote.
Yeah.
Like your dad turning off the TV when something bad comes on.
Yeah, that was our VidAngel growing up.
Oh, I got a feature pitch for you guys.
This was from, I think Brandon wanted this feature because he uses VidAngel.
He wants you to be able to black out the screen, but still show the audio on certain scenes.
Yes.
That's like Game of Thrones.
There will be important dialogue that happens in a whorehouse.
Yeah.
It has nothing to do with what's being said.
We made a commercial on Game of Thrones where we have a guy pretending to be the director of Game of Thrones and he's talking about how the only reason why they have so much sex and nudity in it is because they just don't have budget for wardrobe.
And so I was watching Game of Thrones on VidAngel to try to figure out how to make sure the voice was right on this commercial.
And I go to one of my friends and he's like, how are you liking Game of Thrones now that you're watching it with VidAngel?
And I was like, well, it's pretty good, except for there's this one character that has almost no development.
And he's like, oh, that's because you're watching it on VidAngel.
He's like, Irian Lannister.
No character.
Anyway, so you can't be a movie critic when you're watching that way.
It's easy.
So did you guys hire like total heathens to watch this stuff?
Yeah, so long story, but we're not sweatshop of atheists.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
We sold.
Yeah, I need the skills.
But the way we built it was that it was crowd filtered.
So you get people who would already watch.
You can't tag, we call it tagging a movie, tagging the scenes.
You can't tag a movie that you wouldn't already watch.
So no taking one for the team.
You don't get a go.
Yes.
I will watch that episode.
My work for the Lord.
I must watch Game of Thrones.
Because there's too many people that were like, no taking one for the team.
You have to sign a thing that says, I won't watch content that I wouldn't already watch.
But there's millions of people that watch Game of Thrones, so it's easy to tag.
Quite a few.
Yeah.
So there was a DVD technology to skip over Gibbies.
We were trying to solve the problem for streaming.
For streaming, okay.
And the attorneys.
And so we did a bunch of research, found out all the landmines.
We did some research on how many Americans wanted this product.
It was about half of parents wanted this product.
And so we said, let's launch this business.
And we did.
And the attorneys told us, they said, rather than just going and getting streaming, buy the DVDs.
Well, that's later.
Oh, that's later.
So we launched.
I'm jumping ahead.
We launched one service.
Just a simple potato farmer doesn't know when to.
We launched a service.
Whatever you say, Neil.
On the Chromecast.
We launched a service on the Chromecast.
It got shut down.
We tried to partner with Google Play.
Technically shut it down, though.
Yeah, they shut it down technically.
We tried to partner with Google Play, and the studios told them no.
But it wasn't just, we didn't go to Google Play.
They came to us.
Yeah.
They said, this is really cool.
There was an executive there who said, this is really cool.
I'm interested in implementing this in Google Play.
And we said, well, the tech got shut down on the Chromecast.
So let's give it a shot.
He took it to the studios and they shut him down.
Yeah.
We did this video that became our most viral video ever where there was a family sitting down on a couch in white and they got pelted with paintballs to represent modern media and the change in modern media.
And it just grew like wildfire and then that thing got censored.
So we're just getting hit and pounded down, pounded down, pounded down every time we try.
And we meet a Hollywood attorney, David Quinto, who had represented the Oscars for 30 years.
He was the founding member of the largest litigation firm in the world.
And worked for Disney and Warner Brothers and everything.
And we talked to him and said, We've got this problem.
There's a law that says that we can skip over stuff in streaming, but effectively we don't know how to do it.
We've tried this way, this way, and they keep shutting us down.
And he reads the law and he said, You could do it this way.
And then we launched a system where we bought millions of dollars of DVDs and Blu-rays, stuck them in a warehouse, and then we would sell them to the customers so that they own them.
And then we would filter them online to the customers.
And then he said, as you launch this service, you need to write the studios, let them know what you're doing, and get their feedback.
So we wrote all like 17 studios, including Disney, and said, Hey, this is what we're doing.
This is how it makes you money.
And this is the law that we're doing it under.
If you got any feedback, let us know.
And they didn't let us know anything.
And we wrote him again.
And then we launched the service because we didn't hear anything from the studios.
And he said, you're good.
So we launched the service and a year later got slapped with a lawsuit from Disney.
Yeah.
So Disney sued us, which was confusing at first until you realized that all the other content becomes more family friendly and more competitive with Disney's content when it's when you have filtering.
And we're like, oh, I guess it makes sense.
This actually has a financial reason for them to do it.
It was struck me as weird when I heard about this lawsuit that they would care.
Like, you know, I don't know if it was like an artistic integrity thing.
Like they didn't want movies being shown like not from the original director's vision.
I don't know.
Did you guys sense any of that kind of pushback that they didn't want these clean versions?
They felt very strongly about keeping the F-bomb in Hamilton.
So I think that was probably an inspiration, right?
I actually thought at the time when I called Neil, I actually thought that they were building this to sell it to Disney.
I mean, well, that's my initial reaction.
You build this back in technology and all these things.
All the studios would be great.
Like, now all these people can watch our stuff.
They're not interested in doing that.
Right.
That's a good question.
Right after the lawsuit started, we went to those studios again and we went to LA and started meeting with them and saying, what's going on, guys?
We wrote you all, but we were only able to visit the ones who didn't sue us.
It was just Disney, Warner Brothers, and Fox that sued us, and Fox got assumed into Disney.
So it was two major studios.
But we met with all the others and said, thanks for not suing us.
We told you what we wanted to do.
If you guys don't like this, tell us how you want to do it.
And they said, it is a little untenable unless you can figure out how to get the creators on board with directors.
The directors specifically.
So they were interested, but they said, you know, we got to maintain the relationship with the directors.
They were like, you've got to get a few big ones to fall and then we'll join you.
But Disney specifically, I don't think it was about that.
Like they wanted to look like the knight in shining armor who is protecting the directors, but in reality, they were just protecting their market.
Yeah.
So then, okay, yeah, so what was the outcome of so we get hit with a lawsuit?
It's probably easy to be sued by Disney.
They're not.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They have the, I mean, we found out they're the law firm that represents them is like $1,800 an hour per attorney.
And so they sue us.
We don't have money.
We're just like in growth mode.
We were growing like crazy.
Very fast.
It was growing very fast.
They sue us.
We don't have the money to fight the lawsuit.
So either we're going to have to shut down or we're going to have to find a way to get money.
And there's a new law that Obama had signed that says that average people can invest into a because previously, if you weren't an accredited investor, which means you're a millionaire, essentially, then you can't invest in non-public companies.
But this new law allowed average people to invest a small percentage of their income into crowdfunded projects.
And so we went to the crowd.
We were the ninth company to do that.
The ninth company to try it out.
And we went to them and we said, we got the guy who helped pass the law, written the book on it.
He put together all the legal side of it.
And then we went to the crowd and we said, all 14 companies that tried this before got sued.
They got shut down.
How the only way that we're going to be able to fight this is if we can get at least $5 million.
So we're opening up an opportunity where you can invest in our company and we'll fight the lawsuit if you want us to.
And there's a super good chance that we fail.
But we think we got a fighting chance to actually win.
We did.
We were a little bit naive.
Sure, we can take on the biggest media company in the world.
Yeah.
And we're like, but you do it.
We'll go fight it.
And we raised $10 million in five days from over 8,000 families across the world just came and poured in and said, we want you to fight this battle for us.
Let's go.
Let's go to war.
And so we get that done.
The attorneys are really confident in our case.
And they're also saying, if Disney waits a year to sue you and you're making them money, you're going to be able to operate while the legal.
While the legal stuff gets figured out.
Yeah, while it gets figured out.
So they're like, there's no way that they're going to get what's called a preliminary injunction where they actually shut you down before because it's going to harm them and it's urgent to shut us down.
A year after we had launched, the judge enjoins the company and shuts us down.
It's an LA judge, downtown LA.
And the reason I remember the few hundred thousand goal is because somebody in the industry had told us, your dream to make your own stories, don't jump into that until you at least have a million people that are paying you.
And we got to about 200, you know, a few hundred thousand.
Well, it's a few hundred thousand monthly payments.
Yes.
Yep.
The people who are paying regularly.
And it was December 12th, 2016.
We were having a big company party.
We were in new offices.
You've been out to our offices, Kyle.
And we were in that new building.
We'd just gotten in there.
And we're having a party.
And then that night, 6 p.m., the injunction order comes out.
We get up at 5 a.m. the next morning with the leadership team.
We change the whole second day of our company meeting, invite the press in.
And we said, you know what?
There's not going to be another chance to do it.
We didn't ever get to a million people, but let's go ahead and launch the Angel Studios now.
And the first thing that we did was Drybar.
It's a stand-up comedy show.
So Drybar is the first original content from Angel Studios and stand-up comics.
I know a lot of those clips, I would see them go viral on Facebook.
That's probably how a lot of people started to get, because it's great for social media engagement.
Yep.
Now you guys got it nailed down.
You bring in comics and how long in advance do you tape these before they come out?
They're usually a month or two before they come out.
Yeah.
And we just set it up like a machine.
And you just bulk, do a bunch of comedians at once and like machine type comedians every weekend.
But with a unique twist, right?
Because we started this whole thing because we were wanting stories for our kids.
And so we said to the comedians, you come in, you perform here.
The audience rates you.
And you got to be rated well enough that you even get published.
And about two-thirds of them make it past that first stage.
And then after that, we have a bonus pool that when people don't skip bad words, you get a bonus.
Like you get paid more.
And as soon as that happened, then the comedians, we didn't have to police it.
And then people would come in, they'd bend over backwards for the audience and do this amazing stand-up because we had funny comedians who aren't normally clean coming in and performing for this audience.
And it was, and the result was huge.
Like we billions of views.
It was mostly established comedians that you guys are going after or no, medium.
These are these are veteran comedians that have never had their break.
Gotcha.
And we money balled it.
It was just like, what if we bring in 50 of them?
Can we find the gold ones, the ones that just nobody's like discovered yet and make them big?
That was the idea.
And it ended up working.
Like it took us 18 months, three seasons, and like $3 million of investment.
So it was, it was horrifying.
It was so scary.
But in each season, when we would greenlight a new season, it was like, are we just burning money?
So Jeff making dry bar work was no laughing matter.
It was really, it was scary.
And Kyle's like, doom, doom.
So VidAngel had to completely redo its business model.
At what point did you guys spin off Angel Studios, VidAngel, break that off?
So Angel Studios, we actually renamed VidAngel as Angel Studios last year.
Gotcha.
So we've been as Angel Studios for a year, but we called it VidAngel Studios before that.
Because we were just looking for the right name.
We wanted Angel Studios.
It just took us a long time to get the domain.
Yep.
Yep.
And then as soon as we got the domain, we separated them, sold the filtering.
The filtering to protect, because the filtering in its heyday made like $8 million.
Last year, we did over $122 million.
Like telling the stories is where the real battle's fought, as you guys know.
And so that's what that was what the goal was.
Well, and if you go back, we raised that money, the $10 million in five days.
Daniel, who's a director, our brother that's in between us, he calls me the day we finish raising that money and he's just like, Jeff, do you realize what this means?
We can raise big budget funds for legitimate series and movies like Hollywood does, but from the crowd.
I was like, oh, we actually have a path to that vision Neil had of making that content.
And so we're building Drybar at this point.
Now we're working on Drybar.
And I'm thinking, okay, we just did one through a bigger crowdfunding round that wasn't necessarily specifically for Dry Bar comedy, but to fight a lawsuit and to build a new business.
Now, what is going to be the show, right?
The show that we do, we launched this whole entire model off of not having to go to a Hollywood executive and beg them for money.
You can go to the crowd, show them what you want to build, and see if they'll rally around it and help you create your show.
And so I'm looking for that.
Neil's fighting the legal battle and Disney's just pounding us.
It's, you can get, well, they, I mean, to the point of threatening to sue us personally.
The first lawsuit.
This is ongoing.
Yes yes, this is the Disney suit and we're trying to build Dry Bar and and we're we're running down low.
We got within like 40 days of the end of our runway and it was um around that time when Matthew sent um Jeffrey the the the Shepherd yeah, so i'm looking where Neil has told me that he had come to me and said, you know, one of our really good attorney called us and he said, I have an idea for you guys.
When a predator company is coming after a little company, there is what's called chapter 11 bankruptcy and he's like you can use that to actually as a shield.
One of the the laws allows you to use chapter 11 as this shield.
It's not like you're going under, it's like you're protecting yourself from a predator and he's like you guys should use this to stop Disney.
And so Neil comes to me and he says, we're going to file chapter 11 bankruptcy as a as a strategic move on Disney.
Matthew Faraci sends me this, this short film from Dallas Jenkins.
I watch it and it's like the whole, all the other things just disappear while i'm watching this, this little story on a shepherd who is the lowest in his society, shepherds are the lowest and then he's a crippled shepherd.
So he's like lower than the lowest and it and he's kicked.
He's an outcast, not just from the synagogues and everywhere, but he's also an outcast from his own shepherds and they are visited by the angels and he gets to see baby Jesus for the first time.
And as i'm watching this, it's just like for the next hours, after a flood of information, just like is just like coming into to my mind about how to use this show as a pilot episode to crowdfund a series, and it's all just starting to come together.
All these years and years of work are starting to come together in my mind.
And I go to Neil the next day and I said Neil, I think I found what we're going to launch the crowdfunding system with for films.
And Neil's like what is it?
And I was like it's a bible show.
And he's like, no, we're not doing a Bible study.
No.
No.
Why?
And it's totally tied into the branding of, and the churches should be doing this, not not a for-profit organization, etc.
And I said Neil, just watch it, just watch the show.
And Neil puts on his earphones, he watches, and I just remember him taking him off and just saying, Jeff, this is why we made Angel Studios, this is why we did this and um, and I mean the.
When that happened and I watched the show, the world completely vanished around me and I was there for the birth of Christ.
That's what it felt like to me, and then I remembered All those people from many years before.
And that's why after I pull off my headphones, I said to Jeff, I think this is why we created VidAngel.
And I said, okay, Neil, Matthew Ferraci says he might have a series.
He's going to connect me.
But here's some problems.
I've identified at least five reasons why he may not want to work with us.
The first one was we're in a Disney with the largest studio in the world, and this is a Hollywood director.
You know, we're in a Disney battle with Disney.
Number two, Matthew Faraci said he does not like filtering.
Matthew had brought it up before.
He doesn't like this idea of skipping things in movies.
Because he's a director.
He's a director.
Yeah.
You're going to ruin my art kind of thing, you know?
Yeah.
Number three is the fact that we're crowdfunding and crowdfunding is crazy.
There's only, I mean, we were the ninth company to try it.
And so this is super high risk on that front.
Number four is we're members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Latter-day Saints.
And his dad is got to be a shorter way to say this.
Gotta be a shorter way.
Latter-day Saints.
I'm brainstorming.
Kyle will come back to us with some ideas.
So, so there, there, I was like, his dad wrote the Left Behind series.
This guy is like hardcore evangelical.
And evangelicals, as far as I understand, don't really jive with our doctrines.
If I can interject, back during the lawsuit, the evangelicals were the first to come to our aid.
Absolutely.
That's fair.
Absolutely.
When we got sued, we had some friends that would pastors that would call us and say, Can I pray with you?
Yes.
Because I believe you guys are going to make it.
And it was consistently the evangelical community that was our best friend.
A thousand percent.
I remember going to the Jews.
Were the Jews good teachers?
They were good friends too.
Yeah, in trial.
In trial, when we were sitting in the courtroom, there were little families.
Jewish families in LA would show up with all their little kids and they would watch the trial while the Disney side was full of suits and attorneys and law school students.
So, yeah, some of whom were probably also Jews, but let's just, we'll just ignore that.
Different Jews.
But I will say, yeah, back in the beginning, I remember Kyle, there were, I went to so many leaders that I knew that you and I, I'm sure, both know and now, Neil and Jeff do.
And they loved the idea of Vidangel.
And growing up as I did in the pro-life movement, the way I was raised, all these different people from different faiths came together around the life issue.
And so to me, that was the way that it should be.
What did Reagan say?
Somebody agrees with you 75, 70% of the time is your friend, right?
And so to me, it just made sense.
What Vidangel's doing is consistent with the values of Jews, of Christians, of anybody really that holds to either the Bible or let's just say general biblical moral values, you could put it that way.
And so, or the Bible plus a few other books.
Yeah.
And so he's referring to the Talmud.
So, yeah.
So, so, yeah, they were that we had a ton of support at the beginning from leaders.
Yeah.
Dr. Dobson and so many other people that these guys rallied around us.
Yeah, it was awesome.
So, so, anyway, I'm, and then I, and then I said, Neil, so we've got those four things.
And the fifth thing is we're filing chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Like, I said, we better tell him that before he leaves.
Yeah, so, so I called Dallas and I started going over with him.
And I'm just explaining about our success with Dry Bar Comedy, Pooperie, Purple Mattress, Lumi Deodorant.
I'm just trying to like everything I can to get him interested.
And at the end of the conversation, he said, okay, let's look at it.
And I was like, this was a two-hour conversation.
I was like, oh, my potato sales paid off.
No, I was like, I'm either a really good salesman or he's really desperate right now.
Come to find out.
It's a little bit of both.
So, so he, I said, well, then you need, I'm going to fly you and your wife out here.
And you guys need to come meet our families.
You need to meet our office.
You need to, I mean, we are very different culture than what you come from.
If we're going to like get into this marriage, you guys got to come out here and like get to know what you're getting into.
So he and Amanda.
No literal marriage.
No.
So, yeah, business.
Business.
I mean, these days you might have to have it.
Oh, sorry.
That is the wrong way to describe what I just described.
But so they fly out and they meet with us.
We worship together.
We go and we're just chatting the whole time.
And we actually kick it off really, really well.
And at the end of the trip, Dallas and Amanda said, okay, let's do it.
We're going to make the flagship series for this new platform, new studio around this, this Shepherd.
And then Daryl and I were really, really bullish because we felt so good about it.
And we're like, we're just going to launch this.
Everybody's going to flock around it.
It took us 18 months.
And getting Angel down to less than how many days of runway?
Like 40 days.
Yeah.
So we throw the entire, we bet, bet the farm to use an Idaho term.
It keeps happening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We bet the farm on this show.
I pull most of the team resources just to work on this project.
And we don't have many left.
And we're subsiding off of dry bar revenues are just starting to pick up.
And yeah, dry bar picked up just in time to keep us alive.
And so, and then we launch and eventually over 18 months, we get 19,000 investors to invest almost $10 million, just about $10 million when it closed to build season one of the chosen.
And it was like crawling on glass.
Dallas had quit his job at his church that he had been working at before.
Daryl was helping him keep his life afloat.
We were, I mean, every single day was just like barely, Dallas's wife, Amanda, calls it that we were on the mana program.
We were just getting enough to take it.
And do you remember also, guys, in those early days?
I'll never forget it because when I hear people that like this show now, I appreciate that.
But in those early days, you guys helped us.
Kirk Cameron helped us.
Yes.
The piano guys helped us.
Yes.
There was like a, I'm trying to remember all the influencers, but there was, there was a lot of influencers who for free.
Dr. Dobson, Ravi Zacharias was in.
Anne Graham Lotz was in.
I'm trying to remember there was, but basically I called in and Dallas called in everybody.
Every favor you could.
Every favor we ever had and said, hey, can you help us with this?
And we were calling in every favor we could within our world.
People jumped in a lot of people deserve a lot of credit because they jumped in for free.
Yes.
It's not just us crawling on glass.
There were so many people that supported us.
But from our side, we're looking at it and saying, we're in chapter 11.
We're fighting off this lawsuit.
We are almost out of money.
Now, once the chosen raises its money, it agreed that it would pay us back what we had invested.
But that was a risk.
Like we're dumping money into something that may or may not have enough gas to get us there.
And then we get enough money to film episodes one through four, and they start.
They start filming.
And it's beautiful.
And then it's like, now we've got to launch this.
How are we going to launch it?
We don't any longer have very many people watching the system for the filtering.
like we had planned.
We have to come up with a new way to build this platform.
And so we just start testing all different kinds of models.
We ran hundreds, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tests to figure out how to build a model to monetize episodes one through four when they were done.
And while Dallas is filming in a very simple way, at the ad agency, our goal is to bring in a viewer and have that viewer earn more money than it costs us to get the viewer.
And that's what we agree.
And once you figure out that equation, then you can scale a project.
And we struggled to find that equation with the chosen for a year.
Yeah, close to a year.
Yeah, we were sitting there just grinding.
And I mean, I feel really bad.
An entrepreneur, this is kind of like we've already started a bunch of businesses, and this was the hardest period I've ever been through.
I can't imagine what someone like Dallas, who's just a filmmaker, who's not an entrepreneur by heart, and is just getting dragged.
I mean, he's got to feel like he's just been hooked to the back of horses and just like, we're just like dragging him through all this terrible, like, it's a heavy, heavy load that we put on these guys.
And in the middle of that, we end up in trial with Disney in LA for a week.
For a week.
The number two person at Disney there the entire time, the general counsel.
And they— You remember I said that we tried to approach Google?
We had a Google executive who was going to be a witness.
Judge threw out the Google witness right last minute.
Our attorney said there's no way you would ever get a willful infringement charge because you had advice of counsel.
Well, the judge somehow ruled that we couldn't even defend ourselves as having the advice of counsel so that they could get a willful charge and dig a grave.
I was throwing out that guy from Google.
He was now working at Netflix.
He says, I'm getting pressure from all over the place to not go do this, but I'm going to go do it even if, didn't he say if it cost me my job?
He shows up the morning to court to testify of what had happened.
And the judge says, you can't come in.
He holds him out of the courtroom.
Then the judge says he's irrelevant, right?
That's what he said.
Then he lets another witness from Disney get up and talk through the meetings that guy had.
So it's just like a sham trial.
And Neil's up in front with, and they ask him, why did you make a certain decision that looks like willful infringement?
And Neil has in his journal.
I have a line written in my journal, and I just basically repeated the line, and then the whole courtroom explodes.
Yeah, so he's like, he's like, I was praying about what I should do, and I wrote down this line in my journal.
The words that came into my mind is, follow the advice of counsel.
And we're not supposed to use that terminology in the courtroom because the judges ruled we can't use advice of counsels to define.
But they directly asked me a question and I had to answer it honestly.
So I answered it and then the whole courtroom blew up.
And the judge is like, you can't use that word.
So you get the $62 million judgment handed down.
And I assume you had $62 million on you at the time.
In small bills.
Ready to hand over.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That judgment was built to put us out of business.
They knew that they had done a pretty weak trial that won't hold up against appeals.
But they knew that if they got a high enough judgment, that the bankruptcy court would likely flip us into chapter seven.
That's what would normally happen.
Which is involuntary liquidation, which means all your assets get sold to others.
And that would have happened immediately in most cases, but we had already filed Chapter 11 as a protection, which at the time we filed Chapter 11, it was like a year before, right?
Or it was almost a year before we had filed it.
It seemed kind of crazy, like nobody understood why.
But Neil had had these, it was kind of a spiritual prompting to do Chapter 11.
And then we go.
Well, and it bought us enough time to get Drybar going to where Drybar was succeeding.
And then it bought us enough time to actually get the Chosen launched.
So it bought us a year where we could put off trial for a year and rebuild the business.
That's right.
And then once we got the judgment, it also bought us arguments that we should hold off.
We shouldn't do the forced liquidation.
We should see whether there's something to save in this business.
Yeah.
And so that night after the judgment, my wife was there.
Annie Ellie, she was there.
And we're just like sitting in the hotel room.
And I just like leaned over on her lap and just wept because it had been years of battling.
And I was just waiting for like something to save us, you know, like a miracle.
And realizing this is it.
We're going to, we're going to go down in flames.
And Matthew, like you said.
Matthew was in shock too.
Yeah.
I couldn't even couldn't even like speak.
Yes.
Remember, I was incoherent because when they dropped the judgment, I never thought it was going to hit.
And the only way I can describe it, Kyle, is it was like a wave, like an invisible wave just hit me because I thought, like you, I thought somehow this is going to work out.
And I, and I, and I, it was shocking to me because I just thought there's no way that we're going to, we're going to lose.
And then we did so fantastically.
And I just, I couldn't even process it in my brain that it was so fantastic.
That size of judgment was just so impossible.
Impossible.
But two things happened that night.
Three things that got me thinking.
First one was one of the attorneys asked me if I could go over to his hotel room and pray with him because he was so surprised.
And praying with him, the words came like, it's time to stand back and watch God.
The second thing is my wife driving back from that.
That was my words that I didn't even believe, but the Spirit was speaking to me.
My wife says, Jeff, our God is stronger than corrupt judges and Disney.
And then we get back and I asked Neil to pray for me because I was struggling so much.
In his prayer, same kind of words, Jeff, Angel Studios will be saved.
And I was like, I wrote in my journal, I don't believe it, but I'll work like it's true.
I don't believe these words, even though the spirit's there, but I'll work like this is true.
And so we regroup and we go and Disney had filed two things.
One had come because of a strategic move Neil and our attorneys had made while we were in trial that convinced them to file a trustee.
Ask for a trustee to be over our company, which we thought was a bad thing at the moment.
Then they file to force us into chapter seven.
They get up in front of the court in the bankruptcy courts in Utah because we filed chapter 11.
Get up in front of this bankruptcy attorney, a bankruptcy judge, and they say, it is impossible for a company to be rehabilitated from a $62.
Whatever million dollar judgment that has so little revenues.
This is, you just need to turn it over into bankruptcy.
And we offered, we said, well, they filed two motions.
One is to put a trustee and one is for chapter seven.
We will voluntarily put a trustee in place and the trustee can assess whether or not we should be put into chapter seven, not us, not Disney.
An objective third party.
Yes.
And Neil came to me with this idea of doing a trustee.
And I was like, no, you're going to get some attorney to walk in.
Disney could probably buy them off or whatever.
And they're just going to turn our company over and liquidate us.
And I went and prayed about it.
And the word Lazarus came to my mind.
And I looked up the scriptures about Lazarus.
And I just had this feeling like, if God can raise Lazarus from the dead, he said, if I can raise Lazarus from the dead, certainly I can raise a company from the dead.
That's easy.
And I felt peaceful about it.
And I said, all right, Neil, let's surrender our company to a trustee.
We have no more control.
And we went and we did this.
And it was actually a miracle that we even got Disney to do it because our one rule was they couldn't change the trustee once we picked one.
That's right.
We said we're going to do an objective third party, but you can't just change them like you can under the law.
You got to agree not to change them.
Because normally you can change them under the law.
But because we came in voluntarily in front of the court, Disney was like, okay, we'll do it.
And that turned out to be the trustee comes in.
He says, we're probably going to liquidate the company.
I don't see how we're, what did he say?
No.
No, he said, when he came in, he says, I'm going to watch what's going on for a few weeks or months.
And when I determine you're the bad actor, I'm going to ram it down your throat and you won't know what would hit you.
He says, I'm going to do the same thing on Disney's side, too.
If they're a bad actor.
If they're the bad actor.
And then we were in that process.
The law doesn't allow you to use a ruling just to destroy a business.
Yeah.
So, but I don't remember how long it was after the trustee came.
I think he came out in the fall.
And then by March of the next year, we were growing so fast that the trustee proposed to the judge that we pay off the entire $62 million.
But getting to that, we're with the chosen.
We decide to launch the chosen app.
There's a whole bunch.
This history is better recorded.
But we were deciding to launch the chosen app.
Well, when we launched the first four episodes in the spring, we made $750,000 over that year.
The trustee came in and he said, you guys are doing so little.
You've got to at least do $1.5 million this Christmas season.
On episodes 500.
Or else I don't see how you're going to make it.
Yeah.
He says, you have to make at least $1.5 million on episodes five through eight.
I tell Dallas, I say, let's get the episodes out by Thanksgiving.
And he says, that's really pushing it, but we'll work on it.
We'll get them out by Thanksgiving.
And he did it in an amazing time.
He did it.
Yes.
They did it.
And they worked like crazy.
And then I called Dallas after we had come up with this idea of pay it forward, whereas you watch the episode for free, somebody else paid for you, and then you can pay it forward for others.
I called Dallas and I said, Dallas, here's the idea for the show for episodes five through eight.
He's a little skeptical, but Amanda's like, that's it.
That's what we're going to do.
The gospel should be free.
That's the model that I like.
And I said, Dallas, let's meet up because we're going to have to get to an change of all of our agreement in place that represents this new change.
Because we had this perpetual agreement for S VOD because subscription video on demand because we thought we were going to be a Netflix, like a Netflix competitor.
And so we just had rights to the chosen in perpetuity for that.
And now we're going to offer a free and not make any money off of it through our subscription.
So we said, we've got to do a new agreement that basically represents now what we're doing.
Yeah, the changes to this new model.
And so I explained it to him and he says, Jeff, I'm in editing to get this out by Thanksgiving.
We can't meet till the beginning of November.
I'm like, Dallas, we need to meet now because he's like, no, we can just launch the other episodes the same way as we launched these ones.
Let's raise money for season two.
And he's, you know, just like, let's, let's take our time.
And I got off the phone with him and I was like, Neil, I need the team.
We've got to build the app as if Dallas is going to agree to this.
Absolutely.
Because there's not time.
There's not time.
And I said, we've already started.
Yeah.
And so we put the entire company on this new app before Dallas and we had met other than the phone call, assuming that in November, he's going to say, let's do it, right?
Let's change things to work this way.
Yeah.
And because we have to, we're going to have from Thanksgiving till December 31st to make $1.5 million or else we're chapter seven.
Like he's going to liquidate, the trustee is going to liquidate the company.
And so we're just cranking on this app.
We meet with them in November.
They agree.
And we switch the S VOD over to Pay It Forward.
So we switch from Perpetual S VOD to Perpetual Pay Forward.
Where we can make money off of the other.
Yeah, where we make money off the other stuff.
And we're just cranking and cranking.
And everything's just like down to the wire.
There's so many things that could go wrong with what we're doing and launching a chosen app.
And finally, we get it out at Thanksgiving and it starts working.
And we got to exactly like right just over 1.5 million.
Just over 1.5 million.
And then it just keeps climbing and it keeps climbing and then COVID hit.
Yeah, but by March, even before COVID, it was climbing.
He's submitting, the trustee is submitting to the judge to say, Disney, we'll pay off all of your entire 62 plus interest over a 14-year period.
And Disney comes back and says, no, they need to be in chapter seven.
And the judge is like, wait a second.
I thought the goal is to get paid back.
You don't want to be paid back.
And then the judge started saying, if you're not even willing to act in your own interest as a company, I can't trust that you're not a predator.
So the judge is starting to say, I'm not going to shut them down.
I think we all know that Disney's a predator.
Yeah.
So that would unfold over time.
That's clear.
So, so COVID hits.
We decide to make the app.
We do some tweaks to make it to where it's free all the time.
You don't have to wait for somebody to pay it forward.
The pay it forwards just catch up.
And it's working.
It's working.
It's just skyrocketing.
We hit Easter and COVID at the same time.
Everybody's going in their house.
They're sick of all the HBO and Netflix content.
And they all start wanting something more uplifting.
And it just explodes in growth.
And so the trustee's strong argument goes to like an invincible argument with the judge.
Then we file our appeals because our attorney who watched the trial, he said that was just a garbage trial.
I'm going to appeal for you guys for basically almost nothing.
Right.
And so he files the appeal to the upper court.
And Disney starts losing $50 million a day.
$25.
Yeah.
Oh, $25 million a day.
I don't know.
I thought it was $50.
Okay.
Anyway, they're losing tons of money every single day because their parks are shut down.
So they're getting pressure from their side.
And as soon as we file the appeal, we start getting, they get a new, they switch out their attorneys and a new attorney comes in and he says, we want a settlement.
And they start working on a settlement.
And they settled.
They just said, just don't filter our stuff.
Don't skip our stuff.
With your tech.
And we will settle for $7.
Whatever million dollars, which is less than the attorney fees.
I mean, our attorneys say the public numbers are low that they had released in the thing, but our attorney said they spent at least $30 million trying to destroy our company.
So they come in to $7 million.
They just say, we're going to cut our losses and we're not going to charge the $62.5.
You just don't appeal.
You agree not to appeal.
And after the recent rulings, I'm like, would we have won?
But we went to all of our investors and said, hey, guys, we said we'd fight this.
What do you want to do?
We've got this opportunity to start a studio.
We have Dry Bar Comedy.
With Dry Bar and the Chosen.
We can fight this battle all the way to the top and we don't know whether we'll win.
And they overwhelmingly voted this way.
And then they said, settle with Disney and move on.
Yes, move on.
We want to go after the stories.
And there were a few people who were upset.
And we offered them to buy out their shares.
And so it worked out really well.
So we are out.
And I remember just thinking that those kind of prophetic prayers ended up being totally like right.
And it's always easier in hindsight to see that and then to record it and kind of do your stones like Joshua.
The and then, I mean, this is just, this is just one side of the miracle world.
I mean, the way the chosen, I mean, there was another threat that came is during COVID: we couldn't get a set.
And yeah, that was on season two.
Couldn't get a set.
And all of our people.
Because of COVID, Malta was out.
We were going to go to Bulgaria.
It was a mess.
And no one, there was no.
People inside of our company, other companies, friends, all tried to get the set, all know to get a set.
And it was no set that the church, the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, had built this set 10 years before.
That's like this huge, I mean, it takes like an hour to walk around the set.
It's like an acre of a couple acres of property.
And you can see it inside the behind the scenes.
But we were trying to get that set because we're like, maybe that set will work during COVID.
And we had tried and tried, and just they had said no, and we were hitting bureaucratic roadblocks everywhere.
And then Dallas gets on tried for years, Jeff, because I remember two years meetings about that like years ago.
And Dallas said the first time he walked on that set, he had these very strong feelings that the show would be filmed there.
And so he was confused because we had been told no at least seven times.
And every single person on our team had gotten told no on trying to get that.
And this was also a concern.
This was right around the time of settlement.
And we really felt like the leverage of knowing that there's a set and season two is being filmed because one of the arguments Disney could make is they film season one, but can they even keep this going?
You know, and Dallas Guilt goes to the farm where they shot the Shepherd episode in Chicago.
And he's sitting there and he asks everyone to pray that we can get a set.
And that day, a senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles inside of the church, his secretary comes in and she says, I just watched the most amazing series over the weekend called The Chosen.
You really need to watch it.
And then he gets a phone call from somebody who had watched the video of Dallas asking everybody to pray.
And he had an impression to call this member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
I mean, this is like the top of the top of the church.
And he says, calls and says, I just call him because I feel like I should call you about The Chosen, this TV series.
And they're like, oh, we're talking about that right now.
And he binges the whole entire show that day that Dallas asked everybody to pray.
And then he goes, and this guy who calls says, it's a friend, not an employee, not a member of each team.
Just somebody wanted to help.
And he says, I just feel like I should call you and tell you that they need a set for season two.
And the entire bureaucracy is reversed within a very short period of time.
And this miracle to get this set happens.
I'm not doing it justice, but anyway, Kyle, the story that scripture that says that the books, that there aren't enough books that can be filled to tell the story of the scriptures.
We've come close to writing all those books in this podcast.
We're giving you a very long version of the story.
We're thank you for doing that.
We're going to cut this down to 10 minutes.
Okay, good.
Yeah, so you guys get the chosen out.
Angel Studios is doing more original content now.
More properties that you guys got, like Wingfeather, Wingfeather Saga.
I know there's more, what more crowdfunding coming up for that soon?
Tuttle Twins.
What do you guys got in the works?
There's the Wingfeather Saga.
There's a lot of stuff.
You got to tell them about David.
There's Tuttle Twins.
There's David.
David.
He's just massive South African entrepreneur, the guy that Phil Cunningham grows up in Zimbabwe.
His parents are missionaries.
They went down to Zimbabwe to establish a mission.
He grows up there.
His farm doesn't even have electricity.
He sees his first movie, I think when he was 15, 14, something like that.
And he said he watched the movie and he came away from it and said, I'm going to be a filmmaker.
And then he goes down the Zimbazi River.
I think I'm saying that right, but he goes down the river and you can go like five days without seeing anybody.
And while he's on it, he's reading in Acts and it says, I found in David a man after my own heart.
And he said, if I can tell the story of David and his heart, God will know, people will know God's heart.
And so he's building this series that he's been working on.
It's like a life's work.
And they are, I mean, their company does work for all the Hollywood studios animation work.
They are very good, but it's a musical, like Moana.
It'll be like, it'll be like Prince of Egypt in how epic it feels, but then it'll be fun, animation, and re-watchable like Moana.
And these projects all cross ecumenical lines.
That's the thing that's so cool about them, right?
I mean, Riot and the Dance.
Matthew at NRB, there was one creator.
He's from the UK.
His name is Paul Sierstadt.
He is 30 years old.
He's a prodigy, in my opinion.
And he watched The Chosen, was so inspired by The Chosen and the Angel Studios model that he did everything he could to put together a concept pilot like Dallas did the shepherd.
And then he found out we were going to be at NRB and he flew like last minute.
NRB's national religious broadcasters.
Went to the NRB conference, showed up at the pitch-a-thon, walked over to our table, said, I just flew in.
I flew, you know, eight, eight, 12 hours, just found out about this.
I came all the way here to share with you guys this project.
And it's called the Testament.
And it's the Gospels from the Acts on, set in modern day.
It's like mind-blowing the way he's approached it.
Super cool.
But this is happening, like South Africa, the UK.
These shows are just popping things up.
Moscow, Idaho, that created the Riot and the Dance, which is like a planet Earth, but with God celebrating God in creation.
Nashville with the Wingfeather Saga and Andrew Peterson.
These shows, like every one of them have the story that we just told, but their own story where they're trying to share something that the world is not accepting, like the traditional Hollywood world, but that needs to be told.
And it's super exciting.
So I don't know if this is so much a question as it is a comment or an observation.
So, you know, you guys are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And you're working with a lot of content creators who come from different denominations within Christianity, you know, different places across the spectrum there, like, you know, all around the world.
We've got a Jew sitting here for some reason.
And so what I've...
There's so many jokes that start and end that way, right?
What I've I'll tell you what I feel.
What I've felt is that there's we're in this paradoxical place where we can all acknowledge that we have theological divisions between us, like within our camps.
Like we can say, I don't see eye to eye with you on various aspects of theology, on the scriptures.
You know, we accepting coffee.
You guys want any probably not.
And at the same time, it feels like a lot of us have felt culturally that there's a bigger war outside of that.
And I don't mean to make that sound like that war is more important because I think us having conversations about theology is as important, obviously has eternal implications.
At the same time, it's like we see things in our country where our freedoms are under attack.
We see the woke stuff that Disney's putting out.
We see attacks on our kids.
And you find that with our backs against the wall, all of a sudden we're cooperating more in certain areas.
And I think there's an interesting balance to be found there.
It makes some people uncomfortable.
I think there can be legitimate concerns there where we can say, oh, like, how can we work together on this project or that project if we're not aligned?
And what kind of conversations do you guys have about that behind the scenes?
And what are your, I don't know, what's your take on that?
So I play basketball in the morning.
And when The Chosen first came out, I was buying The Chosen for all of my friends and tried to get 100 people to watch it and gave out DVDs and Blu-rays to everybody that I play basketball with.
And it was like pulling teeth to get anybody to watch it.
Like nobody wanted to watch it.
And we'd get comments from time to time where people are like, we don't know if we want, you know, this isn't some evangelical production.
Because we gave all the creative rights to Dallas.
It's not.
That's our studio model, actually.
We don't take control over the creative.
So we're not putting any of our doctrines or anything into the show.
We don't have any influence on that.
And so they were feeling, you know, distrusting.
And then when we got season two, one of the parts of the agreement is that BYU-TV actually wanted to broadcast The Chosen.
They said, we'll give you the set if you'll broadcast on BY TV.
And we said, okay, great.
As soon as it was on BYU-TV, suddenly I had friends at basketball saying, oh, I love the chosen.
It was just like, now that there's a sanctioned source for where they can receive it, it's suddenly okay.
And before that, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't okay to watch it.
So, you know, I'm sure that Dallas has experienced way more of that than we have.
We're just, you know, when we were kids, it was legal to shoot us in Missouri.
But meaning we've moved a long way forward.
Yeah, there were laws up until the 1980s in Missouri that allowed you to kill a Mormon legally.
What state specifically are the Missouri?
Okay.
Yeah.
And they got rid of that and apologized for it.
Sorry about that killing thing, guys.
We just want to roll that back a little bit.
But Dallas, we understand, has gotten a lot of flack for working with us.
And we're just the distributors, marketers.
Like we just want to get the show out.
And I often, like, I wrote a blog post about this.
Why I am helping evangelicals build this show and get it to the world.
Why am I down in Brazil spending five months with my family?
Almost, I mean, my wife said halfway through, she's like, it's like we're serving a mission down here.
I know we're here for work, but it feels like we're serving a mission.
We're just meeting with all kinds of people.
And why are we doing this over a show that is done by somebody who doesn't even have the same doctrinal views as us?
And there's significant differences between doctrines.
I don't think we should make light of the doctrinal differences.
And I wrote in it just that if God can call a like apostate tax collector that, you know, if you're a tax collector and a Jew,
you were just completely ostracized from like Matthew and totally ignorant fisherman and goes and calls a Samaritan who the Jews believed had doctrines that were completely incompatible with their Jewish world, right?
Matthew and you.
Yeah, they weren't.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is it wasn't even, it wasn't Judaism.
It was seen as a different, a different religion.
But that's the first person he goes and calls.
Why can't he call evangelical Jews, Catholics, and even Latter-day Saints?
And from a Latter-day Saint perspective, we would say even evangelicals.
Yeah, even the Baptists.
But why can't he call all of us to work on a show like this?
And honestly, the way I feel about it is whatever they say, it doesn't change my relationship with Christ.
I know Jesus Christ.
I've accepted him.
He saved me.
And I know what my relationship is.
And so I'm going to do whatever I need to do to help the show, regardless, and help get it to the world.
But I've tried to explain some of my views on why I'm okay letting Dallas have full control over the content.
Well, and the other weird thing, too, is that if he didn't go through Angel Studios or some partner that's outside Hollywood, he'd be getting it distributed by godless atheist, child sacrificing Satan worship.
These are all technicalities, kind of drink baby blood or whatever out in Hollywood.
So just a theory, just a theory.
So it's weird that we feel comfortable with that, but not this.
And I guess some of that is the doctrinal distinction and fuzziness.
And where do you set boundaries and lines?
But yeah, that's a good perspective.
We all have our sincere belief.
You have your sincere belief, your relationship with Christ.
You have your perspective on that.
We have our perspective on what that looks like.
And we can disagree on those things and yet say at the same time, we have similar goals externally in the culture war or whatever you want to call it.
Well, and also just, I mean, as one last note is I can understand because this is like the most important part of people's life, their faith.
So I understand.
Watch the show.
Let it speak for itself.
Let these things speak for themselves by their fruits.
And if something that Dallas and his team have created unites us all a little bit more in this world, we'll take it.
Let's move into our 10 questions.
And I'm sure we'll all keep chatting well beyond this.
But we ask every guest the same 10 questions.
The 10 questions.
Have you ever met Carmen?
Carmen?
Yeah, he's a Christian rapper.
No.
Okay.
Have you ever met Carmen?
No.
Have you ever met Carmen?
Then I have to do this first.
Okay.
Are you a Calvinist or an Arminian?
I cleaned the fifth.
Well, you know, predestination or free will, if you had to fall somewhere on that spectrum.
Well, I'll just say this, the Torah teaches that you need to trust God and work your behind off.
So where do you put me on that scale?
You're an Arminian.
Oh, okay.
Well, there we go.
Calvinist or Arminian?
More on the free will count.
On the free will side.
Yeah.
Yeah, free will.
Free will.
Okay.
You get to.
Oh, I think I was predestined to marry my wife.
She's amazing.
Okay.
I was a Calvinist.
You get to add one book to the Bible.
What is it?
Usually people pick their favorite book or something that everybody should read.
Well, you know, in our tradition, we have so much, you know, this tradition of like the oral Torah that there's so much.
I wouldn't add a thing because I can't possibly even get to the stuff that Rabbis have already written.
All right.
What's your second favorite book besides the Bible?
Completely unrelated.
Exodus by Leon Uras.
Okay.
Cool.
I'd say outside of the scriptures, the book that impacted me the most is Les Miz.
Especially the very first book because it's six books, but the one about the bishop, or it's called Fontaine.
That book changed my life.
Awesome.
Just a stream of thought, probably not well thought out, but How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen had a huge impact.
Okay.
Whiskey or beer.
Whiskey.
All right.
Lahayam.
Whiskey or whiskey has more uses for those who don't drink alcohol.
Oh, you're drinking it.
I didn't expect you to say whiskey.
Remember, they create a dry ball.
Hey, Jeff, same answer as Neil.
Whiskey would have more uses.
Would have more uses for non-drinking whiskey.
I'll take your whiskey.
It's my thing to bear.
You get to hang out with any three people, living or dead.
Who are they?
Oh, my goodness.
And you guys can jump in.
If one of you has your list ready, feel free.
Jesus, for sure.
Oh, you can't pick Jesus.
Oh, you can't?
You said living or dead?
Yeah.
And Jesus is living, but George Washington would be one.
I need to think a little bit.
My grandpa.
Okay.
He passed away.
I'd love my grandpa, Frank.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to meet Satoshi Nakamoto.
Okay.
That would count for more than three people.
Yeah, they say that's up to seven.
Okay.
Does that count?
Am I done?
No.
Matthew.
Come on, Matthew.
I'm fascinated by, I'll just throw it out.
What comes to my head?
John Quincy Adams.
I love the duty is ours.
The consequences are his.
I think what an amazing man.
David, a poet, a warrior, so many things.
And yet unremarkable.
What the heck is this guy like?
He would be one.
And then the Rebbe.
I don't know if you've heard of the Rebbe, but he's probably the most impactful rabbi in our lifetime and an absolutely fascinating person.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thomas Jefferson would be another one.
All right.
So you got a lot, but there's.
Just no, you got to pick three.
So there you go.
I think.
Did you only do grandpa so far?
Yeah, Isaiah.
I'd love to meet Isaiah.
Okay.
That's a good one, Neil.
That's a good one.
Yeah.
And I've done two, huh?
Yeah.
We're all waiting on you.
I mean, I would definitely say George Washington.
I was trying to come up with something outside of Washington.
Great.
Yeah.
All right.
That's a good group of people to hang out with.
Cigars or pipes?
Cigars.
Oh, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
That's tough because pipes are pipes.
Can I change my answer?
Okay, pipes.
And again, you're going to get stuck with those guys.
So why don't you guys just pick the thing that Kyle and I are going to have to do?
And I'll give you, you can have bacon.
I got to leave the bacon.
Pipes look cooler than cigars.
There you go.
So pipes.
I'll do cigars.
Okay.
Just to be different.
Yeah, cool.
It could be a bubble pipe.
Those were very popular when I was.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm saying that with the understanding that I wouldn't pick either.
Yeah.
Well, I do it because I think I know of some people who would like the cigar, so I give it to them.
Yeah.
What would be the first thing you would do as president?
I would cut the bureaucracy by 85%.
And that's probably a conservative essay.
Conservative number.
Yeah.
Of the things that the president can do, you know, I'd love to focus on our own defense.
Great.
Yeah.
Instead of all over the world.
Good.
Yeah.
Go through all the executive orders that have been written that the president did illegally and undo them.
Great.
Oh, I like that.
Great.
I'll vote for you, Jeff.
Question number eight.
Have you ever punched anyone or been punched?
Oh, wow.
Yes.
I guess any of you can jump in.
Yeah.
So third grade, playing tackle football, which we shouldn't have been doing.
There was a friend who had cowboy boots.
He kicked me in the face in the pile as we were tackling people.
I pulled him out of the pile and punched him in the nose.
Man, a week later, we were friends and playing together at each other's house.
But yeah, that was one time.
Jeff, have you ever punched anyone?
I've been punched.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is it a good story or dramatic story?
There was a kid that had got to the baseball diamond first.
And so he was supposed to pitch.
And the other kid kicked him off.
And so I went and confronted the other kid and said, hey, he was here first.
That's the rules.
And then I won that little thing.
But then this kid that was way bigger than everybody had been held back a grade, like jumped me on the playground later.
And he punched me pretty hard.
So yeah, I was bloodied from that.
Awesome.
Cool.
Have you ever punched anyone or been punched?
This is not a fair question because I studied boxing for a while.
So people punched me and I punched them all.
Outside of the ring.
Outside of.
Yeah.
There may have been a college roommate who had something coming and there may have been a few punches exchanged.
Okay.
All right.
Cool.
Yeah.
What is the stuff up?
What does the rabbinic tradition say about them?
The rabbinic tradition says you're supposed to yell at each other over a theological question, but it should, you know, but it doesn't come to blows.
But everybody who's not Jewish thinks it's about to come to blows.
So usually when you're learning a particular thing, you're in each other's face and people walk by like, what's about to happen to both of you guys?
And then you just stop and go, we're learning.
We're studying.
What's your problem?
We're just yelling at each other.
What, you know?
Yeah.
This is vigorous debate.
Yeah.
All right.
Question number nine.
You get to go to any concert of any band in history.
Who do you pick?
And you can't pick Imagine Dragons.
That is so good.
I want to see.
I just watched the Elvis movie.
I would have loved to have gone to one of those concerts when he was younger.
Yeah, for sure.
That would have been super fun.
Yes.
Elvis?
It would have been one of the swing bands.
Okay.
Sing, sing, sing.
All right.
Hear that live by the original.
Great.
That'd be great.
Great.
Gotta see.
I mean, Sinatra, to see Sinatra in concert would have been fun.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Yeah, amazing.
Okay, great.
All right, final question.
With every head bowed and every eye closed in this place, will you accept the Baptist Jesus as your Lord and Savior?
The Trinitarian Christ.
Modify the question a little.
We will get in trouble for this.
Can I interstate?
I love that.
You just qualified that question.
Well, it seems like I didn't convert anybody today, but still, it was a good podcast.