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“Every piece of great art that stood the test of time when you go back through history and you look at the ones that we have the history of the artist those artists have gone through tremendous pain and suffering to get to a point where they were able to take their life experience and all the pain and suffering that they have transcended and then put it into that piece of art or that film to the point that that film transcends space and time. They all have pain and suffering behind them and then AI is only a derivative of that output. Unless AI can get to the point where it can feel pain and suffering it will not be able to make art that stands the test of time.”

“If you're fearful of losing or you have a fear of failure, I feel like you're almost certain to be stuck. You're not gonna take shots that are material, and you're gonna protect downside more than go after upside. And I don't tend to believe that's really the founder mentality. If you took a risk once upon a time to start a business where there was nothing, you didn't even know what it was gonna become, and you knew the odds were 99, five nine is likely that you were gonna fail. That in itself has to tell you the founder mentality's gotta be chase winning.”

“if I just went to the core business, our core advertising products are about 400 people. So call it some very, very high percentage of all the company's EBITDA comes from the core business. So if you then calculate the EBITDA per employee over 400, it's a really, really high number. I think it's it's reaching over 10,000,000,000, 10,000,000 ahead now. So the question on, can you have a team full of A players? Not everyone can be an A player in a team. You need some roles that are just there to be processed and keep the lights on.”

“One of the stats in Hollywood that's really interesting is almost all of the movie like 75% of all the money in Hollywood is made off of PG and PG-13 movies, but 70 plus percent of the movies are R-rated. That's interesting. So they're just they're not connecting. 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?”

“I've found and the reason I just reacted a little awkwardly to the kindness point, if you're too kind and not as direct, not as aggressive, you're wasting time. And in a world where time is limited and you can't quantify the loss from sugarcoating things, I'd much rather be aggressive and rub some people the wrong way and surround myself with people that wanna push hard then really be surrounded by people who care so much about kindness that they're willing to slow down. Have you ever rubbed people up the wrong way and you regretted it? Not really. I mean, I guess I just don't think about it much.”

“We chose not to have it because we wanted to have exceptional engineers that understood the product. The belief was, if our engineering team is writing the product that delivers revenue, our sales team and all other teams are effectively cheerleading for the engineering team, making sure they have what they need, and then eventually going out and selling their product. But we can only sell the product if it's good enough to be sold. The engineers, if exceptional, better be good enough at understanding the product that they need to build to go build it. And so I do think the role of product should end up looking a lot like it does at our company over time.”

“Sound of Freedom is wild. It'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. 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.”

“The benefit of not doing things in these one on one silos and very structured is you can document everything in Slacks or transcripted video calls. If you do that, any new person can come in and go, hey, Claude. Summarize for me what Adam cares about over the last quarter. And write me a book of everything that matters to him. And take the person who's running the best sales calls and summarize what he does or she does for those calls and tell me what I should know on this job. And then, like, you start asking these types of questions. You start getting really good output because all of the information is available to Cloud.”

“Yeah. I mean, 90% probably, but, like, that discounts quality over quantity. So, like, I think what's important is if you just shoot after a percentage of your tokens consumed, you could get to a place where you're just creating slop. If you're incentivizing slop, like, you're not gonna get very far as a business. You're gonna have massive fees to go pay the large language model businesses, but you're not gonna get further as a business. What's important is, are your engineers good enough to use these technologies to accelerate what creates value for the company? And can you measure that?”

“It is easier to take a comedian cuz the ad agency and the stand-up comedy were happening together. So, it's easier to turn a comedian into a marketer. That takes about 6 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, bad experiences make great stories and great comedians.”

“One of my beliefs is that really good people figure out a way. They don't need a whole lot of mentorship. So if people on my team if they directly report to me, I never do one on ones. I don't do reviews. If I don't like something they're doing, they know about it in real time via chat. If I like what they're doing, they don't need to know. They they know that I respect them and and and they're good to go. Good people don't need that type of hand holding. And what ends up happening is people who need a lot of development too, those people aren't the people that I want on this team of a players.”

“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.”

“VidAngel was a streaming platform? It wasn't a streaming platform. It was a automatic remote control platform. Parental controls. Disney is the one who came after us initially. They said that we were infringing on copyright. Had a big long battle. We went to our audience and said, Our promise to you, our brand promise was that we were going to protect the home through this automatic remote control. Would you be interested in us shifting to do original content like The Chosen and Dry Bar? And the vast majority of the audience said we prefer just go after the original content.”

“We learned something very early on. If you make them pay, they laugh better. So at first we did it for free. And then we realized, no, if they're paying, they actually laugh. If you give a free ticket, they're like folding their arms, like, make me laugh. Show me. And then as soon as we got it big enough to where we actually got paid people in both early and late show, they equaled out.”

“The rapid rate of product delivery in the large language model space makes a lot of traditional enterprise SaaS companies hard to bet on years into the future. So what happens? Well, terminal value is dicier. So you value the company less. You get out. Their stock based comp was high, but it was an acceptable percentage of total value. Stock tanks, stock based comp becomes too extreme. Now they're in a position where not only are they gonna lose their heads, they're also competitively challenged. So you're in a really bad downward spiral. So in a way, I would say not only is it fair because of the risks that exist, I'm not sure it's actually done yet.”

“Everybody praises somebody who burns the boats and goes after their business idea. Like, that's a big deal. We praise it cuz 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 should go out of our way to hero these mothers who go and have a child before they have enough money because they're burning the boats to change the world.”

“And we noticed that on our Facebook fan page people would get on and they would say I really want to watch this, but I can't afford to pay for it. And 100% of the time when they said that, somebody would chime in underneath and say, I love the series. Send me your email. I will buy it for you and send it to you. What if we just make that the model? You get to watch 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.”

“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. Anybody who's going to disrupt the law needs to own the stack. 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 built all our own TV apps.”

“So I don't invest anymore for a couple reasons. One is, in order to invest, you've got to sell shares in your own business to have liquidity to go invest. And I don't know again, if if I didn't start this business for money, I don't know what I need to invest to create more return on. And if you're you're an investor, hopefully, you really wanna create return or impact or something that is a KPI that you care about. But the second you care about that KPI and you chase it, you're selling from your own core business to go diversify. You're not focused on your day job.”

“What we instead did was go and say, if you are a seller, please work with us to sell back to the business. And so we went and deployed every dollar that we made and including we raised some debt to deploy even more and took back a lot of the shares on the cap table that we're gonna inevitably sell into the public markets over the coming months. By doing that, we were able to get liquidity to company folks, investors, and old ex cofounders, and other folks on the cap table that needed liquidity. We were able to get them liquidity. No problem. We're happy to do the trade.”