Yesterday, I met the guys who invented the “Skip Ad” button on YouTube – a truly transformational invention if there ever was one, right up there with the stapler and the corkscrew. (These are the same guys who created the ad campaign for Poopourri, the Orabrush Tongue Scrapper, and The Squatty Potty, among other things.)
After transforming internet advertising forever, Jeff and Neal Harmon developed some software called Vid Angel, that allowed concerned parents to skip over the naughty parts in movies, so as not to prematurely pollute the minds of their impressionable children. For their trouble, they were sued by Disney. How they survived that lawsuit is a movie in and of itself. And speaking of movies, Jeff and Neal not only survived Disney, they went on to launch Angel Studios, which got a lot of attention when The Chosen came out of nowhere, and transformed the way movies got made, which pissed off Disney even more. And then, they got even more attention, when The Sound of Freedom came out of nowhere to out-earn a bunch of Hollywood blockbusters, and left Disney with no choice but to accept the undeniable fact that they picked a fight with the wrong Mormons.
Today, Angel Studios is proving that all sorts of excellent content can be made when you let the audience call the shots. They’re also proving what can happen to a couple of farm boys who were home-schooled by an anxious mother who didn’t want her kids to learn about sex in high school. Which the attached clip will illustrate.
Strap in. This is a good one. The whole conversation is here.