Thomas Tull: From Batman Dark Knight Trilogy to AI and The Rolling Stones

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Thomas Tall,

00:00:02.440 | founder of Legendary Entertainment,

00:00:04.680 | known for producing blockbusters

00:00:06.800 | like Batman's Dark Knight Trilogy,

00:00:09.120 | The Hangover franchise, Godzilla, Inception,

00:00:12.240 | Jurassic World, 300, and many more.

00:00:15.720 | He runs Talco, which is an investment company

00:00:18.120 | that focuses on how artificial intelligence

00:00:21.000 | can revolutionize large industries.

00:00:23.800 | He is part owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

00:00:26.480 | He's the guitarist for the band Ghost Hounds

00:00:29.000 | that tours with the Rolling Stones.

00:00:31.600 | But most importantly, he's humble, down to earth,

00:00:35.320 | and someone who has quickly become a mentor and friend.

00:00:38.340 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:41.440 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:43.600 | in the description.

00:00:44.880 | And now, here's my conversation with Thomas Tall.

00:00:48.760 | In 2004, you founded Legendary Entertainment,

00:00:53.240 | known for producing blockbusters

00:00:55.000 | like Batman's Dark Knight Trilogy

00:00:57.880 | that includes Batman Begins, Dark Knight,

00:00:59.880 | and Dark Knight Rises, The Hangover franchise,

00:01:03.240 | Godzilla, Inception, Jurassic World, 300,

00:01:05.880 | and the list goes on.

00:01:07.200 | It's just some of the biggest movies in history.

00:01:10.400 | What does it take to make an epic movie like that?

00:01:12.560 | Or what does it take to make it happen

00:01:14.120 | from start to finish?

00:01:15.200 | - Well, look, I've been enamored with movies

00:01:19.600 | since I was a kid as a fan.

00:01:21.320 | And I think what you need

00:01:24.200 | is to be able to tell a great story.

00:01:26.600 | And if you're gonna tell a great story,

00:01:28.720 | you need a great director.

00:01:30.380 | You gotta start with a fantastic script

00:01:32.640 | that is able to take some of these iconic characters

00:01:38.360 | that we did and put your own stamp on it

00:01:41.080 | while still respecting the mythology.

00:01:44.880 | And I had zero experience in movies and television

00:01:48.720 | before I started Legendary.

00:01:50.240 | So it was a very interesting trip.

00:01:53.220 | Total luck that we had the opportunity

00:01:57.300 | to make five movies at the time with Chris Nolan,

00:02:01.020 | who turned out to be one of the greatest filmmakers

00:02:03.140 | of all time.

00:02:04.500 | But each one is its own little startup company.

00:02:07.880 | And I don't think there's any formula to get there.

00:02:11.980 | But I know that if you don't have a great director

00:02:15.140 | and a great script, if you don't have that foundation,

00:02:17.620 | it's hard to pull off.

00:02:18.940 | - Who's the CEO of that little startup company?

00:02:21.180 | Is it the director?

00:02:22.780 | Who would you say kind of defines the success

00:02:25.100 | or the failure of a movie?

00:02:26.440 | - Well, when you build a big movie like that,

00:02:30.000 | it's an enormous effort, 360 degrees.

00:02:33.400 | I mean, from digital effects, certainly the actors.

00:02:37.820 | I mean, if you have an amazing script, an amazing director,

00:02:40.860 | but you don't believe anybody playing the parts,

00:02:42.980 | that's a problem.

00:02:43.820 | So the reason I think it was so difficult to pull off

00:02:47.940 | is I always used to say,

00:02:48.820 | you start with a stack of papers with words on it

00:02:51.980 | called the script, bring that to life.

00:02:55.820 | And you're asking an audience to believe in everything

00:02:58.500 | that you're trying to put out there.

00:03:00.340 | And you've got a cast that even if they're immensely

00:03:04.060 | talented individually, they have to mesh together,

00:03:06.400 | they have to have chemistry together.

00:03:08.260 | And the director is kind of the general on the battlefield,

00:03:13.780 | but if you have a strong producer who's very hands-on,

00:03:18.380 | but it truly to me is each one had its own story

00:03:22.340 | and its own sort of how it came to be

00:03:24.740 | and why it worked or didn't work.

00:03:27.340 | - So you said you were new to the industry,

00:03:30.780 | but you did a lot of revolutionary things with Legendary.

00:03:34.540 | So at that time and now, what is the good, the bad,

00:03:38.620 | and the ugly of the business of filmmaking?

00:03:41.340 | What are some interesting holes that you were able to,

00:03:44.460 | or like problems that you were able to fix?

00:03:47.340 | What problems still exist that can still be solved?

00:03:50.840 | - Well, look, the business has changed

00:03:54.980 | so radically since 2004.

00:03:58.200 | When I started Legendary, DVDs were still a cash cow.

00:04:01.740 | So, you know, that's how far things have come.

00:04:05.580 | But I would say a couple of things.

00:04:07.140 | The reason that I started it from a business perspective

00:04:10.740 | was at the time it was a $30 billion industry

00:04:14.220 | and there was no institutional capital

00:04:17.660 | around the movie business.

00:04:19.660 | And I was fascinated by that

00:04:20.860 | because almost every other category

00:04:23.140 | that you look at of that size

00:04:24.980 | has institutional capital, private equity, et cetera,

00:04:27.980 | is kind of a cottage industry set up around it.

00:04:31.020 | And I was perplexed and fascinated that that didn't occur.

00:04:35.020 | And the way the movie business worked

00:04:36.780 | was unlike any business I'd ever looked at before.

00:04:40.020 | So after kind of convincing myself

00:04:43.840 | that you could actually make money

00:04:45.980 | if you were disciplined and had the right approach,

00:04:48.540 | you know, went out, raised the money

00:04:51.140 | from the capital markets, which was Herculean,

00:04:54.740 | still maybe the hardest thing I've ever done in my career,

00:04:58.900 | to walk around and say, look, I have no experience,

00:05:02.000 | I've never done this before, but, you know.

00:05:04.980 | And the second thing, being very fortunate at the time,

00:05:08.940 | was able to partner up with Warner Brothers.

00:05:11.740 | Warner's at the time was run by a man named Alan Horn,

00:05:15.860 | who besides being creative is also a Harvard MBA.

00:05:18.920 | So really understood what I wanted to do.

00:05:21.660 | And Alan, you know, was just an absolute gentleman,

00:05:26.300 | someone that I still look up to to this day.

00:05:29.380 | After Warner Brothers, he went and ran Disney

00:05:31.860 | with their run, you know, between Marvel

00:05:34.460 | and Star Wars and everything.

00:05:35.660 | And so between Alan being responsible for Harry Potter,

00:05:40.740 | the Dark Knight stuff, and then on to all the Disney stuff,

00:05:43.100 | he probably had as great a career

00:05:44.580 | as anyone I've ever heard of in the movie business.

00:05:48.060 | So my first focus was around sort of two concepts,

00:05:52.260 | global, worldwide, large, tentpole films and franchises,

00:05:57.260 | and then the business aspect of being,

00:05:59.760 | bringing long-term institutional capital to bear.

00:06:03.420 | - I'm gonna ask you dumb questions,

00:06:05.580 | which is part of the style, I guess.

00:06:10.500 | But just for people who don't know, including me,

00:06:13.820 | what is institutional, what is capital?

00:06:16.500 | What is institutional capital?

00:06:18.340 | What is equity, what is private equity?

00:06:20.700 | - Got it, okay.

00:06:21.780 | Well, so if you're starting a company

00:06:26.080 | and you go around to a bunch of your successful friends

00:06:30.920 | and say, "Hey, you should invest in my company."

00:06:34.020 | Well, that's sort of, that's great and it's capital,

00:06:37.380 | but it's not getting money from Fidelity or T. Rowe

00:06:42.380 | or a sovereign wealth fund or an endowment fund

00:06:46.580 | from a university that has large pools of organized capital

00:06:51.580 | that has a long-term point of view on your business.

00:06:56.500 | So if you get money from your neighbor

00:06:59.260 | who's a successful dentist, next year,

00:07:02.580 | the dentist may say, "Hey, times are hard.

00:07:05.540 | I need my money back."

00:07:07.380 | If your partner's with Fidelity or Morgan Stanley

00:07:10.660 | or any of these institutions,

00:07:12.460 | they have the capital and the wherewithal to say,

00:07:16.060 | "Okay, I'm looking in this over the next five to 10 years."

00:07:19.540 | And I thought there was an opportunity

00:07:21.520 | to bring that type of capital to the movie business

00:07:25.860 | to be patient.

00:07:27.980 | - And the benefit of that patient, so it's long-term,

00:07:32.780 | you have to deal with fewer parties

00:07:34.980 | and they would do much larger investments.

00:07:37.780 | So what are the benefits?

00:07:40.100 | What are the sort of the challenges

00:07:41.540 | of that kind of investment?

00:07:42.740 | - Well, I think the benefits in some ways

00:07:45.220 | are they're professionals who are largely dispassionate.

00:07:48.780 | Right, it's like, look, if you're hitting the numbers

00:07:50.620 | you told me and you're hitting your plan, great.

00:07:54.060 | And the other thing that always was interesting to me

00:07:58.900 | about the movie business is if I'm investing

00:08:02.480 | in an artificial intelligence company

00:08:04.300 | or a chip set company or something like that,

00:08:06.540 | a lot of the institutions don't have the technical expertise

00:08:11.900 | to really truly grasp what's being done.

00:08:16.380 | So they don't, other than good business practices,

00:08:19.280 | they're not offering every little opinion.

00:08:21.700 | The movies and television are completely approachable,

00:08:25.160 | meaning everybody has an opinion.

00:08:27.860 | So whether it's, I think you guys chose the wrong actor

00:08:31.420 | for that, or why did you do that movie?

00:08:33.380 | It's, so it invites a lot more sort of second guessing

00:08:38.380 | and things like that.

00:08:39.500 | So that was always one of the idiosyncrasies

00:08:42.780 | of the business that I thought was interesting.

00:08:46.420 | And then when you talk about private equity

00:08:50.220 | versus public equity, if you're a public company

00:08:52.820 | where the companies can, are traded,

00:08:56.140 | you want to buy Microsoft shares, you just go to your broker

00:08:59.500 | go on TD Ameritrade and buy them.

00:09:01.800 | If on the other hand, you're talking about private equity,

00:09:04.780 | that's institutions or individuals investing

00:09:09.120 | in private companies.

00:09:11.140 | So thus the, if you have pools of capital

00:09:13.680 | that mostly invest in private equity deals,

00:09:16.540 | that's how you think about it.

00:09:18.540 | - It's difficult to make those happen

00:09:20.180 | 'cause it's individuals, you have to sort of,

00:09:23.540 | what have dinners and agree.

00:09:26.460 | So it's much less, it's much more human,

00:09:31.160 | much less mechanical, I would say.

00:09:33.580 | - Yeah, now, and again, massive difference

00:09:36.020 | between large private equity shops who are professionalized

00:09:41.020 | and in the same category that I mentioned earlier

00:09:44.400 | versus private individuals who are wealthy or whatever.

00:09:49.300 | But again, it's much more individualized

00:09:51.980 | when you're going to people who like your idea

00:09:55.740 | and just say, I'd like to invest in this.

00:09:58.140 | - Is there, is that from all the kinds of investments

00:10:01.200 | you've seen, what do you think is the most conducive

00:10:05.200 | to creating works of genius,

00:10:08.680 | whether that's in technology, AI space,

00:10:11.100 | or whether that's in movies?

00:10:12.400 | - Sure.

00:10:13.240 | - So creating something special in this world.

00:10:16.100 | - I would say a couple of things.

00:10:18.800 | Enough money that whatever endeavor you're going into

00:10:24.820 | that you're not so nervous about the edges, right?

00:10:28.500 | If I have $100 to spend and I think I can create

00:10:33.160 | a perpetual motion machine or something for $104,

00:10:37.020 | I can't do it because they're all over me about the budget.

00:10:40.600 | So I would say making sure that you have enough capital,

00:10:44.180 | making sure that that capital is patient enough

00:10:47.340 | so that it's, if you're going to do things

00:10:49.320 | that are extraordinary, it takes some time

00:10:53.000 | and you're going to break stuff, right?

00:10:55.120 | You're going to make mistakes.

00:10:56.200 | You're going to have a whole bunch of film

00:10:58.840 | on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

00:11:00.520 | Or if you're in the lab, you're going to have a whole bunch

00:11:02.420 | of broken stuff.

00:11:04.160 | And I also think it's very important at the beginning,

00:11:07.680 | and I always try to do this with companies I invest in

00:11:10.440 | or buy, is make sure that you have a philosophical

00:11:15.440 | and somewhat mechanical alignment with the management team.

00:11:20.120 | So that going in, you both understand, hey,

00:11:24.280 | this is how we think about this problem or this company.

00:11:27.840 | This is what we feel like our culture is.

00:11:30.560 | This is what our goal is.

00:11:31.760 | And these are the metrics by which we'll agree

00:11:33.960 | to measure them by.

00:11:35.680 | Because if you don't have that shared, you know,

00:11:40.040 | hey, we're going to take this journey,

00:11:42.720 | then I think that's where people get upset,

00:11:45.320 | disappointed, et cetera.

00:11:47.100 | - What about, this is a weird question,

00:11:49.540 | but constraints, so this is both for filmmaking

00:11:52.240 | and investment, do you think more money is always better?

00:11:57.060 | - No.

00:11:58.520 | - So I like constraints a lot.

00:12:01.880 | It's like constraints and almost like a desperation

00:12:06.400 | and deadlines are a catalyst for creativity,

00:12:10.520 | for productivity, for sort of innovation.

00:12:15.240 | So can you kind of speak to that?

00:12:17.880 | - Sure.

00:12:18.720 | - As an investor, as a creator,

00:12:20.400 | like what's the right balance here?

00:12:23.440 | - Well, I think if you're focused on a particular problem

00:12:27.640 | or a company or a thesis, if you have that focus

00:12:32.000 | and you feel like I have unlimited resources

00:12:36.160 | or renewable resources, so there's really,

00:12:39.240 | there's no leverage in the situation, right?

00:12:43.540 | There's no, if I fail at this, I'll just go get more money.

00:12:49.180 | Right, I'll just go, I think that's a hard way

00:12:52.900 | to be resilient and to think of new ways to solve problems.

00:12:57.900 | So I think capitalizing things just to the nth degree

00:13:05.700 | does create some problems.

00:13:08.620 | So I think there's that perfect blend

00:13:10.380 | of don't starve the oxygen to the point

00:13:13.980 | where you make short-term decisions

00:13:15.940 | or non-strategic or thoughtful decisions

00:13:18.720 | because you got to pay the rent.

00:13:20.380 | And on the other hand, you can't have it be like this,

00:13:25.180 | everlasting gobstopper of whatever you want,

00:13:28.940 | we'll just keep flowing the cash

00:13:30.420 | because that doesn't create any friction points

00:13:33.080 | that I think do result in works of genius

00:13:38.080 | in things that are transformative.

00:13:44.260 | And one of the things that is interesting to me

00:13:48.460 | about society sort of writ large is,

00:13:52.600 | I think that when you go through hard times

00:13:57.100 | and you have to do things that are uncomfortable

00:14:02.260 | and you don't want to do them 'cause you're tired,

00:14:04.980 | 'cause you're, that in some ways builds up

00:14:08.420 | that you're comfortable being uncomfortable muscle.

00:14:12.700 | And I sometimes think we're losing that a little bit

00:14:17.700 | and you can't sort of paint with a wide brush,

00:14:20.860 | but that's one of the things that I kind of observe

00:14:25.860 | and hope that we don't go that way.

00:14:30.300 | - I do think challenge and discomfort are a kind of gift.

00:14:34.220 | It's like overcoming that.

00:14:36.920 | It's like from every perspective,

00:14:39.020 | from a human perspective,

00:14:40.180 | it's a source of happiness and fulfillment,

00:14:42.360 | overcoming challenge.

00:14:43.780 | But from a business perspective,

00:14:45.840 | I see like if something is really difficult,

00:14:48.860 | to me it's also a sign that most others would,

00:14:51.740 | or many others would fail at this point.

00:14:54.400 | So like it's a feature.

00:14:55.940 | It's nice that something is difficult.

00:14:58.140 | When people tell you that something is impossible,

00:15:02.100 | I love that 'cause it's like, all right,

00:15:03.980 | well then that's what a lot of people would believe.

00:15:06.940 | And that gives you an opportunity to be the person

00:15:09.500 | who shows it's not impossible.

00:15:11.100 | And of course you might be wrong,

00:15:12.760 | but if you're not wrong,

00:15:14.080 | you have the opportunity to stand out.

00:15:15.560 | So going through that hardship,

00:15:17.160 | taking those big risks is going to really pay off.

00:15:20.360 | So like discomfort is a feature, not a bug,

00:15:25.360 | of both personal life, it's just good for life,

00:15:30.080 | but for business, it seems like just good business sense.

00:15:34.760 | If something is hard, it's probably a good idea to do that.

00:15:38.640 | - Yeah.

00:15:39.460 | Most others will fail.

00:15:40.500 | Fun question.

00:15:42.400 | I don't know if you can answer this,

00:15:43.520 | but what's the most expensive movie

00:15:46.160 | you were involved with to make and why was it?

00:15:49.820 | You don't have to say numbers,

00:15:50.860 | but like, do something stand out

00:15:53.140 | as being exceptionally expensive and why is it expensive?

00:15:57.400 | - I think "Jurassic World" was pretty expensive.

00:16:02.320 | I mean, worked out great.

00:16:04.220 | And-

00:16:06.920 | - That's an epic film, by the way.

00:16:09.620 | - Look, it's one of my favorites.

00:16:13.900 | They just did an amazing job.

00:16:16.160 | And frankly, the crazy thing about my life

00:16:20.400 | is all the stuff that I loved as a kid

00:16:23.060 | somehow came full circle back into my adult life.

00:16:27.240 | And having the opportunity while I was out there

00:16:31.300 | to develop a friendship with Steven Spielberg,

00:16:35.200 | and then have my name on the same film as Steven Spielberg.

00:16:39.120 | I mean, that was pretty surreal.

00:16:42.760 | So that was an expensive film.

00:16:46.140 | "Dark Knight Rises" was an expensive film.

00:16:49.820 | But again, to me, there's a difference

00:16:51.640 | between expensive and irresponsible.

00:16:54.480 | And expensive because the vision warranted

00:16:58.520 | and it turned out financially, it certainly did.

00:17:01.180 | - Yeah, with "Jurassic World,"

00:17:04.340 | I mean, I can't even imagine having those meetings

00:17:06.420 | 'cause you have to create so much.

00:17:08.980 | And so much of it is obviously not real.

00:17:11.100 | You can't bring dinosaurs in.

00:17:14.220 | - Yeah.

00:17:15.780 | - Is that where a lot of the cost is,

00:17:17.460 | is in the computer side of things?

00:17:22.460 | - Yeah, those are generally pretty massive components

00:17:26.140 | of the budget.

00:17:27.660 | And especially if you're doing it

00:17:30.180 | and inventing things as you go.

00:17:32.740 | I mean, Jim Cameron is one of those filmmakers

00:17:36.540 | who is designing the plane as it's flying

00:17:41.540 | in such a brilliant way.

00:17:43.940 | And I've got to know him over the years

00:17:47.540 | and just in awe of the way his brain works.

00:17:51.380 | And so, yeah, it's a big component.

00:17:55.300 | - Can you speak a little bit more to him

00:17:57.020 | in terms of, 'cause you're such a fascinating person

00:18:01.060 | 'cause you care a lot about technology.

00:18:02.940 | You care a lot about the cutting edge of technology.

00:18:06.020 | So how does he, a creator, a director,

00:18:10.300 | build the plane while it's flying?

00:18:12.460 | Like what's the role of innovation in this whole process?

00:18:15.620 | - Well, so I never made a film with Jim.

00:18:20.040 | I'm just a huge fan and got to know him

00:18:22.660 | and John Landau, his producing partner.

00:18:26.340 | And one of the things that just fascinates me about Jim

00:18:30.620 | is, so he makes Titanic

00:18:32.580 | and there's a bunch of underwater cameras

00:18:34.960 | and things that they need that don't exist.

00:18:37.520 | So he goes and invents them

00:18:39.780 | and has a good grasp of engineering

00:18:43.940 | and has not only the imagination

00:18:46.060 | but the ability to lead a team to build them.

00:18:48.820 | I got to go down early when they were shooting "Avatar"

00:18:54.020 | at a warehouse, I think it was, where they were shooting.

00:18:57.940 | And as they were explaining to me how they were capturing it

00:19:02.020 | and that they could go back later

00:19:03.700 | because they created the environment, it blew my mind.

00:19:08.540 | And I said, okay, this is truly,

00:19:11.180 | people talk about a big leap, this certainly is one.

00:19:14.040 | So he has continued to push the envelope

00:19:18.700 | in terms of the art of the possible.

00:19:20.900 | And I just think he's an incredible genius in that way.

00:19:24.740 | - Again, another hard question.

00:19:27.740 | So you in the realm of music care about story, storytelling.

00:19:32.000 | Is there some aspect in which money

00:19:37.300 | and beautiful graphics get in the way of story?

00:19:40.040 | In filmmaking, so if you think about "Jurassic World",

00:19:47.140 | obviously that's an experience like any other.

00:19:49.900 | Like, what do you think about the tension

00:19:54.780 | between story, experience and like visual effects?

00:19:59.780 | - Well, look, if you're using big effect shots

00:20:06.380 | and all kinds of tricks to cover over the fact

00:20:10.540 | that you don't have a very interesting story to tell,

00:20:13.660 | that's where I think it gets in the way.

00:20:15.760 | Where I think you have these incredible filmmakers,

00:20:21.820 | we mentioned Chris Nolan and Jim Cameron,

00:20:23.520 | Guillermo del Toro, you could go on and on,

00:20:28.260 | folks that just see the world differently

00:20:34.020 | and use technology to enhance the storytelling, right?

00:20:38.820 | To make you believe differently,

00:20:41.780 | rather to make you not just suspend your disbelief,

00:20:46.820 | but to feel like you're immersed in it.

00:20:49.420 | So I've certainly seen it done expertly

00:20:52.280 | and I've seen it done poorly.

00:20:54.620 | - You've talked about this a little bit in the past.

00:20:57.460 | You kind of left the moviemaking business

00:21:02.140 | at an interesting time, perhaps you saw the changes.

00:21:05.660 | There's been a lot of excitement with Netflix, with TV,

00:21:10.100 | so the role of film in society has changed.

00:21:13.860 | So what do you think is the future of movies versus TV?

00:21:18.180 | Like if you were as a business person, as a creator,

00:21:21.460 | as a consumer, as a technologist,

00:21:24.800 | are thinking about the next 10, 20 years,

00:21:27.520 | what do you think is going to be the godfather,

00:21:31.960 | the great pieces that move us as a society

00:21:36.060 | in the next 10, 20 years?

00:21:37.320 | Is it going to be TV?

00:21:38.240 | Is it going to be movie?

00:21:39.660 | Is it going to be a TikTok clips?

00:21:43.680 | What is it?

00:21:44.600 | - Well, so, and I think the other category

00:21:48.560 | that I would add to that,

00:21:50.000 | that will be the next great medium

00:21:52.280 | is truly immersive virtual reality

00:21:55.000 | in which new storytellers will emerge,

00:22:00.520 | especially when you can go into VR

00:22:02.960 | and there's enough computing power to sustain it

00:22:08.260 | and to allow it to be social

00:22:10.320 | and for you to have different paths to go down.

00:22:14.680 | That'll be, I think, the next realm

00:22:17.040 | of what storytelling and experience will look like.

00:22:19.840 | - So do you think a video game kind of world

00:22:22.120 | or is it more movies or is it more social network

00:22:26.160 | or is it all of it kind of blending reality

00:22:30.000 | and gaming and movies?

00:22:31.780 | - Yeah, I thought if you saw "Ready Player One,"

00:22:35.080 | which I love the book and the movie was cool too,

00:22:37.820 | but that's one version of it, right?

00:22:42.960 | Where you go in,

00:22:44.640 | now everybody's talking about the metaverse and all that,

00:22:46.600 | but you go into a world that's fully rendered

00:22:49.680 | as yourself and you interact with that world.

00:22:51.520 | The other side of it is to go in

00:22:54.080 | somewhere between being a passive observer

00:22:57.760 | but being able to move around your point of view

00:23:00.080 | and experiences, which I think is interesting.

00:23:03.320 | And then I think another adventure, so to speak,

00:23:07.120 | I could think of is a blend of video games.

00:23:10.320 | So there's a mission, right?

00:23:12.040 | There's obstacles, there's everything,

00:23:14.600 | and you move through it, but it's immersive

00:23:17.900 | and it tells a story at the same time.

00:23:19.640 | And that's why I think you're gonna see

00:23:22.760 | new, amazing storytellers that we don't know yet

00:23:27.760 | that understand how to innovate

00:23:29.760 | and how to make you feel something in that environment.

00:23:32.900 | And to your earlier point,

00:23:36.720 | I saw probably around 2015

00:23:40.720 | when Netflix decided to be bold,

00:23:45.800 | put out "House of Cards," put out all the episodes,

00:23:49.560 | leave you in charge of the pace

00:23:51.320 | at which you would view them, which I thought was great.

00:23:55.620 | - That was a gutsy move.

00:23:57.800 | - Yes, it was.

00:23:58.760 | And I can't tell you around Hollywood,

00:24:00.640 | anybody that says that everybody thought

00:24:02.280 | it was a great idea is not being truthful

00:24:04.560 | because everybody I talked to said this is,

00:24:08.360 | they're idiots, right?

00:24:10.160 | What do they know about movie making and TV?

00:24:13.520 | And what I saw happening was

00:24:17.920 | if you look at what Netflix pulled off

00:24:20.160 | and they realized that there isn't really a moat

00:24:22.720 | around the studios, you really could make stuff

00:24:26.320 | and really good stuff.

00:24:29.560 | And so they started to create their own content

00:24:31.920 | that pulled in Amazon, which pulled in Google

00:24:37.680 | through YouTube, and then you had Hulu,

00:24:40.560 | then you had Disney deciding

00:24:43.240 | that they're gonna have Disney Plus.

00:24:44.680 | And the next thing you know,

00:24:46.680 | you have some of the biggest companies

00:24:48.880 | with the largest balance sheets on the planet

00:24:51.120 | being in the creative business.

00:24:54.020 | If you're an independent,

00:24:56.480 | that's bringing a knife to a gunfight to be sure.

00:25:00.580 | And so I thought that was interesting.

00:25:03.760 | The other thing that it used to be

00:25:05.640 | that movies were where the big things happened

00:25:08.360 | and television was sort of,

00:25:10.320 | it was small screen, different experience.

00:25:13.160 | And you had something like "Game of Thrones" come out,

00:25:15.760 | which was not only on the same epic level visually

00:25:19.840 | and storytelling wise,

00:25:21.120 | but had the budget to be able to do it.

00:25:24.040 | And now I think you're seeing

00:25:27.560 | all kinds of different storytelling taking place.

00:25:35.760 | And also like that you're not pigeonholed into a time.

00:25:40.280 | Like you got two hours to tell the story.

00:25:42.620 | You can do a three-part miniseries, a five-part miniseries.

00:25:45.480 | You can do television that's,

00:25:47.680 | all kinds of different format.

00:25:49.360 | That I think is,

00:25:50.560 | allows creators to do a lot more interesting things.

00:25:55.180 | - It is also interesting to consider the role of companies

00:26:00.680 | that enable that, like the capital that enables that.

00:26:04.640 | Without Netflix, you wouldn't,

00:26:06.200 | an HBO, you wouldn't have some of these epic shows.

00:26:11.200 | And so if we're thinking about the virtual reality world

00:26:14.360 | that you're talking about,

00:26:15.660 | it's interesting to consider who will enable that.

00:26:19.120 | You know, now, like you said,

00:26:20.520 | Facebook is talking about meta and metaverse,

00:26:24.320 | but it's unclear that just having money is enough.

00:26:28.720 | Netflix did a lot of really revolutionary stuff.

00:26:31.440 | There's a, you know, Amazon has money.

00:26:34.160 | There's a lot of companies that have money

00:26:35.360 | that don't quite do as good of a job yet

00:26:38.480 | at enabling creators of,

00:26:42.600 | creating revolutionary new content

00:26:44.520 | that changes the whole industry.

00:26:46.640 | And that's probably going to be the case

00:26:48.120 | with virtual reality.

00:26:49.400 | There is a lot of money needed to enable experiences,

00:26:54.160 | like in terms of compute infrastructure.

00:26:56.400 | There needs to be a huge amount of money there,

00:26:59.520 | but you also need to somehow give freedom to creators

00:27:02.840 | to have fun, to do their best work.

00:27:05.920 | And at the same time,

00:27:07.920 | like provide the perfect amount of constraints,

00:27:12.600 | all of that together.

00:27:13.480 | Like however Netflix makes it happen,

00:27:15.180 | they do a pretty good job

00:27:16.460 | 'cause it's a very constrained platform,

00:27:18.880 | but yet all the creators I've ever talked to,

00:27:21.340 | comedians and so on, that work with Netflix

00:27:24.320 | are really happy 'cause they feel free to create their work.

00:27:27.880 | - Yeah, and I think a lot of times,

00:27:30.280 | you know, companies are a letterhead,

00:27:32.560 | but it boils down to the people.

00:27:34.480 | And I think I've known Ted Sarandos a long time

00:27:38.720 | who ran the studio at Netflix

00:27:40.840 | and now took over for Reed running the company.

00:27:44.420 | But Ted, very smart, talented guy,

00:27:47.640 | and understood early how to cultivate talent

00:27:50.880 | and relationships with talent, which is important.

00:27:53.520 | When you're dealing with creative people,

00:27:56.240 | their motivations and their goals

00:27:58.280 | are not always the same, right?

00:28:00.000 | They're not always capitalistic, right?

00:28:02.420 | And so in terms of being able to communicate

00:28:05.900 | with creative people that are not always A to B to C

00:28:10.640 | is a talent.

00:28:11.960 | And so I think they did a great job.

00:28:14.200 | Ted did a great job with that early.

00:28:16.300 | You know, but I think that you're gonna see

00:28:20.440 | different formats.

00:28:21.480 | I don't think, I mean, going to a theater

00:28:26.200 | to see a massive movie on that screen in that format

00:28:30.600 | is a fundamentally different experience.

00:28:33.260 | And I think you're gonna find movies,

00:28:35.900 | you know, my old shop Legendary just put out "Dune,"

00:28:38.800 | which I thought was phenomenal.

00:28:41.400 | When we secured the rights to "Dune" years ago,

00:28:46.640 | I was over the moon because I love the book.

00:28:51.420 | I love the entire world that is "Dune."

00:28:56.420 | And that's a movie that I think you see on the big screen.

00:28:59.920 | I think when "Avatar 2" comes out,

00:29:03.320 | I wanna see that on a big screen.

00:29:06.020 | But I think you're gonna see a ton of content

00:29:09.600 | is obviously being produced,

00:29:11.420 | and it's not all gonna go to a theater going experience.

00:29:14.120 | So you're gonna see, I think, different versions of this

00:29:17.200 | over the next five to 10 years.

00:29:18.760 | - In case James Cameron is listening to this,

00:29:22.120 | so he officially agreed to talk at the time of,

00:29:25.280 | on this podcast at the time of "Avatar 2" release.

00:29:27.840 | I'm just holding you to that in this recorded conversation.

00:29:30.800 | Also just super excited, both the movie and the director.

00:29:36.540 | There's something special about movies.

00:29:41.260 | You know, they win Oscars.

00:29:42.800 | They're historic in nature.

00:29:46.760 | There's something about TV shows,

00:29:48.480 | even when they're epic like "Game of Thrones,"

00:29:51.000 | that they're forgotten much quicker in history.

00:29:54.360 | I don't know, maybe that's

00:29:55.680 | because we haven't had enough of them,

00:29:57.680 | but you know, the De Niro performances,

00:30:00.200 | and you know, the Scorsese films,

00:30:02.800 | all the great films that kind of we think of

00:30:06.200 | throughout the generations,

00:30:07.320 | that define generations are films.

00:30:10.280 | Is that just old school thinking?

00:30:13.000 | Is that always going to be the case?

00:30:14.120 | - I mean, look, to me,

00:30:16.000 | going in a darkened theater with a bunch of strangers

00:30:21.360 | and the lights go down, and you go on this journey,

00:30:26.120 | there is something special and magical about that.

00:30:30.000 | And I think movies have been a part

00:30:33.480 | of our cultural fabric forever.

00:30:36.080 | And for some reason, Hollywood in America

00:30:39.440 | was uniquely positioned to do a great job with it, right?

00:30:45.320 | And not that there aren't great foreign movies,

00:30:48.080 | but far and away, American movies dominate

00:30:53.080 | not only the world market,

00:30:54.440 | but you know, and so whatever it is that we do well,

00:30:58.280 | or Hollywood does well,

00:30:59.760 | you know, there's something in the water apparently.

00:31:03.560 | But I agree that I love movies,

00:31:07.840 | and I will, you know, for the rest of my days.

00:31:10.560 | It's interesting how creators can move back

00:31:13.760 | and forth now as well.

00:31:15.600 | That used to be a complete no-no.

00:31:17.300 | You're either a movie guy, or you're a person,

00:31:22.000 | or you're a TV director, and that's that.

00:31:24.600 | But those lines have completely blurred.

00:31:27.640 | - And they're also blurring,

00:31:29.480 | I mean, they're blurring all kinds of lines.

00:31:31.120 | Like they're moving to TikTok and Instagram.

00:31:35.200 | And like, I know right now it seems ridiculous

00:31:38.600 | to consider that these like one minute things

00:31:42.720 | could be considered even in the same realm creatively

00:31:47.320 | as a film, but maybe that changes over time too.

00:31:50.560 | Maybe experiences can completely become fluid

00:31:53.240 | in terms of their size,

00:31:55.720 | as long as they have some deep lasting impact

00:31:59.200 | on you as a human being, as a consumer.

00:32:02.160 | - Look, to me, the whole thing is about

00:32:06.360 | either the moving image, or even sometimes a picture

00:32:09.080 | will bring out an emotion, a reaction, something.

00:32:13.440 | So, you know, short form is harder

00:32:17.120 | because you have less time to set things up and all that.

00:32:19.560 | But I'm sure there will be short videos

00:32:22.840 | and creators that come up with things.

00:32:24.600 | And if a moving image can get a reaction out of you

00:32:29.560 | and make you feel a certain way

00:32:31.160 | and stay with you or inspire you,

00:32:33.800 | well, that to me is just the next evolution

00:32:36.440 | of whatever it's going to be

00:32:38.400 | between humans and cameras, et cetera.

00:32:41.080 | - See, I think that's why we've talked offline about this.

00:32:44.720 | That's why I love robots,

00:32:46.000 | is I think there's certain things in the short form

00:32:49.480 | with robots that immediately can bring out

00:32:52.360 | a feeling in people.

00:32:54.000 | There's something about our consideration

00:32:57.520 | of our own intelligence, of our own consciousness,

00:33:01.160 | of all the fears and hopes

00:33:03.440 | and the beautiful things about human nature,

00:33:06.160 | the dark things about human nature

00:33:07.800 | that somehow, especially Lego robots bring out.

00:33:11.800 | 'Cause we have both a fear and excitement towards that.

00:33:15.400 | Are these going to be our overlords,

00:33:17.400 | our gods that overtake humanity?

00:33:20.760 | Are these going to be things like horses

00:33:24.400 | or something like that, something that empower humanity?

00:33:27.160 | Like you don't know what to make sense of it.

00:33:28.960 | That's why they're super exciting.

00:33:30.880 | - I agree.

00:33:31.720 | - Speaking of robots and film,

00:33:33.320 | you've gone into traditional industries

00:33:36.560 | and disrupted them quite a few times.

00:33:39.440 | Was there, is there a system for deciding

00:33:43.040 | which industry is right for disruption?

00:33:45.800 | When you look at the world and see

00:33:49.000 | what are the big problems you would like to solve?

00:33:52.440 | Do you have a system of how you see which problems to solve?

00:33:56.560 | How do you look at the world?

00:33:58.960 | - Yeah, well, on the business side of that,

00:34:01.380 | so I have a holding company called Tolko,

00:34:04.600 | I know, very imaginatively named.

00:34:07.400 | Part of that is literally every name ever is now taken,

00:34:11.520 | registered and all that stuff.

00:34:14.360 | So we're a holding company.

00:34:16.800 | - What's a holding company?

00:34:18.020 | - So instead of being a fund that has money

00:34:20.960 | flowing in and out of it,

00:34:22.280 | and there's what's called a vintage year,

00:34:24.920 | I raise capital and I agree to invest that capital

00:34:28.620 | for so long and then I give it back to you,

00:34:30.720 | which sometimes creates artificial time pressures

00:34:33.680 | and things like that.

00:34:34.520 | A holding company is more permanent capital.

00:34:38.160 | So the idea was behind Tolko was to buy,

00:34:43.380 | almost always whole companies or majority stakes

00:34:45.840 | with great management teams in spaces

00:34:48.680 | that did not traditionally have a lot of innovation.

00:34:52.080 | And to have our labs group who were data scientists,

00:34:57.720 | AI practitioners, engineers, machine learning, et cetera,

00:35:02.720 | and to be able to bring that wherewithal to that company.

00:35:07.360 | So to provide them with the right capital

00:35:10.400 | and to provide them with access to technology

00:35:13.320 | that would be hard to individually recruit

00:35:16.880 | for that company.

00:35:17.840 | So I would say that the thesis was to look for industries

00:35:22.840 | that were large enough,

00:35:24.840 | that hadn't traditionally had access

00:35:27.240 | to that type of technology or innovation,

00:35:30.480 | and to try to look for companies

00:35:32.480 | that not only look that part,

00:35:36.620 | but had management teams that embrace this

00:35:40.160 | and wanted to take that kind of journey.

00:35:42.000 | - Yeah, there is quite a few industries like that,

00:35:44.720 | but that finding the industries and the management pair,

00:35:49.720 | because those industries often have

00:35:54.040 | a lot of old school folks who don't.

00:35:56.380 | It takes quite a bit of work for them

00:35:59.120 | to leap into technology.

00:36:00.880 | I work quite a bit with the autonomous vehicles

00:36:03.600 | and just the automotive industry.

00:36:06.040 | Depending on the company, there's old school folks.

00:36:08.840 | It's like Detroit thinking versus,

00:36:11.360 | what would you call it?

00:36:12.200 | I don't know, California thinking.

00:36:14.360 | - Well, I think you have to look at the nexus

00:36:18.800 | of two things there.

00:36:19.640 | One is just plain old human behavior.

00:36:22.640 | If I am uncomfortable and this isn't a comfort zone for me,

00:36:27.640 | and it's not something I have as a field of expertise,

00:36:31.200 | I'm gonna shy away from that.

00:36:33.280 | Especially if I'm successful and I feel good about myself

00:36:36.720 | and it's a big successful company or person

00:36:38.720 | or whatever it might be.

00:36:40.920 | And the second thing is that,

00:36:44.160 | especially if you're a public company

00:36:45.840 | and you're being weighed and measured every quarter,

00:36:48.480 | you are rewarding the managers of that company

00:36:52.440 | to hit metrics and to be reliable and to say,

00:36:55.360 | hey, I'm counting quarter to quarter

00:36:57.240 | that you're gonna deliver what you say.

00:36:59.720 | It's difficult to say, you know what, everybody?

00:37:03.360 | For the next two years, I wouldn't count

00:37:05.640 | on our financial projections at all

00:37:08.360 | 'cause we're gonna reinvent what we're doing.

00:37:10.720 | It's gonna work in the long run

00:37:13.240 | and you're gonna see that this was a really smart investment

00:37:15.680 | five to seven years from now.

00:37:17.120 | That's not the way capitalism is currently wired generally.

00:37:23.560 | So again, if you reward managers with yearly bonuses

00:37:29.520 | and stock options based and tied to stock price

00:37:33.680 | and all these other things,

00:37:36.280 | and then ask them to go break stuff,

00:37:38.280 | that's hard, I think.

00:37:41.160 | - So you're saying like,

00:37:43.040 | the talk of approach to this,

00:37:46.920 | the private investment is the best way

00:37:50.120 | or perhaps the only way to enable

00:37:52.760 | this kind of long-term innovation,

00:37:54.440 | investment, taking big risks, investing in innovation.

00:37:57.640 | - Well, look, we certainly are not by any means

00:38:01.280 | the only one doing it.

00:38:02.360 | I'm just saying that when you think about big companies,

00:38:06.160 | the more successful that are in old line businesses,

00:38:10.880 | and I hear people sort of talk about,

00:38:13.400 | well, why can't they just pivot?

00:38:15.160 | They recognize they need to be in the technology business

00:38:19.160 | well, 'cause it's hard.

00:38:20.640 | It's hard to steer a ship and turn it that big.

00:38:24.160 | And especially if it's not part of your DNA at that company.

00:38:27.720 | So, I just think that what we tried to do

00:38:33.680 | is to enable management teams

00:38:38.480 | that know where they want to go

00:38:40.800 | and to be patient with capital,

00:38:43.240 | and also again, bring innovation

00:38:46.080 | to bear that they have access to.

00:38:50.680 | But there's plenty of capital structures

00:38:52.640 | doing interesting things.

00:38:54.360 | That's one of the things I love about our country.

00:38:57.400 | This country innovates and this country invents things.

00:39:01.720 | And I'm constantly in awe of just the human ability

00:39:06.720 | to innovate and to iterate.

00:39:13.420 | I get to hang around some universities,

00:39:18.040 | including your old shop, MIT, and it's like--

00:39:20.560 | - I'm still there. - Yeah, you're still there.

00:39:22.280 | - Still teaching there. - Still teaching.

00:39:24.280 | But that place is like Hogwarts.

00:39:26.160 | I mean, it's just, it's inspiring, right?

00:39:30.680 | And certainly the energy in Silicon Valley,

00:39:34.040 | which now Austin, Texas, where we're sitting,

00:39:37.400 | has its own incredible ecosystem.

00:39:40.720 | So, that's one of the things I love about America

00:39:45.040 | is the ability, and that really is,

00:39:48.800 | I think, in the American DNA,

00:39:50.200 | to create things and invent things.

00:39:53.680 | And I just, I think that's invigorating.

00:39:55.920 | - And I think that's even bigger than capitalism,

00:39:58.220 | sort of the machine of how capitalism works.

00:40:01.460 | That's just human nature.

00:40:02.920 | Capitalism is just one of the ways

00:40:04.560 | to sort of make that human nature shine, I suppose.

00:40:09.560 | But it's like, you mentioned MIT.

00:40:12.820 | There's a drive there to invent, to innovate.

00:40:20.260 | That's so purely human, that human spirit

00:40:25.260 | to sort of build something new.

00:40:28.120 | It's like that hopeful, optimistic spirit,

00:40:30.180 | especially in the engineering space.

00:40:32.020 | Like, if you pay attention to the internet,

00:40:33.580 | like Twitter and all that kind of stuff,

00:40:36.180 | intellectuals and so on, there's a cynicism

00:40:39.460 | to when we talk about stuff,

00:40:43.300 | but there's an optimism to when we do stuff.

00:40:46.900 | And the doing part, when you actually build things,

00:40:49.860 | especially, like you care a lot about manufacturing too.

00:40:52.900 | Like, you actually build physical products,

00:40:55.840 | that's where we truly shine.

00:40:59.140 | - Yeah, no question about it.

00:41:01.020 | And I'm passionate about our country making stuff again,

00:41:06.020 | doing our own manufacturing

00:41:09.540 | and making sure that we don't lose the ability,

00:41:14.020 | not just to create things intellectually

00:41:17.940 | and do the world's greatest blueprints,

00:41:19.520 | but actually make things here.

00:41:22.060 | - Actual factories.

00:41:23.100 | - Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:41:24.800 | - How do we do that?

00:41:26.120 | How do we bring more manufacturing to the United States?

00:41:30.640 | - Well, there's a company that I have

00:41:32.600 | a big personal investment in called Rebuild

00:41:35.960 | with some folks that all went through the MIT school

00:41:41.680 | years ago.

00:41:45.080 | There's a good friend of mine named Jeff Wilkie

00:41:47.120 | who used to be at Amazon.

00:41:49.680 | And we all felt the same way that,

00:41:53.120 | America needed to make sure

00:41:54.820 | that it didn't lose its edge in that way.

00:41:56.540 | So it's a company that invests

00:42:00.240 | in American high-tech manufacturing.

00:42:03.920 | And I think the way that we do that is provide capital,

00:42:07.500 | provide training.

00:42:09.620 | To me, this is also fertile ground for good,

00:42:12.300 | sustainable, high-paying jobs.

00:42:14.320 | And we have to make it economically feasible to do that

00:42:22.000 | again here in this country.

00:42:24.180 | And not to say to companies that again,

00:42:26.500 | are being weighed and measured quarter by quarter,

00:42:28.820 | hey, this is three times as expensive to do it here,

00:42:31.460 | but you should do it here.

00:42:33.140 | We need to innovate and we need to create processes

00:42:36.980 | and companies and opportunity that balance that equation.

00:42:41.980 | And I think as we saw during the pandemic,

00:42:44.460 | I don't think in this day and age

00:42:47.180 | you can be an isolationist.

00:42:48.620 | That doesn't make any sense to me.

00:42:51.500 | But being self-reliant and self-determinant

00:42:54.900 | and making sure that you are never in a position

00:42:59.060 | as a nation that we can't do basic things

00:43:01.880 | because we're relying on supply chain in other countries.

00:43:05.320 | And whether it's, we're not friends anymore

00:43:09.360 | or a natural disaster or a virus or something pops up.

00:43:13.920 | I think those are costs of doing business

00:43:17.180 | that we have to put into the calculus

00:43:20.020 | of being able to make things here.

00:43:22.860 | - There's an extremely high cost

00:43:24.460 | to making supply chain resilient

00:43:26.140 | that we really have to consider.

00:43:27.860 | And so if you really consider that cost,

00:43:31.460 | it makes a lot of sense to invest,

00:43:33.100 | especially long-term in building up manufacturing

00:43:36.520 | in a way where like you're making most of the stuff

00:43:38.960 | in one place.

00:43:40.380 | Sort of bringing it all, not all,

00:43:44.940 | but as much in as possible

00:43:47.020 | and building it almost like from scratch,

00:43:49.840 | here in the United States.

00:43:50.840 | I mean, what, I guess your thought is with innovation,

00:43:55.840 | it's possible to sort of revolutionize

00:43:59.660 | the way we do manufacturing.

00:44:00.900 | So reduce the amount of supply chain stuff

00:44:03.580 | and like build stuff from scratch,

00:44:05.260 | like do high-tech manufacturing.

00:44:08.780 | So like optimize all aspects of the manufacturing

00:44:11.740 | and all that kind of stuff.

00:44:13.660 | - Yeah, and I think where technology is the most efficient,

00:44:19.640 | is the human machine interface, right?

00:44:23.800 | It's not, let's automate everything

00:44:25.520 | and have nobody work anywhere.

00:44:27.040 | I, for a long time, that's neither feasible nor desirable,

00:44:32.040 | but where we can enhance jobs

00:44:35.660 | and make that interface immensely productive

00:44:41.400 | with the right training and so forth,

00:44:43.920 | I think that's a worthwhile endeavor

00:44:46.280 | and something that's gonna be important to our country.

00:44:49.220 | - Yeah, I mean, you're, you know who you're talking to.

00:44:52.940 | I love human robot interaction, human machine interaction,

00:44:55.900 | human AI interaction.

00:44:57.300 | So what do you think is the role of robotics

00:44:59.140 | in this high-tech manufacturing?

00:45:01.300 | Sort of like industrial robots, robotic arms,

00:45:04.420 | all that kind of stuff,

00:45:06.420 | or even more complicated kind of robots.

00:45:09.420 | What do you think is the role of robotics?

00:45:11.700 | What do you think is the role of AI

00:45:13.260 | in this manufacturing future you're thinking about?

00:45:16.260 | - Well, robotics to me is an extremely exciting field.

00:45:20.400 | I don't have the same expertise that you do.

00:45:23.100 | I have an adjacency, but not the depth of knowledge.

00:45:26.020 | Have never really delved deeply into it

00:45:29.200 | or made investments in it.

00:45:30.420 | But I think what's exciting about it

00:45:32.540 | is everything from doing jobs

00:45:35.020 | that are very dangerous for humans,

00:45:37.440 | enhancing the human experience.

00:45:41.580 | When you look at really repetitive labor,

00:45:44.940 | things that, you know, it might take away a job,

00:45:49.100 | but is it a good job for that person?

00:45:51.580 | Is, you know, spending 30 years

00:45:53.340 | doing something highly repetitious,

00:45:55.180 | is that a good experience in life?

00:45:59.020 | So I think, and then when you think about everything

00:46:02.540 | from military applications, you know, rescue,

00:46:06.980 | we're already seeing a bunch of those things.

00:46:09.020 | And then just lastly,

00:46:11.660 | when you talk about that human interaction with robots,

00:46:15.180 | when you start to have the combination,

00:46:17.980 | so you have some level of intelligence and interaction,

00:46:22.260 | I mean, that's why we always love the droids

00:46:25.760 | and Star Wars, right?

00:46:26.820 | I mean, it's exciting.

00:46:30.220 | It captures the imagination.

00:46:31.880 | And I think, look, many, many hours

00:46:38.580 | have been spent on debating artificial intelligence

00:46:42.740 | and the ramifications if things go sideways and so forth.

00:46:47.140 | And I think those are all, you know,

00:46:50.580 | those are appropriate conversations to be having.

00:46:54.180 | AI is happening.

00:46:56.220 | I think it's actually happening slower

00:46:57.960 | than most people realize

00:46:59.420 | because there are tasks that humans do

00:47:04.580 | every minute of every day standing up

00:47:07.740 | without losing your sense of balance.

00:47:09.620 | I mean, these are really hard things,

00:47:12.860 | but I think there's enough investment

00:47:16.660 | both in private industry as well as nation states now

00:47:19.820 | on artificial intelligence that it is coming.

00:47:22.640 | - So both in the software space, in the digital space

00:47:27.340 | and in the physical space.

00:47:29.100 | So we talked about manufacturing,

00:47:30.620 | so industrial robotics is very true

00:47:33.820 | that even in the factory,

00:47:35.060 | even the tasks that you think are pretty basic,

00:47:40.060 | you know, the amount of small intuitive decisions

00:47:44.300 | that humans make is quite incredible.

00:47:46.540 | So we have to be kind of explicit about saying

00:47:49.760 | which tasks are actually really hard

00:47:52.140 | and humans are just really good at them.

00:47:54.660 | And so on the flip side, in the digital space

00:47:59.220 | with social networks, with recommender systems,

00:48:01.620 | with all kinds of like personal assistance

00:48:04.740 | in terms of voice-based AI systems, all of that,

00:48:09.740 | there's opportunities there to find niches

00:48:13.140 | where AI can really have a transformative effect.

00:48:17.260 | I think one of the places that really haven't,

00:48:22.180 | this is where like you're worried to say stupid things,

00:48:27.420 | but I believe this very much,

00:48:29.400 | that when we have AI systems in the home currently,

00:48:33.140 | you have somebody like Alexa and Google Home and so on,

00:48:36.500 | they're kind of very basic servants.

00:48:40.820 | They tell you about the weather,

00:48:41.940 | they can play some music,

00:48:43.220 | they can turn the lights on and off,

00:48:45.060 | all that kind of like smart home stuff.

00:48:47.620 | I think there's a lot of value in systems

00:48:51.380 | that form relationships with us

00:48:55.080 | in the way that pets do, dogs and cats.

00:48:58.980 | I don't know, just for people who have cats,

00:49:01.320 | cats don't care about you.

00:49:02.500 | They really don't.

00:49:03.520 | They don't form any kind of relationship.

00:49:05.120 | I don't know why you have relationship with them.

00:49:07.040 | It's one way.

00:49:08.280 | Anyway, sorry, I threw on some shade.

00:49:11.940 | I'm just kidding, by the way.

00:49:13.200 | That's a basic kind of connection you have

00:49:14.960 | with another living being.

00:49:16.960 | Then there's also just friends.

00:49:18.440 | You have different levels of friends, acquaintances,

00:49:20.680 | you have lifelong friends, all that.

00:49:22.560 | That friendship you have,

00:49:25.280 | I really believe that there is some aspect

00:49:27.880 | of the human experience that is deeply enriched

00:49:32.600 | by interacting with other beings.

00:49:35.400 | And for systems, computing systems,

00:49:40.320 | artificial intelligence systems in our world,

00:49:43.060 | to have the capability to engage in some of that,

00:49:46.940 | I think is not just an opportunity

00:49:49.000 | to help people grow, become better people,

00:49:53.600 | but it's also just a good business opportunity too.

00:49:56.120 | And that hasn't really been explored enough.

00:49:58.560 | So that to me is really,

00:49:59.760 | that's a whole exciting space that I think

00:50:03.560 | will enable better industrial robotics.

00:50:08.560 | It will empower a better Facebook

00:50:11.480 | or a better social network,

00:50:13.120 | a competitor to Facebook that overthrows Facebook.

00:50:15.760 | So it'll create better technologies

00:50:19.680 | that currently don't have

00:50:21.320 | that human robot interaction touch.

00:50:24.320 | So I don't know.

00:50:26.400 | That's super exciting to me,

00:50:27.720 | but that has to deal with the mess of human nature.

00:50:32.720 | The reason that most robotics people

00:50:36.960 | and AI people stay away from humans,

00:50:39.280 | they stay away from the human robot interaction problem

00:50:43.880 | is 'cause humans are complicated.

00:50:46.320 | They're messy.

00:50:47.460 | They're hard to control.

00:50:49.180 | They're hard to predict stuff about.

00:50:54.380 | They're hard to make sense of or like test repeatedly

00:50:58.660 | because one human can be drastically different

00:51:01.860 | from another human.

00:51:02.940 | And so to deal with that as a robotics problem is super hard.

00:51:06.120 | And so one of the questions is,

00:51:09.600 | which problems can you remove the human from consideration

00:51:14.060 | when you're trying to solve the problem?

00:51:15.580 | So like Elon Musk is an example of somebody

00:51:17.700 | who believes autonomous driving,

00:51:20.540 | we can remove the human from consideration.

00:51:23.140 | We can solve autonomous driving as a robotics problem.

00:51:26.420 | It's stay in the lane.

00:51:28.360 | When there's a red light, you stop at a red light.

00:51:31.540 | If there is humans in the picture like pedestrians,

00:51:34.560 | that's a ballistics problem.

00:51:36.520 | It's just treat them as a moving object

00:51:39.540 | that has a, with like 90% probability

00:51:42.620 | keeps moving in the way they were in the past few seconds

00:51:45.860 | with some smaller probability that might stop or turn.

00:51:48.780 | Like just do some basic models about them

00:51:51.460 | and you'll be able to do just fine.

00:51:53.260 | So I tend to believe that even driving

00:51:57.140 | has to consider the full messiness of humans.

00:52:01.060 | The dance, the game theoretic dance of chicken

00:52:03.900 | that we all do when we jaywalk, we look at the car,

00:52:08.740 | is that car, that car doesn't,

00:52:10.100 | that driver doesn't have the guts to murder me.

00:52:12.100 | So I'm going to walk in front of it and not look at the car.

00:52:14.580 | We do that kind of dance and AI systems need to be able

00:52:18.020 | to play, do that kind of dance.

00:52:22.080 | In Talco, there's the labs.

00:52:28.460 | So there's a data science component, it's an AI component.

00:52:32.260 | So how do they go into a company

00:52:35.780 | and help revolutionize that industry?

00:52:38.100 | - Well, there's different examples.

00:52:39.820 | So one of our companies, FIGS, makes healthcare workwear,

00:52:44.820 | started by these two brilliant women.

00:52:47.580 | And early days, helping to build the platform

00:52:52.580 | and recruit and make sure that everything that we did

00:52:58.620 | at the company embraced technology.

00:53:03.360 | And at the same time, they were obsessive

00:53:06.060 | about their customer, which is doctors, nurses,

00:53:09.940 | healthcare workers who are putting it on the line every day

00:53:12.620 | and obsessive about their product.

00:53:14.100 | And when you have those two things come together,

00:53:17.340 | you get the result that we did at FIGS.

00:53:22.340 | We have a company called Acasure,

00:53:26.780 | which it's AI lab and base is down here in Austin, Texas.

00:53:31.540 | It was an insurance,

00:53:33.700 | one of the largest insurance brokers in the world.

00:53:36.720 | And we did a deal with them and sold some

00:53:41.720 | of our insurance holdings.

00:53:44.460 | It was completely AI driven.

00:53:47.420 | And in that case, you basically put the team

00:53:50.820 | inside the company, right?

00:53:52.820 | Because it's a massive company with all,

00:53:56.260 | and we've gone into all kinds of things.

00:53:58.260 | So it just depends on the different situations.

00:54:03.940 | But the biggest thing was just to make sure

00:54:06.720 | whatever the company needed, they had access to the talent.

00:54:11.720 | Sometimes we'd build it,

00:54:13.300 | sometimes we'd help recruit for it.

00:54:15.520 | You know how in technology, it's whatever works, right?

00:54:18.520 | There's no one way to do things.

00:54:22.260 | - Well, Acasure is really interesting as an example.

00:54:25.780 | So insurance is a fascinating space.

00:54:27.620 | It seems like very ripe still

00:54:30.380 | for disruption across the board.

00:54:32.660 | So how do you, it seems like a lot of the disruption

00:54:35.600 | has to do with like almost the first dumb step

00:54:42.060 | of we've been using mostly paper, like it's not digitized.

00:54:47.060 | You have to basically convert,

00:54:49.880 | create a infrastructure and a framework

00:54:52.200 | where like everybody is using the same digital system,

00:54:55.360 | like databases and just organize the data.

00:54:59.040 | It seems like that's a huge leap

00:55:01.340 | that basically can revolutionize major industries

00:55:04.000 | that still hasn't been done.

00:55:05.480 | Insurance is obviously the great example of that.

00:55:08.040 | - And one of the things that struck me,

00:55:10.800 | the founder CEO of Acasure is a guy named Greg Williams.

00:55:14.080 | They're out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

00:55:16.180 | And as we were looking at expanding our footprint

00:55:18.520 | in insurance, I met with a lot of insurance executives

00:55:22.300 | and they would talk about technology,

00:55:24.360 | but Greg truly understood the power

00:55:28.880 | of what would happen across actuarial sciences,

00:55:32.100 | predictive analytics and using machine learning

00:55:37.280 | to really run every aspect of your business

00:55:39.560 | and then automating a lot of the,

00:55:42.440 | just the back office, tedious steps.

00:55:45.560 | And as you said, one of the things that was great for us,

00:55:48.720 | they already had a data collection system and department.

00:55:53.720 | So it was much easier to pivot.

00:55:57.040 | And I'm very excited about the future of that company.

00:56:01.140 | They're doing some pretty innovative groundbreaking things.

00:56:07.440 | And those are the things that I like doing, right?

00:56:11.040 | Is that, yes, I wanna make money,

00:56:15.400 | just, you know, that's what that is.

00:56:17.320 | But at the same time,

00:56:19.000 | what did you do with your time on earth, right?

00:56:21.600 | Did you do anything to leave any kind of mark

00:56:24.360 | that, you know, you did anything interesting?

00:56:27.680 | I can only speak for myself.

00:56:29.500 | There are many more ways to measure one's life

00:56:33.400 | and I can only speak about how I think about things.

00:56:37.660 | You know, I grew up poor in upstate New York

00:56:40.420 | with a single mom and watched her work a couple jobs

00:56:43.260 | and, you know, had to, from a young age,

00:56:47.700 | you know, shovel snow and mow lawns

00:56:49.660 | and do all kinds of things to help her

00:56:51.780 | make sure the lights weren't turned off

00:56:54.340 | in our little place.

00:56:55.260 | And so that's just something

00:56:57.300 | that I've always been driven towards.

00:57:00.200 | And, you know, I just,

00:57:03.380 | I have really eclectic tastes and interests

00:57:07.100 | and, you know, it's just been an interesting journey.

00:57:11.260 | So help be part of and help enable

00:57:14.740 | some cool new creations across the board,

00:57:19.740 | like film, music, AI, manufacturing,

00:57:24.820 | just, you know, insurance,

00:57:28.340 | all the specific industries that you disrupted.

00:57:31.820 | - Yeah, small tangent,

00:57:34.380 | back to your childhood with your mom,

00:57:39.220 | any memories kind of stand out,

00:57:42.660 | stick with you as something that helped define

00:57:47.260 | who you are as a man?

00:57:49.140 | - Yeah, even though, you know,

00:57:51.620 | the university and college experience

00:57:53.280 | was not part of the family tree

00:57:55.860 | and we had no connections,

00:58:00.220 | I didn't understand, I didn't know what a trust fund was

00:58:03.220 | or prep school, I didn't know what any of that was.

00:58:05.720 | But my mom from a young age would always say,

00:58:10.960 | you know, you're gonna go to college,

00:58:12.180 | there's no, you know, if you choose to,

00:58:15.340 | and I think from a young age,

00:58:16.980 | that was just an expectation that I had

00:58:21.060 | and that she instilled and the work ethic,

00:58:23.260 | I watched her and then my grandmother

00:58:26.340 | was a janitor, a cleaning lady in a hospital for 50 years.

00:58:31.340 | And then I remember there were times of, you know,

00:58:36.420 | I'm probably 10 years old, it's freezing cold out

00:58:39.500 | and if I don't go out and shovel six driveways,

00:58:42.860 | we don't have enough money to pay the bill.

00:58:45.060 | So I don't know, I'm not a psychologist,

00:58:48.420 | so I don't know how that manifests itself in my life today,

00:58:52.860 | but I think the grit to say,

00:58:57.860 | I'm not in the mood to do this, I don't wanna do this,

00:59:01.620 | but that's the work that needs to be done.

00:59:04.460 | And no excuses, not I'm a victim

00:59:08.460 | and I'm gonna sit around and talk about,

00:59:10.260 | no, it is what it is and you have to get done

00:59:13.380 | what you need to get done.

00:59:15.020 | And again, I think it's,

00:59:17.180 | you can never fully put yourself in someone else's shoes

00:59:22.420 | or experience, 'cause I don't know what that is

00:59:24.780 | or feels like, but for me, those were two,

00:59:28.180 | I think formative things that were important in my childhood.

00:59:33.180 | - So that's pretty, the reality of life like that

00:59:37.020 | is pretty humbling.

00:59:38.380 | You still, you've been so exceptionally successful

00:59:41.820 | that it's easy to get soft now.

00:59:45.140 | How do you get humble these days?

00:59:48.380 | - By getting up.

00:59:50.580 | You know, I think for me personally,

00:59:55.380 | trying to push the envelope

00:59:57.380 | and being weighed and measured, right?

00:59:59.300 | That's why I always love sports too.

01:00:00.740 | There's a scoreboard and I'm a huge believer

01:00:04.580 | in opportunity, meritocracy, all those things

01:00:09.020 | that I think are ideals that we wanna aspire to.

01:00:14.020 | And I think that there's a lot of things

01:00:18.300 | I'm involved with right now that I just wanna see

01:00:21.420 | if I can do it.

01:00:22.260 | I wanna see if, and my own little mantra

01:00:27.260 | is cause the outcome, right?

01:00:29.660 | As much as you can, and at the same time,

01:00:32.500 | have the humility and not to have the hubris or arrogance

01:00:36.100 | to say, I'm always gonna cause the outcome

01:00:38.940 | 'cause you'll get your ass kicked pretty quickly

01:00:41.740 | and humbled.

01:00:43.100 | The world and the universe is a big place

01:00:45.220 | with forces beyond.

01:00:47.700 | But I think, I also think a lot

01:00:53.580 | about being intellectually honest,

01:00:56.220 | which when I do university talks and so forth,

01:00:59.540 | I think that's a superpower.

01:01:02.700 | Because if you find yourself making decisions

01:01:06.620 | based on other people's expectations,

01:01:10.100 | based on places you don't wanna go,

01:01:13.300 | but you're either, you feel like momentum

01:01:17.700 | is taking you there.

01:01:18.940 | I think that's a big problem.

01:01:22.180 | And there are people that go to our top universities

01:01:26.980 | and can't wait to get out and start their own company.

01:01:30.620 | And they want that pressure and they want to grind.

01:01:35.180 | And there are other people that are smart and talented,

01:01:38.540 | but just say, look, I don't wanna lay awake

01:01:41.100 | staring at the ceiling,

01:01:42.060 | wondering how I'm gonna make payroll.

01:01:43.700 | I don't want that in my life.

01:01:45.500 | And I think if you can square that up

01:01:48.620 | and be okay with it and say, what makes me tick?

01:01:51.260 | What makes me happy?

01:01:52.820 | What puts me in a bad head space?

01:01:54.700 | 'Cause there's a difference between challenging yourself

01:01:57.940 | and going against your nature.

01:02:00.100 | So that's why I think that being intellectually honest

01:02:03.020 | and being able to really sit down

01:02:05.300 | and go inside your own head and say, what am I good at?

01:02:08.820 | What am I not good at?

01:02:10.500 | How am I gonna put myself in a position to be successful?

01:02:13.780 | Because I'm working on my weaknesses,

01:02:17.460 | but I'm not gonna put myself career-wise in a position

01:02:21.860 | where I'm just fundamentally gonna have a hard time

01:02:24.840 | being successful.

01:02:25.820 | - Yeah, intellectually honest is a tricky one.

01:02:30.100 | And it gets, there's like levels to it too.

01:02:34.300 | - Sure.

01:02:37.260 | - Well, some of the things, I think about when you,

01:02:41.840 | when you dream of doing certain kinds of big things,

01:02:47.460 | part of intellectual honesty is to say several things.

01:02:53.540 | One is like, hey, the thing you're dreaming about,

01:02:58.320 | like one, the fact that nobody's done it

01:03:02.940 | probably shows that you're just a dreamer.

01:03:07.940 | This is not going to, like think clearly.

01:03:13.100 | The fact that it hasn't been done probably shows

01:03:15.180 | that it may not be the right path.

01:03:17.480 | And two is like, if you're dreaming about stuff,

01:03:21.700 | there's a certain point where it's like,

01:03:23.700 | hey, you haven't done it.

01:03:25.820 | Like, why haven't you done it already then?

01:03:27.740 | Like, you have to be honest with yourself.

01:03:29.220 | Like, you have to be ambitious.

01:03:30.460 | Like, you know, a lot of people work hard a long time

01:03:35.460 | for a dream, but you have to wake up and be like,

01:03:38.620 | all right, I've been at this for 10 years.

01:03:40.980 | Like with a startup, you launch a startup

01:03:43.220 | and you think, okay, one year, two years,

01:03:46.800 | three years, four years, pretty successful, you know,

01:03:49.060 | but it hasn't exploded.

01:03:49.980 | Like you dreamed and you have to shut it down.

01:03:53.540 | You know, you have to be intellectually honest there.

01:03:55.980 | At the same time, you might want to be

01:04:00.100 | like step it up, lean into it.

01:04:03.060 | Say almost like the flip side of like intellectual honesty

01:04:09.180 | is like maddening ambition of just saying, fuck it,

01:04:14.980 | I'm going to go all in.

01:04:16.940 | But that is a kind of intellectual honesty saying like,

01:04:19.820 | you know, the big problem here is I've been kind of going,

01:04:23.140 | doing too many things.

01:04:26.180 | Maybe with this dream, you have to go all in on it.

01:04:29.940 | All those kinds of things.

01:04:30.780 | I mean, this is human experience, it's complicated.

01:04:34.180 | - Yes, all human things are complicated.

01:04:37.580 | And I think there's a difference between being reckless

01:04:41.660 | and making well thought out informed decisions.

01:04:44.960 | If you're going to go all in, make sure you've, you know,

01:04:48.340 | measure twice, cut once, as they say.

01:04:50.860 | And one of my other favorite, I forget, many years ago,

01:04:55.780 | I heard this saying and it stayed with me.

01:04:57.420 | It was never mistake clear line of sight with distance.

01:05:02.420 | And you know that, so I think that the key,

01:05:07.460 | whether you're starting a business

01:05:10.020 | or you're thinking about leaving the company you're at

01:05:12.300 | and starting a business or just leaving for another job,

01:05:15.300 | any of these things is as much as you can, right?

01:05:19.180 | And psychologists, I think, would tell us

01:05:21.300 | it's hard to be self-aware completely, right?

01:05:24.300 | That's the rub, that if we were all completely self-aware

01:05:27.540 | of everything that we did and strength and weaknesses,

01:05:30.340 | it'd be a different world.

01:05:32.340 | But I do think you can work on that

01:05:35.480 | and at least challenge yourself to think about it

01:05:39.380 | and not be in a position where I'm, you know,

01:05:42.740 | I'm going to medical school

01:05:43.940 | 'cause that's what you do in my family.

01:05:45.620 | And even though I'm miserable doing it,

01:05:48.400 | you know, things like that.

01:05:51.660 | - So definitely you don't want to be sort of,

01:05:54.700 | because you don't think fall victim to conformity.

01:05:59.700 | Let's just go on doing the same thing over and over.

01:06:02.180 | - That's right.

01:06:03.020 | - But at the same time, is measure twice and cut once.

01:06:08.020 | It does feel like some of the biggest leaps taken

01:06:16.540 | are where you cut once and measure later.

01:06:22.180 | - Is you leap in first.

01:06:24.220 | - Sure.

01:06:25.060 | - It's almost like a gut.

01:06:27.020 | I suppose that is a measurement,

01:06:28.340 | but you build up a good gut instinct of like what to do.

01:06:32.300 | And then you just do it.

01:06:33.820 | And then you figure out as it's the building the airplane

01:06:37.100 | as you're flying it.

01:06:37.940 | - Right.

01:06:39.020 | Well, and I think each one of those instances

01:06:42.900 | that you could probably cite

01:06:44.060 | has its own unique circumstances, right?

01:06:47.740 | I don't have a deep biotech background.

01:06:50.360 | So if I suddenly stood up and said,

01:06:51.900 | I'm going to put everything I have into this idea.

01:06:55.060 | Well, that's, you know, those are, right.

01:06:58.620 | It's game theory, right?

01:06:59.840 | What are the odds of success?

01:07:01.860 | If on the other hand, you know,

01:07:04.900 | you're brilliant in your field,

01:07:06.820 | or you've seen some opportunity

01:07:08.780 | that you think is wide open

01:07:12.060 | and you're going to go for it and break stuff.

01:07:15.100 | That's great.

01:07:16.140 | You just want to weigh, to me, always say like,

01:07:20.100 | how crazy is this on the spectrum of, you know,

01:07:23.700 | do I have any expertise?

01:07:25.820 | What is the downside if I fail, right?

01:07:30.020 | You know, if you're at a certain point in life

01:07:33.300 | with young children and you've got a mortgage

01:07:36.780 | and whatever else, that is one circumstance

01:07:39.100 | versus I just got out of Stanford

01:07:41.280 | or I just got out of whatever and I'm going to go for it.

01:07:44.740 | It's just the whole thing, right?

01:07:47.020 | It is complex as you point out.

01:07:49.900 | And sometimes you just want to have the right matrix

01:07:52.780 | in your head of decision-making process

01:07:55.460 | to try to arrive at the right place.

01:07:57.660 | And even if you get close,

01:07:59.300 | that's where I think you say, you know what?

01:08:01.640 | The hell with it.

01:08:02.620 | I'm doing this.

01:08:03.580 | - Yeah.

01:08:04.860 | Yeah.

01:08:06.120 | I do want to ask you about one specific idea

01:08:10.580 | that sounds super fascinating

01:08:12.620 | that you're involved with recently.

01:08:13.860 | You led the $15 million seed round

01:08:16.220 | for a company called Colossal

01:08:18.340 | that is focused on de-extinction.

01:08:21.320 | This is funny relative to our connection

01:08:25.500 | and conversation about Jurassic world.

01:08:27.500 | They're seeking to restore lost ecosystems

01:08:30.900 | and use gene editing to restore the woolly mammoth

01:08:34.660 | to the Arctic tundra.

01:08:36.260 | How are they going to do that?

01:08:39.640 | - Well, I met this fascinating guy at Harvard

01:08:43.360 | named George Church five, six years ago.

01:08:48.160 | And found him to be incredibly smart,

01:08:51.800 | have an imagination.

01:08:54.620 | And he partnered up with a guy named Ben Lamb,

01:08:59.820 | who's an entrepreneur.

01:09:01.100 | And basically the press and to me,

01:09:07.160 | the imaginative, like you're capturing my imagination

01:09:12.000 | by telling me you're going to bring back

01:09:13.240 | the woolly mammoth and other extinct animals.

01:09:15.620 | And we'll see where that road leads.

01:09:18.720 | I was more interested in an investor

01:09:22.240 | in the things that they're working through

01:09:24.480 | around understanding genes and proteins

01:09:30.080 | and CRISPR and all these other things.

01:09:31.840 | Because being adjacent to George Church and his team

01:09:36.840 | as these things unfold over the next decade,

01:09:39.040 | I thought was the right thing to do.

01:09:42.840 | - So people are important here.

01:09:44.180 | Just like investing in people

01:09:46.200 | and seeing what the hell they come up with.

01:09:48.120 | - Absolutely.

01:09:48.960 | I mean, you can look through history

01:09:51.420 | and great things are done by great people.

01:09:56.420 | And companies, they end up over time becoming a logo

01:10:02.360 | and immediately what you think of them.

01:10:04.820 | But they started out with a person, with an idea

01:10:08.360 | and a team that cultivated that and made that happen.

01:10:13.760 | And I think there are certain folks

01:10:16.560 | that are just immensely talented

01:10:18.240 | that if you can be around them,

01:10:21.840 | and I also know his and his team's ethics

01:10:25.940 | in terms of after spending time

01:10:28.680 | talking about where the lines are.

01:10:31.380 | People in other countries that may not have the same process,

01:10:37.480 | may not have the same checks and balances

01:10:39.760 | are doing this and pursuing this regardless.

01:10:42.500 | So at least I felt like with George and Ben and their teams,

01:10:46.280 | they're also very responsible people.

01:10:48.280 | - This is where the human side of things comes into play.

01:10:53.560 | I've interacted with a lot of really brilliant people

01:10:55.960 | in the technology space where you kind of,

01:11:00.000 | there's a lot of ways to feel this out.

01:11:01.520 | You can ask them whether they kind of read literature.

01:11:03.880 | You can feel out how much they really understand

01:11:08.000 | about like human nature here.

01:11:12.240 | Like whatever the technology is,

01:11:14.780 | when it actually starts to play,

01:11:17.820 | interact with society at scale,

01:11:21.140 | like do they have an understanding

01:11:23.620 | or an intuition about how that happens?

01:11:26.400 | Some of that requires studying history.

01:11:28.180 | Some of that requires like just looking at the worst

01:11:31.460 | and best parts and events in human history

01:11:35.340 | to understand like, hey, it doesn't always turn out

01:11:38.800 | like everybody hoped the technology turns out.

01:11:42.860 | If a person has a depth of understanding about history,

01:11:47.380 | about human nature, then I think that's the right person

01:11:52.380 | to mess with some of this cutting edge stuff.

01:11:56.540 | - Yeah, you want Marcus Aurelius with a PhD from MIT.

01:11:59.820 | (laughing)

01:12:01.420 | - Exactly, exactly.

01:12:03.280 | Just small tangent, but you mentioned having a conversation

01:12:08.460 | with Warren Buffett, you spoke really highly of him

01:12:11.380 | as an investor, as a human being.

01:12:13.520 | What about him do you admire?

01:12:17.180 | What from him, what insights have you drawn from him

01:12:21.140 | as a great investor yourself?

01:12:23.700 | - Well, the afternoon that I got to spend with him,

01:12:26.220 | which is something I'll treasure forever.

01:12:28.900 | Look, sometimes when you meet people,

01:12:31.260 | even that are immensely successful,

01:12:35.060 | you may decide that after 20 minutes or a half hour,

01:12:39.340 | oh, you were in the right place at the right time

01:12:42.300 | and that's fine.

01:12:45.740 | There are other people that are clearly different, special,

01:12:49.940 | and I don't care if you made them start from zero,

01:12:52.940 | would end up in a good place.

01:12:56.940 | And so it was an absolute privilege

01:12:59.580 | to spend the time with him.

01:13:03.420 | - You know, a couple of things that stood out

01:13:06.060 | in the conversation,

01:13:07.340 | he is incredibly intellectually curious and well-read.

01:13:12.860 | And I like how simplistic he likes

01:13:15.800 | to keep his thought matrix.

01:13:17.960 | And then also, instead of trying to outsmart the market,

01:13:22.080 | it seems like a simple axiom, but just look,

01:13:26.680 | good companies that are led by talented managers

01:13:31.180 | that are good businesses over time are gonna get there.

01:13:35.100 | So I'm not gonna day trade, I'm just gonna,

01:13:37.820 | I'm looking for value.

01:13:40.380 | And then just on life stuff, he just,

01:13:43.860 | and also his ability to take in and then use information

01:13:49.860 | was incredibly impressive.

01:13:54.660 | So I only spent the, I'd met him before,

01:13:58.260 | but I only spent one afternoon with him,

01:14:00.180 | but it's pretty incredible.

01:14:02.700 | And one of the things that stuck out to me

01:14:05.140 | is we were in the middle of talking about

01:14:07.860 | Tolko or investing or how we thought about it.

01:14:10.800 | And I said, "I'm trying to be smart about."

01:14:14.540 | And he stopped me and he said,

01:14:16.060 | "Charlie Munger, his partner of many years,

01:14:17.980 | "Charlie and I don't try to think of the smart thing to do.

01:14:20.940 | "We try to think what's the dumb thing we could do here."

01:14:24.660 | And I kind of laughed and he said,

01:14:25.880 | "No, I'm dead serious.

01:14:27.980 | "We think about it from the standpoint of

01:14:30.820 | "what could we do in this situation that later we'd be like,

01:14:34.640 | "that was a really dumb thing to do."

01:14:37.500 | And I actually thought that was,

01:14:39.800 | it got in my head and I still think a lot about that

01:14:43.460 | as I'm dissecting problems.

01:14:45.680 | - So there is, like, that's a kind of long-term thinking

01:14:51.540 | if you just avoid the dumb things,

01:14:54.100 | or if you simplify, just focus on those simple steps,

01:14:59.100 | all it takes is just do that for a long period of time

01:15:02.700 | and you'll be successful.

01:15:04.500 | - Well, it certainly worked for him.

01:15:06.740 | That's all I can say.

01:15:07.580 | - What about you?

01:15:10.220 | You've been a great investor yourself.

01:15:14.660 | How do you know, when you judge people,

01:15:18.220 | so whenever I go to San Francisco,

01:15:21.140 | I was thinking of moving to San Francisco.

01:15:22.940 | That's why I decided to,

01:15:25.140 | after really giving it some thought,

01:15:26.420 | talking to people, decided to move to Austin.

01:15:28.660 | Everybody's dreaming big and they have big plans.

01:15:33.660 | And it's actually, I don't envy the job of an investor

01:15:37.820 | of any kind because everybody has big dreams

01:15:42.180 | and it's hard to know who exactly,

01:15:45.140 | what idea is going to materialize,

01:15:48.380 | what team is going to materialize into something great.

01:15:51.700 | How do you make those decisions about people, about ideas?

01:15:55.140 | - Well, if I had any kind of a lattice work on this,

01:16:01.900 | it absolutely starts with the people.

01:16:04.860 | And I think the reason for that is,

01:16:06.780 | your business plan is going to change, right?

01:16:10.340 | There's very few businesses I know of that say,

01:16:13.340 | we're going to make a widget in this location

01:16:16.020 | and 30 years later, we're successful

01:16:18.460 | and we just make a widget and that's what it is.

01:16:21.060 | Things happen, right?

01:16:22.420 | And today they happen with such velocity

01:16:24.980 | that you have to be able to make hard decisions

01:16:30.980 | based on imperfect information.

01:16:34.220 | And how are you going to calculate those answers?

01:16:38.700 | How self-interested are you going to be?

01:16:41.780 | What kind of ethics will you apply?

01:16:43.940 | What's your short-term versus long-term thinking?

01:16:47.500 | Are you able to give an honest assessment

01:16:50.980 | of a situation?

01:16:52.180 | Because the thing that you can count on

01:16:55.860 | is problems are going to happen.

01:16:57.660 | Things you didn't anticipate are going to happen.

01:17:01.660 | How pliable are you, right?

01:17:04.060 | How much elasticity is there in your ability

01:17:09.060 | to be successful?

01:17:10.660 | And I think it's important when you invest in something

01:17:15.300 | that you both see,

01:17:17.820 | you understand the roadmap ahead and agree to it, right?

01:17:21.740 | It doesn't mean there won't be twists and turns,

01:17:23.460 | but you're not like, well, wait a minute,

01:17:25.060 | what did we do here?

01:17:26.260 | This isn't what was in the thing I signed up for.

01:17:29.540 | And then I think honesty and communication

01:17:34.940 | is a huge thing to me with,

01:17:36.700 | I always tell people if bi-directionally,

01:17:42.340 | if there's something going on,

01:17:43.780 | start the conversation with Lex,

01:17:46.820 | we have a problem.

01:17:48.380 | Okay, now I'm sitting up, you have my full attention,

01:17:52.180 | we're going to talk about whatever it is.

01:17:54.180 | Bad news should travel faster than good news.

01:17:56.860 | And because it's going to happen,

01:18:01.300 | being in business with someone

01:18:04.460 | that is going to shoot you straight

01:18:06.180 | and sometimes say, I don't know.

01:18:09.860 | I don't know what the answer is.

01:18:10.940 | I got to go figure it out.

01:18:12.500 | That I can process a lot better than,

01:18:15.900 | look, I don't want you mad at me or disappointed

01:18:18.420 | or I can't handle not having success.

01:18:20.940 | So we're just going to kick the can.

01:18:23.020 | And I think, especially in today's business environment,

01:18:26.940 | that's very, very dangerous.

01:18:29.820 | - So that's a bad sign,

01:18:31.220 | not just because it's good to do,

01:18:33.660 | to communicate and be honest,

01:18:35.740 | but if they're not willing to do that,

01:18:37.780 | then it goes back to the intellectual honesty.

01:18:40.260 | They're probably not also able to be

01:18:43.780 | brutally honest with themselves

01:18:45.340 | when they look in the mirror

01:18:46.380 | about the direction of the company.

01:18:48.420 | - But look, I wasn't there, so I don't know.

01:18:53.260 | But I think if you unpack many situations

01:18:57.780 | that turned out negatively,

01:19:00.020 | most of the people,

01:19:01.380 | whether you're faking lab results, right?

01:19:03.700 | You have a biotech company.

01:19:04.820 | We have everybody staring at Theranos these days.

01:19:08.420 | Do I think in a lot of cases,

01:19:11.660 | you're either the villain,

01:19:13.180 | like you started out saying,

01:19:14.860 | I'm going to screw my shareholders over

01:19:17.100 | and I'm going to be a liar.

01:19:18.460 | That isn't my experience.

01:19:22.740 | Most things are little incremental moves that you say,

01:19:25.940 | we're going to get this right next week,

01:19:27.500 | but today we got to make the presentation.

01:19:29.180 | So we're going to just tweak things a little bit.

01:19:31.700 | That's a slippery slope, right?

01:19:34.140 | And so that's why I think from a standpoint of people,

01:19:38.620 | you want to go into the foxhole

01:19:41.820 | with folks that understand things are going to happen

01:19:46.820 | and I'm going to let you know about them

01:19:49.020 | and we're going to try to solve them together.

01:19:52.980 | And then just in terms of the idea,

01:19:55.380 | it's, I always ask like, okay,

01:19:57.780 | if this company executed the way,

01:20:00.380 | that's the other thing that always cracks me up

01:20:01.860 | about financials.

01:20:03.180 | Whenever somebody pitches you,

01:20:05.060 | inevitably they'll say,

01:20:06.180 | our projections are really, really conservative.

01:20:09.940 | I'm still waiting for somebody to come in

01:20:11.580 | and say, look, my projections are wildly optimistic.

01:20:14.460 | We'll never hit these numbers, but anyway.

01:20:17.180 | If this company did what it says and executes,

01:20:23.820 | does it matter?

01:20:25.460 | Right, does it move the needle enough?

01:20:27.220 | And what are the things that uniquely position

01:20:31.380 | this company to be successful?

01:20:33.220 | And you just have to be able to answer,

01:20:35.060 | I think a number of those questions pretty crisply.

01:20:39.100 | But at the end of the day, it's still a big risk.

01:20:41.660 | So you just try to minimize the risk.

01:20:44.500 | Let me jump to another topic.

01:20:49.220 | You're an incredible human being

01:20:53.020 | that you're involved with this.

01:20:54.380 | Your band, Ghost Hounds,

01:20:56.660 | is touring with the Rolling Stones.

01:21:00.380 | So before we talk about your band,

01:21:01.940 | let me ask about that.

01:21:03.500 | What's that like, playing with the Rolling Stones?

01:21:07.140 | Surreal, just because they're my favorite band of all time.

01:21:12.140 | To me, the greatest rock and roll band.

01:21:17.260 | It's not even close of all time.

01:21:19.020 | And to share the same stage, to be on tour

01:21:24.020 | and to go out and get that energy from the crowd.

01:21:27.660 | And every night, and come off stage,

01:21:32.340 | and later when they go on and you hear that iconic,

01:21:34.700 | ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones.

01:21:36.660 | And then it's incredible.

01:21:38.540 | And what's amazing to me about the band,

01:21:42.420 | next year will be their 60th anniversary, 60 years.

01:21:47.180 | And it's hard to be around anything for that long,

01:21:53.020 | but making music and packing stadiums.

01:21:56.540 | And what's amazing to me, they can play a two-hour set.

01:21:59.700 | And it's not just that, oh, that's a hit

01:22:01.460 | or you recognize it.

01:22:03.060 | It's like every song is an anthem, right?

01:22:06.900 | - Yeah.

01:22:07.740 | - So it's been amazing.

01:22:10.780 | We got to play with them in 2019.

01:22:12.740 | And when they ask us to do this again,

01:22:15.620 | it's just an absolute privilege.

01:22:19.820 | - I asked you this offline,

01:22:21.580 | so I know you are a kind of rock star.

01:22:24.260 | - Yeah.

01:22:25.100 | - But just me, maybe I'm projecting,

01:22:27.580 | but do you get nervous?

01:22:30.300 | Such a large audience with the Rolling Stones?

01:22:33.700 | It feels like there'll be a lot of pressure.

01:22:35.980 | - Yeah, I mean, you definitely don't want to screw it up.

01:22:39.460 | I think the band, our band, is tight knit and all that stuff.

01:22:44.460 | And I think that you, the individual nervousness dissipates

01:22:50.620 | when you go out as a group and you're making music together

01:22:54.340 | and you sort of, okay, we're all in this

01:22:57.180 | and we're doing a thing, which is why even in sports,

01:23:01.620 | I always look at individual events like ice skating

01:23:04.700 | or anything where it's just you out there alone.

01:23:09.020 | And that's different than being with a team

01:23:12.180 | and nerve wracking.

01:23:13.020 | So I'm sure if it was me with an acoustic guitar

01:23:16.820 | just going out, it would feel different.

01:23:18.900 | But absolutely you get the right kind of butterflies,

01:23:22.700 | I would call it.

01:23:23.540 | And just the energy of playing music

01:23:28.020 | and having it be this relationship

01:23:31.260 | and look, I get it, I've been to a ton of concerts

01:23:35.540 | where I'm like, look, can we just get to the band, please?

01:23:38.620 | But what's been great is just an amazing reception.

01:23:42.380 | And we have this guy named Trey Nation

01:23:46.460 | as the lead singer is just incredibly talented.

01:23:49.900 | I mean, he's just not only an amazing voice

01:23:54.180 | but just has that charismatic thing.

01:23:56.460 | - Yeah, he's great.

01:23:57.900 | - It's fun.

01:23:58.740 | - What's it feel like to play in front of a huge audience?

01:24:02.780 | As a guitarist, what's the feel?

01:24:06.060 | Are you lost in the music?

01:24:07.340 | Like you almost don't feel the audience.

01:24:10.580 | Does it add extra energy?

01:24:12.300 | Does it add extra anxiety?

01:24:14.300 | What does it make?

01:24:15.620 | What's it feel like?

01:24:16.740 | - Stadiums are interesting

01:24:19.420 | just because it's so big and cavernous

01:24:22.340 | and because you wanna protect your ears.

01:24:24.580 | So we use an in-ear system

01:24:27.220 | so that you are a little disconnected from the crowd

01:24:30.580 | because if you're playing that loud

01:24:32.180 | and you're standing in front of your amps

01:24:33.380 | without ear protection, that's bad.

01:24:36.180 | - How are you monitoring the sound?

01:24:38.180 | The in-ear stuff, is that producing sound

01:24:40.540 | or is it strictly earplugs?

01:24:41.940 | - No, it's producing the sound.

01:24:43.140 | So it's like putting ear pods in and listening to a song

01:24:47.500 | and you're playing to it, right?

01:24:48.820 | It's just us playing, but it protects your ears.

01:24:54.820 | But the energy from the crowd

01:24:58.020 | when they get going and get into it,

01:25:00.620 | which knock on wood so far has been amazing,

01:25:03.340 | there's nothing like it.

01:25:05.820 | It's just this bi-directional thing that happens.

01:25:12.220 | Music and sports were kind of my first loves.

01:25:22.260 | Yeah, it's very difficult to describe, I think accurately

01:25:26.660 | because it's like no other feeling.

01:25:29.980 | - Musically, how is it different than playing in a garage

01:25:35.500 | with the band by yourself practicing?

01:25:37.860 | Do you feel like you're creating something different

01:25:42.500 | when you got the guitar and the amp

01:25:47.500 | and just the sound dissipating out

01:25:50.180 | and everybody's listening?

01:25:51.820 | - Listen, the first time we did it

01:25:55.660 | and there's nobody in the stadium,

01:25:57.100 | first time I ever played in a stadium

01:25:59.220 | and I'm just like, I'm out there in front

01:26:03.300 | and just hitting different chords

01:26:05.300 | and playing different licks.

01:26:06.420 | And I'm like, it's like I won a contest

01:26:09.220 | and I get to do this.

01:26:10.460 | But what's different about it,

01:26:15.020 | and each venue is different.

01:26:16.300 | So if you, we went on the road with ZZ Top a few years ago,

01:26:21.300 | which was incredible, love Billy Gibbons, he's a Texan,

01:26:24.380 | incredible person and guitar player.

01:26:28.100 | But when you're playing in like five to 7,000 seats,

01:26:32.540 | it's really, I mean, you're right there with them,

01:26:36.420 | with the crowd.

01:26:37.340 | And then when you play in an arena,

01:26:39.780 | we toured with Bob Seger on his last tour,

01:26:44.260 | which was cool, played some shows with him.

01:26:47.060 | And again, the arena, like they're all kind of packed

01:26:50.180 | on top of you and it's super loud, which was cool.

01:26:54.180 | Meaning the crowd is,

01:26:56.580 | stadiums is a completely different animal.

01:26:59.900 | And it's just a completely different experience.

01:27:04.900 | - Do you enjoy it versus like a smaller room?

01:27:08.340 | What's as a guitarist, as a musician,

01:27:13.340 | what's your favorite like room to play?

01:27:15.740 | Of the size?

01:27:16.580 | - Any room that'll have me.

01:27:17.820 | Look, I think arenas are the perfect blend,

01:27:23.660 | if I had to say, because it's loud and 20, 30,000 people,

01:27:28.420 | but like right up on you.

01:27:31.100 | Stadium, look, playing the stadiums with the Rolling Stones,

01:27:36.100 | it just is gonna go on the head marker somewhere,

01:27:40.060 | is one of the more,

01:27:42.020 | I say this and I really mean it.

01:27:43.660 | My life is like a punked episode that just hasn't,

01:27:47.140 | no one's burst in yet, but yeah,

01:27:51.540 | it's as cool as you think it is.

01:27:53.260 | - So 60 years, how do you think Mick Jagger still got it?

01:27:56.300 | How do you explain it?

01:27:59.540 | - I gotta tell you something.

01:28:00.460 | I mean, the funny thing is,

01:28:03.260 | whatever, wherever there is excellence,

01:28:06.380 | people wanna know how'd you do it, right?

01:28:09.660 | What's the secret?

01:28:11.860 | Not only is Mick Jagger,

01:28:13.660 | and I think the songs that Keith Richards

01:28:16.500 | and Mick Jagger wrote together,

01:28:18.020 | if you go back and listen to the lyrics,

01:28:20.020 | it's just incredibly poignant

01:28:23.980 | and I'm just a huge Stones fan,

01:28:27.380 | but he works out like a maniac, right?

01:28:32.380 | And it's that 10,000 hours thing,

01:28:35.580 | and it's that, hey, maybe I don't feel my best today,

01:28:38.620 | but I'm gonna get up and do my routine

01:28:41.100 | and work out so that at his age,

01:28:45.540 | which I mean, you can look at people at different ages

01:28:49.180 | chronologically that are,

01:28:51.740 | maybe we're both at this age,

01:28:54.380 | but I'm a lot older than you are and vice versa.

01:28:57.860 | And he just, I think it's the combination of raw talent

01:29:02.860 | and the ability, and he's very smart, right?

01:29:06.100 | Like he understands how to have interaction with a crowd

01:29:10.500 | and hold them in the palm of his hand

01:29:12.020 | and be an entertainer.

01:29:13.860 | But then on top of that,

01:29:15.140 | the reason he can at this age run around stadiums

01:29:19.100 | and be just as energetic as he puts the work in.

01:29:22.740 | And that's one thing,

01:29:23.740 | step that I think a lot of people miss sometimes

01:29:26.620 | where they want that magic trick,

01:29:28.060 | they wanna know what's the shortcut.

01:29:30.340 | Most of the time the answer is there's no shortcut.

01:29:32.820 | - Yeah, you have to work hard on the way there

01:29:36.180 | and work hard to stay on top.

01:29:38.080 | - That's it.

01:29:40.020 | - And sometimes it's not even like work hard,

01:29:41.820 | it's just like, it's like be a professional,

01:29:45.180 | which that involves like, in his case, at his age,

01:29:48.980 | with the amount of stuff you have to do on stage

01:29:52.020 | and the way he does it.

01:29:53.100 | - For two hours.

01:29:53.940 | - You have, this is a professional athlete,

01:29:58.240 | a professional athlete that has to do things

01:30:01.540 | that are probably designed for 20 year olds

01:30:04.220 | and 30 year olds has to do it at an older age,

01:30:06.900 | which means like, what do you have to do?

01:30:08.700 | Well, you have to probably,

01:30:09.540 | he probably has like a whole physical routine he has to do.

01:30:12.460 | - Diet, the whole thing.

01:30:13.780 | And it's hard.

01:30:14.940 | Look, if you wanna do great things,

01:30:17.180 | you probably have to do hard things to get there.

01:30:20.000 | - I'm not gonna make you pick,

01:30:22.940 | just stick on the stones for one more minute.

01:30:26.740 | But what are some great Rolling Stones songs

01:30:31.740 | that were impactful to you, lyrically, musically,

01:30:36.020 | maybe something you like playing, like air guitar?

01:30:41.020 | I don't know.

01:30:43.820 | - Probably my favorites.

01:30:44.980 | I love "Sympathy for the Devil."

01:30:46.940 | It's a very, I don't know, sort of Faustian.

01:30:50.980 | I love the lyrics.

01:30:52.340 | I love how the, almost a voodoo beat

01:30:55.060 | just kind of builds throughout the song.

01:30:57.280 | That's always been one of my favorites.

01:31:00.340 | - So in that song, he never mentions devil, does he?

01:31:02.980 | No, wait, sorry.

01:31:04.020 | Like, you know my name.

01:31:07.580 | - Yeah.

01:31:08.420 | - There's like a flirtation going on in the lyrics.

01:31:11.180 | It's kind of interesting.

01:31:12.700 | - Here's all the trouble I've caused

01:31:14.540 | along the way with you humans.

01:31:16.940 | And I just think it's really, really great.

01:31:18.820 | - And musically builds really nicely.

01:31:20.700 | - Yeah.

01:31:21.540 | - It's like both fun and dark.

01:31:23.420 | It's cool.

01:31:24.580 | It's a,

01:31:25.420 | there's a playful nature to it.

01:31:30.980 | It's, that's very stones,

01:31:33.780 | only they can pull it off 'cause it's like playful,

01:31:36.300 | but it's also like dark and cool.

01:31:38.140 | - Dangerous.

01:31:38.980 | - Dangerous, dangerous, yeah.

01:31:39.940 | - Yeah, and "Gimme Shelter."

01:31:41.820 | - "Gimme Shelter."

01:31:42.660 | - Is just, you know, and to this day,

01:31:45.820 | when I listen to the studio version

01:31:48.380 | and Mary Clayton just comes on and sings that epic,

01:31:53.380 | iconic part, and there's a documentary that was done

01:31:58.380 | about backup singers, phenomenal.

01:32:02.540 | And it tells the story of that moment

01:32:06.820 | in that song with Mary Clayton.

01:32:08.180 | And it's just her voice and the way it unfolded,

01:32:13.180 | they got her out of bed at like 10 o'clock at night in LA.

01:32:15.700 | And she's like, "The Rolling Stones?"

01:32:17.780 | And went in and just killed it.

01:32:20.500 | And I can't sing at all.

01:32:23.100 | I'm by ordinance not allowed around a microphone.

01:32:26.740 | So I'm always in awe when someone can sing like that.

01:32:31.180 | But, you know, those are some of my favorite

01:32:37.900 | Rolling Stones songs and "Paint It Black" is awesome.

01:32:41.460 | I mean, I could go on.

01:32:42.620 | - Yeah, "Paint It Black" is great.

01:32:44.020 | Again, a song that builds, it's badass.

01:32:45.980 | I mean, it defines a whole generation.

01:32:48.340 | What made you pick up a guitar?

01:32:49.580 | What made you fall in love with the guitar?

01:32:52.580 | - It's just the coolest instrument, right?

01:32:55.060 | I mean, when you watched back then, you know,

01:32:59.220 | and I was kind of an old soul.

01:33:01.660 | I was listening at a fairly young age to Muddy Waters,

01:33:06.660 | Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, B.B. King,

01:33:11.900 | and just the soulfulness.

01:33:14.860 | - Thrills gone.

01:33:16.020 | - Oh my God, I mean, B.B. plays five notes

01:33:19.460 | and just kills it.

01:33:21.820 | And the emotion that it evokes.

01:33:24.100 | So I just was just in awe of the instrument.

01:33:29.100 | And, you know, I also, there's always somebody around

01:33:34.380 | who's a musician that just picks the instrument up

01:33:37.540 | and can play, right?

01:33:39.300 | And they're just so talented at it.

01:33:41.260 | And they can just listen to a record and play it.

01:33:43.940 | That was never me.

01:33:45.780 | I never took formal lessons.

01:33:47.940 | I had to grind, you know, to just make it sound

01:33:52.020 | like I wanted it to sound.

01:33:54.260 | - So both technically and ear, everything was hard work.

01:33:58.180 | - Yeah, I mean, I could hear it.

01:33:59.840 | And what they call, you know, you play.

01:34:04.380 | So my right hand, you know, the rhythm side of it is,

01:34:09.380 | that's probably, if I have anything, my strength.

01:34:13.180 | But there's something pretty amazing that happens

01:34:18.100 | when you get together with other people and play a song

01:34:22.500 | in that moment where it hits the pocket

01:34:24.860 | and you all kind of know it.

01:34:27.940 | And it's just such a cool feeling.

01:34:31.140 | And it was interesting growing up because I was,

01:34:34.940 | again, I always had eclectic interests.

01:34:36.620 | So I loved math and physics and science.

01:34:38.780 | So I had those friends and I was an athlete

01:34:41.100 | and played football and baseball and basketball.

01:34:43.100 | So I had my jock friends and then I had my music friends.

01:34:47.780 | And so it was just kind of that.

01:34:51.620 | And so when I was still living in Los Angeles

01:34:55.780 | and had Legendary, I just missed playing.

01:35:00.780 | And so I put this band together

01:35:04.540 | and called it the Ghost Hounds because, again,

01:35:08.140 | huge Robert Johnson fan and that legend

01:35:11.860 | of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads

01:35:15.220 | in exchange for his musical talent.

01:35:17.100 | - You guys have that in one of the videos.

01:35:18.780 | - Yeah, yeah. - Such a cool video.

01:35:20.260 | - Exactly.

01:35:21.100 | So I always, I just thought like, that's such cool lore.

01:35:25.620 | I just love the blues.

01:35:28.340 | So Robert Johnson would often,

01:35:30.300 | would talk about hellhounds on his trail.

01:35:33.460 | And so I always just thought, huh, what about Ghost Hounds?

01:35:37.580 | So that's, I wish it were a more clever, deeper story,

01:35:41.500 | but that's about it for the name.

01:35:43.780 | - That's pretty deep.

01:35:44.660 | Robert Johnson's incredible.

01:35:45.780 | But you also talk about this,

01:35:47.300 | that you connect to the storytelling of blues.

01:35:50.860 | So what makes a good story in a song?

01:35:53.700 | Like what aspects of storytelling connects with you in song?

01:35:57.820 | So I'm a big lyrics guy too.

01:35:59.100 | I love deep lyric people like Tom Waits

01:36:03.820 | and people that are like Leonard Cohen,

01:36:07.060 | like that are, even Bob Dylan,

01:36:08.780 | they're like obviously, yes, poetry.

01:36:12.700 | And then there's some people like the Rolling Stones,

01:36:15.500 | it's like seemingly simpler,

01:36:18.260 | but it's still so much more to it.

01:36:20.980 | It's like less is often more.

01:36:23.740 | It still tells a strong story.

01:36:25.620 | - Yeah, and there's certain people,

01:36:27.820 | and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are in this boat,

01:36:31.020 | Billy Gibbons is in this boat.

01:36:32.940 | They just say things in a certain way

01:36:35.700 | that are just cool, right?

01:36:37.260 | It's just, and so I write our music and lyrics.

01:36:42.260 | I have to tell a story.

01:36:46.980 | I have to know the characters in the song.

01:36:48.700 | I'm not good at just writing some rhymes

01:36:51.500 | and having it match up to the right key in the right music.

01:36:54.780 | I have to understand like, that's just me.

01:36:58.380 | So I think that, look,

01:37:01.500 | if you have three or four minutes to tell a story,

01:37:04.420 | you have to be more efficient with your use of language.

01:37:09.420 | And you have to understand what you're building to,

01:37:12.180 | if anything, and evoke emotion.

01:37:15.460 | And hopefully for those three minutes,

01:37:18.660 | get the listener to understand

01:37:21.660 | not only the point of the song,

01:37:22.900 | but where you're coming from,

01:37:24.540 | and to make you feel a certain way.

01:37:27.980 | There's a song that the audience has seemed to like a lot

01:37:31.820 | on the new album called "Good Old Days."

01:37:34.380 | And I wrote that because,

01:37:35.900 | especially during COVID and reflecting on

01:37:39.580 | what normalcy looks like

01:37:42.260 | and what happens when you're cut off,

01:37:44.580 | I just was kind of taken with this idea of

01:37:49.140 | that when you sit around and reminisce with friends,

01:37:53.740 | oftentimes, it's not just like some big event happened.

01:37:58.740 | It's, remember that summer,

01:38:00.980 | we'd go up to the lake all the time,

01:38:03.060 | and it's who you were with.

01:38:05.340 | And at the time, it probably seemed pretty pedestrian.

01:38:09.580 | It just seemed like kind of a normal day,

01:38:12.140 | but it was the company you were keeping.

01:38:14.020 | It was the time in your life.

01:38:15.780 | It was whatever it was.

01:38:17.900 | And it just kind of struck me that right now,

01:38:21.460 | we're doing stuff that you're going to reminisce about later

01:38:24.220 | that seems kind of ordinary,

01:38:26.260 | but you're like, "Man, that was such a great time."

01:38:29.140 | So the idea is be in the moment and all that stuff.

01:38:31.580 | But these are the good old days,

01:38:34.500 | and enjoy it and soak it in and kind of be present for it.

01:38:39.420 | - Yeah, it's a great perspective to take on the present

01:38:42.380 | 'cause we are in the thing that we'll remember.

01:38:44.380 | We're living through the thing we'll remember.

01:38:46.180 | And sometimes the things we'll remember

01:38:47.700 | is the simple stuff, the little stuff.

01:38:49.900 | - Yeah.

01:38:50.740 | - Outside of Keith Richards,

01:38:55.740 | who is the greatest, ridiculous question,

01:38:58.620 | but just indulge me.

01:39:00.180 | Who is the greatest blues guitarist of all time,

01:39:03.180 | rock guitarist of all time?

01:39:04.660 | - Well, you got a little bit of a hybrid

01:39:07.220 | with Jimi Hendrix, right?

01:39:08.500 | Because he played the blues and he played rock and roll.

01:39:11.420 | So I think most guitarists would say

01:39:14.580 | Jimi Hendrix is pretty ridiculous.

01:39:17.940 | - That probably for me,

01:39:19.140 | I'm a huge, huge, huge Hendrix fan to play.

01:39:21.260 | - Well, 'cause he can't, you can't.

01:39:22.740 | I mean, even to this day,

01:39:24.780 | I don't care technology, pedals, whatever.

01:39:27.220 | He just somehow fused with the instrument.

01:39:31.500 | I can't be sitting here in Austin, Texas

01:39:34.660 | without mentioning one of the great guitar players

01:39:37.900 | of all time and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

01:39:40.180 | - See, that's how I know you're like a rockstar.

01:39:42.260 | You're sucking up to the audience.

01:39:43.700 | (laughing)

01:39:44.900 | - No, but you have listeners all over the place.

01:39:48.060 | Stevie Ray Vaughan is another one of those.

01:39:51.140 | - Yeah, he's incredible.

01:39:51.980 | - Just blows me away.

01:39:53.620 | And then with the older guys,

01:39:56.940 | I mean, BB King, Hubert Sumlin, Clapton.

01:40:01.060 | - Yeah.

01:40:01.900 | - Clapton's, I saw him on his last tour

01:40:06.380 | and just walked out on my,

01:40:08.860 | just like unbelievable how he still sounds.

01:40:12.700 | So--

01:40:14.660 | - And both electric and acoustic.

01:40:16.380 | - Yeah, he's a master. - Just so strange.

01:40:18.620 | - Absolute master.

01:40:19.700 | - And the greatest storyteller, you mentioned Bob Seger.

01:40:24.020 | That's an interesting one.

01:40:26.300 | He almost doesn't get enough credit, I feel like,

01:40:30.620 | for how great he is.

01:40:31.500 | Obviously, he's super famous, but--

01:40:33.300 | - No, he's, and his voice.

01:40:36.500 | I also, I had the privilege of getting friendly

01:40:39.180 | with John Fogerty, you know, John Fogerty and CCR fame.

01:40:43.580 | And he's another one that's just,

01:40:45.340 | the way he phrases things.

01:40:48.100 | And you just look at the catalog of stuff he wrote.

01:40:51.220 | Amazing talent.

01:40:54.900 | I read Bruce Springsteen's book and was,

01:40:59.900 | I'm a fan, but after reading the book, it was really,

01:41:04.060 | you go back and listen to his lyrics

01:41:05.820 | and the way he pours himself out is pretty incredible.

01:41:10.820 | And then again, with the old blues guys,

01:41:16.020 | I just think the emotion they could get out of

01:41:20.660 | playing like, staying on the one, right?

01:41:23.060 | Just playing the same rhythm.

01:41:25.180 | John Lee Hooker, you listen to Manish Boy by Muddy Waters.

01:41:30.180 | And it's just, there's something so,

01:41:36.140 | it just draws me in every time

01:41:38.140 | and the emotion they're able to get out of things.

01:41:40.880 | And I'm also a huge Chuck Berry fan.

01:41:44.420 | I just think that sound is, I love it.

01:41:47.020 | - Do you know how to play Johnny B. Goode?

01:41:51.080 | - I do.

01:41:52.760 | - I do, yeah.

01:41:53.600 | - That's good.

01:41:55.000 | - Maybe, you know, one of the great moments,

01:41:57.280 | at least of my childhood, was Back to the Future

01:42:02.280 | and watching Michael J. Fox plug in

01:42:05.440 | and then at the end play at the dance

01:42:09.320 | to save his parents with Johnny B. Goode.

01:42:11.320 | Pretty awesome.

01:42:12.160 | - Yeah, the guitar is so much more

01:42:13.280 | than a musical instrument.

01:42:14.760 | It feels like, it's like the,

01:42:17.440 | in the 20th century, it's like the car.

01:42:20.420 | Like it defines so much of Hollywood,

01:42:22.980 | so much of a generation of what it means to be,

01:42:25.840 | I don't know, what it means to be a man,

01:42:28.800 | what it means to be a human in America.

01:42:31.100 | It's fascinating.

01:42:32.600 | - It's just emblematic to me of a certain type of music.

01:42:37.160 | - Yeah.

01:42:38.000 | - And that's, I made a documentary years ago,

01:42:40.480 | called it "Mike It Loud" with Jim Page.

01:42:43.440 | - I highly recommend that everybody watch that documentary.

01:42:46.520 | It's incredible celebration of the guitar.

01:42:48.980 | - Yeah, it says Jimmy Page, Jack White from White Stripes.

01:42:53.520 | - The Edge.

01:42:54.360 | - And the Edge from U2.

01:42:56.520 | Okay, all right.

01:42:57.360 | Well, now you have to tell the story of that one

01:42:59.260 | 'cause how the heck did that all come together?

01:43:02.480 | 'Cause it's so fascinating.

01:43:03.520 | Such different musicians all coming together,

01:43:07.360 | talking about their story,

01:43:09.760 | talking about how they approach the music

01:43:11.520 | and also playing together a little bit

01:43:13.760 | in this casual kind of setting.

01:43:15.360 | - Well, look, one day I came downstairs

01:43:18.800 | and the Rolling Stone magazine is sitting there

01:43:21.080 | and it was the 50 top guitarists of all time, their list.

01:43:25.880 | And then I had some other financial report with video games

01:43:29.500 | and the top video game at the time was Guitar Hero, right?

01:43:32.920 | And then there was a third thing, I can't recall it,

01:43:35.200 | but I just, and I said to myself,

01:43:37.320 | what is it about the guitar that is so central

01:43:42.320 | to the rock and roll, whatever you want to call it,

01:43:45.000 | like, why is that the symbol?

01:43:48.460 | And I said to myself, I want to ask Jimmy Page

01:43:52.060 | why he picked up the guitar,

01:43:54.240 | 'cause he's Jimmy Page, right?

01:43:56.160 | And so I called a friend of mine, Davis Guggenheim,

01:44:00.520 | who had directed Inconvenient Truth,

01:44:02.600 | and I think still is,

01:44:03.680 | but at the time was the biggest documentary ever.

01:44:06.780 | And I called Davis and I said, look, I have this idea.

01:44:09.120 | I want to make this movie about the guitar,

01:44:12.960 | about different eras and styles and whatever,

01:44:15.520 | but I've never made a documentary.

01:44:17.000 | I don't know how to do that.

01:44:18.120 | And so I was just looking for advice.

01:44:20.440 | And thankfully, because he's one

01:44:24.160 | of the best documentarians ever,

01:44:27.000 | Davis is like, you know what?

01:44:28.340 | I can't get this out of my head, I'll direct it,

01:44:30.960 | which was amazing.

01:44:32.520 | And we wrote three names down

01:44:34.560 | that represented different eras and different styles.

01:44:38.240 | Rarely do you get, you know, you go three for three,

01:44:41.760 | but it was those three guys.

01:44:44.720 | And it was just such a incredible experience

01:44:49.720 | to sit there and get to know Jimmy Page.

01:44:53.560 | You know, I mean, it was like,

01:44:55.040 | and he was like Gandalf, man.

01:44:57.560 | He was like always Jimmy Page.

01:45:00.320 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:45:01.160 | - And-

01:45:02.040 | - That was so cool to see him.

01:45:03.760 | Gandalf was, there's like a wisdom,

01:45:06.680 | there's a calmness to him,

01:45:08.280 | compared to like the restlessness of Jack White.

01:45:14.520 | I mean, that combination was just fascinating.

01:45:16.760 | - It was one of the coolest experiences ever.

01:45:19.800 | And one of the things, there was a moment

01:45:22.120 | where Jimmy, he was going through his guitar case

01:45:26.240 | and he had the double neck from "Stairway to Heaven"

01:45:28.160 | and he handed it to me and I was like, mm-hmm.

01:45:30.720 | I mean, it's like somebody handing you Excalibur

01:45:35.200 | or something, right? - Yeah, yeah.

01:45:36.960 | - Amazing experience.

01:45:38.120 | And The Edge, one of the kindest human beings

01:45:40.960 | you'll ever meet in your life.

01:45:42.640 | Just an amazing person.

01:45:44.880 | And I think he hit it right in the head with Jack

01:45:47.040 | is he's got that energy, you know,

01:45:49.840 | and constantly pushing himself.

01:45:52.240 | But it's hard to believe it's been, I think, 10 or 11

01:45:55.360 | or maybe even 12 years since it came out, but.

01:45:58.080 | - After watching it, I realized like how much it was needed.

01:46:02.720 | And I was almost surprised it didn't already exist.

01:46:07.320 | It was like, yeah, the guitar wasn't quite celebrated

01:46:12.320 | like explicitly, we almost didn't acknowledge it.

01:46:14.760 | How important it was culturally.

01:46:17.680 | It's kind of amazing.

01:46:18.500 | And the way it closed from the song, the--

01:46:20.560 | - The Wait.

01:46:21.400 | - It was called The Wait, yeah, by the band.

01:46:23.400 | - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah.

01:46:24.680 | - That's 'cause they didn't wanna go home.

01:46:26.840 | We were shooting on a Warner Brothers soundstage

01:46:30.000 | for three days when we called it The Summit

01:46:32.020 | where the three of them came together.

01:46:34.320 | And the two things I'll never forget is when Jimmy

01:46:38.000 | starts to play the riff from "Whole Lotta Love,"

01:46:41.920 | Edge and Jack ceased to be rock gods or whatever,

01:46:46.920 | and had the same 15-year-old kid feeling that I did,

01:46:51.640 | you could see in their face.

01:46:53.360 | And then at the end, they're like, hey, can we play?

01:46:55.640 | We just wanna, we don't wanna go.

01:46:57.080 | Can we just play something acoustically?

01:46:59.600 | So we printed out the lyrics,

01:47:00.880 | that's what they wanted to play.

01:47:02.000 | And they just sat there and sat on those couches and just--

01:47:06.560 | - Such a good way to end.

01:47:07.600 | - Yeah, it was incredible.

01:47:09.440 | - What's your guitar rig set up like?

01:47:13.160 | You have a few guitars.

01:47:15.360 | First, let's just put on the line.

01:47:17.600 | So what's better, Les Paul or Strat?

01:47:21.880 | - Well, I'm not gonna get into what's better

01:47:24.480 | 'cause I'm sure that'll start a flood of whatever.

01:47:26.360 | For me--

01:47:27.880 | - I'm gonna say it's Strat.

01:47:29.200 | - All right, well, I'm a Les Paul.

01:47:32.040 | My main instrument is a Les Paul.

01:47:34.760 | - But I, okay, okay, let me just put it on the table.

01:47:36.720 | I'm speaking as somebody who literally,

01:47:39.040 | I don't think I've ever actually strummed a chord

01:47:41.680 | on a Les Paul.

01:47:42.520 | So I've been--

01:47:43.360 | - All right, so you're uninitiated.

01:47:45.320 | - Exactly, so I don't speak from experience,

01:47:47.960 | but it's probably because of Hendrix,

01:47:50.480 | I'm so deeply influenced by Hendrix

01:47:52.200 | that I just kind of followed in his footsteps

01:47:55.200 | and clapped and so on.

01:47:56.640 | - The amazing thing to me is if you look back at Leo Fender

01:48:01.120 | and what the Gibson Guitar Company and Les Paul did

01:48:03.640 | in the '50s, those are still the shapes

01:48:07.440 | and the perfect thing today, right?

01:48:09.680 | The Strat and the Telecaster and the Les Paul.

01:48:12.960 | And they got it right way back then.

01:48:15.680 | So I have my main guitar, you gotta name your guitar.

01:48:20.680 | So my main guitar is named Hazel and it's a '59 Les Paul.

01:48:26.280 | And there's something magical in that year,

01:48:31.020 | like a Stradivarius, and there's something different

01:48:35.080 | about 'em.

01:48:36.880 | So I play that and then I play it through,

01:48:40.440 | sort of my main rig is either a '59 Fender Twin

01:48:45.480 | or a '65 Marshall.

01:48:50.560 | And then when we're on the road now,

01:48:52.880 | 'cause when you use older vintage stuff,

01:48:54.920 | you just gotta be super careful with the tubes

01:48:56.960 | and everything, it has to be reliable.

01:48:58.760 | So very nicely, the guys from 2 Rock

01:49:01.360 | sent me some of their amps and they're really,

01:49:03.640 | 'cause I don't use any new stuff,

01:49:05.520 | but the 2 Rock stuff is pretty great.

01:49:07.480 | So that's actually what I'm using.

01:49:08.320 | - Oh, it gets close to the sound that you like

01:49:11.120 | with the Marshall.

01:49:11.960 | - Yeah, and it's new and reliable.

01:49:14.040 | So that's what I'm using on the road right now.

01:49:15.440 | - Do people use emulation?

01:49:17.240 | Do they use software or is it still?

01:49:19.200 | - They do.

01:49:20.040 | I personally don't.

01:49:21.360 | I go, I don't have many pedals.

01:49:23.680 | I use a Klon, vintage Klon straight into the amp.

01:49:28.040 | - That's cool.

01:49:28.880 | - That's it.

01:49:29.700 | - As old school as possible.

01:49:31.000 | Is there other cool guitars you have that kind of stand out?

01:49:34.520 | - I have a bunch of what they call Blackguard Telecasters

01:49:38.320 | from the 50s, which are pretty great.

01:49:42.120 | - What are those, Blackguard Telecasters?

01:49:44.000 | - Yeah, so they just, you know, it's in the 50s.

01:49:45.760 | - Oh, they actually legit have a Blackguard.

01:49:47.880 | - Blackguard.

01:49:48.720 | - Got it.

01:49:49.560 | - But they're incredible, so.

01:49:51.320 | - What's the color of the Telecaster itself?

01:49:53.220 | - Most of them are yellow with black

01:49:55.200 | and then they got into different configurations,

01:49:57.400 | but there's something, I have a 51 Telecaster

01:50:01.560 | that I play in Open G, and in songs with Open G,

01:50:04.720 | that just, again, there's something, you know,

01:50:09.000 | and I'll take all the help I can get

01:50:10.680 | in terms of making it sound great.

01:50:13.200 | So I'll try to find the magic ones.

01:50:15.840 | - What's your writing process like

01:50:18.120 | for the music and the lyrics?

01:50:21.640 | Is there, do you have to go to the mountains?

01:50:26.120 | Is there whiskey involved?

01:50:27.640 | What do you have to do?

01:50:28.720 | Or do you just write a little bit

01:50:29.880 | whenever you have a moment of free time?

01:50:31.760 | - I'm a boring guy, 'cause I don't drink.

01:50:33.760 | I don't, I just, I figure I can screw things up

01:50:37.240 | plenty on my own without adding anything.

01:50:39.760 | - That's a good call.

01:50:40.920 | - But, you know, for me, it either starts with a riff,

01:50:45.920 | just some, something that I think is an interesting,

01:50:49.920 | you know, riff or tone that I can kind of sink my teeth

01:50:54.200 | into a little bit.

01:50:55.800 | And a lot of times I'll write a title

01:50:59.040 | and love a title and then start to backfill.

01:51:02.480 | - So the title is almost like an idea.

01:51:04.440 | - Yeah, like this is where I want to be.

01:51:07.000 | And then start kind of writing it out.

01:51:10.280 | And again, I just have to know,

01:51:13.960 | am I writing from a character's point of view?

01:51:16.520 | Am I writing about someone or something,

01:51:19.880 | you know, as like the narrator?

01:51:22.080 | And, you know, what is this person?

01:51:23.720 | Are they happy?

01:51:24.560 | Are they sad?

01:51:25.380 | Are they, where are they in life?

01:51:27.920 | I don't know if all that, like great writers,

01:51:30.680 | I'm sure would say, why don't you just write?

01:51:34.160 | You don't need all that.

01:51:36.080 | But that's, for me, that's my process.

01:51:38.400 | - Well, I'm not so sure about that.

01:51:39.960 | I bet you quite a lot of writers

01:51:42.160 | have created a world in their mind

01:51:45.880 | before they even put the simplest of words down.

01:51:48.760 | So yeah, there's quite a lot to that.

01:51:51.600 | - What's your favorite song to play?

01:51:57.800 | Is there some favorite ones you go to?

01:52:00.920 | Both play and kind of, I'm sure you love singing.

01:52:04.480 | - No, no, no, no.

01:52:05.440 | - No, you don't?

01:52:06.760 | - I'm not, I'm neither talented nor do I have the desire.

01:52:10.880 | And I think, you know, if you come see the show,

01:52:14.240 | you won't see a microphone anywhere near me.

01:52:16.480 | - But do you, I mean, do you hear,

01:52:18.040 | like when you're thinking about lyrics,

01:52:19.400 | do you hear the idea of the words?

01:52:21.840 | - 100%.

01:52:22.680 | And especially what's great, you know, with Trey

01:52:26.320 | is I write for his voice.

01:52:28.600 | And then we have these amazing backup singers

01:52:32.200 | that are just, and I can hear all of it.

01:52:35.240 | I just can't do it.

01:52:36.520 | And so I'd say to, of our stuff,

01:52:41.720 | there's a song called "Half My Fault"

01:52:44.440 | that I play in Open G that just,

01:52:47.320 | I love playing the song, I love that energy.

01:52:50.520 | And then there's, we have a new blues album coming out

01:52:53.920 | and there's a song called "Baby We're Through"

01:52:58.920 | and it just stays on the one.

01:53:01.280 | And if for non-musicians, that means,

01:53:03.840 | like in a lot of rock and roll and blues,

01:53:05.520 | it's what's called a one, four, five progression

01:53:09.280 | from your kind of root note.

01:53:11.000 | And you would hear, if you're a non-musician,

01:53:13.120 | if you heard it, you'd be like, oh yeah,

01:53:14.720 | that's a lot of songs.

01:53:16.480 | And this song just stays on the same groove,

01:53:18.960 | like "La Grange" or "Shake Your Hips"

01:53:21.880 | or any of those songs.

01:53:23.400 | And it's just got this unbelievable energy

01:53:26.880 | and it's fun to play,

01:53:27.720 | but I have to keep the same rhythmic thing going

01:53:31.320 | for the whole song.

01:53:32.760 | - Well, that simplicity, I mean,

01:53:33.960 | the personality of the song can really shine.

01:53:36.640 | I mean, Trey's, I mean, that guy, really cool.

01:53:41.640 | It just comes through.

01:53:44.040 | I mean, I guess you need that from a lead singer.

01:53:45.680 | It's just like, it's just.

01:53:47.360 | - Yeah, you gotta have that.

01:53:48.200 | And my other guitar player, Johnny Bob,

01:53:51.160 | is, he's a phenomenal, I mean,

01:53:54.360 | like a legitimate guitar slinger.

01:53:57.360 | You know, we probably split the leads 70/30

01:54:03.280 | and he is just, you know, there's times,

01:54:06.680 | sometimes I look over at him and I'm like,

01:54:08.380 | I'm being a fan right now,

01:54:09.480 | 'cause what you just laid down is pretty good.

01:54:11.780 | - From a lead perspective,

01:54:14.040 | what's the most fun thing to play?

01:54:16.280 | What do you, what kind of stuff do you,

01:54:17.560 | do you like slow?

01:54:18.480 | Do you like, I mean, if you, like, thrill is gone.

01:54:21.320 | There's a, so if you look at B.B. King,

01:54:23.040 | sometimes one note just bending the shit out of that.

01:54:25.840 | What do you call that, vibrato?

01:54:27.080 | - Yeah, if I'm gonna play the lead,

01:54:28.720 | it's a certain kind of feel.

01:54:30.320 | Slow blues is probably my favorite to play

01:54:33.880 | or something that's got a little more

01:54:35.480 | of that Chuck Berry drive

01:54:37.840 | where you can be rhythmic in the lead.

01:54:40.040 | You know, I can't, the shredding thing

01:54:44.360 | that those guys do is, that's not my.

01:54:47.600 | I was actually always able to do that really well.

01:54:51.360 | Like you mentioned people that pick up,

01:54:53.560 | like maybe it's the classical piano training.

01:54:55.840 | I could play super fast in guitar, super technical,

01:54:58.860 | but to me, the hardest thing and the,

01:55:01.080 | my favorite thing is, it's just,

01:55:03.580 | has probably less to do with the guitar

01:55:06.360 | and more living on life that's worth playing a guitar for.

01:55:09.980 | It's like a certain kind of emotion

01:55:13.640 | that you can put into the notes.

01:55:15.520 | And that has to do with bending notes.

01:55:17.000 | Well, like bending notes is a whole other art form of,

01:55:20.800 | I worked surprisingly a long time on "Comfortably Numb."

01:55:26.440 | And there's, so David Gilmour does a lot of bending

01:55:31.960 | and they're simple, they sound simple,

01:55:35.320 | but the dynamics of them to express like a buildup

01:55:40.320 | in the way it's held and there's often a vibrato

01:55:44.800 | at the top for a bit, just that,

01:55:48.360 | it's almost like a sigh and a sigh of relief

01:55:53.920 | and the buildup, I mean, it's just the,

01:55:55.640 | that's an art form for him that's hard to get right.

01:55:58.120 | It's not just playing a note, playing a note,

01:56:00.240 | playing a note, it's in that like dynamic movement

01:56:04.680 | of a note that so much can happen.

01:56:06.400 | That's where the blues just happens to.

01:56:08.360 | It's, look, I'm a huge Freddie King fan too, right?

01:56:11.440 | And you listen to these guys

01:56:13.520 | and they're, you sit there and they're like,

01:56:16.960 | "Man, you're playing in a small range on the neck."

01:56:21.520 | But in, it's like, I know the notes you're playing

01:56:26.900 | and I'm playing them too, but not like that, right?

01:56:30.400 | I mean, it's, and Gilmour is certainly one of those guys.

01:56:33.480 | It's incredible guitar player.

01:56:36.040 | - And yet another chapter of an amazing life.

01:56:40.560 | You love football, like you meant, you play football?

01:56:43.120 | - Yes.

01:56:43.960 | - What position did you play?

01:56:44.780 | - Wide receiver.

01:56:45.620 | - Wide receiver, awesome.

01:56:48.200 | So maybe we can talk a little bit about your love of football

01:56:53.200 | and the fact that you are part owner

01:56:58.760 | of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

01:57:00.800 | - Yeah.

01:57:01.640 | - So, I mean, where do we start?

01:57:02.920 | We start at the beginning, let's start at the end.

01:57:05.280 | Why the Steelers?

01:57:06.840 | What attracted you to the, first of all,

01:57:09.640 | I think, not to be controversial,

01:57:12.640 | but one of the best uniforms in football

01:57:15.960 | in terms of just the black and gold, just.

01:57:19.080 | - Decal only on one side.

01:57:20.880 | - Yeah, it's great.

01:57:21.880 | - Yeah, the helmet.

01:57:23.120 | Look, I've bled black and gold since I was a little boy.

01:57:27.080 | I grew up in upstate New York

01:57:29.560 | and the first football game I ever saw

01:57:32.440 | was the Steelers in the Super Bowl as a really little kid.

01:57:35.760 | And it just, I mean, Jack Lambert and Joe Green

01:57:39.960 | and Franco Harris and those guys were like,

01:57:41.920 | came down from Olympia, Mount Olympus or something.

01:57:45.680 | And I just was enamored with the team.

01:57:48.560 | And because we only had three channels,

01:57:50.820 | the only time I'd get to see them

01:57:52.120 | is occasionally when they were the game of the week

01:57:54.800 | or something.

01:57:55.640 | And I just loved, to me, what they stood for,

01:58:01.760 | the toughness and they played football,

01:58:05.240 | the way that I thought was great.

01:58:08.160 | I was a huge Jack Lambert fan,

01:58:10.060 | our Hall of Fame linebacker

01:58:14.000 | who just intimidated everybody.

01:58:15.800 | - So that was like the decade of the Steel Curtain.

01:58:19.360 | I mean, arguably one of the great sort of defensive

01:58:24.560 | in football history

01:58:26.600 | and also one of the greatest football teams period

01:58:30.480 | in football history.

01:58:32.360 | - I've been a lifelong fan.

01:58:35.180 | And was very fortunate to meet Mr. Rooney.

01:58:38.760 | The Rooney family started the team in 1933,

01:58:43.000 | got to know him and just was asked to be

01:58:48.580 | part of the ownership group.

01:58:49.740 | I think it was the end of 2007.

01:58:52.520 | First year as part of the group in 2008,

01:58:54.500 | we won the Super Bowl and it was like beyond surreal.

01:58:59.500 | I mean, just beyond surreal.

01:59:01.860 | And it's amazing to be able to do.

01:59:06.860 | I mean, the Rooney family is one of those

01:59:10.860 | most revered in sports for the way they conduct themselves.

01:59:16.780 | Mr. Rooney passed away, I think five years ago now,

01:59:20.980 | and we lost him, but was a champion, helped build the league.

01:59:23.940 | I mean, put the league as we know it together.

01:59:27.300 | More importantly, was a civil rights champion

01:59:30.820 | who created what we now call the Rooney rule

01:59:33.380 | to make sure that we're being fair

01:59:36.020 | about giving minority coaches a chance to get hired.

01:59:40.460 | And just is one of the most kind

01:59:44.700 | and amazing human beings I ever met.

01:59:47.880 | - It's incredible what sport does

01:59:51.860 | to bring out the best in people,

01:59:55.980 | to give people hope, to inspire people.

01:59:58.300 | There is something about football

01:59:59.860 | that has all the elements of a great sport.

02:00:04.860 | It's the teamwork, it's the sort of the combat aspect of it.

02:00:09.860 | It's the purity of it.

02:00:11.860 | It's of strength and power and speed,

02:00:16.860 | and all the elements of last minute close calls

02:00:22.580 | required to win the game.

02:00:25.120 | And where referee decisions,

02:00:27.780 | of course that's essential for a sport,

02:00:29.340 | can screw up the whole thing.

02:00:30.980 | Just got all of it together, I think.

02:00:32.860 | I don't know, it gives the drama

02:00:37.020 | and the triumphs are just beautiful.

02:00:40.100 | Like some of my favorite memories,

02:00:42.540 | I don't know if it's an accident

02:00:43.740 | or this is common with people,

02:00:45.700 | is just with friends watching football

02:00:48.400 | and connecting over that.

02:00:50.060 | - Yeah, well, look, it's an incredible game

02:00:54.240 | because there's nowhere to hide, right?

02:00:56.140 | You're out there on the field.

02:00:57.740 | You know, it's a great game that requires

02:01:02.140 | not only all those attributes that you said,

02:01:04.380 | but it's incredibly complex game.

02:01:07.620 | So if you don't know what you're looking at

02:01:09.220 | and you don't understand how complex defenses

02:01:12.420 | are trying to disguise what they're doing,

02:01:14.940 | offenses are trying to overcome that,

02:01:17.100 | and you can set up one play in the entire game,

02:01:22.340 | but a team that plays well together, right?

02:01:26.980 | Knows their plays inside and out,

02:01:28.340 | knows their assignments inside and out,

02:01:30.420 | can overcome and beat a more physically gifted team

02:01:33.980 | because of that aspect of working together.

02:01:38.980 | One of the things that I always loved about sports

02:01:43.020 | is just you're out there, there's a set of rules,

02:01:47.260 | and there's a scoreboard.

02:01:49.000 | So at the end of that game, it says,

02:01:51.900 | and you can make excuses about the refs

02:01:54.440 | or this happened or that happened,

02:01:55.620 | but at the end of the day, did you go out and compete?

02:02:00.620 | And when you went out and were a competitor,

02:02:05.700 | how did it work out, right?

02:02:07.780 | And the simplicity of that and the purity of that

02:02:10.740 | is something that I always have been drawn to.

02:02:15.220 | - What about the business of sort of owning a team

02:02:18.820 | or putting together a team

02:02:20.020 | or trying to build up a team that's going to be a great team?

02:02:23.940 | What are some interesting aspects

02:02:25.340 | that people might not realize that you can carry over

02:02:27.740 | from all the other experience you have in business?

02:02:31.920 | - I think the hardest thing about professional sports,

02:02:36.220 | right now it's individuals getting paid money

02:02:39.740 | to play a sport, which is different than,

02:02:42.900 | it's certainly different than amateur.

02:02:45.120 | And the decisions that are hard

02:02:48.440 | is when you get to know somebody

02:02:50.620 | who's a player on the team

02:02:52.100 | and either they're at the end of their career

02:02:55.180 | or you need to go in a different direction.

02:02:57.300 | And that person who's done everything that you've asked,

02:03:00.820 | whatever the coaches have asked of that person

02:03:03.900 | and you get close to them.

02:03:05.920 | And then when they have to be traded, released,

02:03:09.020 | or whatever happens, that's sad.

02:03:12.100 | And being able to stand back

02:03:16.820 | and in some ways be dispassionate and not be a fan, right?

02:03:21.100 | I'm on the Baseball Hall of Fame board

02:03:25.860 | and one of the guys that's on the board of me

02:03:29.620 | is Jerry Reinsdorf.

02:03:30.620 | And I think it was Jerry who said,

02:03:32.860 | if you act like a fan, you'll be sitting with them,

02:03:35.420 | which I thought was kind of funny.

02:03:37.820 | - Well, I got to push back on that a little bit

02:03:40.620 | as by way of a fan asking a dumb question.

02:03:43.740 | (Jerry sighs)

02:03:46.240 | Okay, let me just give some examples.

02:03:49.220 | It's very common in sport.

02:03:51.580 | It's funny you said this example of like

02:03:54.380 | certain great players going to another team

02:03:57.380 | right at the end of their career.

02:03:59.020 | And it always makes me sad.

02:04:02.980 | It almost makes me wanna wish

02:04:04.340 | that he kind of retired right there.

02:04:06.440 | From a perspective of just like,

02:04:10.860 | do you ever as a owner, but just in that space,

02:04:15.500 | think about like the Steelers

02:04:18.740 | in the full arc of human history?

02:04:21.620 | So not like as a business.

02:04:23.360 | Okay, this question might be absurd.

02:04:26.180 | - I don't have to think about it as a business.

02:04:28.660 | - You could just be almost like a fan.

02:04:29.500 | - I'm a minority owner,

02:04:30.500 | so I can think about it almost as a fan,

02:04:33.100 | but I'm sorry, go ahead.

02:04:34.100 | - Yeah, that's what I mean.

02:04:35.420 | I suppose this is a dumb question to think of,

02:04:40.420 | like of a business in that way,

02:04:42.980 | not just investment, but like legacy of like,

02:04:47.980 | what footprint would you leave on this world,

02:04:51.860 | on this history?

02:04:52.740 | - That is one thing that I can say unequivocally.

02:04:55.980 | And I only have the experience that I have.

02:04:59.420 | But one of the things that I'm so proud of

02:05:02.460 | about the way the Steelers conduct themselves is,

02:05:07.700 | and that's the Rooney family.

02:05:08.940 | That's the legacy of the Rooney family

02:05:10.620 | is asking constantly about what's right for the league,

02:05:13.500 | what's right for the players,

02:05:15.020 | what's the right thing to do here?

02:05:19.060 | And that's something that I would hear Mr. Rooney say

02:05:22.180 | all the time.

02:05:23.020 | So I think that legacy is important

02:05:25.420 | because ultimately the team belongs to that city, right?

02:05:29.620 | Belongs to those fans

02:05:31.700 | and the owners are the custodians of that.

02:05:35.380 | So I think, and when you realize what sports teams mean

02:05:40.380 | to the fans, the memories that it creates,

02:05:43.580 | the bonds that it creates, it's a responsibility.

02:05:47.660 | And I think that you do have to think beyond the,

02:05:55.020 | certainly not just dollars and cents,

02:05:57.140 | but just sports is a very big deal in our society.

02:06:02.980 | And it has to be, I think, held to a standard

02:06:06.700 | that's not just, well, were we profitable this year?

02:06:11.820 | There are other businesses for that.

02:06:14.820 | It is certainly a business.

02:06:16.220 | I don't mean to romanticize to the point that it's not,

02:06:19.220 | but to me, it's more than that,

02:06:22.260 | or at least my experience has been that it's more than that.

02:06:24.820 | - It's a source of meaning for millions of people.

02:06:27.620 | Like, and you see that most like during COVID, for example,

02:06:32.140 | when there's so much desperation,

02:06:33.740 | so many people losing their jobs,

02:06:35.500 | so many people having to deal with the uncertainty

02:06:37.300 | of what the future holds.

02:06:38.980 | There's something about sports that just unites us,

02:06:42.140 | that again, the tragedy and the triumphs of sport,

02:06:47.140 | of uniting, of gathering together with your friends,

02:06:50.780 | with family, shared experience of over like this,

02:06:54.100 | yeah, over just team, over rooting for your team,

02:06:58.180 | for your city, ultimately.

02:06:59.940 | And the access, again, as I alluded to,

02:07:03.300 | we didn't have anything when I was growing up,

02:07:05.340 | but I would pour through the box scores.

02:07:07.820 | I was a huge Yankee fan and Steeler fan,

02:07:10.380 | and feeling some ownership of that, right?

02:07:13.740 | That I could read the box score and relive what they did

02:07:16.340 | and occasionally see them on TV

02:07:18.940 | and feel like I was part of that celebration

02:07:22.540 | when they won and everything.

02:07:24.220 | It's a very powerful thing.

02:07:26.220 | - You've been exceptionally successful

02:07:29.540 | in a bunch of avenues and a bunch of efforts.

02:07:32.020 | What advice would you give to a young person today,

02:07:34.780 | a high school student, a college undergraduate

02:07:38.260 | that's thinking about career,

02:07:42.580 | maybe advice, not about just career,

02:07:44.940 | but about how to live a life they can be proud of?

02:07:48.040 | - You know, we talked earlier about intellectual honesty,

02:07:51.780 | and to me, that's the first step of just saying,

02:07:55.140 | to the best of your ability, who am I

02:07:58.020 | and what's important to me

02:07:59.980 | and what do I want to do and accomplish?

02:08:01.980 | If you can start with that

02:08:05.100 | and develop some sort of rules-based philosophical,

02:08:10.060 | here's what I'll do, what I won't do.

02:08:14.100 | And that way, you can be flexible and pliable

02:08:18.240 | and you're going to need to be,

02:08:19.220 | but if you still have a compass that tells you,

02:08:25.180 | hey, at least I know this is the path I'm going to take,

02:08:28.300 | I think that's very important.

02:08:29.940 | - The rules you're referring to, the principles,

02:08:33.020 | that's kind of like underlying integrity.

02:08:35.780 | So knowing what lines you don't cross on this path.

02:08:38.820 | - That's exactly right,

02:08:39.940 | because if you have those absolutes,

02:08:42.780 | there are many decisions that come into focus very quickly,

02:08:46.260 | right, because, hey, that's not for me,

02:08:49.060 | or, hey, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to do X, Y, and Z.

02:08:53.980 | And it has to do with the thing you were talking about.

02:08:56.340 | It's kind of interesting,

02:08:57.420 | you mentioned earlier in the conversation

02:09:00.100 | about slippery slope and that's how often it happens,

02:09:03.380 | like how the slipping into unethical behavior happens.

02:09:07.820 | It's a slippery slope of little adjustments,

02:09:09.940 | you put stuff off.

02:09:11.700 | And I found that to be,

02:09:13.940 | I've been fortunate to not have to encounter these moments

02:09:19.780 | very much in my life, but I still encounter them.

02:09:22.740 | That's what integrity, I think, looks like,

02:09:25.340 | is as the slippery slope is happening,

02:09:29.060 | those little things is without drama,

02:09:33.260 | without making a show of it,

02:09:35.980 | making a decision that stands behind your principles

02:09:38.620 | and just walking away.

02:09:40.340 | - Yeah, and besides the big ideas,

02:09:42.940 | I'm going to change the world, I'm going to innovate,

02:09:46.100 | I'm going to do all those other things.

02:09:48.100 | I also start, if I'm giving any advice,

02:09:51.340 | which we can debate whether or not I should be giving advice

02:09:55.860 | but just in terms of, well, let me start with this.

02:09:59.100 | Are you a good friend?

02:10:01.140 | Can you be counted on?

02:10:02.860 | Do you do what you say you're going to do?

02:10:05.220 | Are you accountable to what you sign up for

02:10:09.740 | and do you hold others accountable?

02:10:12.100 | What does all that look like?

02:10:13.740 | And then I think it's being as intellectually curious

02:10:18.740 | and well-read as you can be.

02:10:20.140 | We live in a world that is designed to distract you, right?

02:10:24.540 | And being able to sit with your thoughts

02:10:27.540 | or go on a walk and think deeply about something

02:10:30.860 | and not just surface area, you text me, I text you back

02:10:34.660 | and we decide the fate of the world

02:10:36.620 | based on a couple of text messages or something.

02:10:39.080 | You don't want to lose touch, I think, with being well-read

02:10:46.580 | and understanding and standing on great thinkers shoulders

02:10:50.740 | and learning from those works.

02:10:55.360 | And then I also think that there's resiliency

02:11:00.360 | and then there's grit.

02:11:02.340 | And I heard someone say one time

02:11:04.420 | that those are slightly different.

02:11:06.860 | And I'm also, I know that there are all kinds

02:11:11.400 | of challenges in life, right?

02:11:13.580 | That are tragic, that are unfair.

02:11:16.700 | There's no question that's the world we live in.

02:11:19.300 | But for me personally, to try as much as possible

02:11:23.100 | not to be in the victim mindset

02:11:26.900 | because unfair things are gonna happen.

02:11:30.700 | And we all wanna live in an idealistic, just world.

02:11:35.700 | That should be what we aspire to.

02:11:38.800 | I haven't seen that yet.

02:11:41.460 | I haven't experienced that yet.

02:11:43.020 | But yet you still have to function in that world.

02:11:47.140 | So, I think that that resiliency thing is very important.

02:11:52.140 | And then putting yourself out there, right?

02:11:56.900 | Because if you play scared and you're always afraid to fail,

02:11:59.900 | you know, this is probably a dumb way

02:12:03.760 | to get to the end of the podcast.

02:12:05.120 | But there are times, especially I'm out West,

02:12:08.660 | I love the big sky out in Montana, Idaho,

02:12:12.400 | places like that.

02:12:13.660 | And when you look up at night, it's almost like

02:12:16.060 | I've never seen anything like this before.

02:12:18.260 | 'Cause there's no light pollution, so to speak.

02:12:21.200 | And sometimes when I look up, the most daunting problems

02:12:25.300 | that I'm experiencing, I'm like,

02:12:26.860 | those things have been there for a billion years

02:12:30.860 | or whatever and I'll be gone and it doesn't,

02:12:34.200 | you know, the most famous person on earth 200 years ago?

02:12:41.340 | So, you know, it's pretty fleeting.

02:12:43.800 | And so make sure you have a good journey

02:12:48.040 | and especially coming out of COVID,

02:12:50.520 | I think telling people that you care about

02:12:52.700 | that you care about them and maintaining and cultivating

02:12:56.120 | your friendships and relationships

02:12:57.840 | and they're not just transactional, right?

02:13:00.740 | And making sure that someday when you're laying there,

02:13:04.760 | you can say, yeah, I was a good family member.

02:13:07.020 | I was a good friend.

02:13:10.180 | I was someone that could be counted on.

02:13:12.000 | I think all those things go into the mix of, you know,

02:13:15.740 | however you want to take the journey.

02:13:17.520 | - So when you look up to the stars,

02:13:19.000 | do you think about that quickly approaching end of yours?

02:13:23.080 | Do you think about your own mortality?

02:13:24.560 | Do you think about your death?

02:13:26.080 | Are you afraid of your death?

02:13:27.860 | - I'm a huge fan of stoicism, right?

02:13:30.420 | I read a lot of stoicism.

02:13:32.600 | I think Ryan Holiday has done a great job

02:13:35.880 | of bringing some of that back into the forefront.

02:13:38.920 | It's just really thought provoking to me

02:13:43.420 | and rings a lot of it rings just hits me

02:13:45.720 | and says, I think that's right.

02:13:47.680 | And that momento mori thing, which is,

02:13:51.680 | hey, we're all gonna die.

02:13:53.040 | So you should contemplate it.

02:13:55.280 | There's a finality to this thing.

02:13:58.720 | And so I think if you can rightly frame that

02:14:03.040 | between fretting about it every day and being afraid

02:14:07.360 | and being so laissez-faire that you think,

02:14:09.400 | you know, you're gonna live forever,

02:14:12.060 | it'll influence some of the decisions you make.

02:14:15.920 | It'll influence the way you attack things

02:14:19.160 | and hopefully the way that you live your life.

02:14:23.400 | So yes, I wouldn't say I obsess over it

02:14:28.180 | and I wouldn't say it's omnipresent,

02:14:30.400 | but because I read a lot of stoicism

02:14:33.800 | and just I think it's right to pause and say,

02:14:36.940 | who knows, right?

02:14:38.720 | There's gonna be an expiration date.

02:14:41.300 | And if it happened tomorrow,

02:14:43.960 | have I done the things I wanted to do?

02:14:46.720 | And am I the person I wanted to be?

02:14:50.120 | And I think it's important along the way

02:14:52.080 | to check those things.

02:14:53.840 | - Yeah, I try to make sure that I actually visualize this,

02:14:58.440 | that I'm okay dying at the end of the day,

02:15:01.360 | at the end of each day.

02:15:03.120 | Like if this is the last thing I do in my life

02:15:05.480 | is talking to you.

02:15:07.760 | - Oh, good Lord.

02:15:08.700 | - I'm happy.

02:15:12.860 | I know you're joking, but I, you know,

02:15:15.160 | that yeah, I'm happy I get to live the life I do.

02:15:19.600 | And I think moment to more,

02:15:20.760 | I think the Stokes have it right.

02:15:23.120 | So you, and you have it right in saying,

02:15:26.400 | meditate on death enough to remember

02:15:28.920 | that this ride ends pretty quickly

02:15:31.480 | to help you appreciate every day

02:15:34.360 | and the people you love, the people close to you

02:15:36.680 | and the cool shit that you're doing in your life,

02:15:39.320 | the cool shit you're creating.

02:15:40.800 | And the fact that you, Mr. Thomas Tall,

02:15:44.240 | are playing with the motherfucking Rolling Stones tomorrow.

02:15:48.640 | You are the man in so many disciplines,

02:15:50.720 | so respected, so successful.

02:15:52.980 | It's truly an honor.

02:15:54.520 | You sit down and talk with me today.

02:15:56.500 | Thomas, thank you so much for showing up in Texas

02:15:59.800 | and for talking on this silly little podcast.

02:16:01.960 | - Oh, it's great, man.

02:16:02.840 | I'm a huge fan of the show

02:16:04.360 | and have had a great time hanging with you

02:16:06.760 | and really appreciate it.

02:16:09.280 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:16:10.800 | with Thomas Tall.

02:16:12.040 | To support this podcast,

02:16:13.440 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:16:16.160 | And now let me leave you with some words

02:16:18.360 | from Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.

02:16:21.360 | You can't always get what you want,

02:16:23.540 | but if you try sometimes,

02:16:25.040 | you might find you'll get what you need.

02:16:27.500 | Thank you for listening

02:16:29.360 | and hope to see you next time.

02:16:30.960 | (upbeat music)

02:16:33.540 | (upbeat music)

02:16:36.120 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Thomas Tull: From Batman Dark Knight Trilogy to AI and The Rolling Stones | Lex Fridman Podcast #259

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