Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Thomas Tall,
00:00:02 founder of Legendary Entertainment,
00:00:04 known for producing blockbusters
00:00:06 like Batman’s Dark Knight Trilogy,
00:00:09 The Hangover franchise, Godzilla, Inception,
00:00:12 Jurassic World, 300, and many more.
00:00:15 He runs Tolko, which is an investment company
00:00:18 that focuses on how artificial intelligence
00:00:21 can revolutionize large industries.
00:00:23 He is part owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
00:00:26 He’s the guitarist for the band Ghost Hounds
00:00:29 that tours with the Rolling Stones.
00:00:31 But most importantly, he’s humble, down to earth,
00:00:35 and someone who has quickly become a mentor and friend.
00:00:39 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:41 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:43 in the description.
00:00:44 And now, here’s my conversation with Thomas Tall.
00:00:49 In 2004, you founded Legendary Entertainment,
00:00:53 known for producing blockbusters
00:00:55 like Batman’s Dark Knight Trilogy,
00:00:57 that includes Batman Begins, Dark Knight,
00:00:59 and Dark Knight Rises, The Hangover franchise,
00:01:03 Godzilla, Inception, Jurassic World, 300,
00:01:05 and the list goes on.
00:01:07 It’s just some of the biggest movies in history.
00:01:10 What does it take to make an epic movie like that?
00:01:12 Or what does it take to make it happen
00:01:14 from start to finish?
00:01:16 Well, look, I’ve been enamored with movies
00:01:19 since I was a kid as a fan,
00:01:21 and I think what you need is to be able
00:01:25 to tell a great story.
00:01:26 And if you’re gonna tell a great story,
00:01:28 you need a great director.
00:01:30 You gotta start with a fantastic script
00:01:33 that is able to take some of these iconic characters
00:01:38 that we did and put your own stamp on it
00:01:41 while still respecting the mythology.
00:01:44 And I had zero experience in movies and television
00:01:48 before I started Legendary,
00:01:50 so it was a very interesting trip.
00:01:53 Total luck that we had the opportunity
00:01:57 to make five movies at the time with Chris Nolan,
00:02:01 who turned out to be one of the greatest filmmakers
00:02:03 of all time.
00:02:04 But each one is its own little startup company,
00:02:08 and I don’t think there’s any formula to get there,
00:02:11 but I know that if you don’t have a great director
00:02:15 and a great script, if you don’t have that foundation,
00:02:17 it’s hard to pull off.
00:02:18 Who’s the CEO of that little startup company?
00:02:21 Is it the director?
00:02:22 Who would you say defines the success
00:02:25 or the failure of a movie?
00:02:26 Well, when you build a big movie like that,
00:02:30 it’s an enormous effort, 360 degrees.
00:02:33 I mean, from digital effects, certainly the actors.
00:02:37 I mean, if you have an amazing script and amazing director,
00:02:40 but you don’t believe anybody playing the parts,
00:02:42 that’s a problem.
00:02:43 So the reason I think it was so difficult to pull off
00:02:47 is I always used to say you start with a stack of papers
00:02:51 with words on it called the script, bring that to life,
00:02:55 and you’re asking an audience to believe in everything
00:02:58 that you’re trying to put out there,
00:03:00 and you’ve got a cast that,
00:03:02 even if they’re immensely talented individually,
00:03:05 they have to mesh together,
00:03:06 they have to have chemistry together.
00:03:09 And the director is kind of a general on the battlefield,
00:03:13 but if you have a strong producer who’s very hands on,
00:03:18 but it truly, to me, is each one had its own story
00:03:22 and its own sort of how it came to be
00:03:24 and why it worked or didn’t work.
00:03:28 See, you said you were new to the industry,
00:03:30 but you did a lot of revolutionary things with Legendary.
00:03:34 So at that time and now, what is the good, the bad,
00:03:38 and the ugly of the business of filmmaking?
00:03:41 What are some interesting holes that you were able to,
00:03:44 or like problems that you were able to fix?
00:03:47 What problems still exist that can still be solved?
00:03:51 Well, look, the business has changed so radically
00:03:55 since 2004.
00:03:58 When I started Legendary, DVDs were still a cash cow.
00:04:01 So that’s how far things have come.
00:04:05 But I would say a couple of things.
00:04:07 The reason that I started it from a business perspective
00:04:10 was at the time it was a $30 billion industry,
00:04:14 and there was no institutional capital
00:04:17 around the movie business.
00:04:19 And I was fascinated by that
00:04:20 because almost every other category that you look at
00:04:23 of that size has institutional capital,
00:04:26 private equity, et cetera,
00:04:27 is kind of a cottage industry set up around it.
00:04:31 And I was perplexed and fascinated that that didn’t occur.
00:04:35 And the way the movie business worked
00:04:36 was unlike any business I’d ever looked at before.
00:04:40 So after kind of convincing myself
00:04:43 that you could actually make money
00:04:45 if you were disciplined and had the right approach,
00:04:49 you know, went out,
00:04:50 raised the money from the capital markets,
00:04:52 markets which was Herculean,
00:04:54 still maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my career,
00:04:58 to walk around and say, look, I have no experience.
00:05:01 I’ve never done this before, but, you know.
00:05:04 And the second thing, being very fortunate at the time,
00:05:08 was able to partner up with Warner Brothers.
00:05:11 Warner’s at the time was run by a man named Alan Horn,
00:05:15 who besides being creative is also a Harvard MBA.
00:05:18 So really understood what I wanted to do.
00:05:22 And Alan, you know, was just an absolute gentleman,
00:05:26 someone that I still look up to to this day.
00:05:29 After Warner Brothers, he went and ran Disney
00:05:31 with their run, you know,
00:05:33 between Marvel and Star Wars and everything.
00:05:35 And so between Alan being responsible for Harry Potter,
00:05:40 the Dark Knight stuff, and then onto all the Disney stuff,
00:05:43 he probably had as great a career
00:05:44 as anyone I’ve ever heard of in the movie business.
00:05:47 So my first focus was around sort of two concepts,
00:05:52 global, worldwide, large tentpole films and franchises,
00:05:57 and then the business aspect of being,
00:05:59 bringing longterm institutional capital to bear.
00:06:03 I’m gonna ask you dumb questions,
00:06:05 which is part of the style, I guess.
00:06:10 But just for people who don’t know, including me,
00:06:13 what is institutional, what is capital?
00:06:16 What is institutional capital?
00:06:18 What is equity, what is private equity?
00:06:20 Got it, okay.
00:06:21 Well, so if you’re starting a company
00:06:27 and you go around to a bunch of your successful friends
00:06:30 and say, hey, you should invest in my company.
00:06:34 Well, that’s sort of, that’s great and it’s capital,
00:06:37 but it’s not getting money from Fidelity or TRO
00:06:42 or a sovereign wealth fund or an endowment fund
00:06:46 from a university that has large pools of organized capital
00:06:52 that has a longterm point of view on your business.
00:06:56 So if you get money from your neighbor
00:06:59 who’s a successful dentist,
00:07:01 next year the dentist may say,
00:07:03 hey, times are hard, I need my money back.
00:07:07 If you’re partners with Fidelity or Morgan Stanley
00:07:10 or any of these institutions,
00:07:12 they have the capital and the wherewithal to say,
00:07:16 okay, I’m looking at this over the next five to 10 years.
00:07:19 And I thought there was an opportunity
00:07:21 to bring that type of capital to the movie business
00:07:26 to be patient.
00:07:27 And the benefit of that patient, so it’s longterm,
00:07:32 you have to deal with fewer parties
00:07:34 and they would do much larger investments.
00:07:38 So what are the benefits?
00:07:40 What are the sort of the challenges
00:07:41 of that kind of investment?
00:07:42 Well, I think the benefits in some ways
00:07:45 are they’re professionals who are largely dispassionate.
00:07:48 It’s like, look, if you’re hitting the numbers you told me
00:07:51 and you’re hitting your plan, great.
00:07:55 And the other thing that always was interesting to me
00:07:58 about the movie business is if I’m investing
00:08:02 in an artificial intelligence company
00:08:04 or a chipset company or something like that,
00:08:07 a lot of the institutions don’t have the technical expertise
00:08:11 to really truly grasp what’s being done.
00:08:16 So they don’t, other than good business practices,
00:08:19 they’re not offering every little opinion.
00:08:21 The movies and television are completely approachable,
00:08:25 meaning everybody has an opinion.
00:08:27 So whether it’s, I think you guys chose the wrong actor
00:08:31 for that or why did you do that movie?
00:08:34 So it invites a lot more sort of second guessing
00:08:38 and things like that.
00:08:39 So that was always one of the idiosyncrasies
00:08:42 of the business that I thought was interesting.
00:08:47 And then when you talk about private equity
00:08:50 versus public equity, if you’re a public company
00:08:52 where the companies are traded,
00:08:56 you wanna buy Microsoft shares, you just go to your broker,
00:08:59 go on TD Ameritrade and buy them.
00:09:01 If on the other hand, you’re talking about private equity,
00:09:04 that’s institutions or individuals
00:09:08 investing in private companies.
00:09:11 So thus, if you have pools of capital
00:09:13 that mostly invest in private equity deals,
00:09:16 that’s how you’d think about it.
00:09:18 It’s difficult to make those happen
00:09:20 because it’s individuals, you have to sort of,
00:09:23 what, have dinners and agree.
00:09:26 So it’s much less, it’s much more human,
00:09:31 much less mechanical, I would say.
00:09:33 Yeah, now, and again, massive difference
00:09:36 between large private equity shops who are professionalized
00:09:41 and in the same category that I mentioned earlier
00:09:44 versus private individuals who are wealthy or whatever.
00:09:49 But again, it’s much more individualized
00:09:51 when you’re going to people who like your idea
00:09:55 and just say, I’d like to invest in this.
00:09:58 Is that, from all the kinds of investments you’ve seen,
00:10:03 what do you think is the most conducive
00:10:05 to creating works of genius,
00:10:08 whether that’s in technology, AI space,
00:10:11 or whether that’s in movies?
00:10:12 So creating something special in this world.
00:10:16 I would say a couple of things.
00:10:18 Enough money that whatever endeavor you’re going into,
00:10:23 that you’re not so nervous about the edges, right?
00:10:27 If I have $100 to spend and I think I can create
00:10:32 a perpetual motion machine or something for $104,
00:10:37 I can’t do it because they’re all over me about the budget.
00:10:39 So I would say making sure that you have enough capital,
00:10:43 making sure that that capital is patient enough
00:10:46 so that it’s, if you’re gonna do things
00:10:48 that are extraordinary, it takes some time.
00:10:52 And you’re gonna break stuff, right?
00:10:55 You’re gonna make mistakes,
00:10:56 you’re gonna have a whole bunch of film
00:10:58 on the cutting room floor, so to speak,
00:11:00 or if you’re in the lab,
00:11:01 you’re gonna have a whole bunch of broken stuff.
00:11:04 And I also think it’s very important at the beginning,
00:11:07 and I always try to do this with companies I invest in
00:11:10 or buy, is make sure that you have a philosophical
00:11:15 and somewhat mechanical alignment with the management team.
00:11:20 So that going in, you both understand,
00:11:23 hey, this is how we think about this problem
00:11:26 or this company, this is what we feel like our culture is,
00:11:30 this is what our goal is, and these are the metrics
00:11:32 by which we’ll agree to measure them by.
00:11:35 Because if you don’t have that shared,
00:11:39 you know, hey, we’re gonna take this journey,
00:11:42 then I think that’s where people get upset,
00:11:45 disappointed, et cetera.
00:11:47 What about, this is a weird question, but constraints.
00:11:50 So this is both for filmmaking and investment.
00:11:54 Do you think more money is always better?
00:11:57 No.
00:11:58 So I like constraints a lot.
00:12:01 It’s like constraints and almost like a desperation,
00:12:06 and deadlines are catalysts for creativity,
00:12:10 for productivity, for sort of innovation.
00:12:15 So can you kind of speak to that as an investor,
00:12:19 as a creator, like what’s the right balance here?
00:12:23 Well, I think if you’re focused on a particular problem
00:12:27 or a company or a thesis, if you have that focus
00:12:31 and you feel like I have unlimited resources
00:12:36 or renewable resources, so there’s really,
00:12:39 there’s no leverage in the situation, right?
00:12:43 There’s no, if I fail at this,
00:12:47 I’ll just go get more money, right?
00:12:49 I’ll just go, I think that’s a hard way to be resilient
00:12:55 and to think of new ways to solve problems.
00:13:00 So I think capitalizing things just, you know,
00:13:05 to the nth degree does create some problems.
00:13:08 So I think there’s that perfect blend of
00:13:11 don’t starve the oxygen to the point
00:13:14 where you make short term decisions
00:13:15 or non strategic or thoughtful decisions
00:13:18 because you gotta pay the rent.
00:13:20 And on the other hand, you can’t have it be like this,
00:13:24 you know, everlasting gobstopper of whatever you want
00:13:28 will just keep flowing the cash
00:13:30 because that doesn’t create any friction points
00:13:33 that I think do result in works of genius,
00:13:38 works of genius in things that, you know,
00:13:42 that are transformative.
00:13:44 And one of the things that is interesting to me
00:13:48 about society sort of writ large is
00:13:54 I think that when you go through hard times
00:13:59 and you have to do things that are uncomfortable
00:14:02 and you don’t wanna do them because you’re tired,
00:14:04 because you’re, that in some ways builds up that
00:14:09 you’re comfortable being uncomfortable muscle.
00:14:12 And I sometimes think we’re losing that a little bit
00:14:17 and you can’t sort of paint with a wide brush,
00:14:20 but you know, that’s one of the things
00:14:25 that I kind of observe and hope that we don’t go that way.
00:14:30 I do think challenge and discomfort are a kind of gift
00:14:34 because like overcoming that,
00:14:36 it’s like from every perspective,
00:14:39 from a human perspective, it’s a source of happiness
00:14:41 and fulfillment, overcoming challenge.
00:14:43 But from a business perspective,
00:14:45 I see like if something is really difficult,
00:14:48 to me it’s also a sign that most others would,
00:14:51 or many others would fail at this point.
00:14:54 So like it’s a feature.
00:14:55 It’s nice that something is difficult.
00:14:58 When people tell you that something is impossible,
00:15:02 I love that because it’s like, all right,
00:15:03 well then that’s what a lot of people would believe.
00:15:06 And that gives you an opportunity to be the person
00:15:09 who shows it’s not impossible.
00:15:11 And you, of course you might be wrong,
00:15:12 but if you’re not wrong,
00:15:14 you have the opportunity to stand out.
00:15:15 So going through that hardship, taking those big risks,
00:15:18 it’s going to really pay off.
00:15:20 So like discomfort is a feature, not a bug
00:15:26 of both personal life, it’s just good for life,
00:15:30 but for business, it seems like just good business sense.
00:15:34 If something is hard, it’s probably a good idea to do that.
00:15:38 Yeah.
00:15:39 Because most others will fail.
00:15:41 Fun question.
00:15:42 I don’t know if you can answer this,
00:15:43 but what’s the most expensive movie
00:15:46 you were involved with to make?
00:15:48 And why was it, you don’t have to say numbers,
00:15:50 but like is something stand out
00:15:53 as being exceptionally expensive and why is it expensive?
00:15:57 Um, I think Jurassic World was pretty expensive.
00:16:01 Nice.
00:16:02 I mean, worked out great.
00:16:05 And, uh.
00:16:06 That’s an epic film, by the way.
00:16:09 It, look, it’s one of my favorites.
00:16:13 They just did an amazing job.
00:16:16 And frankly, the crazy thing about my life
00:16:20 is all the stuff that I loved as a kid
00:16:23 somehow came full circle back into my adult life.
00:16:27 And having the opportunity while I was out there
00:16:31 to develop a friendship with Steven Spielberg
00:16:35 and then have my name on the same film as Steven Spielberg.
00:16:39 I mean, that was pretty surreal.
00:16:44 So that was an expensive film.
00:16:46 You know, Dark Knight Rises was an expensive film.
00:16:49 But again, to me, there’s a difference
00:16:51 between expensive and irresponsible,
00:16:54 and expensive because the vision warranted
00:16:58 and it turned out financially it certainly did.
00:17:01 Yeah, with Jurassic World, it’s.
00:17:04 I mean, I can’t even imagine having those meetings
00:17:06 because like you have to create so much
00:17:08 and so much of it is obviously not real.
00:17:11 You can’t bring dinosaurs in a.
00:17:14 Yeah.
00:17:15 Is that where a lot of the cost is,
00:17:17 is in the computer side of things?
00:17:22 Yeah, those are generally pretty massive components
00:17:26 of the budget, and especially if you’re doing it
00:17:30 and inventing things as you go.
00:17:32 I mean, Jim Cameron is one of those filmmakers
00:17:36 who is designing the plane as it’s flying
00:17:41 in such a brilliant way.
00:17:43 And I’ve got to know him over the years
00:17:47 and just in awe of the way his brain works.
00:17:51 And so yeah, it’s a big component.
00:17:55 Can you speak a little bit more to him
00:17:57 in terms of, because you’re such a fascinating person
00:18:01 because you care a lot about technology.
00:18:02 You care a lot about the cutting edge of technology.
00:18:06 So how does he, a creator, a director,
00:18:10 build the plane while it’s flying?
00:18:12 Like what’s the role of innovation in this whole process?
00:18:15 Well, so I never made a film with Jim.
00:18:20 I’m just a huge fan and got to know him
00:18:23 and John Landau, his producing partner.
00:18:27 And one of the things that just fascinates me about Jim is,
00:18:31 so he makes Titanic and there’s a bunch of underwater cameras
00:18:34 and things that they need that don’t exist.
00:18:37 So he goes and invents them and has a good grasp
00:18:42 of engineering and has not only the imagination,
00:18:46 but the ability to lead a team to build them.
00:18:50 I got to go down early when they were shooting Avatar
00:18:55 at a warehouse, I think it was, where they were shooting.
00:18:57 And as they were explaining to me how they were capturing it
00:19:02 and that they could go back later
00:19:03 because they created the environment, it blew my mind.
00:19:08 And I said, okay, this is truly,
00:19:11 people talk about a big leap.
00:19:13 This certainly is one.
00:19:14 So he has continued to push the envelope
00:19:18 in terms of the art of the possible.
00:19:20 And I just think he’s an incredible genius in that way.
00:19:26 Again, another hard question.
00:19:27 So you, in the realm of music, care about story, storytelling.
00:19:33 Is there some aspect in which money
00:19:37 and beautiful graphics get in the way of story?
00:19:40 In filmmaking, so if you think about Jurassic World,
00:19:47 obviously that’s an experience like any other.
00:19:52 Like what do you think about the tension
00:19:54 between story, experience and like visual effects?
00:20:01 Well, look, if you’re using big effect shots
00:20:06 and all kinds of tricks to cover over the fact
00:20:10 that you don’t have a very interesting story to tell,
00:20:13 that’s where I think it gets in the way.
00:20:17 Where I think you have these incredible filmmakers,
00:20:21 we mentioned Chris Nolan and Jim Cameron,
00:20:23 Guillermo del Toro, you could go on and on,
00:20:28 folks that just see the world differently
00:20:33 and use technology to enhance the storytelling, right?
00:20:38 To make you believe differently,
00:20:42 rather to make you not just suspend your disbelief,
00:20:46 but to feel like you’re immersed in it.
00:20:49 So I’ve certainly seen it done expertly
00:20:52 and I’ve seen it done poorly.
00:20:54 You’ve talked about this a little bit in the past.
00:20:57 You kind of left the moviemaking business
00:21:02 at an interesting time, perhaps you saw the changes.
00:21:07 There’s been a lot of excitement with Netflix, with TV,
00:21:10 so the role of film in society has changed.
00:21:13 So what do you think is the future of movies versus TV?
00:21:18 Like if you were as a business person, as a creator,
00:21:21 as a consumer, as a technologist,
00:21:24 are thinking about the next 10, 20 years,
00:21:27 what do you think is going to be the godfather,
00:21:31 the great pieces that move us as a society
00:21:36 in the next 10, 20 years?
00:21:37 Is it going to be TV?
00:21:38 Is it going to be movie?
00:21:39 Is it going to be a TikTok clips?
00:21:43 What is it?
00:21:44 Well, so, and I think the other category
00:21:48 that I would add to that, that will be the next great medium
00:21:52 is truly immersive virtual reality
00:21:55 in which new storytellers will emerge,
00:22:00 especially when you can go into VR
00:22:03 and there’s enough computing power to sustain it
00:22:08 and to allow it to be social
00:22:10 and for you to have different paths to go down.
00:22:14 That’ll be, I think, the next realm
00:22:17 of what storytelling and experience will look like.
00:22:20 Do you think a video game kind of world
00:22:22 or is it more movies or is it more social network
00:22:26 or is it all of it kind of blending reality and gaming
00:22:30 and movies?
00:22:31 Yeah, I thought if you saw Ready Player One,
00:22:35 which I love the book and the movie was cool too,
00:22:39 but that’s one version of it, right?
00:22:42 Where you go in, now everybody’s talking about the metaverse
00:22:46 and all that, but you go into a world
00:22:47 that’s fully rendered as yourself
00:22:50 and you interact with that world.
00:22:51 The other side of it is to go in somewhere
00:22:54 between being a passive observer,
00:22:57 but being able to move around your point of view
00:23:00 and experiences, which I think is interesting.
00:23:03 And then I think another adventure, so to speak,
00:23:07 I could think of is a blend of video games.
00:23:10 So there’s a mission, right?
00:23:12 There’s obstacles, there’s everything
00:23:14 and you move through it, but it’s immersive
00:23:17 and it tells a story at the same time.
00:23:19 And that’s why I think you’re gonna see
00:23:22 new amazing storytellers that we don’t know yet
00:23:27 that understand how to innovate
00:23:29 and how to make you feel something in that environment.
00:23:34 And to your earlier point, I saw probably around 2015
00:23:41 when Netflix decided to be bold, put out House of Cards,
00:23:47 put out all the episodes, leave you in charge
00:23:50 of the pace at which you would view them,
00:23:53 which I thought was great.
00:23:56 That was a gutsy move.
00:23:57 Yes, it was.
00:23:58 And I can’t tell you around Hollywood,
00:24:00 anybody that says that everybody thought it was a great idea
00:24:03 is not being truthful because everybody I talked to
00:24:06 said this is, they’re idiots, right?
00:24:10 What do they know about movie making and TV?
00:24:13 And what I saw happening was if you look
00:24:18 at what Netflix pulled off and they realized
00:24:21 that there isn’t really a moat around the studios,
00:24:24 you really could make stuff and really good stuff.
00:24:29 And so they started to create their own content
00:24:32 that pulled in Amazon, which pulled in Google
00:24:37 through YouTube and then you had Hulu,
00:24:40 then you had Disney deciding
00:24:43 that they’re gonna have Disney Plus.
00:24:44 And the next thing you know, you have some
00:24:47 of the biggest companies with the largest balance sheets
00:24:50 on the planet being in the creative business.
00:24:55 If you’re an independent, that’s bringing a knife
00:24:58 to a gunfight to be sure.
00:25:00 And so I thought that was interesting.
00:25:03 The other thing that it used to be that movies
00:25:06 were where the big things happened
00:25:08 and television was sort of,
00:25:10 it was small screen, different experience.
00:25:13 And you had something like Game of Thrones come out,
00:25:15 which was not only on the same epic level visually
00:25:19 and storytelling wise, but had the budget
00:25:22 to be able to do it.
00:25:24 And now I think you’re seeing all kinds
00:25:31 of different storytelling taking place.
00:25:35 And I also like that you’re not pigeonholed into a time.
00:25:40 You got two hours to tell the story.
00:25:42 You can do a three part mini series,
00:25:44 a five part mini series.
00:25:45 You can do television that’s all kinds of different format.
00:25:49 That I think allows creators
00:25:53 to do a lot more interesting things.
00:25:57 It is also interesting to consider the role
00:25:59 of companies that enable that,
00:26:01 like the capital that enables that.
00:26:04 Without Netflix and HBO, you wouldn’t have
00:26:09 some of these epic shows.
00:26:11 And so if we’re thinking about the virtual reality world
00:26:14 that you’re talking about,
00:26:16 it’s interesting to consider who will enable that.
00:26:19 Now, like you said, Facebook is talking about meta
00:26:22 and metaverse, but it’s unclear
00:26:25 that just having money is enough.
00:26:28 Netflix did a lot of really revolutionary stuff.
00:26:33 Amazon has money.
00:26:34 There’s a lot of companies that have money
00:26:35 that don’t quite do as good of a job yet
00:26:38 at enabling creators of creating revolutionary new content.
00:26:44 That changes the whole industry.
00:26:46 And that’s probably going to be the case
00:26:48 with virtual reality.
00:26:49 There is a lot of money needed to enable experiences,
00:26:54 like in terms of compute infrastructure.
00:26:57 There needs to be a huge amount of money there,
00:26:59 but you also need to somehow give freedom to creators
00:27:02 to have fun, to do their best work,
00:27:05 and at the same time provide the perfect amount
00:27:11 of constraints, all of that together.
00:27:13 However Netflix makes it happen,
00:27:15 they do a pretty good job
00:27:16 because it’s a very constrained platform,
00:27:18 but yet all the creators I’ve ever talked to,
00:27:21 comedians and so on, that work with Netflix,
00:27:24 are really happy because they feel free
00:27:26 to create their work.
00:27:27 Yeah, and I think a lot of times companies are a letterhead,
00:27:32 but it boils down to the people.
00:27:34 And I think I’ve known Ted Sarandos a long time
00:27:38 who ran the studio at Netflix
00:27:40 and now took over for Reed running the company.
00:27:44 But Ted, very smart, talented guy,
00:27:47 and understood early how to cultivate talent
00:27:50 and relationships with talent, which is important.
00:27:53 When you’re dealing with creative people,
00:27:56 their motivations and their goals
00:27:58 are not always the same, right?
00:28:00 They’re not always capitalistic, right?
00:28:02 And so in terms of being able to communicate
00:28:05 with creative people that are not always A to B to C
00:28:10 is a talent.
00:28:11 And so I think they did a great job.
00:28:14 Ted did a great job with that early.
00:28:18 But I think that you’re gonna see different formats.
00:28:21 I don’t think, I mean, going to a theater
00:28:26 to see a massive movie on that screen in that format
00:28:30 is a fundamentally different experience.
00:28:33 And I think you’re gonna find movies,
00:28:36 my old shop, Legendary, just put out Dune,
00:28:38 which I thought was phenomenal.
00:28:43 When we secured the rights to Dune years ago,
00:28:48 I was over the moon because I love the book.
00:28:51 I love the entire world that is Dune.
00:28:57 And that’s a movie that I think you see on the big screen.
00:28:59 I think when Avatar 2 comes out,
00:29:03 I wanna see that on a big screen.
00:29:06 But I think you’re gonna see a ton of content
00:29:09 is obviously being produced,
00:29:11 and it’s not all gonna go to a theater going experience.
00:29:14 So you’re gonna see, I think, different versions of this
00:29:17 over the next five to 10 years.
00:29:19 In case James Cameron is listening to this,
00:29:22 so he officially agreed to talk at the time of,
00:29:25 on this podcast, at the time of Avatar 2 release.
00:29:27 I’m just holding you to that in this recorded conversation.
00:29:31 Also just super excited, both the movie and the director.
00:29:38 There’s something special about movies.
00:29:41 They win Oscars, they’re historic in nature.
00:29:46 There’s something about TV shows,
00:29:48 even when they’re epic like Game of Thrones,
00:29:50 that they’re forgotten much quicker in history.
00:29:54 I don’t know, maybe that’s because we haven’t had
00:29:56 enough of them, but the De Niro performances,
00:30:00 and the Scorsese films, all the great films
00:30:04 that we think of throughout the generations
00:30:07 that define generations are films.
00:30:10 Is that just old school thinking?
00:30:12 Is that always going to be the case?
00:30:14 I mean, look, to me, going in a darkened theater
00:30:20 with a bunch of strangers, and the lights go down,
00:30:23 and you go on this journey, there is something special
00:30:28 and magical about that.
00:30:29 And I think movies have been a part
00:30:33 of our cultural fabric forever.
00:30:36 And for some reason, Hollywood in America
00:30:40 was uniquely positioned to do a great job with it.
00:30:46 Not that there aren’t great foreign movies,
00:30:48 but far and away, American movies dominate,
00:30:53 not only the world market, but you know,
00:30:55 and so whatever it is that we do well,
00:30:58 or Hollywood does well, there’s something
00:31:02 in the water, apparently.
00:31:03 But I agree that I love movies,
00:31:07 and I will for the rest of my days.
00:31:10 It’s interesting how creators can move
00:31:13 back and forth now as well.
00:31:15 That used to be a complete no no.
00:31:17 You’re either a movie guy, or you’re a person,
00:31:20 or you’re a TV director, and that’s that.
00:31:24 But those lines have completely blurred.
00:31:27 And they’re also blurring, I mean,
00:31:29 they’re blurring all kinds of lines.
00:31:31 Like they’re moving to TikTok and Instagram,
00:31:35 and I know right now it seems ridiculous
00:31:38 to consider that these one minute things
00:31:43 could be considered even in the same realm creatively
00:31:47 as a film, but maybe that changes over time too.
00:31:50 Maybe experiences can completely become fluid
00:31:53 in terms of their size, as long as they have
00:31:56 some deep lasting impact on you as a human being,
00:32:01 as a consumer.
00:32:02 Look, to me, the whole thing is about
00:32:06 either the moving image, or even sometimes a picture
00:32:09 will bring out an emotion, a reaction, something.
00:32:13 So short form is harder, because you have less time
00:32:18 to set things up and all that.
00:32:19 But I’m sure there will be short videos
00:32:22 and creators that come up with things,
00:32:24 and if a moving image can get a reaction out of you,
00:32:29 and make you feel a certain way,
00:32:31 and stay with you, or inspire you,
00:32:33 well, that to me is just the next evolution
00:32:36 of whatever it’s gonna be between humans
00:32:39 and cameras, et cetera.
00:32:41 See, I think that’s why we’ve talked offline about this.
00:32:44 That’s why I love robots, is I think there’s certain things
00:32:47 in the short form with robots that immediately
00:32:51 can bring out a feeling in people.
00:32:54 There’s something about our consideration
00:32:57 of our own intelligence, of our own consciousness,
00:33:01 of all the fears and hopes, and the beautiful things
00:33:04 about human nature, the dark things about human nature
00:33:07 that somehow, especially Lego robots bring out.
00:33:11 Because we have both a fear and excitement towards that.
00:33:15 Are these going to be our overlords,
00:33:17 our gods that overtake humanity?
00:33:20 Are these going to be things like horses
00:33:24 or something like that, something that empower humanity?
00:33:27 Like you don’t know what to make sense of it.
00:33:28 That’s why they’re super exciting.
00:33:30 I agree.
00:33:31 Speaking of robots and film, you’ve gone
00:33:35 into traditional industries and disrupted them
00:33:38 quite a few times.
00:33:40 Was there, is there a system for deciding
00:33:43 which industry is right for disruption?
00:33:45 When you look at the world and see
00:33:49 what are the big problems you would like to solve,
00:33:53 do you have a system of how you see which problems to solve?
00:33:56 How do you look at the world?
00:33:58 Yeah, well, on the business side of that,
00:34:02 so I have a holding company called Tolko,
00:34:04 I know, very imaginatively named.
00:34:07 Part of that is literally every name ever is now taken,
00:34:11 registered and all that stuff.
00:34:14 So we’re a holding company.
00:34:16 What’s a holding company?
00:34:18 So instead of being a fund that has money flowing
00:34:21 in and out of it, and there’s what’s called a vintage year,
00:34:24 I raise capital and I agree to invest that capital
00:34:28 for so long, and then I give it back to you,
00:34:30 which sometimes creates artificial time pressures
00:34:33 and things like that.
00:34:34 A holding company is more permanent capital.
00:34:38 So the idea was, behind Tolko,
00:34:41 was to buy almost always whole companies
00:34:44 or majority stakes with great management teams
00:34:47 in spaces that did not traditionally
00:34:50 have a lot of innovation.
00:34:53 And to have our labs group, who were data scientists,
00:34:57 AI practitioners, engineers, machine learning, et cetera,
00:35:02 and to be able to bring that wherewithal to that company.
00:35:07 So to provide them with the right capital
00:35:10 and to provide them with access to technology,
00:35:13 that would be hard to individually recruit for that company.
00:35:17 So I would say that the thesis was to look
00:35:22 for industries that were large enough,
00:35:24 that hadn’t traditionally had access
00:35:27 to that type of technology or innovation,
00:35:30 and to try to look for companies that not only
00:35:35 looked that part, but had management teams
00:35:38 that embraced this and wanted to take that kind of journey.
00:35:41 Yeah, there is quite a few industries like that,
00:35:44 but that finding the industries and the management pair,
00:35:52 because those industries often have
00:35:54 a lot of old school folks who don’t,
00:35:57 it takes quite a bit of work for them
00:35:59 to leap into technology.
00:36:00 I work quite a bit with the autonomous vehicles
00:36:03 and just the automotive industry.
00:36:06 Depending on the company, there’s old school folks.
00:36:08 It’s like Detroit thinking versus like,
00:36:11 what do you call it, I don’t know, California thinking.
00:36:15 Well, I think you have to look at the nexus
00:36:18 of two things there.
00:36:19 One is just plain old human behavior.
00:36:22 If I am uncomfortable and this isn’t a comfort zone for me
00:36:27 and it’s not something I have as a field of expertise,
00:36:31 I’m gonna shy away from that.
00:36:33 Especially if I’m successful and I feel good about myself
00:36:36 and it’s a big successful company or person
00:36:38 or whatever it might be.
00:36:41 And the second thing is that especially
00:36:44 if you’re a public company and you’re being weighed
00:36:46 and measured every quarter, you are rewarding
00:36:49 the managers of that company to hit metrics
00:36:53 and to be reliable and to say, hey,
00:36:55 I’m counting quarter to quarter
00:36:57 that you’re gonna deliver what you say.
00:37:00 It’s difficult to say, you know what, everybody,
00:37:03 for the next two years, I wouldn’t count
00:37:05 on our financial projections at all
00:37:08 because we’re gonna reinvent what we’re doing.
00:37:10 It’s gonna work in the long run and you’re gonna see
00:37:14 that this was a really smart investment
00:37:15 five to seven years from now.
00:37:18 That’s not the way capitalism is currently wired,
00:37:22 generally, right?
00:37:24 And a lot of, so again, if you reward managers
00:37:28 with yearly bonuses and stock options
00:37:30 based and tied to stock price and all these other things,
00:37:35 you know, and then ask them to go break stuff,
00:37:39 that’s hard, I think.
00:37:41 So you’re saying like, so the talker approach
00:37:46 to this, the private investment is the best way
00:37:50 or perhaps the only way to enable this kind
00:37:53 of long term innovation, investment,
00:37:55 taking big risks, investing in innovation.
00:37:57 Well, look, we certainly are not, by any means,
00:38:01 the only one doing it.
00:38:02 I’m just saying that when you think about big companies,
00:38:06 more successful, you know, that are in old line businesses,
00:38:10 and I hear people sort of talk about,
00:38:13 well, why can’t they just pivot?
00:38:15 They recognize they need to be in the technology business
00:38:19 because it’s hard, it’s hard to steer a ship and turn it
00:38:23 that big, and especially if it’s not part
00:38:25 of your DNA at that company.
00:38:28 So, you know, I just think that what we tried to do
00:38:33 is to enable management teams that know
00:38:38 where they wanna go and to be patient with capital
00:38:43 and also, again, bring innovation to bear
00:38:48 that they have access to.
00:38:50 There’s plenty of capital structures
00:38:52 doing interesting things.
00:38:54 That’s one of the things I love about our country.
00:38:57 This country innovates and this country invents things,
00:39:01 and I’m constantly in awe of just the, you know,
00:39:08 the human ability to innovate and to iterate.
00:39:14 You know, I get to hang around some universities,
00:39:18 including your old shop, MIT, and it’s like.
00:39:20 I’m still there.
00:39:21 Yeah, you’re still there.
00:39:22 Still there, still teaching there.
00:39:23 Still teaching, but that place is like Hogwarts.
00:39:26 I mean, it’s just, it’s inspiring, right?
00:39:30 And certainly the energy in Silicon Valley,
00:39:34 which now Austin, Texas, where we’re sitting,
00:39:37 has its own incredible ecosystem.
00:39:40 So that’s one of the things I love about America
00:39:45 is the ability, and that really is, I think,
00:39:49 in the American DNA, to create things and invent things,
00:39:53 and I just, I think that’s invigorating.
00:39:55 And I think that’s even bigger than capitalism,
00:39:58 sort of the machine of how capitalism works.
00:40:01 That’s just human nature.
00:40:02 Capitalism is just one of the ways
00:40:04 to sort of make that human nature shine, I suppose,
00:40:10 but it’s like, you mentioned MIT.
00:40:12 There’s a drive there to invent, to innovate,
00:40:20 that’s so purely human, that human spirit
00:40:25 to sort of build something new.
00:40:28 It’s like that hopeful, optimistic spirit,
00:40:30 especially in the engineering space.
00:40:32 Like if you pay attention to the internet,
00:40:33 like Twitter and all that kind of stuff,
00:40:36 intellectuals and so on, there’s a cynicism
00:40:39 to when we talk about stuff,
00:40:43 but there’s an optimism to when we do stuff.
00:40:46 And the doing part, when you actually build things,
00:40:49 especially, like you care a lot about manufacturing too,
00:40:52 like you actually build physical products,
00:40:55 that’s where we truly shine.
00:40:59 Yeah, no question about it.
00:41:01 And I’m passionate about our country making stuff again,
00:41:06 doing our own manufacturing and making sure
00:41:11 that we don’t lose the ability,
00:41:14 not just to create things intellectually
00:41:17 and do the world’s greatest blueprints,
00:41:19 but actually make things here.
00:41:22 Actual factories.
00:41:23 Yeah, that’s exactly right.
00:41:24 How do we do that?
00:41:26 How do we bring more manufacturing to the United States?
00:41:30 Well, there’s a company that I have a big personal investment
00:41:34 in called Rebuild with some folks
00:41:39 that all went through the MIT school years ago.
00:41:45 There’s a good friend of mine named Jeff Wilkie
00:41:47 who used to be at Amazon.
00:41:49 And we all felt the same way that America needed
00:41:54 to make sure that it didn’t lose its edge in that way.
00:41:56 So it’s a company that invests
00:42:00 in American high tech manufacturing.
00:42:03 And I think the way that we do that is provide capital,
00:42:07 provide training.
00:42:09 To me, this is also fertile ground for good,
00:42:12 sustainable, high paying jobs.
00:42:16 And we have to make it economically feasible to do that,
00:42:21 again, here in this country.
00:42:24 And not to say to companies that, again,
00:42:26 are being weighed and measured quarter by quarter.
00:42:28 Hey, this is three times as expensive to do it here,
00:42:31 but you should do it here.
00:42:33 We need to innovate and we need to create processes
00:42:36 and companies and opportunity that balance that equation.
00:42:42 And I think as we saw during the pandemic,
00:42:45 I don’t think in this day and age you can be an isolationist.
00:42:48 That doesn’t make any sense to me.
00:42:51 But being self reliant and self determinant
00:42:54 and making sure that you are never in a position as a nation
00:43:00 that we can’t do basic things
00:43:01 because we’re relying on supply chain in other countries.
00:43:05 And whether it’s we’re not friends anymore,
00:43:09 or a natural disaster or a virus or something pops up,
00:43:13 I think those are costs of doing business
00:43:17 that we have to put into the calculus
00:43:20 of being able to make things here.
00:43:22 There’s an extremely high cost to making supply chain
00:43:25 resilient that we really have to consider.
00:43:27 And so if you really consider that cost,
00:43:31 it makes a lot of sense to invest especially long term
00:43:34 in building up manufacturing in a way
00:43:37 where like you’re making most of the stuff in one place.
00:43:40 Sort of bringing it all, not all,
00:43:44 but as much in as possible.
00:43:47 And building it almost like from scratch
00:43:49 here in the United States.
00:43:50 I mean, what I guess your thought is with innovation,
00:43:57 it’s possible to sort of revolutionize
00:43:59 the way we do manufacturing.
00:44:00 So reduce the amount of supply chain stuff
00:44:03 and like build stuff from scratch.
00:44:05 Like do high tech manufacturing.
00:44:08 So like optimize all aspects of the manufacturing
00:44:11 and all that kind of stuff.
00:44:13 Yeah, and I think where technology is the most efficient
00:44:19 is the human machine interface, right?
00:44:23 It’s not let’s automate everything
00:44:25 and have nobody work anywhere.
00:44:27 I, for a long time, that’s neither feasible nor desirable.
00:44:32 But where we can enhance jobs
00:44:37 and make that interface immensely productive
00:44:42 with the right training and so forth,
00:44:43 I think that’s a worthwhile endeavor
00:44:46 and something that’s gonna be important to our country.
00:44:49 Yeah, I mean, you know who you’re talking to.
00:44:53 I love human robot interaction, human machine interaction,
00:44:55 human AI interaction.
00:44:57 So what do you think is the role of robotics
00:44:59 in this high tech manufacturing?
00:45:02 Sort of like industrial robots, robotic arms,
00:45:04 all that kind of stuff.
00:45:06 Or even more complicated kind of robots.
00:45:09 What do you think is the role of robotics?
00:45:11 What do you think is the role of AI
00:45:13 in this manufacturing future you’re thinking about?
00:45:16 Well, robotics to me is an extremely exciting field.
00:45:20 I don’t have the same expertise that you do.
00:45:23 I have an adjacency, but not the depth of knowledge.
00:45:27 Have never really delved deeply into it
00:45:29 or made investments in it.
00:45:30 But I think what’s exciting about it
00:45:32 is everything from doing jobs
00:45:34 that are very dangerous for humans,
00:45:38 enhancing the human experience.
00:45:41 When you look at really repetitive labor,
00:45:44 things that, you know, it might take away a job,
00:45:49 but is it a good job for that person?
00:45:51 Is, you know, spending 30 years
00:45:53 doing something highly repetitious,
00:45:55 is that a good experience in life?
00:45:58 So I think, and then when you think about everything
00:46:02 from military applications, you know, rescue,
00:46:06 we’re already seeing a bunch of those things.
00:46:08 And then just lastly,
00:46:11 when you talk about that human interaction with robots,
00:46:15 when you start to have the combination,
00:46:17 so you have some level of intelligence and interaction,
00:46:22 I mean, that’s why we always love the droids
00:46:25 in Star Wars, right?
00:46:26 I mean, it’s exciting, it captures the imagination.
00:46:33 And I think, look, many, many hours have been spent
00:46:39 on debating artificial intelligence
00:46:42 and the ramifications, if things go sideways and so forth.
00:46:48 And I think those are all, you know,
00:46:50 those are appropriate conversations to be having.
00:46:54 AI is happening.
00:46:55 I think it’s actually happening slower
00:46:57 than most people realize,
00:47:01 because there are tasks that humans do
00:47:04 every minute of every day,
00:47:06 standing up without losing your sense of balance.
00:47:09 I mean, these are really hard things,
00:47:12 but I think there’s enough investment,
00:47:16 both in private industry as well as nation states now
00:47:19 on artificial intelligence that it is coming.
00:47:23 So both in the software space, in the digital space
00:47:27 and in the physical space.
00:47:29 So we talk about manufacturing,
00:47:30 so industrial robotics is very true
00:47:33 that even in the factory, even the tasks that you think
00:47:36 are pretty basic, you know,
00:47:40 the amount of small intuitive decisions that humans make
00:47:45 is quite incredible.
00:47:46 So we have to be kind of explicit about saying
00:47:49 which tasks are actually really hard
00:47:52 and humans are just really good at them.
00:47:54 And so on the flip side in the digital space
00:47:59 with social networks, we recommend our systems
00:48:01 with all kinds of like personal assistance
00:48:04 in terms of voice based AI systems, all of that.
00:48:10 There’s opportunities there to find niches
00:48:13 where AI can really have a transformative effect.
00:48:17 I think one of the places that really haven’t,
00:48:25 this is where like you’re worried to say stupid things,
00:48:27 but I believe this very much that when we have AI systems
00:48:32 in the home currently, you have somebody like Alexa
00:48:34 and Google Home and so on,
00:48:36 they’re kind of very basic servants.
00:48:40 They tell you about the weather, they can play some music,
00:48:43 they can turn the lights on and off,
00:48:45 all the kind of like smart home stuff.
00:48:47 I think there’s a lot of value in systems
00:48:51 that form relationships with us
00:48:55 in the way that pets do, dogs and cats.
00:48:58 I don’t know, just for people who have cats,
00:49:01 cats don’t care about you.
00:49:02 They really don’t, they don’t form any kind of relationship.
00:49:05 I don’t know why you have relationship with them.
00:49:07 It’s one way.
00:49:08 Anyway, sorry, I threw out some shade.
00:49:11 I’m just kidding by the way.
00:49:13 That’s a basic kind of connection you have
00:49:14 with another living being.
00:49:16 Then there’s also just friends.
00:49:18 You have different levels of friends,
00:49:20 acquaintances, you have lifelong friends, all that.
00:49:22 That friendship you have, I really believe
00:49:26 that there is some aspect of the human experience
00:49:29 that is deeply enriched by interacting with other beings.
00:49:35 And for systems, computing systems,
00:49:40 artificial intelligence systems in our world,
00:49:44 to have the capability to engage in some of that,
00:49:46 I think is not just an opportunity
00:49:49 to help people grow, become better people,
00:49:53 but it’s also just a good business opportunity too.
00:49:56 And that hasn’t really been explored enough.
00:49:58 So that to me is really, that’s a whole exciting space
00:50:02 that I think will enable better industrial robotics.
00:50:08 It will empower a better Facebook
00:50:11 or a better social network, a competitor to Facebook
00:50:14 that overthrows Facebook.
00:50:15 So it’ll create better technologies
00:50:19 that currently don’t have that human robot interaction touch.
00:50:24 So I don’t know, that’s super exciting to me,
00:50:27 but that has to deal with the mess of human nature.
00:50:34 The reason that most robotics people
00:50:36 and AI people stay away from humans,
00:50:40 they stay away from the human robot interaction problem,
00:50:43 is because humans are complicated.
00:50:46 They’re messy, they’re hard to control,
00:50:49 they’re hard to predict stuff about,
00:50:54 they’re hard to make sense of or like test repeatedly
00:50:58 because one human can be drastically different
00:51:01 from another human.
00:51:02 And so to deal with that as a robotics problem
00:51:05 is super hard.
00:51:07 And so one of the questions is which problems
00:51:11 can you remove the human from consideration
00:51:14 when you’re trying to solve the problem?
00:51:15 So like Elon Musk is an example of somebody
00:51:17 who believes autonomous driving,
00:51:20 we can remove the human from consideration,
00:51:23 we can solve autonomous driving as a robotics problem.
00:51:26 It’s stay in the lane.
00:51:28 When there’s a red light, you stop at a red light.
00:51:31 If there is humans in the picture like pedestrians,
00:51:34 that’s a ballistics problem.
00:51:36 It’s just treat them as a moving object
00:51:39 that has with like 90% probability
00:51:42 keeps moving in the way they were in the past few seconds
00:51:45 with some smaller probability that might stop or turn.
00:51:49 Just do some basic models about them
00:51:51 and you’ll be able to do just fine.
00:51:53 So I tend to believe that even driving
00:51:58 has to consider the full messiness of humans.
00:52:01 The dance, the game theoretic dance of chicken
00:52:03 that we all do when we jaywalk,
00:52:07 we look at the car, that car doesn’t,
00:52:10 that driver doesn’t have the guts to murder me
00:52:12 so I’m going to walk in front of it and not look at the car.
00:52:14 We do that kind of dance and AI systems
00:52:17 need to be able to play, do that kind of dance.
00:52:24 In Tolko, there’s the labs.
00:52:28 So there’s a data science component, there’s an AI component.
00:52:32 So how do they go into a company
00:52:35 and help revolutionize that industry?
00:52:38 Well, there’s different examples.
00:52:39 So one of our companies, Figs, makes healthcare workwear,
00:52:44 started by these two brilliant women
00:52:47 and early days helping to build the platform and recruit
00:52:54 and make sure that everything that we did
00:52:59 at the company embraced technology
00:53:03 and at the same time, they were obsessive
00:53:05 about their customer, which is doctors, nurses,
00:53:09 healthcare workers who are putting it on the line every day
00:53:12 and obsessive about their product.
00:53:13 And when you have those two things come together,
00:53:17 you get the result that we did at Figs.
00:53:24 We have a company called Acashure,
00:53:26 which it’s AI lab and base is down here in Austin, Texas.
00:53:31 It was an insurance,
00:53:33 one of the largest insurance brokers in the world.
00:53:36 And we did a deal with them
00:53:40 and sold some of our insurance holdings
00:53:44 that was completely AI driven.
00:53:47 And in that case, you basically put the team
00:53:50 inside the company, right?
00:53:52 Because it’s a massive company
00:53:56 and we’ve gone into all kinds of things.
00:53:59 So it just depends on the different situations.
00:54:03 But the biggest thing was just to make sure
00:54:06 whatever the company needed,
00:54:08 they had access to the talent.
00:54:11 Sometimes we’d build it, sometimes we’d help recruit for it.
00:54:15 You know how in technology, it’s whatever works, right?
00:54:18 There’s no one way to do things.
00:54:22 Well, Acashure is really interesting as an example.
00:54:25 So insurance is a fascinating space.
00:54:27 It seems like very ripe still
00:54:30 for disruption across the board.
00:54:32 So how do you, it seems like a lot of the disruption
00:54:35 has to do with almost the first dump step
00:54:42 of we’ve been using mostly paper.
00:54:46 It’s not digitized.
00:54:47 You have to basically create a infrastructure
00:54:51 and a framework where everybody is using
00:54:53 the same digital system, like databases
00:54:56 and just organize the data.
00:54:59 It seems like that’s a huge leap
00:55:01 that basically can revolutionize major industries
00:55:03 that still hasn’t been done.
00:55:05 Insurance is obviously the great example of that.
00:55:08 And one of the things that struck me,
00:55:10 the founder CEO of Acashure is a guy named Greg Williams.
00:55:14 They’re out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
00:55:16 And as we were looking at expanding our footprint
00:55:18 in insurance, I met with a lot of insurance executives.
00:55:22 And they would talk about technology,
00:55:24 but Greg truly understood the power
00:55:28 of what would happen across actuarial sciences,
00:55:32 predictive analytics and using machine learning
00:55:37 to really run every aspect of your business.
00:55:39 And then automating a lot of the,
00:55:42 just the back office tedious steps.
00:55:45 And as you said, one of the things that was great for us,
00:55:48 they already had a data collection system and department.
00:55:54 So it was much easier to pivot.
00:55:58 And I’m very excited about the future of that company.
00:56:01 It’s, they’re doing some pretty innovative,
00:56:06 groundbreaking things.
00:56:07 And those are the things that I like doing, right?
00:56:11 Is that, yes, I wanna make money.
00:56:15 Just, that’s what that is.
00:56:17 But at the same time,
00:56:19 what did you do with your time on earth, right?
00:56:21 Did you do anything to leave any kind of mark
00:56:24 that you did anything interesting?
00:56:27 I can only speak for myself.
00:56:29 There are many more ways to measure one’s life.
00:56:33 And I can only speak about how I think about things.
00:56:37 I grew up poor in upstate New York with a single mom
00:56:41 and watched her work a couple of jobs
00:56:43 and had to, from a young age, shovel snow and mow lawns
00:56:49 and do all kinds of things to help her
00:56:52 make sure the lights weren’t turned off in our little place.
00:56:55 And so that’s just something
00:56:57 that I’ve always been driven towards.
00:57:00 And I just, I have really eclectic tastes and interests.
00:57:07 And it’s just been an interesting journey.
00:57:11 So help be part of and help enable
00:57:14 some cool new creations across the board,
00:57:19 like film, music, AI, manufacturing,
00:57:24 just insurance, all the specific industries
00:57:31 that you disrupted, yeah.
00:57:33 Small tangent, back to your childhood with your mom.
00:57:39 Any memories kind of stand out,
00:57:42 stick with you as something
00:57:46 that helped define who you are as a man?
00:57:49 Yeah, even though the university and college experience
00:57:53 was not part of the family tree,
00:57:58 and we had no connections, I didn’t understand,
00:58:01 I didn’t know what a trust fund was or prep school,
00:58:03 I didn’t know what any of that was.
00:58:07 But my mom from a young age would always say,
00:58:10 you know, you’re gonna go to college.
00:58:12 There’s no, you know, if you choose to,
00:58:15 and I think from a young age,
00:58:17 that was just an expectation that I had
00:58:21 and that she instilled and the work ethic.
00:58:23 I watched her.
00:58:24 And then my grandmother was a janitor,
00:58:28 a cleaning lady in a hospital for 50 years.
00:58:31 And then I remember there were times of, you know,
00:58:36 I’m probably 10 years old, it’s freezing cold out.
00:58:39 And if I don’t go out and shovel six driveways,
00:58:42 we don’t have enough money to pay the bill.
00:58:45 So I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist,
00:58:48 so I don’t know how that manifests itself in my life today.
00:58:52 But I think the grit to say,
00:58:57 I’m not in the mood to do this, I don’t wanna do this,
00:59:01 but that’s the work that needs to be done.
00:59:04 And no excuses, not I’m a victim
00:59:08 and I’m gonna sit around and talk about,
00:59:10 no, it is what it is,
00:59:12 and you have to get done what you need to get done.
00:59:15 And again, I think it’s,
00:59:19 you can never fully put yourself in someone else’s shoes
00:59:22 or experience, so I don’t know what that is or feels like.
00:59:25 But for me, those were two, I think,
00:59:28 formative things that were important in my childhood.
00:59:33 So that’s pretty, the reality of life like that
00:59:37 is pretty humbling.
00:59:38 You still, you’ve been so exceptionally successful
00:59:41 that it’s easy to get soft now.
00:59:45 How do you get humbled these days?
00:59:49 By getting up.
00:59:50 You know, I think for me personally,
00:59:55 trying to push the envelope
00:59:57 and being weighed and measured, right?
00:59:59 That’s why I always loved sports too.
01:00:00 There’s a scoreboard.
01:00:02 And I’m a huge believer in opportunity, meritocracy,
01:00:07 all those things that I think are ideals
01:00:11 that we wanna aspire to.
01:00:14 And I think that there’s a lot of things
01:00:18 I’m involved with right now that I just wanna see
01:00:21 if I can do it.
01:00:22 I wanna see if, and you know,
01:00:26 my own little mantra is cause the outcome, right?
01:00:29 As much as you can, and at the same time,
01:00:32 have the humility and not to have the hubris or arrogance
01:00:36 to say I’m always gonna cause the outcome.
01:00:38 Because you’ll get your ass kicked pretty quickly
01:00:41 and humbled.
01:00:43 The world and the universe is a big place
01:00:45 with forces beyond, but I think,
01:00:52 I also think a lot about being intellectually honest,
01:00:56 which when I do university talks and so forth,
01:00:59 I think that’s a superpower.
01:01:02 Because if you find yourself making decisions
01:01:06 based on other people’s expectations,
01:01:10 based on places you don’t wanna go,
01:01:13 but you feel like momentum is taking you there,
01:01:20 I think that’s a big problem.
01:01:22 And there are people that go to our top universities
01:01:26 and can’t wait to get out and start their own company
01:01:30 and they want that pressure and they want to grind.
01:01:35 And there are other people that are smart and talented,
01:01:38 but just say, look, I don’t wanna lay awake
01:01:41 staring at the ceiling wondering
01:01:42 how I’m gonna make payroll.
01:01:43 I don’t want that in my life.
01:01:45 And I think if you can square that up
01:01:48 and be okay with it and say, what makes me tick?
01:01:51 What makes me happy?
01:01:52 What puts me in a bad head space?
01:01:54 Because there’s a difference between challenging yourself
01:01:57 and going against your nature.
01:02:00 So that’s why I think that being intellectually honest
01:02:03 and being able to really sit down
01:02:05 and go inside your own head and say,
01:02:08 what am I good at?
01:02:08 What am I not good at?
01:02:10 How am I gonna put myself in a position
01:02:12 to be successful?
01:02:13 Because I’m working on my weaknesses,
01:02:17 but I’m not gonna put myself career wise in a position
01:02:21 where I’m just fundamentally gonna have a hard time
01:02:24 being successful.
01:02:28 Yeah, intellectually honest is a tricky one.
01:02:30 And it gets, there’s like levels to it too.
01:02:34 Sure.
01:02:35 Because some of the things I think about
01:02:40 when you dream of doing certain kinds of big things,
01:02:49 a part of intellectual honesty is to say several things.
01:02:53 One is like, hey, the thing you’re dreaming about,
01:02:59 like one, the fact that nobody’s done it
01:03:02 probably shows that you’re just a dreamer.
01:03:07 This is not going to, like think clearly.
01:03:13 The fact that it hasn’t been done
01:03:14 probably shows that it may not be the right path.
01:03:17 And two is like, if you’re dreaming about stuff,
01:03:21 there’s a certain point where it’s like,
01:03:23 hey, you haven’t done it.
01:03:25 Like, why haven’t you done it already then?
01:03:27 Like you have to be honest with yourself.
01:03:29 Like you have to be ambitious.
01:03:30 Like a lot of people work hard a long time for a dream,
01:03:35 but you have to wake up and be like, all right,
01:03:38 I’ve been at this for 10 years.
01:03:41 Like with a startup, you launch a startup
01:03:43 and you think, okay, one year, two years,
01:03:46 three years, four years, pretty successful,
01:03:49 but it hasn’t exploded like you dreamed
01:03:50 and you have to shut it down.
01:03:54 You have to be intellectually honest there.
01:03:56 At the same time, you might want to be,
01:04:01 like step it up, lean into it.
01:04:03 Say almost like the flip side of like intellectual honesty
01:04:10 is like maddening ambition of just saying, fuck it,
01:04:14 I’m going to go all in.
01:04:16 But that is a kind of intellectual honesty saying like,
01:04:19 you know, the big problem here is I’ve been kind of going,
01:04:23 doing too many things.
01:04:26 Maybe with this dream, you have to go all in on it.
01:04:29 All those kinds of things.
01:04:30 I mean, this is human experience, it’s complicated.
01:04:34 Yes, all human things are complicated.
01:04:37 And I think there’s a difference between being reckless
01:04:41 and making well thought out informed decisions.
01:04:44 If you’re going to go all in,
01:04:46 make sure you’ve measured twice, cut once, as they say.
01:04:50 And one of my other favorite, I forget,
01:04:54 many years ago, I heard this saying and it stayed with me.
01:04:57 It was never mistake, clear line of sight
01:05:00 with distance and you know that.
01:05:03 So I think that the key, whether you’re starting a business
01:05:10 or you’re thinking about leaving the company you’re at
01:05:12 and starting a business or just leaving for another job,
01:05:15 any of these things is as much as you can, right?
01:05:19 And psychologists, I think would tell us,
01:05:21 it’s hard to be self aware completely, right?
01:05:24 That’s the rub that if we were all completely self aware
01:05:27 of everything that we did and strengthen weaknesses,
01:05:30 it’d be a different world.
01:05:32 But I do think you can work on that
01:05:35 and at least challenge yourself to think about it
01:05:39 and not be in a position where I’m going to medical school
01:05:43 because that’s what you do in my family
01:05:45 and even though I’m miserable doing it,
01:05:50 things like that.
01:05:51 So definitely you don’t want to be sort of,
01:05:54 because you don’t think fall victim to conformity.
01:05:59 Let’s just go on doing the same thing over and over.
01:06:02 That’s right.
01:06:03 But at the same time, is measure twice and cut once.
01:06:11 It does feel like some of the biggest leaps taken
01:06:17 are where you cut once and measure later.
01:06:22 Is you leap in first.
01:06:24 Sure.
01:06:25 It’s almost like a gut, I suppose that is a measurement,
01:06:28 but you build up a good gut instinct of what to do
01:06:32 and then you just do it and then you figure out,
01:06:35 it’s the building the airplane as you’re flying it.
01:06:37 Right.
01:06:39 Well, and I think each one of those instances
01:06:42 that you could probably cite
01:06:44 has its own unique circumstances, right?
01:06:47 I don’t have a deep biotech background,
01:06:50 so if I suddenly stood up and said,
01:06:51 I’m gonna put everything I have into this idea,
01:06:55 well, those are, it’s game theory, right?
01:06:59 What are the odds of success?
01:07:01 If on the other hand, you’re brilliant in your field
01:07:06 or you’ve seen some opportunity
01:07:08 that you think is wide open
01:07:12 and you’re gonna go for it and break stuff, that’s great.
01:07:16 You just wanna, to me, always say like,
01:07:20 how crazy is this on the spectrum of,
01:07:23 do I have any expertise?
01:07:25 What is the downside if I fail, right?
01:07:30 If you’re at a certain point in life with young children
01:07:34 and you’ve got a mortgage and whatever else,
01:07:37 that is one circumstance versus I just got out of Stanford
01:07:41 or I just got out of whatever and I’m gonna go for it.
01:07:44 It’s just the whole thing, right?
01:07:47 It is complex as you point out.
01:07:49 And sometimes you just wanna have the right matrix
01:07:52 in your head of decision making process
01:07:55 to try to arrive at the right place.
01:07:57 And even if you get close, that’s where I think you say,
01:08:00 you know what, the hell with it, I’m doing this.
01:08:03 Yeah, yeah.
01:08:06 I do wanna ask you about one specific idea
01:08:10 that sounds super fascinating
01:08:12 that you’re involved with recently.
01:08:13 You led the $50 million seed round
01:08:16 for a company called Colossal
01:08:18 that is focused on deextinction.
01:08:22 This is funny relative to our connection
01:08:25 and conversation about Jurassic World.
01:08:28 They’re seeking to restore lost ecosystems
01:08:30 and use gene editing to restore the woolly mammoth
01:08:34 to the Arctic tundra.
01:08:37 How are they gonna do that?
01:08:39 Well, I met this fascinating guy at Harvard
01:08:43 named George Church five, six years ago,
01:08:48 and found him to be incredibly smart, have an imagination.
01:08:56 And he partnered up with a guy named Ben Lamb,
01:08:59 who’s an entrepreneur.
01:09:02 And basically the press and to me the imaginative,
01:09:09 like you’re capturing my imagination by telling me
01:09:12 you’re gonna bring back the woolly mammoth
01:09:14 and other extinct animals.
01:09:15 And I, you know, we’ll see where that road leads.
01:09:18 I was more interested in an investor
01:09:22 in the things that they’re working through
01:09:25 around understanding genes and proteins
01:09:30 and CRISPR and all these other things
01:09:31 because being adjacent to George Church and his team
01:09:36 as these things unfold over the next decade,
01:09:39 I thought was the right thing to do.
01:09:42 So people are important here,
01:09:44 just like investing people and seeing
01:09:46 what the hell they come up with.
01:09:48 Absolutely, I mean, you can look through history
01:09:51 and great things are done by great people, right?
01:09:57 And companies, they end up over time becoming a logo
01:10:02 and immediately what you think of them,
01:10:04 but they started out with a person, with an idea
01:10:08 and a team that cultivated that and made that happen.
01:10:13 And I think there are certain folks
01:10:16 that are just immensely talented
01:10:18 that if you can be around them,
01:10:21 and I also know his and his team’s ethics
01:10:25 in terms of, you know, after spending time
01:10:28 talking about where the lines are,
01:10:32 people in other countries that, you know,
01:10:35 may not have the same process,
01:10:37 may not have the same checks and balances,
01:10:39 are doing this and pursuing this regardless.
01:10:42 So at least I felt like with George and Ben and their teams,
01:10:46 they’re also very responsible people.
01:10:49 This is where the human side of things comes into play.
01:10:53 I’ve interacted with a lot of really brilliant people
01:10:55 in the technology space where you kind of,
01:10:59 you know, there’s a lot of ways to feel this out.
01:11:01 You can ask them whether they kind of read literature.
01:11:03 You can feel out how much do they really understand
01:11:08 about like human nature here.
01:11:12 Like whatever the technology is,
01:11:14 when it actually starts to play,
01:11:17 interact with society at scale,
01:11:21 like do they have an understanding
01:11:23 or an intuition about how that happens?
01:11:26 Some of that requires studying history.
01:11:28 Some of that requires like just looking at
01:11:30 the worst and best parts and events in human history
01:11:35 to understand like, hey, it doesn’t always turn out
01:11:38 like everybody hoped the technology turns out.
01:11:43 If a person has a depth of understanding about history,
01:11:47 about human nature, then I think that’s the right person
01:11:52 to mess with some of this cutting edge stuff.
01:11:56 Now you want Marcus Aurelius with a PhD from MIT.
01:12:01 Exactly, exactly.
01:12:04 Just small tangent, but you mentioned having a conversation
01:12:08 with Warren Buffett, you spoke really highly of him
01:12:11 as an investor, as a human being.
01:12:15 What about him do you admire?
01:12:17 What from him, what insights have you drawn from him
01:12:21 as a great investor yourself?
01:12:23 Well, the afternoon that I got to spend with him,
01:12:26 which is something I’ll treasure forever.
01:12:28 Look, sometimes when you meet people,
01:12:31 even that are immensely successful,
01:12:34 you may decide that after 20 minutes or a half hour,
01:12:39 oh, you were in the right place at the right time
01:12:42 and that’s fine.
01:12:45 There are other people that are clearly different,
01:12:49 special, and I don’t care if you made them start from zero,
01:12:52 you know, would end up in a good place.
01:12:56 And so it was an absolute privilege
01:12:59 to spend the time with him.
01:13:03 You know, and a couple of things that stood out
01:13:06 in the conversation, he is incredibly intellectually curious
01:13:11 and well read, and I like how simplistic he likes
01:13:15 to keep his thought matrix.
01:13:17 And then also, instead of trying to outsmart the market,
01:13:23 it seems like a simple axiom, but just look,
01:13:26 good companies that are led by talented managers
01:13:31 that are good businesses over time are gonna get there.
01:13:35 So I’m not gonna day trade, I’m just gonna,
01:13:37 I’m looking for value.
01:13:40 And then just on life stuff, he just, you know,
01:13:44 and also his ability to take in
01:13:49 and then use information was incredibly impressive.
01:13:54 So I only spent the, you know, I’d met him before,
01:13:58 but I only spent one afternoon with him,
01:14:00 but it’s, you know, pretty incredible.
01:14:02 And one of the things that stuck out to me
01:14:05 is we were in the middle of talking about Tolko
01:14:08 or investing or how we thought about it.
01:14:10 And I said, you know, I’m trying to be smart about,
01:14:14 and he stopped me and he said, Charlie Munger,
01:14:16 his partner of many years, Charlie and I
01:14:18 don’t try to think of the smart thing to do.
01:14:21 We try to think what’s the dumb thing we could do here.
01:14:24 And I kind of laughed and he said, no, I’m dead serious.
01:14:28 We think about it from the standpoint of
01:14:31 what could we do in this situation that later
01:14:34 we’d be like, that was a really dumb thing to do.
01:14:37 And I actually thought that was, it got in my head.
01:14:41 And I still think a lot about that
01:14:43 as I’m dissecting problems.
01:14:46 So there is, like, that’s a kind of longterm thinking
01:14:51 if you just avoid the dumb things,
01:14:54 or if you simplify, just focus on those simple steps,
01:14:59 all it takes is just do that for a long period of time
01:15:02 and you’ll be successful.
01:15:04 Well, it certainly worked for him, that’s all I can say.
01:15:07 What about you?
01:15:10 You’ve been a great investor yourself.
01:15:14 How do you know, when you judge people,
01:15:18 so I, whenever I go to San Francisco,
01:15:21 I was thinking of moving to San Francisco.
01:15:22 That’s why I decided to, after really giving it
01:15:26 some thought, talking to people, decided to move to Austin.
01:15:29 You know, everybody’s dreaming big and they have big plans.
01:15:33 And it’s actually, I don’t envy the job of an investor
01:15:37 of any kind, because everybody has big dreams
01:15:42 and it’s hard to know who exactly,
01:15:45 what idea is going to materialize,
01:15:48 what team is going to materialize into something great.
01:15:51 How do you make those decisions about people, about ideas?
01:15:57 Well, if I had any kind of a lattice work on this,
01:16:01 it absolutely starts with the people.
01:16:04 And I think the reason for that is your business plan
01:16:08 is going to change, right?
01:16:10 There’s very few businesses I know of that say,
01:16:13 we’re gonna make a widget in this location
01:16:16 and 30 years later, we’re successful
01:16:18 and we just make a widget and that’s what it is.
01:16:21 Things happen, right?
01:16:22 And today they happen with such velocity
01:16:25 that you have to be able to make hard decisions
01:16:31 based on imperfect information.
01:16:34 And are you, how are you going to calculate those answers?
01:16:38 How self interested are you going to be?
01:16:41 What kind of ethics will you apply?
01:16:44 What’s your short term versus long term thinking?
01:16:47 Are you able to give an honest assessment of a situation?
01:16:53 Because the thing that you can count on
01:16:55 is problems are gonna happen.
01:16:58 Things you didn’t anticipate are gonna happen.
01:17:01 How pliable are you, right?
01:17:04 How much elasticity is there in your ability
01:17:09 to be successful?
01:17:10 And I think it’s important when you invest in something
01:17:15 that you both see, you understand the roadmap ahead
01:17:20 and agree to it, right?
01:17:21 Doesn’t mean there won’t be twists and turns,
01:17:23 but you’re not like, whoa, wait a minute,
01:17:25 what did we do here?
01:17:26 This isn’t what was in the thing I signed up for.
01:17:29 And then I think honesty and communication
01:17:34 is a huge thing to me with,
01:17:38 I always tell people if bi directionally,
01:17:42 if there’s something going on,
01:17:43 start the conversation with, Lex, we have a problem.
01:17:48 Okay, now I’m sitting up, you have my full attention,
01:17:52 we’re gonna talk about whatever it is.
01:17:54 Bad news should travel faster than good news.
01:17:56 And because it’s going to happen,
01:18:02 being in business with someone
01:18:04 that is gonna shoot you straight
01:18:07 and sometimes say, I don’t know.
01:18:09 I don’t know what the answer is.
01:18:10 I gotta go figure it out.
01:18:12 That I can process a lot better than,
01:18:15 look, I don’t want you mad at me or disappointed
01:18:18 or I can’t handle not having success.
01:18:20 So we’re just gonna kick the can.
01:18:23 And I think, especially in today’s business environment,
01:18:26 that’s very, very dangerous.
01:18:29 So that’s a bad sign, not just because it’s good
01:18:33 to communicate and be honest,
01:18:35 but if they’re not willing to do that,
01:18:37 then it goes back to the intellectual honesty.
01:18:40 They’re probably not also able to be brutally honest
01:18:44 with themselves when they look in the mirror
01:18:46 about the direction of the company.
01:18:48 But look, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know.
01:18:53 But I think if you unpack many situations
01:18:57 that turned out negatively,
01:19:00 most of the people, whether you’re faking lab results,
01:19:03 you have a biotech company,
01:19:05 everybody’s staring at Theranos these days.
01:19:08 Do I think in a lot of cases, you’re either the villain,
01:19:13 like you started out saying,
01:19:14 I’m gonna screw my shareholders over
01:19:17 and I’m gonna be a liar, that isn’t my experience.
01:19:22 Most things are little incremental moves that you say,
01:19:25 we’re gonna get this right next week,
01:19:27 but today we gotta make the presentation.
01:19:29 So we’re gonna just tweak things a little bit.
01:19:31 That’s a slippery slope, right?
01:19:34 And so that’s why I think from a standpoint of people,
01:19:39 you wanna go into the foxhole with folks that,
01:19:43 you know, understand things are gonna happen
01:19:47 and I’m gonna let you know about them
01:19:49 and we’re gonna try to solve them together.
01:19:52 And then just in terms of the idea,
01:19:55 it’s, I always ask like, okay,
01:19:57 if this company executed the way,
01:20:00 that’s the other thing that always cracks me up
01:20:01 about financials, whenever somebody pitches you,
01:20:05 inevitably they’ll say,
01:20:06 our projections are really, really conservative.
01:20:09 I’m still waiting for somebody to come in and say,
01:20:11 look, my projections are wildly optimistic.
01:20:14 We’ll never hit these numbers, but anyway,
01:20:18 it’s, you know, if this company did what it says
01:20:22 and executes and does it matter, right?
01:20:25 Does it move the needle enough?
01:20:27 And what are the things that uniquely position
01:20:31 this company to be successful?
01:20:33 And you just have to be able to answer,
01:20:35 I think a number of those questions pretty crisply.
01:20:39 But at the end of the day, it’s still a big risk.
01:20:41 So you’re just trying to minimize the risk.
01:20:47 Let me jump to another topic.
01:20:50 You’re an incredible human being
01:20:53 that you’re involved with this.
01:20:54 Your band, Ghost Hounds, is touring with the Rolling Stones.
01:21:00 So before we talk about your band, let me ask about that.
01:21:03 What’s that like, playing with the Rolling Stones?
01:21:07 Surreal, just because they’re my favorite band of all time.
01:21:15 To me, the greatest rock and roll band,
01:21:17 it’s not even close, of all time.
01:21:19 And, you know, to share the same stage,
01:21:22 to be on tour and to go out
01:21:25 and get that energy from the crowd, you know,
01:21:30 and every night and come off stage
01:21:32 and later when they go on and you hear that iconic,
01:21:34 ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones.
01:21:36 And then it’s incredible.
01:21:38 And, you know, what’s amazing to me about the band,
01:21:42 next year will be their 60th anniversary, 60 years.
01:21:48 And it’s hard to be around anything for that long,
01:21:53 but making music and packing stadiums.
01:21:56 And what’s amazing to me, they can play a two hour set
01:21:59 and it’s not just that, oh, that’s a hit or you recognize it.
01:22:03 It’s like every song is an anthem, right?
01:22:06 And so it’s been amazing.
01:22:10 We got to play with them in 2019.
01:22:12 And when they ask us to do this again,
01:22:17 it’s just an absolute privilege.
01:22:19 I asked you this offline,
01:22:21 so I know you are a kind of rockstar,
01:22:24 but just me, maybe I’m projecting,
01:22:27 but do you get nervous, such a large audience
01:22:31 with the Rolling Stones?
01:22:33 It feels like there’ll be a lot of pressure.
01:22:36 Yeah, I mean, you definitely don’t want to screw it up.
01:22:39 I think our band is tight knit and all that stuff.
01:22:45 And I think that the individual nervousness dissipates
01:22:50 when you go out as a group and you’re making music together
01:22:54 and you sort of, okay, we’re all in this
01:22:57 and we’re doing a thing, which is why even in sports,
01:23:01 I always look at individual events like ice skating
01:23:04 or anything where it’s just you out there alone.
01:23:09 And that’s different than being with a team and nerve wracking.
01:23:12 So I’m sure if it was me with an acoustic guitar
01:23:16 just going out, it would feel different,
01:23:18 but absolutely you get the right kind of butterflies,
01:23:22 I would call it.
01:23:24 And just the energy of playing music
01:23:28 and having it be this relationship and look, I get it.
01:23:33 I’ve been to a ton of concerts where I’m like,
01:23:36 look, can we just get to the band please?
01:23:38 But what’s been great is just an amazing reception.
01:23:43 And we have this guy named Trey Nation
01:23:46 who’s the lead singer who’s just incredibly talented.
01:23:49 I mean, he’s just not only an amazing voice,
01:23:54 but just has that charismatic thing.
01:23:56 Yeah, he’s great.
01:23:57 It’s fun.
01:23:58 What’s it feel like to play in front of a huge audience?
01:24:02 What’s, as a guitarist, are you lost in the music?
01:24:07 Like you almost don’t feel the audience.
01:24:10 Does it add extra energy?
01:24:12 Does it add extra anxiety?
01:24:14 What does it feel like?
01:24:17 You know, stadiums are interesting
01:24:19 just because it’s so big and cavernous.
01:24:22 And because you want to protect your ears.
01:24:24 So we use an in ear system
01:24:27 so that you are a little disconnected from the crowd.
01:24:30 Because if you’re playing that loud
01:24:32 and you’re standing in front of your amps
01:24:33 without ear protection, that’s bad.
01:24:36 How are you monitoring the sound?
01:24:38 The in ear stuff, is that producing sound
01:24:40 or is it strictly ear plugs?
01:24:41 No, it’s producing the sound.
01:24:43 So it’s like putting ear pods in and listening to a song
01:24:47 and you’re playing to it, right?
01:24:48 It’s just us playing, but it protects your ears.
01:24:54 But the energy from the crowd,
01:24:58 when they get going and get into it,
01:25:00 which Knock On Wood so far has been amazing,
01:25:04 there’s nothing like it.
01:25:06 I mean, it’s just this bi directional thing that happens.
01:25:12 And music and sports were kind of my first loves.
01:25:18 And yeah, it’s very difficult to describe,
01:25:23 I think accurately, because it’s like no other feeling.
01:25:31 Musically, how is it different than playing in a garage
01:25:35 with the band by yourself practicing?
01:25:38 Like, do you feel like you’re creating something different
01:25:42 when you got the guitar and the amp
01:25:47 and just the sound dissipating out
01:25:50 and everybody’s listening, is that?
01:25:52 It’s, listen, the first time we did it
01:25:55 and there’s nobody in the stadium,
01:25:57 first time I ever played in the stadium.
01:25:59 And I’m just like, I’m out there in front
01:26:03 and just hitting different chords
01:26:05 and playing different licks.
01:26:06 And I’m like, it’s like I won a contest
01:26:09 and I get to do this.
01:26:11 But what’s different about it,
01:26:15 and each venue is different.
01:26:16 So if you, we went on the road with ZZ Top a few years ago,
01:26:21 which was incredible.
01:26:22 Love Billy Gibbons, he’s a Texan.
01:26:25 Incredible person and guitar player.
01:26:28 But when you’re playing in like five to 7,000 seats,
01:26:32 it’s really, I mean, it’s, you’re right there with them,
01:26:36 with the crowd.
01:26:37 And then when you play in an arena,
01:26:40 we toured with Bob Seger on his last tour, which was cool.
01:26:44 Played some shows with him.
01:26:47 And again, the arena, like they’re all kind of packed
01:26:50 on top of you.
01:26:51 And it’s super loud, which was cool.
01:26:55 Meaning the crowd is,
01:26:56 stadiums is a completely different animal.
01:26:59 And it’s just a completely different experience.
01:27:05 Do you enjoy it versus like a smaller room?
01:27:09 What, as a guitarist, as a musician,
01:27:13 what’s your favorite like room to play of the size?
01:27:16 Any room that’ll have me.
01:27:17 You know, look, I think arenas are the perfect blend.
01:27:23 If I had to say, because it’s loud and, you know,
01:27:26 20, 30,000 people, but like right up, right up on you.
01:27:31 A stadium, look, playing the stadiums with the Rolling
01:27:36 Stones, it just is gonna go on the head marker somewhere
01:27:40 is one of the more, you know, I say this,
01:27:42 and I really mean it.
01:27:43 My life is like a punked episode that just hasn’t,
01:27:47 no one’s burst in yet, but yeah,
01:27:51 it’s as cool as you think it is.
01:27:53 So 60 years, how do you think Mick Jagger still got it?
01:27:58 How do you explain it?
01:27:59 I gotta tell you something.
01:28:00 I mean, the funny thing is whatever,
01:28:04 wherever there is excellence,
01:28:06 people wanna know how’d you do it, right?
01:28:09 What’s the secret?
01:28:12 Not only is Mick Jagger, and I think the songs
01:28:15 that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger wrote together,
01:28:17 if you go back and listen to the lyrics,
01:28:21 it’s just incredibly poignant,
01:28:23 and I’m just a huge Stones fan, so,
01:28:27 but he works out like a maniac, right?
01:28:32 And it’s that 10,000 hours thing,
01:28:35 and it’s that, hey, maybe I don’t feel my best today,
01:28:38 but I’m gonna get up and do my routine and work out
01:28:41 so that at his age, which, I mean,
01:28:47 you can look at people at different ages chronologically
01:28:51 that are, maybe we’re both at this age,
01:28:54 but I’m a lot older than you are, and vice versa.
01:28:57 And he just, I think it’s the combination of raw talent
01:29:02 and the ability, and he’s very smart, right?
01:29:06 Like he understands how to have interaction with a crowd
01:29:10 and hold them in the palm of his hand
01:29:11 and be an entertainer, but then on top of that,
01:29:15 the reason he can at this age run around stadiums
01:29:19 and be just as energetic is he puts the work in.
01:29:22 And that’s one thing, step that I think
01:29:24 a lot of people miss sometimes,
01:29:26 where they want that magic trick,
01:29:28 they wanna know what’s the shortcut.
01:29:30 Most of the time, the answer is there’s no shortcut.
01:29:32 Yeah, you have to work hard on the way there
01:29:36 and work hard to stay on top.
01:29:39 That’s it.
01:29:40 And sometimes it’s not even like work hard,
01:29:41 it’s just like be a professional,
01:29:45 which that involves, in his case, at his age,
01:29:49 with the amount of stuff you have to do on stage
01:29:51 and the way he does it.
01:29:53 For two hours.
01:29:53 You have, this is a professional athlete.
01:29:58 A professional athlete that has to do things
01:30:01 that are probably designed for 20 year olds
01:30:04 and 30 year olds has to do it at an older age,
01:30:06 which means what do you have to do?
01:30:08 Well, he probably has a whole physical routine
01:30:11 he has to do.
01:30:12 Diet, the whole thing.
01:30:13 And it’s hard, look, if you wanna do great things,
01:30:17 you probably have to do hard things to get there.
01:30:20 I’m not gonna make you pick,
01:30:22 just stick on the stones for one more minute.
01:30:26 But what are some great Rolling Stones songs
01:30:31 that were impactful to you, lyrically, musically,
01:30:36 maybe something you like playing, like air guitar.
01:30:41 Oh, sure.
01:30:42 I don’t know.
01:30:43 Probably my favorites, I love Sympathy for the Devil.
01:30:47 Yeah.
01:30:47 It’s a very, I don’t know, sort of Faustian.
01:30:51 I love the lyrics.
01:30:52 I love how the, almost a voodoo beat
01:30:55 just kind of builds throughout the song.
01:30:58 That’s always been one of my favorites.
01:31:00 So in that song, he never mentions Devil, does he?
01:31:02 No, wait, sorry.
01:31:04 Like, you know my name.
01:31:07 Yeah.
01:31:08 There’s like a flirtation going on in the lyrics.
01:31:11 It’s kind of interesting.
01:31:12 Yeah, here’s all the trouble I’ve caused along the way
01:31:15 with you humans.
01:31:16 And I just think it’s really, really great.
01:31:18 And musically, it builds really nicely.
01:31:20 Yeah.
01:31:21 And it’s like both fun and dark.
01:31:23 It’s cool.
01:31:24 It’s a,
01:31:29 there’s a playful nature to it.
01:31:30 It’s, that’s very stones.
01:31:33 The only, they can pull it off
01:31:34 because it’s like playful,
01:31:36 but it’s also like dark and dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
01:31:39 Yeah.
01:31:40 And Gimme Shelter is just, you know,
01:31:44 and to this day, when I listen to the studio version
01:31:48 and Mary Clayton just comes on and sings that epic,
01:31:53 iconic part.
01:31:55 And there’s a documentary that was done
01:31:58 about backup singers, phenomenal.
01:32:02 And it tells the story of that moment
01:32:06 in that song with Mary Clayton.
01:32:08 And it’s just her voice and the way it unfolded,
01:32:13 they got her out of bed at like 10 o clock at night in LA.
01:32:15 And she’s like the Rolling Stones,
01:32:17 and went in and just killed it.
01:32:20 And I can’t sing at all.
01:32:23 I’m by ordinance not allowed around a microphone.
01:32:26 So I’m always in awe when someone can sing like that.
01:32:32 But, you know, those are,
01:32:35 those are some of my favorite Rolling Stones songs
01:32:39 and Painted Black’s awesome.
01:32:41 I mean, I could go on and on.
01:32:42 Yeah, Painted Black is great.
01:32:44 Again, a song that builds as bad as,
01:32:45 I mean, it defines a whole generation.
01:32:48 What made you pick up a guitar?
01:32:49 What made you fall in love with the guitar?
01:32:52 It’s just the coolest instrument, right?
01:32:55 I mean, when you watched back then,
01:32:59 and I was kind of an old soul.
01:33:01 I was listening at a fairly young age to Muddy Waters,
01:33:08 Robert Johnson, Lightning Hopkins, BB King,
01:33:11 and just the soulfulness.
01:33:14 Thrills gone.
01:33:16 Oh my, I mean, BB plays five notes and just kills it
01:33:21 and the emotion that it evokes.
01:33:24 So I just was just in awe of the instrument.
01:33:29 And I also, there’s always somebody around who’s a musician
01:33:36 that just picks the instrument up and can play, right?
01:33:39 And they’re just so talented at it.
01:33:41 And they can just listen to a record and play it.
01:33:43 That was never me.
01:33:45 I never took formal lessons.
01:33:47 I had to grind to just make it sound
01:33:52 like I wanted it to sound.
01:33:54 So both technically and ear, everything was hard work.
01:33:58 Yeah, I mean, I could hear it and what they call,
01:34:02 you know, you play.
01:34:04 So my right hand, the rhythm side of it is,
01:34:09 that’s probably if I have anything, my strength.
01:34:13 But there’s something pretty amazing that happens
01:34:18 when you get together with other people and play a song
01:34:22 in that moment where it hits the pocket
01:34:25 and you all kind of know it.
01:34:27 And it’s just such a cool feeling.
01:34:31 And it was interesting growing up because I was,
01:34:34 again, I always had eclectic interests.
01:34:36 So I loved math and physics and science.
01:34:38 So I had those friends and I was an athlete
01:34:41 and played football and baseball and basketball.
01:34:43 So I had my jock friends, and then I had my music friends
01:34:47 and so it was just kind of that.
01:34:51 And so when I was still living in Los Angeles
01:34:55 and had Legendary, I just missed playing.
01:35:01 And so I put this band together
01:35:04 and called it the Ghost Hounds because again,
01:35:08 huge Robert Johnson fan and that legend of Robert Johnson
01:35:13 selling his soul at the crossroads
01:35:15 in exchange for his musical talent.
01:35:17 And you guys have that in one of the videos.
01:35:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:35:19 Such a cool video.
01:35:20 Exactly, so I just thought that’s such cool lore.
01:35:26 I just love the blues.
01:35:28 So Robert Johnson would often talk about hellhounds
01:35:32 on his trail.
01:35:33 And so I always just thought, huh, what about ghost towns?
01:35:37 So I wish it were a more clever, deeper story,
01:35:41 but that’s about it for the name.
01:35:43 That’s pretty deep, Robert Johnson’s incredible.
01:35:45 But you also talk about that you connect
01:35:48 to the storytelling of blues.
01:35:50 So what makes a good story in a song?
01:35:53 Like what aspect of storytelling connects with you in song?
01:35:57 So I’m a big lyrics guy too.
01:35:59 I love like deep lyric people like Tom Waits
01:36:03 and like people that are like Leonard Cohen,
01:36:07 like even Bob Dylan, they’re like obviously, it’s poetry.
01:36:12 And then there’s some people like the Rolling Stones there.
01:36:15 It’s like seemingly simpler,
01:36:18 but it’s still so much more to it.
01:36:20 It’s like less is often more.
01:36:23 It still tells a strong story.
01:36:25 Yeah, and there’s certain people
01:36:27 and Jagger and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
01:36:30 are in this boat.
01:36:31 Billy Gibbons is in this boat.
01:36:32 They just say things in a certain way
01:36:35 that are just cool, right?
01:36:37 It’s just, and so I write our music and lyrics.
01:36:42 I have to tell a story.
01:36:44 I have to know the characters in the song.
01:36:46 I’m not good at just writing some rhymes
01:36:49 and having it match up to the right key and the right music.
01:36:52 I have to understand like, that’s just me.
01:36:56 And so I think that, look,
01:36:59 if you have three or four minutes to tell a story,
01:37:02 you have to be more efficient with your use of language.
01:37:07 And you have to understand what you’re building to it
01:37:10 understand what you’re building to, if anything,
01:37:12 and evoke emotion.
01:37:15 And hopefully for those three minutes,
01:37:18 get the listener to understand
01:37:21 not only the point of the song,
01:37:22 but where you’re coming from
01:37:24 and to make you feel a certain way.
01:37:28 There’s a song that the audience has seemed to like a lot
01:37:31 on the new album called Good Old Days.
01:37:34 And I wrote that because especially during COVID
01:37:38 and reflecting on what normalcy looks like
01:37:42 and what happens when you’re cut off,
01:37:46 I just was kind of taken with this idea of
01:37:50 that when you sit around and reminisce with friends,
01:37:53 oftentimes it’s not just like some big event happened.
01:37:59 It’s, remember that summer,
01:38:00 we’d go up to the lake all the time
01:38:03 and it’s who you were with.
01:38:05 And at the time, it probably seemed pretty pedestrian.
01:38:09 It just seemed like kind of a normal day,
01:38:12 but it was the company you were keeping.
01:38:13 It was the time in your life.
01:38:15 It was whatever it was.
01:38:17 And I just kind of struck me that right now
01:38:21 we’re doing stuff that you’re gonna reminisce about later
01:38:24 that seems kind of ordinary to be like,
01:38:26 man, that was such a great time.
01:38:29 So the idea is be in the moment and all that stuff.
01:38:31 But these are the good old days.
01:38:34 And enjoy it and soak it in
01:38:37 and kind of be present for it.
01:38:39 Yeah, it’s a great perspective to take on the present
01:38:42 because we are in the thing that we’ll remember.
01:38:44 We’re living through the thing we’ll remember.
01:38:46 And sometimes the things we’ll remember
01:38:47 is the simple stuff, the little stuff.
01:38:52 Outside of Keith Richards,
01:38:55 who is the greatest, ridiculous question,
01:38:58 but just indulge me,
01:39:00 who is the greatest blues guitarist of all time,
01:39:03 rock guitarist of all time?
01:39:05 Well, you got a little bit of a hybrid
01:39:07 with Jimi Hendrix, right?
01:39:08 Because he played the blues and he played rock and roll.
01:39:11 So I think most guitarists would say
01:39:14 Jimi Hendrix was pretty ridiculous.
01:39:17 That probably for me,
01:39:19 I’m a huge, huge, huge Hendrix fan to play.
01:39:21 He can’t, I mean, even to this day,
01:39:24 I don’t care, technology, pedals, whatever,
01:39:27 he just somehow fused with the instrument.
01:39:31 I can’t be sitting here in Austin, Texas
01:39:34 without mentioning one of the great guitar players
01:39:37 of all time, Stevie Ray Vaughn.
01:39:40 See, that’s how, I know you’re like a rock star.
01:39:42 You’re sucking up to the audience.
01:39:43 Well, no, you have listeners all over the place,
01:39:47 but Stevie Ray Vaughn is another one of those.
01:39:51 That is incredible.
01:39:51 Just blows me away.
01:39:55 And then with the older guys,
01:39:57 BB King, Hubert Sumlin, Clapton.
01:40:01 I saw him on his last tour
01:40:06 and just walked out on my,
01:40:09 just like unbelievable how he still sounds.
01:40:14 And both electric and acoustic, just so strange.
01:40:18 Absolute master.
01:40:20 And the greatest storyteller, you mentioned Bob Seger.
01:40:23 That’s an interesting one.
01:40:26 He almost doesn’t get enough credit, I feel like,
01:40:30 for how great he is.
01:40:31 Obviously he’s super famous, but.
01:40:33 No, he’s, and his voice.
01:40:36 I also, I had the privilege of getting friendly
01:40:39 with John Fogerty, you know, John Fogerty and CCR fame.
01:40:43 And he’s another one that’s just the way he phrases things.
01:40:48 And you just look at the catalog of stuff he wrote.
01:40:52 Amazing talent.
01:40:54 I read Bruce Springsteen’s book
01:40:59 and was, I’m a fan, but after reading the book,
01:41:02 it was really, you go back and listen to his lyrics
01:41:05 and the way he pours himself out is pretty incredible.
01:41:13 And then again, with the old blues guys,
01:41:17 I just think the emotion they could get out of
01:41:20 playing like, staying on the one, right?
01:41:23 Just playing the same rhythm.
01:41:25 John Lee Hooker.
01:41:27 You listen to Manish Boy by Muddy Waters
01:41:31 and it’s just, there’s something so,
01:41:36 it just draws me in every time.
01:41:38 And the emotion they’re able to get out of things.
01:41:42 And I’m also a huge Chuck Berry fan.
01:41:44 I just think that sound is, I love it.
01:41:48 Do you know how to play Johnny B. Goode?
01:41:51 I do.
01:41:53 That’s good.
01:41:55 Maybe one of the great moments, at least of my childhood,
01:41:59 was back to the future and watching Michael J. Fox plug in
01:42:06 and then at the end, play at the dance
01:42:09 to save his parents with Johnny B. Goode, pretty awesome.
01:42:11 Yeah, the guitar is so much more than a musical instrument.
01:42:14 It feels like, it’s like the,
01:42:17 in the 20th century, it’s like the car.
01:42:20 Like it defines so much of Hollywood,
01:42:22 so much of a generation of what it means to be,
01:42:26 I don’t know, what it means to be a man,
01:42:28 what it means to be a human in America.
01:42:31 It’s fascinating.
01:42:32 Emblematic to me of a certain type of music.
01:42:37 Yeah.
01:42:37 And that’s, I made a documentary years ago
01:42:40 called It Might Get Loud with Jimmy Page, The Edge.
01:42:43 I highly recommend that everybody watch that documentary.
01:42:46 It’s an incredible celebration of the guitar.
01:42:48 Yeah, it says Jimmy Page, Jack White from White Stripes.
01:42:53 The Edge.
01:42:54 And The Edge from U2.
01:42:56 Okay, all right.
01:42:57 Well, now you have to tell the story of that one
01:42:59 because how the heck did that all come together?
01:43:02 Because it’s so fascinating,
01:43:03 such different musicians all coming together,
01:43:07 talking about their story,
01:43:09 talking about how they approach the music
01:43:11 and also playing together a little bit
01:43:13 in this casual kind of setting.
01:43:15 Well, look, one day I came downstairs
01:43:18 and the Rolling Stone magazine is sitting there
01:43:21 and it was the 50 top guitarists of all time, their list.
01:43:25 And then I had some other financial report with video games
01:43:29 and the top video game at the time was Guitar Hero, right?
01:43:32 And then there was a third thing, I can’t recall it,
01:43:35 but I just, and I said to myself,
01:43:37 what is it about the guitar that is so central
01:43:42 to the rock and roll, whatever you wanna call it?
01:43:45 Like, why is that the symbol?
01:43:46 And I said to myself, I wanna ask Jimmy Page
01:43:52 why he picked up the guitar,
01:43:54 because he’s Jimmy Page, right?
01:43:56 And so I called a friend of mine, Davis Guggenheim,
01:44:00 who had directed Inconvenient Truth,
01:44:02 and I think still is,
01:44:03 but at the time was the biggest documentary ever.
01:44:06 And I called Davis and I said, look, I have this idea.
01:44:09 I wanna make this movie about the guitar,
01:44:12 about different eras and styles and whatever,
01:44:15 but I’ve never made a documentary.
01:44:16 I don’t know how to do that.
01:44:18 So I was just looking for advice.
01:44:20 And thankfully, because he’s one
01:44:24 of the best documentarians ever, Davis is like,
01:44:27 you know what, I can’t get this out of my head.
01:44:29 I’ll direct it, which was amazing.
01:44:32 And we wrote three names down
01:44:34 that represented different eras and different styles.
01:44:38 Rarely do you get, you go three for three,
01:44:41 but it was those three guys.
01:44:44 And it was just such a incredible experience
01:44:49 to sit there and get to know Jimmy Page.
01:44:53 You know, I mean, it was like,
01:44:55 and he was like Gandalf, man.
01:44:57 He was like always Jimmy Page.
01:45:00 And…
01:45:02 That was so cool to see him.
01:45:03 Gandalf was, there’s like a wisdom,
01:45:06 there’s a calmness to him compared
01:45:08 to like the restlessness of Jack White.
01:45:12 Like the, I mean, that combination was just fascinating.
01:45:16 It was one of the coolest experiences ever.
01:45:19 And one of the things, there was a moment
01:45:22 where Jimmy, he was going through his guitar case
01:45:26 and he had the double neck from stairway to heaven
01:45:28 and he handed it to me and I was like, mm hmm.
01:45:32 I mean, it’s like somebody handing you X caliber or something.
01:45:36 Amazing experience.
01:45:38 And The Edge, one of the kindest human beings
01:45:40 you’ll ever meet in your life.
01:45:42 Just an amazing person.
01:45:44 And I think he hit it right on the head with Jack
01:45:47 is he’s got that energy, you know,
01:45:49 and constantly pushing himself.
01:45:52 But it’s hard to believe it’s been, I think 10 or 11
01:45:55 or maybe even 12 years since it came out, but.
01:45:58 After watching it, I realized like how much it was needed.
01:46:02 And I was almost surprised it didn’t already exist.
01:46:07 It was like, yeah, the guitar wasn’t quite celebrated
01:46:12 like explicitly.
01:46:13 We almost didn’t acknowledge it.
01:46:15 How important it was culturally.
01:46:17 It’s kind of amazing.
01:46:18 And the way it closed from the song, the.
01:46:20 The Wait.
01:46:21 It was called The Wait, yeah, by the band.
01:46:23 Yeah. Yeah.
01:46:24 That’s because they didn’t want to go home.
01:46:26 We were shooting on a Warner Brothers soundstage
01:46:30 for three days when we called it The Summit
01:46:32 where the three of them came together.
01:46:34 And the two things I’ll never forget
01:46:36 is when Jimmy starts to play the riff
01:46:39 from Whole Lotta Love.
01:46:40 Yeah.
01:46:41 Edge and Jack ceased to be rock, you know,
01:46:46 rock gods or whatever,
01:46:47 and had the same 15 year old kid feeling that I did.
01:46:51 You could see in their face.
01:46:53 And then at the end, they’re like, hey, can we play?
01:46:55 We just want to, we don’t want to go.
01:46:57 Can we just play something acoustically?
01:46:59 So we printed out the lyrics.
01:47:00 That’s what they wanted to play.
01:47:01 And they just sat there and sat on those couches
01:47:05 and just.
01:47:06 Such a good way to end.
01:47:07 Yeah.
01:47:08 Incredible.
01:47:09 What’s your guitar rig setup like?
01:47:12 You have a few guitars.
01:47:15 First, let’s just put on the line.
01:47:17 So what’s better, Les Paul or Strat?
01:47:21 Well, I’m not going to get into what’s better
01:47:24 because I’m sure that’ll start a flood of whatever.
01:47:26 For me.
01:47:27 I’m going to say it’s Strat.
01:47:29 All right.
01:47:30 I’m a Les Paul.
01:47:31 My main instrument is a Les Paul.
01:47:34 But I, okay, let me just put it on the table.
01:47:36 I’m speaking as somebody who literally,
01:47:39 I don’t think I’ve ever actually strummed a chord
01:47:41 on a Les Paul.
01:47:42 So I’ve been, maybe I’m uninitiated.
01:47:45 Exactly.
01:47:46 So I don’t, I don’t speak from experience,
01:47:47 but it’s probably because of Hendrix
01:47:50 is so deeply influenced by Hendrix
01:47:52 that I just kind of follow in his footsteps
01:47:55 and clap them and so on.
01:47:56 The amazing thing to me is if you look back at Leo Fender
01:48:01 and what the Gibson Guitar Company and Les Paul did
01:48:03 in the fifties, those are still the shapes
01:48:07 and the perfect thing today, right?
01:48:09 The Strat and the Telecaster and the Les Paul.
01:48:12 And it’s, they got it right way back, way back then.
01:48:15 So I have my main guitar, you got to name your guitar.
01:48:21 So my main guitar is named Hazel and it’s a 59 Les Paul.
01:48:26 And there’s something magical in that year,
01:48:31 like a Stradivarius and they’re just,
01:48:34 there’s something different about them.
01:48:36 So I play that and then I play it through sort of
01:48:41 my main rig is either a 59 Fender Twin or a 65 Marshall.
01:48:50 And then when we’re on the road now,
01:48:52 cause when you use older vintage stuff,
01:48:54 you just got to be super careful with the tubes
01:48:56 and everything, it has to be reliable.
01:48:58 So very nicely, the guys from Two Rock
01:49:01 sent me some of their amps and they’re really,
01:49:03 cause I don’t use any new stuff,
01:49:05 but the Two Rock stuff is pretty great.
01:49:07 So that’s actually what I’m using.
01:49:08 Oh, it gets close to the sound that you like
01:49:11 with the Marshall.
01:49:11 Yeah, it’s new and reliable.
01:49:14 So that’s what I’m using on the road right now.
01:49:15 Do people use like emulation?
01:49:17 Do they use software?
01:49:18 Is it still?
01:49:19 They do.
01:49:20 I personally don’t, I go, I don’t have many pedals.
01:49:23 I use a Klon, an old vintage Klon straight into the amp.
01:49:28 As old school as possible.
01:49:30 Is there other cool guitars you have
01:49:32 that kind of stand out?
01:49:34 I have a bunch of what they call Blackguard Telecasters
01:49:38 from the 50s, which are pretty great.
01:49:42 What are those, Blackguard Telecasters?
01:49:44 Yeah, so they just, you know, it’s in the 50s.
01:49:45 Oh, they actually legit have a Blackguard.
01:49:47 Pickguard.
01:49:48 Got it.
01:49:49 But they’re incredible, so.
01:49:51 What’s the color of the Telecaster itself?
01:49:53 Most of them are yellow with black
01:49:55 and then they got into different configurations,
01:49:57 but there’s something, I have a 51 Telecaster
01:50:01 that I play in Open G, and in songs with Open G,
01:50:04 that just, again, there’s something, you know,
01:50:09 and I’ll take all the help I can get
01:50:11 in terms of making it sound great.
01:50:13 So I’ll try to find the magic ones.
01:50:15 What’s your writing process like
01:50:18 for the music and the lyrics?
01:50:21 Is there, do you have to go to the mountains?
01:50:26 Is there whiskey involved?
01:50:27 What do you have to do?
01:50:28 Or do you just write a little bit
01:50:29 whenever you have a moment of free time?
01:50:31 I’m a boring guy, because I don’t drink.
01:50:33 I don’t, I just, I figure I can screw things up plenty
01:50:37 on my own without adding anything.
01:50:39 It’s a good call.
01:50:40 But, you know, for me, it either starts with a riff,
01:50:46 just something that I think is an interesting,
01:50:50 you know, riff or tone that I can kind of sink my teeth
01:50:54 into a little bit.
01:50:55 And a lot of times I’ll write a title and love a title
01:51:00 and then start to back it up.
01:51:02 So the title is almost like an idea.
01:51:04 Yeah, like this is where I want to be
01:51:07 and then start kind of writing it out.
01:51:10 And again, I just have to know,
01:51:13 am I writing from a character’s point of view?
01:51:16 Am I writing about someone or something,
01:51:19 you know, as like the narrator?
01:51:22 And, you know, what is this person?
01:51:23 Are they happy?
01:51:24 Are they sad?
01:51:25 Are they happy?
01:51:26 Where are they in life?
01:51:27 I don’t know if all that, like,
01:51:29 great writers, I’m sure, would say,
01:51:32 why don’t you just write?
01:51:34 You don’t need all that.
01:51:36 But that’s, for me, that’s my process.
01:51:38 Well, I’m not so sure about that.
01:51:39 I bet you quite a lot of writers have
01:51:43 created a world in their mind
01:51:45 before they even put the simplest of words down.
01:51:48 So yeah, there’s quite a lot to that.
01:51:51 Yeah.
01:51:54 What’s your favorite song to play?
01:51:57 Is there some favorite ones you go to?
01:52:00 But both play and kind of, I’m sure you love singing.
01:52:04 Oh, no, no, no.
01:52:05 No, you don’t?
01:52:06 I’m not, I’m neither talented nor do I have the desire.
01:52:10 And I think, you know, if you come see the show,
01:52:14 you won’t see a microphone anywhere near me.
01:52:16 But do you, I mean, do you hear,
01:52:18 like when you’re thinking about lyrics,
01:52:19 do you hear the idea of the words?
01:52:21 100%.
01:52:22 And especially what’s great with Trey
01:52:26 is I write for his voice.
01:52:28 And then we have these amazing backup singers
01:52:32 that are just, and I can hear all of it,
01:52:35 I just can’t do it.
01:52:37 And so I’d say of our stuff,
01:52:41 there’s a song called Half My Fault
01:52:44 that I play in Open G that just,
01:52:47 I love playing the song.
01:52:49 I love that energy.
01:52:50 And then there’s, we have a new blues album coming out
01:52:53 and there’s a song called Baby We’re Through
01:52:59 and it just stays on the one.
01:53:01 And if for non musicians, that means,
01:53:03 like in a lot of rock and roll and blues,
01:53:05 it’s what’s called a one, four, five progression
01:53:09 from your kind of root note.
01:53:11 And you would hear, if you’re a non musician,
01:53:13 if you heard it, you’d be like,
01:53:14 oh yeah, that’s a lot of songs.
01:53:16 And this song just stays on the same groove.
01:53:18 Like La Grange or Shake Your Hips or any of those songs.
01:53:23 And it’s just got this unbelievable energy
01:53:26 and it’s fun to play,
01:53:27 but I have to keep the same rhythmic thing going
01:53:31 for the whole song.
01:53:32 With that simplicity, I mean,
01:53:33 the personality of the song can really shine.
01:53:36 I mean, Trey’s, I mean, that guy, really cool.
01:53:42 He just comes through.
01:53:44 I mean, I guess you need that from a lead singer.
01:53:45 He’s just, he’s just.
01:53:47 You gotta have that, and my other guitar player,
01:53:50 Johnny Bob is, he’s a phenomenal,
01:53:53 I mean, like a legitimate guitar slinger.
01:53:58 You know, we probably split the leads 70, 30,
01:54:03 and he is just, you know,
01:54:06 there’s times sometimes I look over at him
01:54:07 and I’m like, I’m being a fan right now
01:54:09 because what you just laid down is pretty good.
01:54:12 From a lead perspective, what’s the most fun thing to play?
01:54:16 What kind of stuff do you, do you like slow?
01:54:18 Do you like, I mean, if you, like, thrill is gone.
01:54:21 So if you look at B.B. King,
01:54:23 sometimes one note just bending the shit out of that.
01:54:25 What do you call that, vibrato?
01:54:27 If I’m gonna play the lead, it’s a certain kind of feel.
01:54:30 Slow blues is probably my favorite to play,
01:54:33 or something that’s got a little more
01:54:35 of that Chuck Berry drive
01:54:37 where you can be rhythmic in the lead.
01:54:41 You know, I can’t, the shredding thing that those guys do
01:54:45 is, that’s not my.
01:54:47 I was actually always able to do that really well.
01:54:51 Like, you mentioned people that pick up fast,
01:54:53 like, maybe it’s the classical piano training.
01:54:55 I can play super fast on guitar, super technical.
01:54:58 But to me, the hardest thing and my favorite thing
01:55:02 is just, it’s probably less to do with the guitar,
01:55:06 more living on life that’s worth playing a guitar for.
01:55:10 It’s like a certain kind of emotion
01:55:13 that you can put into the notes.
01:55:15 And that has to do with bending notes well.
01:55:17 Like, bending notes is a whole other art form of,
01:55:22 I worked surprisingly a long time on Comfortably Numb.
01:55:28 And there’s, so David Gilmour, there’s a lot of bending.
01:55:31 And they’re simple, they sound simple.
01:55:35 But the dynamics of them,
01:55:40 to express like a build up in the way it’s held
01:55:43 and there’s often a vibrato at the top for a bit.
01:55:46 Just that, it’s almost like a sigh
01:55:52 and a sigh of relief and the build up.
01:55:54 I mean, that’s an art form for him that’s hard to get right.
01:55:58 It’s not just playing a note, playing a note,
01:56:00 playing a note, it’s in that like dynamic movement
01:56:04 of a note that so much can happen.
01:56:06 That’s where the blues happens to.
01:56:08 Look, I’m a huge Freddie King fan too, right?
01:56:11 And you listen to these guys and they’re,
01:56:15 you sit there and they’re like,
01:56:17 man, you’re playing in a small range on the neck.
01:56:22 But, you know, it’s like, I know the notes you’re playing
01:56:26 and I’m playing them too, but not like that, right?
01:56:30 I mean, it’s, and Gilmour is certainly one of those guys
01:56:33 that’s an incredible guitar player.
01:56:35 And yet another chapter of an amazing life.
01:56:40 You love football, like you mentioned.
01:56:41 You play football?
01:56:43 Yes.
01:56:43 What position do you play?
01:56:44 Wide receiver.
01:56:45 Wide receiver.
01:56:47 Awesome.
01:56:48 So, maybe we can talk a little bit about your love
01:56:52 of football and the fact that you are part owner
01:56:58 of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
01:57:00 Yeah.
01:57:01 So, I mean, where do we start?
01:57:02 You start at the beginning, let’s start at the end.
01:57:05 Why the Steelers?
01:57:06 What attracted you to the, first of all,
01:57:09 I think not to be controversial,
01:57:12 but one of the best uniforms in football
01:57:15 in terms of just the black and gold, just.
01:57:19 Decal only on one side.
01:57:20 Yeah, it’s great.
01:57:21 Yeah, the helmet.
01:57:23 Look, I’ve bled black and gold since I was a little boy.
01:57:27 I grew up in upstate New York.
01:57:29 And the first football game I ever saw
01:57:32 was the Steelers in the Super Bowl is a really little kit.
01:57:35 And it just, I mean, Jack Lambert and Joe Green
01:57:39 and Franco Harris and those guys were like,
01:57:41 came down from Olympia, Mount Olympus or something.
01:57:45 And I just was enamored with the team.
01:57:48 And because we only had three channels,
01:57:50 the only time I’d get to see them is occasionally
01:57:53 when they were the game of the week or something.
01:57:57 And I just loved to me what they stood for, the toughness
01:58:02 and they played football the way that I thought was great.
01:58:08 I was a huge Jack Lambert fan,
01:58:11 our Hall of Fame linebacker who just intimidated everybody.
01:58:15 So that was like the,
01:58:16 that was the decade of the steel curtain.
01:58:21 I mean, arguably one of the great sort of defensive
01:58:24 in football history and also one of the greatest
01:58:28 football teams period of in football history.
01:58:32 I’ve been a lifelong fan and was very fortunate
01:58:37 to meet Mr. Rooney.
01:58:39 The Rooney family started the team in 1933,
01:58:44 got to know him and just was asked to be part
01:58:48 of the ownership group.
01:58:49 I think it was the end of 2007,
01:58:52 first year as part of the group in 2008,
01:58:54 we won the Super Bowl.
01:58:56 And it was like beyond surreal and just beyond surreal.
01:59:01 And it’s amazing to be able to do.
01:59:07 I mean, the Rooney family is one of those most revered
01:59:13 in sports for the way they conduct themselves.
01:59:16 Mr. Rooney passed away, I think five years ago now
01:59:20 and we lost him, but was a champion, helped build the league.
01:59:23 I mean, put the league as we know it together.
01:59:27 More importantly, it was a civil rights champion
01:59:30 who created what we now call the Rooney rule
01:59:34 to make sure that we’re being fair
01:59:36 about giving minority coaches a chance to get hired.
01:59:40 And just is one of the most kind
01:59:44 and amazing human beings I ever met.
01:59:47 It’s incredible what sport does.
01:59:51 Like to bring out the best in people,
01:59:56 to give people hope, to inspire people.
01:59:58 There’s something about football
01:59:59 that has all the elements of a great sport.
02:00:04 It’s the teamwork, it’s the sort of the combat aspect of it.
02:00:10 It’s like, it’s the purity of it.
02:00:11 It’s of like strength and power and speed
02:00:16 and all the elements of like last minute,
02:00:21 close calls required to win the game.
02:00:25 And where referee decisions, of course,
02:00:28 that’s essential for a sport can screw up the whole thing.
02:00:30 Just got all of it together.
02:00:32 I think just, I don’t know, it gives the drama
02:00:36 and the triumphs are just beautiful.
02:00:40 Like some of my favorite memories,
02:00:42 I don’t know if it’s an accident
02:00:43 or this is common with people,
02:00:45 it’s just with friends watching football
02:00:48 and connecting over that.
02:00:51 Yeah, well, look, it’s an incredible game
02:00:54 because there’s nowhere to hide, right?
02:00:56 You’re out there on the field.
02:00:57 You know, it’s a great game that requires
02:01:02 not only all those attributes that you said,
02:01:04 but it’s incredibly complex game.
02:01:07 So if you don’t know what you’re looking at
02:01:09 and you don’t understand how complex
02:01:11 defenses are trying to disguise what they’re doing,
02:01:14 offenses are trying to overcome that
02:01:17 and you can set up one play the entire game,
02:01:22 but a team that plays well together, right?
02:01:26 Knows their plays inside and out,
02:01:28 knows their assignments inside and out,
02:01:30 can overcome and beat a more physically gifted team
02:01:33 because of that aspect of working together.
02:01:38 One of the things that I always loved about sports
02:01:43 is just you’re out there, there’s a set of rules
02:01:47 and there’s a scoreboard.
02:01:48 So at the end of that game, it says,
02:01:51 and you can make excuses about the refs
02:01:54 or this happened or that happened,
02:01:55 but at the end of the day, did you go out and compete?
02:02:01 And when you went out and were a competitor,
02:02:05 how did it work out, right?
02:02:07 And the simplicity of that and the purity of that
02:02:10 is something that I always have been drawn to.
02:02:15 What about the business of sort of owning a team
02:02:18 or putting together a team or trying to like build up a team
02:02:22 that’s going to be a great team?
02:02:23 Like what are some interesting aspects
02:02:25 that people might not realize that you can carry over
02:02:27 from all the other experience you have in business?
02:02:32 I think the hardest thing about professional sports,
02:02:36 right now it’s individuals getting paid money
02:02:39 to play a sport, which is different than,
02:02:42 it’s certainly different than amateur.
02:02:45 And the decisions that are hard
02:02:48 is when you get to know somebody
02:02:50 who’s a player on the team
02:02:53 and either they’re at the end of their career
02:02:55 or you need to go in a different direction
02:02:57 and that person who’s done everything that you’ve asked,
02:03:01 whatever the coaches have asked of that person
02:03:03 and you get close to them.
02:03:05 And then when they have to be traded,
02:03:08 released or whatever happens, it’s, that’s sad.
02:03:12 And being able to stand back and in some ways
02:03:17 be dispassionate and not be a fan, right?
02:03:20 There’s a, I’m on the baseball hall of fame board
02:03:25 and one of the guys that’s on the board of me
02:03:29 is Jerry Reinsdorf.
02:03:30 And I think it was Jerry who said,
02:03:32 if you act like a fan, you’ll be sitting with them,
02:03:36 which I thought was kind of funny.
02:03:37 Well, I got to push back on that a little bit
02:03:40 as a, by way of a fan asking a dumb question.
02:03:47 Okay, let me just give some examples.
02:03:49 It’s very common in sport.
02:03:51 It’s funny you said this example of like
02:03:54 certain great players going to another team
02:03:57 right at the end of their career.
02:04:00 And it always makes me sad.
02:04:03 It almost makes me want to wish
02:04:04 that he kind of retired right there from a perspective
02:04:09 of just like, do you ever, as a owner,
02:04:13 but just in that space, think about like the Steelers
02:04:18 in the full arc of human history.
02:04:21 So not like as a business.
02:04:23 I mean, okay, this question might be absurd.
02:04:26 I don’t have to think about it as a business.
02:04:28 You know, I’m a minority owner,
02:04:30 so I can think about it almost as a fan,
02:04:33 but I’m sorry, go ahead.
02:04:34 Yeah, well, that’s what I mean.
02:04:35 I suppose this is a dumb question to think of,
02:04:40 like of a business in that way, not just investment,
02:04:44 but like legacy of like what footprint
02:04:49 would you leave on this world, on this history?
02:04:52 That is one thing that I can say unequivocally,
02:04:55 and I only have the experience that I have.
02:04:59 But one of the things that I’m so proud of
02:05:02 about the way the Steelers conduct themselves is,
02:05:07 and that’s the Rooney family,
02:05:08 that’s the legacy of the Rooney family,
02:05:10 is asking constantly about what’s right for the league,
02:05:13 what’s right for the players,
02:05:17 what’s the right thing to do here?
02:05:19 And that’s something that I would hear Mr. Rooney say
02:05:22 all the time.
02:05:23 So I think that legacy is important
02:05:25 because ultimately the team belongs to that city, right?
02:05:29 Belongs to those fans and the owners
02:05:33 are the custodians of that.
02:05:35 So I think, and when you realize what sports teams mean
02:05:41 to the fans, the memories that it creates,
02:05:43 the bonds that it creates, it’s a responsibility.
02:05:50 And I think that you do have to think beyond the,
02:05:55 certainly not just dollars and cents,
02:05:57 but just sports is a very big deal in our society.
02:06:02 And it has to be, I think, held to a standard
02:06:08 that’s not just, well, were we profitable this year?
02:06:12 That’s, there are other businesses for that.
02:06:14 It is certainly a business.
02:06:16 I don’t mean to romanticize to the point that it’s not,
02:06:19 but to me, it’s more than that.
02:06:22 Or at least my experience has been that it’s more than that.
02:06:24 It’s a source of meaning for millions of people.
02:06:28 And you see that most, like during COVID, for example,
02:06:32 when there’s so much desperation,
02:06:33 so many people losing their jobs,
02:06:35 so many people having to deal with the uncertainty
02:06:37 of what the future holds.
02:06:38 There’s something about those sports that just unites us
02:06:42 that again, the tragedy and the triumphs of sport,
02:06:47 of united, of gathering together with your friends,
02:06:50 with family, shared experience of over like this,
02:06:54 yeah, over just team, over rooting for your team,
02:06:58 for your city ultimately.
02:06:59 And the access, again, as I alluded to,
02:07:03 we didn’t have anything when I was growing up,
02:07:05 but I would pour through the box scores.
02:07:07 I was a huge Yankee fan and Steeler fan
02:07:10 and feeling some ownership of that, right?
02:07:13 That I could read the box score and relive what they did
02:07:16 and occasionally see them on TV
02:07:18 and feel like I was part of that celebration
02:07:22 when they won and everything.
02:07:24 It’s a very powerful thing.
02:07:27 You’ve been exceptionally successful in a bunch of avenues
02:07:30 and a bunch of efforts.
02:07:31 What advice would you give to a young person today,
02:07:34 a high school student, a college undergraduate
02:07:38 that’s thinking about career, maybe advice,
02:07:43 not about just career, but about how to live a life
02:07:46 they can be proud of?
02:07:49 You know, we talked earlier about intellectual honesty
02:07:51 and to me, that’s the first step of just saying
02:07:55 to the best of your ability, who am I?
02:07:57 And what’s important to me
02:07:59 and what do I wanna do and accomplish?
02:08:03 If you can start with that
02:08:05 and develop some sort of rules based philosophical,
02:08:10 here’s what I’ll do, what I won’t do.
02:08:14 And that way you can be flexible and pliable
02:08:18 and you’re gonna need to be,
02:08:19 but if you still have a compass that tells you,
02:08:25 hey, at least I know this is the path I’m gonna take,
02:08:28 I think that’s very important.
02:08:29 The rules you’re referring to, the principles,
02:08:33 that’s kind of like underlying integrity.
02:08:35 So knowing what lines you don’t cross on this path.
02:08:39 Exactly right, because if you have those absolutes,
02:08:42 there are many decisions that come into focus very quickly
02:08:46 because hey, that’s not for me, or hey,
02:08:49 I’m willing to do whatever it takes to do X, Y, and Z.
02:08:53 And it has to do with the thing you were talking about.
02:08:56 It’s kind of interesting, you mentioned earlier
02:08:58 in the conversation about slippery slope
02:09:01 and that’s how often it happens,
02:09:03 like how the slipping into unethical behavior happens.
02:09:07 It’s a slippery slope of little adjustments,
02:09:09 you put stuff off and I found that to be,
02:09:13 I’ve been fortunate to not have to encounter these moments
02:09:19 very much in my life, but I still encounter them.
02:09:22 That’s what integrity I think looks like,
02:09:25 is as the slippery slope is happening,
02:09:29 those little things is without drama,
02:09:33 without making a show of it,
02:09:35 making a decision that stands behind your principles
02:09:38 and just walking away.
02:09:40 Yeah, and besides the big ideas,
02:09:42 I’m gonna change the world, I’m gonna innovate,
02:09:46 I’m gonna do all those other things,
02:09:48 I also start, if I’m giving any advice,
02:09:51 which we can debate whether or not I should be giving advice,
02:09:55 but just in terms of, well, let me start with this.
02:09:59 Are you a good friend?
02:10:01 Can you be counted on?
02:10:02 Do you do what you say you’re going to do?
02:10:05 Yeah. Right?
02:10:07 Are you accountable to what you sign up for
02:10:09 and do you hold others accountable?
02:10:12 What does all that look like?
02:10:13 And then I think it’s being as intellectually curious
02:10:18 and well read as you can be.
02:10:20 We live in a world that is designed to distract you, right?
02:10:24 And being able to sit with your thoughts
02:10:27 or go on a walk and think deeply about something
02:10:30 and not just surface area, you text me, I text you back
02:10:34 and we decide the fate of the world
02:10:36 based on a couple of text messages or something.
02:10:42 You don’t wanna lose touch, I think, with being well read
02:10:46 and understanding and standing on great thinkers shoulders
02:10:50 and learning from those works.
02:10:55 And then I also think that there’s resiliency
02:11:00 and then there’s grit.
02:11:02 And I heard someone say one time
02:11:04 that those are slightly different.
02:11:06 And I’m also, I know that there are all kinds
02:11:11 of challenges in life, right?
02:11:13 That are tragic, that are unfair.
02:11:16 There’s no question that’s the world we live in.
02:11:19 But for me personally, to try as much as possible
02:11:23 not to be in the victim mindset
02:11:26 because unfair things are gonna happen.
02:11:30 And we all wanna live in an idealistic, just world.
02:11:36 That should be what we aspire to.
02:11:40 I haven’t seen that yet, I haven’t experienced that yet,
02:11:43 but yet you still have to function in that world.
02:11:47 So I think that that resiliency thing is very important.
02:11:52 And then putting yourself out there, right?
02:11:56 Because if you play scared and you’re always afraid to fail,
02:12:01 you know, this is probably a dumb way
02:12:03 to get to the end of the podcast,
02:12:05 but there are times, especially I’m out West,
02:12:08 I love the big sky out in Montana, Idaho, places like that.
02:12:13 And when you look up at night, it’s almost like
02:12:16 I’ve never seen anything like this before
02:12:18 because there’s no light pollution, so to speak.
02:12:22 And sometimes when I look up,
02:12:23 the most daunting problems that I’m experiencing,
02:12:26 I’m like, those things have been there
02:12:29 for a billion years or whatever,
02:12:31 and I’ll be gone and it doesn’t,
02:12:35 the most famous person on earth 200 years ago, eh.
02:12:41 So it’s pretty fleeting.
02:12:44 And so make sure you have a good journey
02:12:48 and especially coming out of COVID,
02:12:50 I think telling people that you care about them
02:12:53 and maintaining and cultivating your friendships
02:12:56 and relationships and they’re not just transactional, right?
02:13:00 And making sure that someday when you’re laying there,
02:13:04 you can say, yeah, I was a good family member.
02:13:07 I was a good friend.
02:13:10 I was someone that could be counted on.
02:13:11 I think all those things go into the mix of, you know,
02:13:15 however you wanna take the journey.
02:13:17 So when you look up to the stars,
02:13:19 do you think about that quickly approaching end of yours?
02:13:23 Do you think about your own mortality?
02:13:24 Do you think about your death?
02:13:26 Are you afraid of your death?
02:13:27 I’m a huge fan of stoicism, right?
02:13:30 I read a lot of stoicism.
02:13:34 I think Ryan Holiday’s done a great job
02:13:35 of bringing some of that back into the forefront.
02:13:38 It’s just really thought provoking to me
02:13:43 and rings, a lot of it rings, just hits me
02:13:45 and says, I think that’s right.
02:13:47 And that Momento Mori thing, which is,
02:13:51 hey, we’re all gonna die, so you should contemplate it.
02:13:56 There’s a finality to this thing.
02:13:58 And so I think if you can rightly frame that
02:14:03 between fretting about it every day and being afraid
02:14:07 and being so laissez faire that you think, you know,
02:14:09 you’re gonna live forever,
02:14:13 it’ll influence some of the decisions you make.
02:14:15 It’ll influence the way you attack things
02:14:19 and hopefully the way that you live your life.
02:14:23 So yes, I wouldn’t say I obsess over it
02:14:28 and I wouldn’t say it’s omnipresent,
02:14:31 but because I read a lot of stoicism
02:14:33 and just, I think it’s right to pause and say,
02:14:37 who knows, right?
02:14:38 There’s gonna be an expiration date.
02:14:42 And if it happened tomorrow,
02:14:43 have I done the things I wanted to do?
02:14:46 And am I the person I wanted to be?
02:14:50 And I think it’s important along the way
02:14:52 to check those things.
02:14:53 Yeah, I try to make sure that I actually visualize this,
02:14:58 that I’m okay dying at the end of the day,
02:15:01 at the end of each day.
02:15:03 Like, if this is the last thing I do in my life
02:15:05 is talking to you.
02:15:07 Oh, good Lord.
02:15:11 I’m happy.
02:15:12 I know you’re joking, but I, you know,
02:15:15 that, yeah, I’m happy I get to live the life I do
02:15:19 and I think momentum more,
02:15:20 I think the stoics have it right.
02:15:23 So you, and you have it right in saying,
02:15:26 meditate on death enough to remember
02:15:28 that this ride ends pretty quickly,
02:15:31 to help you appreciate every day
02:15:34 and the people you love, the people close to you
02:15:36 and the cool shit that you’re doing in your life,
02:15:39 the cool shit you’re creating.
02:15:40 And the fact that you, Mr. Thomas Tall,
02:15:44 are playing with the motherfucking Rolling Stones tomorrow.
02:15:48 You are the man in so many disciplines,
02:15:50 so respected, so successful.
02:15:52 It’s truly an honor that you sit down
02:15:55 and talk with me today.
02:15:56 Thomas, thank you so much for showing up in Texas
02:15:59 and for talking on this silly little podcast.
02:16:01 Oh, it’s great, man.
02:16:02 I’m a huge fan of the show
02:16:04 and have had a great time hanging with you
02:16:06 and really appreciate it.
02:16:09 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Thomas Tall.
02:16:12 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
02:16:14 in the description.
02:16:16 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:16:18 from Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.
02:16:21 You can’t always get what you want,
02:16:23 but if you try sometimes,
02:16:25 you might find you’ll get what you need.
02:16:27 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.