Thomas Tull: From Batman Dark Knight Trilogy to AI and The Rolling Stones | Lex Fridman Podcast #259
the following is a conversation with thomas tull founder of legendary entertainment known for producing blockbusters like batman's dark knight trilogy the hangover franchise godzilla inception jurassic world 300 and many more he runs telco which is an investment company that focuses on how artificial intelligence can revolutionize large industries he is part owner of the pittsburgh steelers he's the guitarist for the band ghost hounds that tours with the rolling stones but most importantly he's humble down to earth and someone who has quickly become a mentor and friend this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with thomas tall in 2004 you founded legendary entertainment known for producing blockbusters like batman's dark knight trilogy that includes batman begins dark night and dark night rises the hangover franchise godzilla inception jurassic world 300 and the list goes on it's just some of the biggest movies in history what does it take to make an epic movie like that or what does it take to make it happen from start to finish well look i i've been enamored with movies since i was a kid as a fan and i think what you need is to is to be able to tell a great story and if you're going to tell a great story you need a great director you got to start with a fantastic script um that you know is able to take some of these iconic characters that we did and put your own stamp on it while still respecting uh the mythology and uh i had zero experience in movies and television before i started legendary so it was it was a very interesting trip total luck uh that uh we had the opportunity to make five movies at the time with chris nolan who turned out to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time but it's uh each one is its own little startup company uh and i don't think there's any formula to get there but i know that if you don't have a great director and a great script if you don't have that foundation it's hard to pull off who's the ceo of that little start-up company companies the the director who would you say kind of defines the success or the failure of a movie well when you build a big movie like that it's an enormous effort 360 degrees i mean from digital effects certainly the actors i mean if you have an amazing script an amazing director but you don't believe anybody playing the parts that's a problem so the reason i think it was so difficult to pull off is always used to say you start with a stack of papers with words on it called a script bring that to life and you're asking an audience to believe in everything that you're trying to put out there and you've got a cast that even if they're immensely talented individually they have to mesh together they have to have chemistry together um and you know the director is kind of the general on the the battlefield but if you have a strong producer who's very hands-on but it truly to me is each one had its own story in its own sort of how it came to be and why it why it worked or didn't work so you said you were new to the industry but you did a lot of revolutionary things with legendary so at that time and now what is the uh the good the bad and ugly of the business of filmmaking what what are some interesting holes that you were able to or like problems that you were able to fix what problems still exist that can still be solved well look the the business has changed so radically since 2004. when i started legendary dvds were still a cash cow so you know that's how how far things have come but i i would say a couple of things the reason that i started it from a business perspective was at the time it was a 30 billion dollar industry and there was no institutional capital around the movie business and i was fascinated by that because almost every other category that you look at of that size has institutional capital private equity etc is kind of a cottage industry set up around it and i was perplexed and fascinated that that didn't occur and the way the movie business worked was unlike any business i'd ever looked at before so after kind of convincing myself that you could actually make money if you were disciplined and had the right approach uh you know went out raised the money from the capital markets markets which was uh herculean still maybe the hardest thing i've ever done in my career to walk around and say look i have no experience i've never done this before but you know and the second thing being very fortunate at the time was able to partner up with warner brothers warner's at the time was run by a man named alan horn who besides being creative is also a harvard mba so really understood what i wanted to do um and alan you know was just an absolute gentleman someone that i still look up to to these to this day after warner brothers he went and ran disney with their run you know between marvel and star wars and everything and so between uh alan being responsible for harry potter the dark knight stuff and then on to all the disney stuff he probably had as great a career as anyone i've ever heard of in the movie business so my first focus was around sort of two concepts global worldwide large tentpole films and franchises and then the business aspect of being bringing long-term institutional capital to bear i'm going to ask you dumb questions which is uh part of the style i guess but just for people who don't know uh including me what is institutional what is capital what is institutional capital what is equity what is private equity got it okay well so if um if you're starting a company and you go around to a bunch of your successful friends and say hey you should invest in my company well that that's sort of uh that's great and it's capital but it's not getting money from fidelity or tea row or you know a sovereign wealth fund or an endowment fund from a university that has large pools of organized capital that has a long term point of view on your business so if you get money from your neighbor who's a successful dentist next year the dentist may say hey times are hard i need my money back if you're partners with you know fidelity or morgan stanley or any of these institutions they have the capital and the wherewithal uh to to say okay i'm looking at this over the next five to ten years and i thought there was an opportunity to bring that type of capital to the to the movie business uh to to be patient and the benefit of that patient so it's long term you have to deal with fewer parties and they would do much larger investments so what what are the benefits what are the sort of the challenges of that kind of investment well i think the benefits in some ways are there professionals who are largely dispassionate right it's like look if you're hitting the numbers you told me and you're hitting your plan great um and the other the other thing that always was interesting to me about the movie business is if i'm investing in an artificial intelligence company or a chipset company or something like that a lot of the institutions don't have the technical expertise to really truly grasp what's being done so they don't you know other than good business practices they're not offering every little opinion the movies and television are completely approachable meaning everybody has an opinion so you know whether it's i think you guys chose the wrong actor for that or why did you do that move it's it's so it invites a lot more sort of second guessing and things like that so that was always uh one of the idiosyncrasies of the business that i thought was uh you know was interesting um and and then when you talk about private equity versus public equity if you're a public company where the companies can are traded you want to buy microsoft shares you just go to your broker go on td ameritrade and buy them if on the other hand uh you're talking about private equity that's uh institutions or individuals investing in private companies um so thus the if you have pools of capital that mostly invest in private equity deals that that's how you how you'd think about it it's difficult to make those happen because it's individuals you have to sort of what have dinners and agree so it's much less it's a much more human much less mechanical i would say yeah now and again massive difference between large private equity shops who are professionalized and in the same category that i mentioned earlier uh versus private individuals who are wealthy or whatever but again it's it's much more individualized when you're going uh to people who like your idea and just say i'd like to invest in this is there is that from all the kinds of investments you've seen what do you think is the most conducive to creating works of genius whether that's in technology ai space or whether that's in movies sure so creating something special in this world i would say a couple of things enough money that whatever endeavor you you're you're going into that you're not so nervous about the edges right if my if i have a hundred dollars to spend and i'm i think i can create a perpetual motion machine or something for 104 i can't do it because they're all over me about the budget so i would say making sure that you have enough capital making sure that that capital is patient enough so that it's you know if you're going to do things that are extraordinary it takes some time and you're going to break stuff right you're going to make mistakes you're going to have a whole bunch of film on the cutting room floor so to speak or if you're in the lab you're going to have a whole bunch of broken stuff and i also think it's very important at the beginning and i always try to do this with companies i invest in or buy is make sure that you have a philosophical and somewhat mechanical alignment with the management team so that going in you both understand hey this is how we think about this problem or this company this is what we feel like our culture is this is what our goal is and these are the metrics by which we'll agree to measure them by because if you don't have that shared you know hey we're going to take this journey then i think that's where people get upset disappointed etc what about this is a weird question but constraints so this is both for filmmaking and investment do you think more money is always better no so i i like constraints a lot it's like constraints and almost like a desperation and deadlines are uh catalysts for creativity for uh for productivity for sort of uh innovation so can you can you kind of speak to that sure as an investor as a creator like what's uh what's the right balance here well i i think if you're focused on a particular problem or a company or a thesis is if you have that focus and you feel like i have unlimited resources or renewable resources so there's really there's no leverage in the situation right there's no if i fail at this i'll just go get more money right i'll just go i i think that's a hard way to be resilient uh and and to think of new ways to solve problems um so i think capitalizing things just you know to the nth degree does create some problems so i think there's that perfect blend of don't starve the oxygen to the point where you make short-term decisions or non-strategic or thoughtful decisions because you got to pay the rent and on the other hand you you can't have it be like this you know everlasting gobstopper of whatever you want will just keep flowing the cash because that doesn't create any friction points that i think um do result in in works of genius in in things that uh you know that that are transformative and one of the things that is interesting to me about society sort of writ large is i think that when you go through hard times and you have to do things that are uncomfortable and you don't want to do them because you're tired because you're that in some ways builds up that you're comfortable being uncomfortable muscle and i i sometimes think we're losing that a little bit and you you can't sort of paint with a wide brush but um you know i i that's that's one of the things that i kind of observe and and hope that we don't go that way i i do think challenge and discomfort are a kind of gift because uh like overcoming that it's like uh from from every perspective from a human perspective it's a source of happiness and fulfillment overcoming challenge but from a business perspective i see like if something is really difficult to me it's also a sign that most others would or many others would fail at this point so like it's a feature it's nice that something is difficult when when people tell you that something is impossible i love that because it's like all right well then that's what a lot of people would believe and that gives you an opportunity to be the person who shows it's not impossible and you of course you might be wrong but if you're not wrong you have the opportunity to stand out so going through that hardship taking those big risks is going to really pay off so like discomfort is a it's a feature not a bug of both personal life it's just good for life but uh for business it seems like just just good business sense if something is hard it's probably a good idea to do that yeah because most others will fail fun question i don't know if you can answer this but uh what's the most expensive movie you were involved with to make and why was it you don't have to say numbers but like do is something stand out as being exceptionally expensive and why this is expensive um i think jurassic world was pretty expensive work i mean worked out great um and uh that's like that's an epic film by the way it it look it's uh it's it's one of my favorites they just did an amazing job and frankly the crazy thing about my life is all the stuff that i loved as a kid somehow came full circle back into my adult life and having the opportunity while i was out there to to develop a friendship with steven spielberg and then have have my name on the same film as steven spielberg i mean that that was pretty surreal um so that was an expensive film um you know dark knight rises was it was an expensive film but again to me there's a difference between expensive and irresponsible and expensive because the vision warranted and it turned out financially it certainly did yeah with jurassic world it's i mean i can't imagine having those meetings because like you have to create so much and so much of it is obviously not real you can't bring dinosaurs in a yeah uh is that where a lot of the cost is is in the uh you know the computer side of things yeah those are generally pretty massive components of uh of the budget and especially if you're doing it and inventing things yeah as you go i mean jim cameron is one of those filmmakers who you know is is designing the plane as it's flying in such a brilliant way and uh i you know i've got to know him over the years and just in awe of the way his brain works and uh so yeah it's it's a big component can you speak a little bit more to him in terms of uh because you're such a fascinating person because you care a lot about technology you care a lot about the cutting edge of technology so how does he a creator a director build the plane while it's flying like what's the role of innovation in this whole process well um so i never made a film with jim i'm just a huge fan and got to know him um and john landau his producing partner and one of the things that just fascinates me about jim is so he makes titanic and there's a bunch of underwater cameras and things that they need that don't exist so he goes and invents them and you know has a good grasp of engineering and has not only the imagination but the ability to lead a team to build them i got to go down early when they were shooting avatar at a warehouse i think it was where they were shooting and as they were explaining to me how they were capturing it and that they could go back later because they created the environment it blew my mind and i said okay this is truly people talk about a a big leap this certainly is one so he has continued to push the envelope in terms of the art of the possible and i i just think he's an incredible genius in that way again another hard question so you uh in the realm of music care about story storytelling is there some aspect in which money and beautiful graphics get in the way of story in filmmaking so if you think um if you think about jurassic world obviously that's an experience like any other like what do we what do you think about the tension between story experience and like visual effects well look if you're using big effect shots and all kinds of tricks to cover over the fact that you don't have a very interesting story to tell that's where i think it gets in the way um where i think you have these incredible filmmakers we mentioned chris nolan and jim cameron guillermo del toro um you know you could go on and on of folks that just see the world differently and use technology to enhance the storytelling right to make you believe uh differently uh rather to to make you not just suspend your disbelief but to feel like you're immersed in it um so i've certainly seen it done expertly and i've seen it done poorly uh you've talked about this a little bit in the past you kind of uh left the the movie-making business at an interesting time perhaps you saw the changes there's been a lot of excitement with netflix with tv so the the role of film in society has changed so what do you think is the future of movies versus tv like if you are as a business person as a creator as a consumer as a technologist or thinking about the next 10 20 years what do you think is going to be the the godfather the great pieces that move us as a society in the next 10 20 years this is going to be tv is it going to be movie is it going to be uh tick tock uh clips what is it well so i i and i think the other category that i would add to that that will be the next great medium is truly immersive virtual reality uh in which new storytellers will emerge especially when you can go into vr and there's enough computing power to sustain it and to allow it to be social and you know for you to have different paths to go down that'll be i think the next realm of what storytelling and experience will will look like so do you think a video game kind of world or is it more movies or is it more social network or is it all the kind of blending reality and gaming and movies yeah i thought uh if you saw ready player one which i loved the book and and the movie was cool too but you know that that's one version of it right where you go in now everybody's talking about the metaverse and all that but you go into a world that's fully rendered as yourself and you interact with that world the other side of it is to go in somewhere between being a passive observer but being able to move around your point of view and experiences which i think is interesting and then i think another another adventure so to speak i could think of is a blend of video games so there's a mission right there's a there's obstacles there's everything and you move through it but it's immersive and it tells a story at the same time and that's why i think you're going to see new amazing storytellers that we don't know yet that understand how to innovate and how to make you feel something in in that environment and to your earlier point you know i saw probably around 2015 when netflix decided to be bold put out house of cards put out all the episodes leave you in charge of the pace at which you would view them uh which i thought was was great that was a gutsy move yes it was and i can't tell you around hollywood anybody that says that everybody thought it was a great idea is not being truthful because everybody i talked to said this is they're idiots right they're what do they know about movie making and tv and what i saw happening was if you look at what netflix pulled off and they realized that there isn't really a moat around the studios you really could make stuff um and really good stuff and so they started to create their own content that pulled in amazon which pulled in google through youtube and and then you had hulu then you had disney deciding that they're gonna have disney plus and the next thing you know you have some of the the biggest companies with the largest balance sheets on the planet uh being in the creative business that's you know if you're an independent that's that's bringing a knife to a gun fight to be sure and so you know i thought that was interesting the other thing that it used to be that movies were where the big things happened and television was sort of it was small screen different experience and you had something like game of thrones come out which was not only on the same epic level visually and storytelling wise but had the budget to be able to do it and now i think you're you're seeing um you're seeing uh all kinds of different storytelling taking place and i also like that it's you're not pigeonholed into a time like you got two hours to tell the story you can do a three-part mini series a five-part mini-series you can do television that's you know all kinds of different format and that i think is uh it allows creators to do a lot more interesting things it is also interesting to consider the role of companies that enable that like the capital that enables that you know without netflix you wouldn't an hbo you wouldn't have um some of these epic shows and so for if we're thinking about the virtual reality world that you're talking about it's interesting to consider who will enable that you know now like you said facebook is talking about meta and metaverse but it's unclear that just having money is enough netflix did a lot of really revolutionary stuff there's a you know amazon has money there's a lot of companies have money that don't quite do as good of a job yet at enabling creators of um creating revolutionary new content that changes the the whole industry and that's probably going to be the case with virtual reality there there is a lot of money needed to enable experiences like in terms of compute infrastructure there needs to be a huge amount of money there but you also need to somehow give freedom to creators to have fun to do their best work and at the same time like provide the the perfect amount of constraints all of that together like however netflix makes it happen they do a pretty good job because it's a very constrained platform but yet all the creators i've ever talked to comedians and so on that work with netflix are really happy because they feel free to create their work yeah and i think a lot of times you know companies are a letterhead but it boils down to the people yeah and i think um i've known ted sarandos a long time who who ran the studio at netflix and now took over for reid uh running the company but ted very smart talented guy and understood early how to cultivate talent and relationships with talent which is important when you're dealing with creative people their motivations and their goals are not always the same right they're not always capitalistic right and so in terms of being able to communicate with creative people uh that are not always a to b to c is is a talent and so i think they they did a great job ted did a great job with that early um you know but i i think that you're gonna see different formats i i i don't think i mean going to a theater to see a massive movie on that screen in that format i is a fundamentally different experience yeah and i think you're gonna find movies uh you know my old shop legendary just put out dune which i thought was phenomenal um i uh you know we when we secured the rights to dune years ago it was i was over the moon because it's i love the book i i love the the entire world um that uh that is dune and that's a movie that i think you see on the the big screen i think uh when avatar 2 comes out i want to see that on a big screen but i think you're going to see a ton of content is obviously being produced and it's not all going to go to a theater going experience so you're going to see i think different versions of this over the next five to 10 years in case james cameron is listening to this so he officially agreed to talk at the time of on this podcast at the time of avatar to release i'm just holding you to that in this recorded conversation um also just super excited um both the movie and uh the director there is something special about movies you know they win oscars they um they're historic in nature there's something about tv shows even when they're epic like game of thrones that they're forgotten much quicker in history i don't know maybe that's because we haven't had enough of them but you know the de niro performances and you know the scorsese films all the great films that kind of we think of uh throughout the generations that define generations are films is that um is that just old school thinking is that always going to be the case i mean look to me going in a darkened theater with a bunch of strangers and the lights go down and you go on this journey there is something special and magical about that and i think movies have been a part of our cultural fabric forever and for some reason hollywood in america was you know uniquely positioned uh to do a great job with it right and not that there aren't great foreign movies but far and away american movies you know are dominate the not only the world market but you know and so whatever it is that we do well or hollywood does well um you know there's there's something in the water apparently but i i agree that i love movies and i will you know for the rest of my days it's it's interesting how creators can move back and forth now as well that used to be a complete no-no you're either a movie guy or you're a person or a you know or you're a tv director and that's that but those lines have completely uh blurred and they're also blurring i mean they're blurring all kinds of lines like they're they're moving to tick tock and instagram and like i know right now it seems ridiculous to consider that these like one minute things could be considered even in the same realm creatively as a film but maybe that changes over time too maybe experiences can completely become fluid in terms of their size as long as they have some deep lasting impact on you as a human being as a consumer look to me the whole thing is about either the moving image or even sometimes a picture will bring out an emotion a reaction something so you know short form is harder because you have less time to set things up and all that but i'm sure there will be short videos and creators that come up with things and if a moving image can get a reaction out of you and make you feel a certain way and stay with you or inspire you well that that to me is just the next evolution of whatever it's going to be between humans and cameras etc see i think that's why we've talked offline about this that's why i love robots as i think there's certain things in the short form with robots that immediately can bring out a feeling in people there's something about our consideration of our own intelligence of our own consciousness of all the fears and hopes and the beautiful things about human nature the dark things about human nature that somehow especially lego robots bring out because we have both a fear and excitement towards that are these going to be our overlords our gods that overtake humanity are these going to be things like horses or something like that something that empower humanity like you don't know what to make sense of it that's why they're super exciting i agree speaking of robots and film uh you've gone into traditional industries and disrupted them quite a few times was there is there a system for deciding which industry is right for disruption when you look at the world and see what are the big problems you would like to solve uh do you have a system of how you see which problems to solve how do you look at the world yeah well on the business side of that um so i have a holding company called tulco very imaginatively named and part of that is literally every name ever is now taken registered and all that stuff um so we're a holding company what's a holding company so instead of being a fund that has money flowing in and out of it and you know there's what's called a vintage year i raise capital and i agree to invest that capital for so long and then i give it back to you which i sometimes creates artificial time pressures and things like that a holding company is more permanent capital so the idea was behind telco was to buy almost always whole companies or majority stakes with great management teams in spaces that did not traditionally have a lot of innovation and to have our labs group who were data scientists ai practitioners you know engineers machine learning etc and to be able to bring that wherewithal to that company so to provide them with the right capital and to provide them with access to technology that would be hard to individually recruit uh for that company so i would say that the thesis was to look for industries that were large enough that hadn't traditionally had access to that type of technology or innovation and to try to look for companies that not only uh looked that part but had management teams that embraced this and wanted to take that kind of journey yeah there is quite a few industries like that but that finding the industries and uh the management pair because like those industries often have a lot of old school folks who don't it takes quite a bit of work for them to leap into technology i work quite a bit with the autonomous vehicles and just the automotive industry depending on the company there's old school folks it's like detroit thinking versus like uh what do you call it i don't know california thinking well you have to i think you have to look at the nexus of two things there one is just plain old human behavior if i am uncomfortable and i this isn't a comfort zone for me and it's not something i have as a field of expertise i'm gonna shy away from that right especially if i'm successful and i feel good about myself and it's a big successful company or person or whatever it might be and the second thing is that especially if you're a public company and you're being weighed and measured every quarter you are rewarding the managers of that company to hit metrics and to be reliable and to say hey i'm counting quarter to quarter that you're going to deliver what you say it's difficult to say you know what everybody for the next two years i wouldn't count on our financial projections at all because we're going to reinvent what we're doing it's going to work in the work in the long run and you're going to see that this was a really smart investment five to seven years from now that's not the way capitalism is currently wired generally right and a lot of so again if you reward managers with yearly bonuses and stock options based and tied to stock price and all these other things you know and then ask them to go break stuff that that's that's hard i think so you're saying like uh so the uh the taco approach this the private investment is the best way or perhaps the only way to enable this kind of long-term innovation investment taking big risks and investing in innovation well look we certainly are not by any means the only one doing it i'm just saying that when you when you think about big companies the more successful you know that are in old line businesses and i hear people sort of talk about well why can't they just pivot they recognize they need to be in the technology business well because it's hard it's hard to steer a ship and turn it that big and especially if it's not part of your dna at that company so you know i i just think that what we tried to do is to enable management teams that know where they want to go and to be patient with capital and also again bring bring innovation um to bear that that they have access to uh but there's plenty of capital structures doing interesting things that's one of the things i love about our country this country innovates and this country invents things and i'm constantly in awe of of just the you know the human ability uh to to innovate and to iterate um you know i i get to hang around some universities uh including your old shop mit and it's like i'm still there yeah still still there still teaching they're still teaching but that place is like hogwarts i mean it's it's just uh it's inspiring yeah right and and certainly the the energy in silicon valley which now austin texas where we're sitting yeah uh has its own incredible ecosystem uh so that's that's one of the things i i love about america is the ability and that really is i think in the american dna to create things and invent things um and i i just i think that's invigorating and i think that's even bigger than capitalism sort of the machine of how capitalism works that's just human nature capitalism is just one of the ways to sort of uh make that human nature shine i suppose but it's it's like you mentioned mit you know there's a drive there to invent to innovate that's um that's so human that that human spirit to sort of build something new it's like that hopeful optimistic spirit especially in the engineering space like if you pay attention to the internet like twitter and all that kind of stuff intellectuals and so on there's a cynicism to when we talk about stuff but there's an optimism to when we do stuff and the the doing part when you actually build things especially like you care a lot about manufacturing too like you actually build physical products that um that's where we truly shine yeah no question about it and i and i you know i'm passionate about our country making stuff again right doing our own manufacturing uh and and making sure that we don't lose the ability not just to create things um intellectually and do the world's greatest blueprints but actually make things here actual factories yeah that's exactly right how how do we how do we do that how do we bring more manufacturing to the united states well there there's a company that i have a big personal investment in called rebuild uh with uh some folks that all went through the mit school years ago there's a good friend of mine named jeff wilke who used to be at amazon and we all felt the same way that you know america needed to make sure that it didn't lose its edge in that way so it's uh it's a company that invests in american high-tech manufacturing and i think the way that we do that is provide capital provide training to me this is also fertile ground for good sustainable high-paying jobs um and you know we have to we have to make it economically feasible to do that again here in this country uh and not to say to companies that again are being weighed and measured quarter by quarter hey this is three times as expensive to do it here but you should do it here we need to innovate and and we need to create processes and and companies and opportunity that balance that equation and i think as we saw during the pandemic you know i don't think in this day and age you can be an isolationist that that doesn't make any sense to me but being self-reliant and self-determinate and making sure that you are never in a position as a nation that we can't do basic things because we're relying on supply chain in other countries and whether it's you know uh we're not friends anymore or a natural disaster or a virus or something pops up i think those are costs of doing business that we have to put into the calculus of uh being able to make things here there's an extremely high cost to making supply chain resilient that we really have to consider and it's so if you really consider that cost it makes a lot of sense to invest especially long term in building up manufacturing in a way where like you're making most of the stuff in one place sort of uh bringing it all not all but as much in as possible and um building it almost like from scratch here in the united states i mean what i guess the your thought is with innovation uh it's possible to sort of revolutionize the way we do manufacturing so reduce the amount of supply chain stuff and like build stuff from scratch like do a high-tech manufacturing so like optimize all aspects of the manufacturing all that kind of stuff yeah and i think where technology is the most efficient uh is is the human machine interface right it's not let's automate everything and have nobody work anywhere i i for a long time that's neither feasible nor desirable but where we can enhance jobs and make that interface immensely productive with the right training and so forth i think that's a worthwhile endeavor and something that's going to be important to our country yeah i mean you're you know who you're talking to i love human robot interaction human machine interaction human ai interaction so what do you think is the role of robotics in this high-tech manufacturing sort of like industrial robots robotic arms all that kind of stuff um or even even more complicated kind of robots what do you think is the role of robotics what do you think is the role of ai in this manufacturing future you're thinking about well robotics to me is an extremely exciting field i don't have the same expertise that you do i have an adjacency but not the depth of knowledge um have never really delved deeply into it or made investments in it but i think what's exciting about it is everything from doing jobs that are very dangerous for humans um enhancing the human experience when you look at really repetitive labor things that you know it might take away a job but is it a good job for that that person is you know spending 30 years doing something highly repetitious is that is that a good experience in life so i think um and then when you think about everything from military applications uh you know rescue we're already seeing a bunch of those things and then just lastly when you talk about that human interaction with robots when you start to have the combination so you have some level of intelligence and interaction i mean that's why we always love the droids in star wars right i mean it's uh it it's it's exciting it captures the imagination um and i i think look many many hours and have been spent on debating artificial intelligence and the the ramifications if things go sideways and so forth um and i think those are all you know those are appropriate conversations to be having ai is happening uh i think it's actually happening slower than most people realize um because there are tasks that humans do every minute of every day standing up without losing your sense of balance i mean these are really hard things but i think there's enough investment both in private industry as well as nation states now on artificial intelligence that it is coming so both in the software space in the digital space and in the physical space so we talked about manufacturing so industrial robotics is very true that even in the factory even the tasks that you think are pretty um basic you know the amount of small intuitive decisions that humans make is quite incredible so we have to be kind of explicit about saying which tasks are actually really hard and humans are just really good at them and uh so on and on the flip side in the digital space was the social networks of recommender systems with all kinds of like personal assistants in terms of voice voice based ai systems all of that there's opportunities there to find niches where ai can really have a transformative effects i think one of the places that really haven't this is where like you're worried to say stupid things but i believe this very much that um when we have ai systems in the home currently you have somebody like alexa and google home and so on they're kind of very basic servants they tell you about the weather they can play some music they can turn the lights on and off all the kind of like smart home stuff i think there's a lot of value in systems that form relationships with us in the way that pets do dogs and cats i don't know just for people who have cats cats don't care about you they they really don't they don't form any kind of relationship i don't know why you have a relationship with them it's one way anyway sorry to throw some shade i'm just kidding by the way that's a basic kind of connection you have with another living being then there's also just friends you have you have different levels of friends acquaintances you have lifelong friends all that that that friendship you have i really believe that there is some aspect of the human experience that is deeply enriched by interacting with other beings and for systems computing systems artificial intelligence systems in our world to have the capability to engage in some of that i think is not just an opportunity to to to uh help people grow become better people but it's also just a good business opportunity too and that hasn't really been explored enough so that to me is really that's a whole exciting space that i think will enable better industrial industrial robotics it will it it will empower a better facebook a better social network a competitor to facebook that overthrows facebook so it'll it'll create better technologies that uh currently don't have that human robot interaction touch so i don't know that's super exciting to me but that that has to deal with the mess of human nature the the the reason that most robotics people and ai people stay away from humans they stay away from the human robot interaction problem it's because humans are complicated they're messy they're hard to control they're hard to predict stuff about they're hard to make sense of or like test repeatedly because one human can be drastically different from another human and so for to deal with that as the robotics problem is super hard and so one of the questions is uh which problems can you remove the human from consideration when you're trying to solve the problem so like elon musk is an example of somebody who believes autonomous driving we can remove the human from consideration we can solve autonomous driving as a robotics problem it's staying lane when there's a red light you stop at a red light you know if there is humans in the picture like pedestrians that's a ballistics problem it's just treat them as a moving object that has uh was with like 90 probability keeps moving in the way they were in the past few seconds with some smaller probability that might stop or turn like just do some basic models about them and you'll be able to do just fine so i i tend to believe that even driving has to consider the full messiness of humans the dance the game theoretic dance of chicken that we all do when we jaywalk we look at the car is that car that car doesn't that driver doesn't have the guts to murder me so i'm going to walk in front of it and not look at the car we do that kind of dance and ai systems need to be able to play the uh um uh do that kind of dance in telco there's the the labs so there's a data science component the ai component so how do they go into a company and help revolutionize that industry well there's different examples so one of our companies figs makes healthcare workwear started by these two brilliant women and you know early days helping to build the platform and recruit and make sure that the the everything that we did at the company uh embraced technology and at the same time they were obsessive about their customer which is you know doctors nurses healthcare workers who are putting it on the line every day and obsessive about their product and when you have those two things come together you know you you get the result that that uh that we did at figgs um we have a company called akasher which it's ai lab and base is down here in austin texas it was uh an insurance one of the largest insurance brokers in the world and uh you know we did a deal with them and sold some of our our insurance holdings that was completely ai driven and in that case you basically put the team inside the company right because it's it's a massive company with all and we've gone into all kinds of things um so it just depends on the different uh situations but the the biggest thing was just to make sure whatever the company needed uh they had access to the talent sometimes we'd build it sometimes we'd help recruit for it you know how thing in technology it's whatever works right there's there's no one way to do things um well echo sure is really dif uh is really interesting as an example so insurance is a fascinating space it sounds like very ripe still for disruption across the board so how do you it seems like a lot of the disruption has to do with like uh almost the first dumb step of we've been using mostly paper like it's not digitized you have to basically convert uh create a uh infrastructure in a framework where like everybody is using the same digital system like databases and just organize the data that it seems like that's a huge leap that basically can revolutionize major industries that still hasn't been done insurance is obviously the great example of that and one of the things that struck me uh the the founder ceo of actual is a guy named greg williams they're out of grand rapids michigan and as we were looking at expanding our footprint and insurance i met with a lot of insurance executives and they would talk about technology but greg uh truly understood the power of what would happen across actuarial sciences you know you know predictive analytics and and using machine learning to really run every aspect of your business and then automating a lot of the just the back office tedious steps and as you said one of the things that was great for us they already had um a data collection system and department so that so it was much easier to pivot um and you know i'm very excited about the future of that company it's uh you know they're doing some pretty innovative uh groundbreaking things and those are the things that i like doing right is that um yes i i want to make money just you know that that's what that is but at the same time what did you do with your time on earth right did you do anything to leave any kind of mark that you know you did anything interesting i i can only speak for myself there are many more ways to measure one's life and i can only speak about how i think about things um you know i grew up poor in upstate new york with a single mom and watched her work a couple jobs and you know had to from a young age you know shovel snow and mow lawns and do all kinds of things to help her picture make sure the lights weren't turned off uh in our little place and so that's just something that i've always been driven towards and um you know i just i have a really eclectic tastes and interests and um you know it's just it's just been an interesting journey so help be part of and help enable some cool new creations across the board like film music ai manufacturing just you know insurance all the specific uh industries that you disrupted yeah uh small tangent back to your childhood with your mom any uh memories kind of stand out stick with you as um as something that helped define who you are as a man yeah even though you know uh the university and college experience was not part of the the family tree um and we had no connections i didn't understand i didn't know what a trust fund was or prep school i didn't know what any of that was um but my mom from a young age would always say you know you're going to go to college there's no you know if you choose to and and i think from a young age that was just an expectation um that that i had and that she instilled and the work ethic i watched her and then my my grandmother was uh was a janitor a cleaning lady in a hospital for 50 years and then i i remember there were times of you know i'm probably 10 years old it's freezing cold out and if i don't go out and shovel six driveways we don't have enough money to pay the bill so i don't know i'm not a psychologist so i don't know how that manifests itself in my life today but i think the grit to say i'm not in the mood to do this i don't want to do this but that's the work that needs to be done and no excuses not i'm a victim and i'm going to sit around and talk about no it is what it is and you have to get done what you need to get done and again i think it's uh you can never fully put yourself in someone else's shoes or experience so i don't know what that is or feels like but for me though those were two i think formative things um that that were important in my childhood so that that's pretty the reality of life like that is pretty humbling you still you've been so exceptionally successful that it's easy to get soft now how do you get uh humbled these days by getting up you know you know i i think um for me personally trying to push the envelope and being weighed and measured right that's why i always love sports too there's a scoreboard and you know i'm a huge believer in opportunity meritocracy all those things that i i think are ideals that we want to uh aspire to and i think that um there's a lot of things i'm involved with right now that i just want to see if i can do it i want to see if you know if and and you know my own little mantra is cause the outcome right as much as you can and at the same time have the humility and not to have the hubris or arrogance to say i'm always going to cause the outcome because you'll get your ass kicked pretty quickly and and humbled the world in the universe is a big place with forces you know beyond uh but i think um you know i also think a lot about being intellectually honest which when i do university talks and so forth i i think that's a superpower because if you find yourself making decisions based on other people's expectations based on places you don't want to go but you know you're either you feel like momentum is taking you there um i think that's a big problem and there there are people that go to our top universities and can't wait to get out and start their own company and they want that pressure and they they want to to grind and there are other people that are smart and talented but just say look i i don't want to lay awake staring at the ceiling wondering how i'm going to make payroll i don't want that in my life and i think if you can square that up and be okay with it and say what what makes me tick what makes me happy what puts me in a bad headspace because there's a difference between challenging yourself and going against your nature so that's why i think that being intellectually honest and being able to really sit down and go inside your own head and say what am i good at what am i not good at how am i going to put myself in a position to be successful because you know i'm working on my weaknesses but i'm not going to put myself career-wise in a position where i i'm just fundamentally going to have a hard time being successful yeah intellectually honest is a tricky one and it gets there's like levels to it too sure because um well like some of the things you know i i think about when you when you dream of doing certain kinds of big things uh a part of intellectual honesty is to say several things one is like hey um the thing you're dreaming about like one the fact that nobody's done it probably shows that you're you know um you're just a dreamer this this is not this is not going to like think clearly the fact that it hasn't been done probably shows that it may not be the right path and uh two is like if you're dreaming about stuff there's a certain point where it's like hey you haven't done it like why haven't you done it already then like you have to be honest with yourself like you're right you have to be ambitious like you know a lot of people work hard a long time for a dream but you have to wake up and be like all right i've been at this for 10 years like with a startup you launched a startup and you think okay one year two years three years four years pretty successful you know but it hasn't exploded like you dreamed and you have to shut it down you know you have to be intellectually honest there at the same time you might want to be uh like step it up lean into it say almost like um the flip side of like intellectual honesty is like maddening ambition i'm just saying fuck it i'm gonna go all in but that that is a kind of intellectual honesty saying like you know the the big problem here is i've been kind of going doing too many things um maybe with this uh dream you have to go all in on it all those kinds of things i mean this is human experience it's complicated yes without all human things are complicated the the and i think there's a difference between being reckless and making well thought out informed decisions if you're going to go all in make sure you you've you know measure twice cut once as they say and one of my other favorite i i forget many years ago i heard this saying and it stayed with me it was never mistake clear line of sight with distance and you know that so i i think that the key whether you're starting a business or you're thinking about leaving the company you're at and starting a business or just leaving for another job any of these things is as much as you can right and psychologists i think would tell us it's hard to be self-aware completely right that's the rub that if we were all completely self-aware of everything that we did in strength and weaknesses it'd be a different world but i do think you can work on that and at least challenge yourself to to think about it and not be in a position where i'm you know i'm going to medical school because that's what you do in my family and even though i'm miserable doing it uh you know things like that this is a definitely you don't want to be sort of um because you don't think fall um victim to conformity let's just go on doing the same thing over and over that's right but at the same time is measured twice and cut once um it does feel like some of the the biggest um leaps taken or where you cut once and measure later is you leap in first sure it's almost like a gut i suppose that is a measurement but you build up a good gut uh instinct of like what to do and then you just do it and then you figure out as it's the building the airplane as you're flying it right well and i think each one of those uh instances that you could probably cite has its own unique circumstances right i don't have a deep biotech background so if i suddenly stood up and said i'm going to put everything i have into this idea well that's you know those are right it's game theory right what are the odds of success if on the other hand uh you know you're you're brilliant in your field or you've seen some opportunity that you you think is wide open and you're gonna go for it and break stuff that's great you just want to wait to me always say like how crazy is this on the spectrum of you know do i have any expertise what is the downside if i fail right you know if you're if you're at a certain point in life with young children and you've got a mortgage or whatever else that that is one circumstance versus i just got out of stanford or i just got out of whatever and i'm gonna go for it it's just the whole thing right it's it is complex as you point out and sometimes you just want to have the right matrix in your head of decision-making process to try to arrive at the right place and even if you get close that's where i think you say you know what the hell with it i'm doing this yeah yeah i do want to ask you about specific idea that uh sounds super fascinating that you're involved with recently you led the 50 million dollar seed round for a company called colossal that is focused on de-extinction uh this is funny relative to our connection uh and conversation about jurassic world they're seeking to restore lost ecosystems and use gene editing to restore the woolly mammoth to the arctic tundra uh how are they gonna do that well um i met this fascinating guy at harvard named george church five six years ago um and found him to be incredibly smart uh have an imagination um and he partnered up with a guy named ben lamb who's an entrepreneur and basically the the uh the press and to me the the imaginative like you're capturing my imagination by telling me you're gonna bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct animals and i you know we'll see where that road leads i'm was more interested in an investor in the things that they're working through uh around understanding genes and more in proteins and crispr and all these other things because um being adjacent to george church and his team as these things unfold over the next decade i i thought was uh the right the right thing to do people are important here just like investing in people and seeing what the hell they come up with absolutely i mean you can look through history and um great things are done by great people right and companies they end up over time becoming a logo and immediately what you think of them but they started out with a person with an idea and a team that cultivated that and made that happen um and i and i think there are certain folks that are just immensely talented that if you can be around uh them and i also know his and his team's ethics in terms of you know after spending time talking about where the lines are people in other countries that you know may not have the same process may not have the same checks and balances are doing this and pursuing this regardless so at least i felt like with george and ben and their teams they're also very responsible people this is where the human side of things comes into play i've interacted with a lot of really brilliant people in the technology space where you kind of you know there's a lot of ways to feel this out you can ask them whether they kind of read literature you could you can feel out how much they really understand about like human nature here like whatever the technology is when it actually starts to play interact with society at scale like do they have an understanding or an intuition about how that happens some of that requires studying history some of that requires like just looking at the worst and best parts and events in human history to understand like hey it doesn't always turn out like everybody hoped uh the technology turns out and if a person has a depth of understanding about history about uh human nature then i think that's the right person to um to mess with some of this cutting-edge stuff yeah you want marcus aurelius with a phd from mit [Laughter] exactly exactly um you just small tangent but you mentioned having a conversation with warren buffett you spoke really highly of him as an investor as a human being what about him do you admire what uh what what from him what insights have you drawn from him as a as a great investor yourself well the afternoon that i got to spend with him which you know something i'll treasure forever look sometimes when you meet people even that are immensely successful you you may decide that after 20 minutes or a half hour oh you were in the right place at the right time and you know that's that's fine uh there are other people that are clearly different special and i don't care if you made him start from zero you know would would end up in a good place and so it was it was a absolute privilege to spend the time with him um you know a couple of things that stood out in the conversation um he is incredibly intellectually curious and well-read and i like how simplistic he likes to keep his thought matrix and then also instead of trying to outsmart the market it seems like a simple axiom but just look good companies that are led by talented managers that our good businesses over time are gonna get there so i'm not gonna day trade i'm not i'm just gonna i'm looking for uh for value and then just on life stuff he just you know and also his ability to take in and then use information uh it was incredibly impressive so uh i only spent the you know i'd met him before but i only spent one afternoon with him but it's you know pretty incredible and one of the things that stuck out to me is we were in the middle of talking about tulco or investing or how we thought about it and i said uh you know i'm trying to be smart about and he stopped me and he said charlie munger his partner of many years charlie and i don't try to think of the smart thing to do we try to think what's the dumb thing we could do here and i kind of laughed and he said no i'm i'm dead serious we think about it from the standpoint of what could we do in this situation that later we would be like that was a really dumb thing to do and i actually thought that was me it got in my head and i i still think a lot about that as i'm as i'm dissecting problems so there is uh like that's a kind of long-term thinking if you just avoid the dumb things or if you uh if you simplify ever just focus on those simple steps all it takes is just do that for a long period of time and you'll be successful well it certainly worked for him that's all i can say what what about what about you uh you've been uh a great investor yourself how do you know when when you judge people so i whenever i go to san francisco i was thinking of moving to san francisco that's why that's why i decided to after really giving us some thought talking to people decided to move to austin you know um everybody's dreaming big and they have big plans and it's actually i don't envy the job of the investor of any kind because everybody has big dreams and it's it's hard to know who exactly uh what idea is going to materialize what uh what team is going to materialize into something great how do you make those decisions about people about ideas well if i had any kind of a lattice work on this it start absolutely starts with the people and i think the reason for that is your business plan is going to change right there's very few businesses i know of that say we're going to make a widget in this location and 30 years later we're successful and we just make a widget and that's what it is things happen right and today they happen with such velocity that you have to be able to make hard decisions based on imperfect information and are you how are you going to calculate those answers how self-interested are you going to be what kind of ethics will you apply what's your short-term versus long-term thinking are you able to give an honest assessment of a situation because the thing that you can count on is problems are going to happen things you didn't anticipate are going to happen how pliable are you right how much elasticity is there in in your ability uh to to be successful and i think it's important when you invest in something that you both see you you you understand the road map ahead and agree to it right doesn't mean there won't be twists and turns but you're not like well wait a minute what did we do here i this isn't what was in the the thing i signed up for um and then i think honesty and communication is a huge thing to me with you know i always tell people if bi-directionally if there's something going on start the conversation with you know lex we have a problem okay now we're i'm sitting up you have my full attention we're going to talk about whatever it is bad news should travel faster than good news and because it's going to happen being in business with someone that is going to shoot you straight and sometimes say i don't know yeah i don't know what the answer is i got to go figure it out that i can process a lot better than look i i don't want you mad at me or disappointed or i i can't handle not having success so we're just going to kick the can and i i think especially in today's business environment that's very very dangerous so that's a bad sign not just because it's uh good to do to communicate and be honest but if if they're not willing to do that then it goes back to the intellectual honesty they're probably not also able to be brutally honest with themselves when they look in the mirror about the direction of the company but look i i wasn't there so i don't know but i think if you unpack many situations that turned out negatively most of the people whether you're faking lab results right you have a biotech company we have everybody's staring at theranos these days do i think in a lot of cases you're either the villain like you started out saying i'm i'm gonna screw my shareholders over and i'm gonna be a liar that that that isn't my experience most things are little incremental moves that you say we're going to get this right next week but today we got to make the presentation so we're going to just tweak things a little bit that's a slippery slope right and so that's why i think from a standpoint of people you want to go into the foxhole with folks that you know understand things are going to happen and i'm going to let you know about them and we're going to try to solve them together and and then just in terms of the idea it's i always ask like okay if this company executed the way that's the other thing always cracks me up about financials whenever somebody pitches you inevitably they'll say our projections are really really conservative i'm i'm still waiting for somebody to come in and say look my projections are wildly optimistic we'll never hit these numbers but anyway um it's uh you know if this company did what it says and executes and does it matter yeah right does it move the needle enough and and what are the what are the things that uniquely position this company to be successful and you just have to be able to answer i think a number of those questions uh pretty crisply but at the end of the day it's still a big risk so you're just trying to to try to minimize the risk let me jump to another topic you're an incredible human being that you're involved with this your band ghost hounds is touring with the rolling stones so before we talk about your band let me ask about that what's that like playing with the rolling stones surreal just because they're my favorite band of all time um there's to me the greatest rock and roll band it's not even close of all time and you know to to share the same stage to to be on tour and to go out and get that energy from the crowd um you know and every night and come off stage and later when they go on and you hear that iconic ladies and gentlemen the rolling stones and then it's incredible and you know what's what's amazing to me about the band next year will be their 60th anniversary 60 years and it's it's hard to be around anything for that long but making music and packing stadiums and what's amazing to me they can play a two-hour set and it's not just that oh that's a hit or you recognize it it's like every song is an anthem right yeah so uh so it's it's it's been amazing we got to play with them in 2019 and when they ask us to do this uh again um it's just it's just a absolute privilege i asked you this offline so i know you are a kind of rock star yeah but just me maybe i'm projecting but do you get nervous such a large audience with the rolling stones it feels like there would be a lot of pressure yeah i mean you you definitely don't want to screw it up i think um the band our band you know is tight-knit and all that stuff and i think that you the individual nervousness dissipates when you go out as a group and you're making music together and you sort of okay we're all in this and you know we're we're doing a thing which is why even in sports i always look at individual events like ice skating or you know anything where it's just you out there alone and that's that's different than being uh with it with a team and nerve wracking so um i'm sure if it was me with an acoustic guitar just going out it would feel different but absolutely you get the right kind of butterflies i would call it um and just the energy of playing music and having it be this relationship and you and look i i get it i've been to a ton of concerts where i'm like look can we just get to the band please but uh what's been great is just an amazing reception um and we have this this uh guy named trey nation who's the lead singer is just incredibly talented i mean he's just uh not only an amazing voice but just has that charismatic thing yeah so he's great it's fun what's it feel like to play in front of a huge audience what's uh what's the as a guitarist like what's uh they feel are you lost in the music like you almost don't feel the audience does it add extra energy does it ex extra anxiety what what is it make what's it feel like you know stadiums are interesting just because it's so big and cavernous and because you know you want to protect your ears so we use an in-ear system so that you are a little disconnected from the crowd because if you're playing that loud and you're standing in front of your amps without ear protection that that's bad how are you monitoring the sound are the in-ear stuff is that producing sound or is it strictly ear plugs no it's producing the sound so it's like putting ear pods in and listening to a song and you're playing to it right it's just us playing but it protects your ears um but the the energy from the crowd when they when they get going and get into it which knock on wood so far has been amazing um there's nothing like it i mean there's it's uh it's just this bi-directional thing that happens and um i love music was kind of music and sports were you know kind of my first loves and um it's uh yeah it's it's very difficult to describe i think accurately because it's like no other feeling musically how is it different than playing in a garage with the band by yourself practicing like is that do you do you feel like you're creating something different when you're when you're um when you got the guitar and the amp and just the sound dissipating out into and everybody's listening was is that it's uh listen the first time we did it and there's nobody in the stadium first time i ever played in the stadium and i'm just like i'm out there in front and just hitting different chords and playing different licks and i'm like it's like i won a contest and i get to do this but uh you know what's different about it and each venue is different so if you if you um we went on the road with zz top a few years ago which was incredible love billy gibbons he's a texan um incredible person and guitar player but you know when you're playing in like five to seven thousand seats it's really i mean it's you know you're right there with them uh with the crowd and then when you play in an arena um for we we toured with uh with bob seger on his last tour which was cool played some shows with him and again the arena like they're all kind of packed on top of you and it's super loud which which was cool um i mean the crowd is stadiums is a completely different animal and uh it's it's just a completely different experience do you enjoy it versus like a smaller room as a guitarist as a musician what's your favorite like room to play of the size any room that'll arenas are the perfect blend yeah if i had to say because it's loud and you know 20 30 000 people but like right up yeah right up on you stadium look playing the stadiums with uh with the rolling stones is it just is going to go on the head marker somewhere is one of the more you know i say this and i really mean it my my life is like a punk episode that just hasn't no one's burst in yet yeah but um yeah it's it's as cool as you think it is so 60 years how do you think mick jagger still got it how do you know how do you explain it i i got to tell you so i mean the funny thing is whatever wherever there is excellence people want to know how'd you do it yeah right what's the secret not only is mick jagger and i think the songs that keith richards and and mick jagger wrote together if you go back and listen to the lyrics it's just incredibly poignant and i'm just a huge stones fan so but he works out like a maniac right and it's it's that 10 000 hours thing and it's that hey maybe i don't feel my best today but i'm going to get up and do my routine and work out so that it you know at his age which you know i mean you can look at people at different ages chronologically that are you know maybe we're both at this age but i'm a lot older than you are vice versa and he just uh i think it's the combination of raw talent and the ability and he's he's very smart right like he's understands how to have interaction with a crowd and hold him in the palm of his hand and be an entertainer but then on top of that the reason he can at this age run around stadiums and be just as energetic as he puts the work in and that's one thing step that i think a lot of people miss sometimes where they want that magic trick they want to know what's the shortcut most of the time the answer is there's no shortcut yeah you have to work hard on the way there and work hard to stay on top that's it and and sometimes it's not even like work hard it's just like um it's like be a professional which that involves like in his case at his age with the amount of stuff you have to do on stage in the way he does it for two hours you have this is a professional athlete a professional athlete that has to do things that are probably designed for 20 year olds and 30 year olds has to do an older age which means like what do you have to do well you have to probably he probably has like a whole physical routine he has to do diet the whole thing and it's hard look if you want to do great things you probably have to do hard things yeah to get there i'm not gonna make you pick just stick on the stones for one more minute um but what are some great rolling stones songs that were impactful to you lyrically musically maybe something uh you like playing uh like air guitar or uh i don't know probably my favorites i love sympathy for the devil yeah uh it's a very i don't know sort of faustian i i love the lyrics i love the how the almost a voodoo beat just kind of builds throughout the song um that's that's always been one of my favorites so in that song he never mentions devil does he no wait sorry uh uh like you know my name yeah there's a there's like a flirtation going around in the in the lyrics it's kind of interesting it's here's all the trouble i've caused along the way with you humans and i i just think it's really really great and musically builds really nicely yeah it's it's it's like both fun and dark it it's it's cool it's a uh it's there's a playful nature to it it's uh that that's very stones like the only they can pull it off because it's like playful but it's also like dark and dangerous dangerous dangerous yeah yeah and and give me shelter in the shelter it's just you know and um to this day when i listen to the studio version and mary clayton just comes on and sings that epic iconic part and uh there's a documentary that was done about uh backup singers uh phenomenal and it tells the story of that moment in that song with mary clayton and it's just uh her voice and and the way it unfolded they got her out of bed at like 10 o'clock at night in la and she's like the rolling stones what and went in and just killed it and um i can't sing at all i'm by ordinance not a lot around a microphone so i'm always in awe when someone can sing like that um but uh you know those are those are some of my uh my favorite rolling stone songs and painted blacks awesome i mean i could go on yeah painted black is great again a song that builds is badass i mean it defines that whole generation what made you pick up a guitar what made you fall in love with the guitar it's just the coolest instrument right i mean when you watched back then you know and i was kind of an old soul i was listening at a fairly young age to muddy waters robert johnson lightning hopkins bb king and just the soulfulness thrill is gone oh my god i mean bibi plays five notes and just kills it and the emotion that that it evokes so i i just was just in awe of the instrument and uh you know i i also there's there's always somebody around who's a musician that just picks the instrument up and can play right and they're just so talented at it and they can just listen to a record and play that that was never me i i never took formal lessons i had to grind you know to just make it sound like i wanted it to sound so both technically an ear everything was hard work yeah i mean i could hear it um and and what they call you know you're you play so my right hand yeah the you know the rhythm side of it is uh that's probably if i have anything my my strength but there's something pretty amazing that happens when you get together with other people and play a song in that moment where it hits the pocket and you all kind of know it and it just it's just such a cool feeling and uh it was interesting growing growing up because i was again i always had eclectic interest so i loved math and physics and science so i had those friends and i was an athlete and played football and baseball and basketball so i had my jock friends uh and then i had my music friends and it so it was it was just kind of that and um so when i was still living in los angeles and had uh legendary i just missed playing and so i i put this band together and called it the ghost hounds because again huge robert johnson fan and that legend of robert johnson selling his soul at the crossroads in exchange for his musical talent you guys have that in one of the videos yeah yeah such a cool video exactly so i always i just thought like that's that's such cool lore um i just love the blues so robert johnson would often would would talk about hellhounds on his trail and so i always just thought huh what about ghost towns so that's i wish it were a more clever deeper story but that that's about it for that name that's pretty deep robert johnson is incredible but you also talk about this that you you connect to the storytelling of blues so what makes a good story in a song like what what aspect of storytelling uh connects with you in song so i'm a big lyrics guy too i love uh like deep lyric people like tom waits and uh like people that are like you know leonard cohen like that are you even bob dylan that are like obviously yes poetry and then there's some people like the rolling stones there it's like seemingly simpler but it's still so much more to it it's like less is often more it still tells a strong story yeah and there's there's certain people and jagger and mick jagger and keith richards are in this boat billy gibbons they just say things in a certain way yeah they're just cool right it just uh and so you know i i write our music and lyrics um i have to tell a story i have to know the characters in the song i'm not good at just writing some rhymes and having it match up to the right key and the right music i i have to understand like that's just me i i've and uh so i think that look if you have three or four minutes to tell a story you have to be more efficient with your your use of language and you have to understand what you're building to if anything and evoke uh emotion and hopefully for those three minutes get the listener to understand not only the point of the song but where you're coming from and to make you feel uh a certain way there's a song that you know the audiences seem to like a lot on the new album called good old days and i wrote that because especially during covenant reflecting on what what normalcy looks like and what it what happens when you're cut off i i just was kind of taken with this idea of that when you sit around and reminisce with friends oftentimes it's not just like some big event happened it's remember that summer we'd go up to the lake all the time and it's who you were with and at the time it probably seemed pretty pedestrian right it just seemed like kind of a normal day but it was the company you were keeping it was the time in your life it was whatever it was and i just kind of struck me that right now we're doing stuff that you're going to reminisce about later that seems kind of ordinary be like man that was such a great time so the idea is be in the moment and all that stuff but these are the good old days and then enjoy it and soak it in and and you know kind of be present for it yeah it's a great perspective to take on the present because we are in the thing that will remember we're living through the thing we'll remember and sometimes the things we'll remember is the simple stuff it's a little stuff yeah outside of uh keith richards who is the greatest ridiculous question but just indulge me who is the greatest uh blues guitarist of all time rock guitarist of all time well you got a little bit of a hybrid with jimi hendrix right because he played the blues and he played rock and roll so i i think most guitarists would say jimi hendrix is pretty yeah ridiculous that that probably for me i'm a huge huge huge hendrix fantasy because he can't you can't i mean even to this day i don't care technology pedals whatever he just somehow fused with the instrument um i can't be sitting here in austin texas without mentioning one of the great guitar players of all time uh stevie ray vaughan see that's how i know you're like a rock star you're sucking up to the audience all over the place yeah stevie ray vaughan is another one of those that is incredible just blows me away um and and then with the older guys and b.b king hubert sumlin clapton clapton's i saw him on his last tour and just walked out with you on my just like unbelievable how he still sounds uh so uh in both electric and acoustic yeah just he's a fast range absolute master and the greatest storyteller you mentioned bob seeger that's that's that's an interesting one he's he doesn't he almost doesn't get enough credit i feel like for how great he is obviously he's super famous but now he's in his voice i i also i have the privilege of of getting friendly with john fogarty uh you know john fogerty and ccr fame and he's another one that's just the way he phrases things and you just look at the catalog of stuff he wrote uh an amazing talent um i read uh spring bruce springsteen's book and was i'm a fan but after reading the book it was really you go back and listen to his lyrics and the way he pours himself out you know is uh is pretty incredible um and then again with the old blues guys i just think the emotion they could get out of playing like this staying on the one right just playing the same rhythm john lee hooker uh you listen to manish boy by uh uh by muddy waters and it's just there's something so it just draws me in every time and the emotion they're able to get out of things um and i'm also a huge chuck berry fan i just think that sound is uh i love it uh do you know how to play johnny be good i do yeah that's good maybe you know one of the great moments at least of my childhood was uh back to the future yeah and watching michael j fox plug in yeah and uh and then at the end play play at the dance to save his parents with johnny be good pretty awesome yeah the guitar is so much more than a musical instrument it feels like it's like the in the 20th century it's like the car like it defines so much of hollywood so much of a generation of what it means to be i don't know what it means to be a man what it means to be a human in america it's it's fascinating emblematic to me of a certain type of music yeah and that that's uh i made a documentary years ago called it might get loud yeah with jimmy page highly recommend that everybody watch that documentary it's incredible celebration of the guitar yeah it says uh jamie page jack white from my stripes from the edge and the edge from you too okay all right well now you have to tell the story of that one because how the heck did that all come together because it's so fascinating such different musicians all coming together talking about their story talking about how they approach the music and also playing together a little bit in this casual kind of setting well look i one day i came downstairs and i the rolling stone magazine is sitting there and it was the 50th was the 50 top guitarist of all time their list and then i had some other financial report with video games and the top video game at the time was guitar hero right and then there was a third thing i can't recall it but i just and i said to myself what is it about the guitar that is so central to the rock and roll whatever you want to call it like why is that the symbol um and i said to myself i want to ask jimmy page why he picked up the guitar because he's jimmy page right and so i called a friend of mine davis guggenheim who had directed inconvenient truth and i think still is but at the time was the biggest documentary ever and i called davis and i said look i have this idea i want to make this movie about the guitar about different eras and styles and whatever but i've never made a documentary i don't i don't know how to do that so i was just looking for advice and thankfully because he's one of the best documentarians ever davis is like you know what i can't get this out of my head i'll direct it which was amazing and we we wrote three names down that represented different eras and different styles rarely do you get you know you go three for three but it was it was those three guys and um it was just it was just such a incredible experience to sit there and get to know jimmy page you know i mean it was like and he was he was like gandalf man he was like always jimmy page yeah and um that's so cool to see him gandalf was there's like a wisdom there's a calmness to him compared to like the uh restlessness of uh jack white like the um i mean that that combination was just fascinating it was one of the coolest experiences ever and one of the things there was a moment where jimmy he was going through his his guitar case and he had the double neck from stairway to heaven and he handed it to me and i was like i mean it's it's like somebody handing you excalibur or something yeah yeah uh amazing experience and the edge one of the kindest human beings you'll ever meet in your life just an amazing person um and i think he hit it right in the head with jack is he's got that that energy you know and constantly pushing himself but uh it's hard to believe it's been i think 10 or 11 or maybe even 12 years since it came out but after watching it i realized like how much it was needed and i was almost surprised it didn't already exist it was like yeah the guitar wasn't quite celebrated like explicitly we almost didn't acknowledge it how important it was culturally it's kind of amazing and the way it closed from the song uh the the wait it was it's called the weight yeah by the band yeah yeah that's because they didn't want to go home yeah we were shooting on a warner brothers sound stage for three days when we called it the summit where the three of them came together yeah and the two things i'll never forget is when jimmy starts to play the riff from whole lot of love yeah edge and jack ceased to be rock you know rock gods or whatever and had the same 15 year old kid feeling that i did you could see in their face and then at the end they're like hey can we play we just want to we don't want to go can we just play something acoustically yeah so we printed out the lyrics that's what they wanted to play and they just sat there and sat on those couches and just such a good way to end yeah it's incredible what's your guitar rig setup like you you also you have a few guitars first well let's let's just put on the line so what what's uh better les paul or strat well i'm not going to get into what's what's better because i'm sure that'll start a flood of whatever for me i'm going to say it's strat all right i'm just going to put out there my main instrument is is a les paul but i okay okay let me just put on the table i'm speaking as somebody who literally i i i don't think i've ever actually strummed a chord in the last ball so i've been i'm not maybe yeah uninitiated yeah exactly so i don't i i don't speak from experience but i it's probably because of hendrix i'm so deeply influenced by hendricks that sure i just kind of followed his footsteps and clapton and so on the amazing thing to me is if you look back at leo fender and what the gibson guitar company and les paul did in the 50s those are still the shapes and the perfect thing today right the strat and the telecaster yeah the last paul and it's they got it right way back way back then so um i have uh my main guitar you got to name your guitar so my main guitar is named hazel and it's a 59 les paul and there's something magical in that year like a stradivarius and they're just there's something different about them um so i i play that and then i play it through sort of my main rig is either a 59 fender twin uh or a 65 um marshall and then when we're on the road now because when you use older vintage stuff you just got to be super careful the tubes and everything it has to be reliable so very nicely the guys from two rock sent me some of their amps and they're really because i don't use any new stuff but the two rock stuff is is pretty great so that's actually what i'm talking about it gets close like it's a close to the sound that you like with the market yeah yeah it's new and reliable so that's what i'm using on the road right do people use like emulation do they use software is it still they do i i personally don't i i go you know i don't have many pedals i use a clon an old you know vintage klon straight into the amp and go as old-school as possible yeah is there other cool guitars you have that kind of stand out i have uh a bunch of what they call blackguard telecasters from the 50s um which are pretty great what are those black guard telecasters yeah so they're just notes oh they actually legit have a black card guard got it uh but they're incredible so what's the color of the telecaster itself most of them are yellow with black and then they got into different configurations but there's something i have a 51 telecaster that i i play an open g on and songs with open g that just again there's something you know and i'll take all the help i can get in terms of you know making it sound great so i'll try to find the magic ones what's your writing process like for uh the music and the lyrics is there do you have to go to the uh the mountains is there whiskey involved what do you have to do or do you just write a little bit whenever you have a moment of free time i'm a boring guy because i don't drink i don't i just uh i figure i can screw things up plenty on my own without adding anything that's a good call um but uh you know for me it either starts with uh with a riff just some something that i think is an interesting you know riff or tone that i i can kind of sink my teeth into a little bit and a lot of times i'll write a title and love a title and then start to oh cool so the title is almost like an idea yeah like this is where i want to be and and then start kind of writing it out and again i just have to know am i writing from a character's point of view am i writing about someone or something you know is like the narrator and you know what is this person are they happy are they sad or they where are they in life i i don't know if all that like great writers i'm sure would say why don't you just write you don't need all that uh but that's for me that's my process well i'm not so sure about that and i bet you quite a lot of writers have create a world in their mind before they even put the simplest awards down so yeah there's there's quite a lot to that what's your favorite song to play is there some favorites one favorite ones you go to but both play and kind of i'm sure you love singing no no no no no you don't i'm not uh i'm neither talented nor do i have the the desire and i think uh you know if you come see the show you won't see a microphone anywhere near me but do you i mean do you hear like when you're thinking about lyrics do you hear the idea of the words and especially what's great you know with trey is i write for his voice and then we have these amazing uh backup singers that that are are just and i i can hear all of it i just can't do it um and so uh i'd say to of our stuff there's a song called half my fault that i play in open g that just i i love playing the song i love that energy and then there's uh we have a new blues album coming out and there's a song called baby we're through and it just stays on the one and for non-musicians that means like in a lot of rock and roll and blues it's what's called a one four five uh progression from your your kind of root note and you would hear if if you're a non-musician if you heard it you'd be like oh yeah that's a lot of songs and this song just stays on the same groove like uh look range or shake your hips or any of those songs and it's just got this unbelievable energy and it's fun to play but i have to keep the same rhythmic thing going for the whole song with that simplicity i mean the the personality of the song can really shine i mean trey's i mean that guy um really cool it just comes through i mean i guess you need that from a lead singer as you said he's just you got to have that and my other guitar player uh johnny bob is uh he's a phenomenal i mean like a legitimate guitar slinger um you know we probably split the lead 70 30 and he is just you know there's times sometimes i look over at him and i'm like i'm being a fan right now because what you just laid down is pretty good from a lead perspective what's the most fun thing to play what do you what kind of stuff do you do like slow do you like i mean if you feel like thrill is gone there's uh so if you look at bb king sometimes one note just bending the shit out of that yeah what do you call that vibrato yeah if i'm gonna play the lead it's a certain kind of feel slow blues is probably my favorite to play or something that's got a little more of that chuck berry drive where you can be rhythmic in the lead um you know i can't the shredding thing that those guys do is that that's not yeah my i was actually always able to do that really well like you mentioned people that pick up fat like maybe it's the classical piano training i could i could play super fast and guitar super technical but to me the hardest thing and the the my favorite things is just um has probably less to do with a guitar more living on life that's worth playing a guitar for it's like a certain kind of emotion that you can put into the notes and that has to do with bending notes well like bending nose is a whole other art form of um i worked surprisingly a long time on comfortably numb um and there's the so so david gilmour is does a lot of bending and they're simple there's they they they sound simple but they're the the dynamics of them to express like a build up in the way it's held and there's often a vibrato at the top for for a bit just that um the the the it's almost like a sigh and a sigh of relief and the build up i mean it's just the that's an art form for him that's hard to get right it's not just playing a note playing a note playing a note it's it's in that like dynamic movement of a note that so much can happen that's where the blues just happens to it's look i'm a huge freddie king fan too right who and you listen to these guys and they're you sit there and they're like man you're you're playing in a small range on the neck but in you know it's like i know the notes you're playing and i'm playing them too but not like that right i mean it's in gilmore is certainly one of those guys that's incredible guitar player and yet another chapter of an amazing life you love football like you meant you you play football yes what positions you play wide receiver wider sear awesome so um maybe you can talk a little bit about your love of football and the fact that you are part owner of the pittsburgh steelers yeah so i mean where do we start you start at the beginning let's start at the end why the steelers what attracted you to the uh first of all i think not to be controversial but one of the best uniforms in football in terms of just like black and gold just decal only on one side yeah it's great yeah the helmet look i've bled black and gold since i was a little boy uh i grew up in upstate new york and uh the first football game i ever saw was the steelers in the super bowl is a really little kit and it just i mean jack lambert and joe green and franco harris and those guys were like came down from uh olympia mount olympus or something and i just was enamored with the team and because we only had three channels the only time i'd get to see him is occasionally when they were the game of the week or something um and i just loved to me what they stood for the toughness and they played football you know the the way that i thought i thought was was great i was a huge jack lambert fan uh our all hall of fame uh linebacker who just intimidated everybody so that was like the that was the decade of the the steel curtain i mean arguably one of the great sort of defensive of in in football history and also one of the greatest football teams period of in football history i've been a lifelong fan um and was very fortunate to meet mr rooney uh the the rooney family started the team in 1933 um got to know him and uh just was asked to be part of the ownership group i think it was the end of 2007. first year as part of the group in 2008 we won the super bowl and it was like beyond surreal and just beyond surreal and um you know it's it's uh it's amazing to to be able to do i mean the rooney family is one of those most revered in sports for the way they they conduct themselves um mr rooney uh passed away i think five years ago now and we lost him but was a champion help build the league i mean put the league as we know it together more importantly was a civil rights champion um who created what we now call the rooney rule uh to to make sure that we're being fair about uh giving minority coaches a chance to get hired and um just just is one of the most kind and amazing human beings i ever ever met it's incredible what sport does um like to bring out the best in people to give people hope to inspire people there is something about football that has all the elements of a great sport it's the teamwork it's the sort of the combat aspect of it it's like it's the purity of it it's uh of like strength and power and speed and all the elements of like last minute close calls required to to win the game and uh where referee decisions of course that's essential for a sport can screw up the whole thing just got all of it together i think uh just i don't know it gives the the drama and the triumphs are just beautiful like some of my favorite memories i don't know if it's an accident or this is common with people is just with friends watching football yeah and connecting over that yeah well it's look it's an incredible game because there's nowhere to hide right you're out there on the field it you know it's uh it's a great game that requires not only all those attributes that you said but it's it's incredibly complex game so if you don't know what you're looking at and you don't understand how complex defenses are trying to disguise what they're doing offenses are trying to overcome that and and you can set up one play the entire in the entire game but a team that plays well together right knows their plays inside and out knows their assignments inside now can overcome and beat a more physically gifted team because of that uh you know work that that aspect of working together one of the things that i always loved about sports is just you're out there there's a set of rules and there's a scoreboard so at the end of that game it says and you can make excuses about the refs or this happened or that happened but you know at the end of the day did you go out and compete and when you went out and were a competitor how did it work out right and and the simplicity of that and the purity of that um is something that i always have been drawn to what about the business of sort of uh owning a team or putting together a team or trying to like build up a team that's going to be a great team like what are some interesting aspects that people might not realize that you can carry over from all the other experience you have in business i i think the hardest thing about professional sports right now it's individuals getting paid money to to play a sport which is different than it's certainly different than amateur and you know the decisions that are hard is when you get to know somebody who's a player on the team and either they're at the end of their career or you need to go in a different direction and that person who's done everything that you've asked you know whatever the coaches have asked of that person and you get close to them and then when they when they have to be traded released or whatever happens it's you know that's sad and being able to stand back and in some ways be dispassionate and not be a fan right there's a um i'm on the baseball hall of fame board and uh one of the the guys that's on the board of me is jerry reinsdorf and i think it was jerry who said you know if you act like a fan you'll be sitting with them um which i thought was kind of funny well i got to push back on that a little bit as a by way of a fan asking a dumb question okay let me just give some examples i it's very common in sport it's funny you said this example of like certain great players going to another team right at the end of their career and uh it always makes me sad it almost makes me want to wish that you kind of retired right there um from a perspective of just like d do you ever as a as an owner but just in that space think about like the steelers in the full arc of human history so not like as a business i mean okay this is my good news sir i don't have to think about it right you know i'm a minority owner so i can think about it almost uh as a fan but i'm sorry go ahead yeah well that's what i mean i i suppose this is a dumb question to think of um like of a business in that way not just investment but like like legacy of like what footprint would you leave on this world right on this history that is one thing that i can say unequivocally and i i only have the experience that i have but one of the things that i'm so proud of um about the way the steelers conduct themselves is and that's the rooney family that's the legacy of the rooney family is asking constantly about what's right for the league what's right for the players you know what what what's the right thing to do here and that that's something i would hear mr rooney say all the time so i think that legacy is important because ultimately the team belongs to that city right belongs to those fans and you know the owners are the custodians of that so i think and when you realize what sports teams mean to the fans the memories that creates the bonds that it creates it's a you know it's a responsibility um and i i i think that you do have to think beyond the you know certainly not just dollars and cents but just sports is a very big deal in our society and and it has to be i think held to a standard uh that's not just uh were we profitable this year or what that's there are other businesses for that it is certainly a business i don't mean to romanticize to the the point that it's not but it to me it's it's more than that or at least my experience has been that it's more than that it's a source of meaning for millions of people like and you see that most like doing kovitz for example when there's so much desperation so many people losing a job so many people having to deal with the uncertainty what the future holds that's right there's something about those sports that just unites us that again the the the tragedy and the triumphs of sport of united of gathering together with your friends with family shared experience of over like this yeah over just team over rooting for your team for your city and the access you know again as i alluded to we didn't have anything when i was growing up but i would pour through the box scores i was a huge yankee fan and steeler fan and feeling some ownership of that right that i could read the box score and relive what they did and occasionally see them on tv and feel like i was part of that celebration when they won and everything it's a very powerful thing you've been exceptionally successful in a bunch of avenues and a bunch of efforts what advice would you give to a young person a day a high school student a college undergraduate that's thinking about career maybe advice not about just career but about how to live a life they can be proud of you know we talked earlier about intellectual honesty and to me that's the first step of just saying to the best of your ability who am i and what i what what's important to me and what do i want to do and accomplish if you can start with that and develop some sort of rules-based philosophical here's what i'll what i'll do but i won't do and that way you can be flexible and pliable and you're gonna need to be but if you if you still have a compass that tells you hey at least i know this is the path i'm going to take i think that's very important the rules you're referring to the principles that's kind of like underlying integrity so knowing what lines you don't cross on this path that's exactly right because if you have those absolutes there are many decisions that come into focus very quickly right because hey i'm that's not for me or hey i i'm willing to do whatever it takes to to do x y and z and it has to do with the thing you were talking about it's kind of interesting you mentioned this earlier in the in the conversation about slippery slope and that's how often it happens like how the the the slipping into unethical behavior happens it's a slippery slope of little adjustments you put stuff off and that that i found that to be uh i've been fortunate to to not have to encounter these moments very much in my life but i still encounter them that's what integrity i think looks like is in as this the slippery slope is happening those little things is um without drama without making a show of it making a decision that stands behind your principles and just walking away yeah and besides the big ideas i'm gonna change the world i'm gonna innovate i'm gonna do all those other things i also start if i'm giving any advice which you know we can debate whether or not you know i should be given advice but just in terms of well let me start with this are you a good friend can you be counted on do you do what you say you're going to do yeah right are you accountable to what you sign up for and do you hold others accountable right what what does all that look like and then i think it's being as intellectually curious and well-read as you can be we live in a world that is designed to distract you right and being able to sit with your thoughts or go on a walk and think deeply about something and not just surface area you text me i text you back and we decide the fate of the world based on a couple of text messages or something um you don't want to lose touch i think with being well read and understanding and standing on great thinker shoulders and learning from uh from from those works and then i also think that you know there's there's resiliency and then there's grit and i i heard someone say one time that those those are slightly different and you know i'm also i know that there are all kinds of challenges in life right that that are tragic that are unfair there's no question that's the world we live in but for me personally to try as much as possible not to be in the victim mindset because unfair things are going to happen and you know we all want to live in an idealistic just world that that should be what we aspire to i'm i haven't seen that yet i haven't experienced that yet but yet you still have to function uh in that world so you know i i think that that resiliency thing is very important and then putting yourself out there right because if you play scared and you're always afraid to fail you know this is probably a dumb way to get to the end of the podcast but there are times especially when i'm out west uh i love the big sky out in you know montana idaho places like that yeah when you look up at night it's almost like i've never seen anything like this before because there's no light pollution so to speak and sometimes when i look up the most daunting problems that i'm experiencing i'm like those those things have been there for a billion years or whatever and i'll be gone and it doesn't you know the most famous person on earth 200 years ago so it you know it's pretty fleeting and uh so make sure you you have a good journey and especially coming out of covid i think telling people that you care about that you care about them and maintaining and cultivating your friendships and relationships and they're not just transactional right and and making sure that someday when you're laying there you can say yeah i was good family member i was a good uh a good friend i was someone that could be counted on i think all those things go into the mix of you know however you want to take the journey so when you look up to the stars do you think about that quickly approaching end of yours do you think about your own mortality do you think about your death are you afraid of your death i'm a huge fan of stoicism right i read a lot a lot of stoicism um i think ryan holliday's done a great job of bringing some of that back into the forefront it's just really thought provoking to me and and rings a lot of it rings just hits me and says i think that's right and that moment momento mori thing which is hey we're all gonna die so you should contemplate it there's a finality to this thing and so i think if you can rightly frame that between fretting about it every day and being afraid and being so laissez faire that you think you know you're gonna you're gonna live forever it'll influence some of the decisions you make it will influence the way you attack things um and hopefully the the way that you live your life so yes i i wouldn't say i obsess over it and i wouldn't say it's omnipresent um but because i read a lot of stoicism and just i think it's it's right to pause and say who knows right there's going to be an expiration date and if it happened tomorrow am i have i done the things i wanted to do and am i the person i wanted to to be and i think it's important along the way to check those things yeah i try to make sure that i actually visualize this that i'm okay dying at the end of the day at the end of each day like if this is the last thing i do in my life is talking to you oh good lord i'm uh [Music] i'm happy you're i know you're joking but um you know that um yeah i'm happy i get to live the life i do and i think momentum more i think the the stoics have it right so you and and you have it right in saying meditate on death enough to remember that this ride ends pretty quickly to help you appreciate uh every day and the people you love the people close to you and the cool shit that you're doing in your life the cool shit you're creating and the fact that you mr thomas tall are playing with the motherfucking rolling stones tomorrow you are the man in so many disciplines so so respected so successful it's truly an honor you sit down and talk with me today thomas thank you so much for showing up in texas and for talking on this silly little podcast oh it's great man i'm a huge fan of the show and i've had a great time hanging with you and uh really appreciate it thanks for listening to this conversation with thomas tall to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from mick jagger and the rolling stones you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you might find you'll get what you need thank you for listening and hope to see you next time