It's just one of those things when you look at it and kind of unpack what happened, you just have to try to stare at the facts as they are and see what you could do better.
Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that help you learn from the best of what other people have already figured out.
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On the show today is the normally reclusive businessman Thomas Tull.
Thomas was the chairman and CEO of Legendary Entertainment.
He produced more than 30 films that together have grossed more than $13 billion worldwide at the box office.
Movies like Straight Outta Compton, Godzilla, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, and so much more.
Today, he's living his dream as part -owner of his favorite childhood sports team, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
He's running telco and buying companies and investing.
He was early money in Magic Leap, Pinterest, Oculus, which sold to Facebook, but we're not going to talk too much investing.
We're going to talk about intellectual honesty, learning from mistakes, how the entertainment industry is changing, professional football, and so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.
You grew up as a single child.
What was it like being, having a single parent?
It's interesting because if you don't know anything else, then maybe it doesn't seem as different.
It was challenging circumstances.
My mom had me at a young age, and my father had left and had a number of issues.
I had two younger sisters, and we were definitely challenged economically and so forth.
Looking back on it, it certainly had a material impact on the rest of my life, and hopefully it's something that...
Who knows if that's what develops drive or doesn't, but it's what happened, so that's the way I grew up.
Was there a point where you realized that your family was different from other families?
Yeah. I think also when I went away to college, it became a little more pronounced just in terms of, okay, this is the outside world.
I think that there was certainly a period that I got very frustrated and felt how unfair and all those other things that, I guess, when you're processing things as a teenager, your neurons aren't firing the way they should.
My mom worked two jobs.
She was a dental hygienist, and I did a lot of shoveling snow, had that business, had a lawn mowing business, running around at 13 doing that kind of stuff, to try to help out.
You just kind of realize at a fairly young age that there are things you don't want to do.
You'd rather be doing other things, but the task at hand is the task at hand.
What was college like?
I think I went to Hamilton, which is a fantastic school in what they call the Nescack with Williams and Amherst and Middlebury.
I received first -rate education, and I think for the first time because of the alumni of the school, many of my classmates had went to fancy prep schools and things like that.
I wasn't aware of what a trust fund was prior to going there and so forth.
I think more importantly, it had a profound impact on how to think, how to communicate, and that you could have efficacy in the world.
I think that if I had to really distill the education down, it's sort of looking at other people and the fact that you could have impact in the world, that it wasn't just, hey, I'm going to get up and do whatever my job is, and I'm sort of slotted in in my life and so forth.
Is that because you were surrounded by ambitious people?
Yeah I think people that were ambitious, people whose families had had impact in the world, again, notable alumni that you get to rub elbows with and be around, and suddenly your worldview opens up and you decide that, hey, maybe there is something that you can do with luck and sort of applied work
and so forth. After that, like opportunities, did you go into college thinking there would be one set of opportunities in life and come out thinking another?
Yeah, the plan was always, I was definitely going to go to law school, and then I had a family friend talk to me and say, look, it's not like it is in LA law and you're going to come out in debt.
There's no more sports scholarships and things like that for law school.
But I'm always fascinated by people that, whether they're practicing attorneys or they have a law degree as part of their educational background, I actually think it's a pretty great set of skills to have and some of the most interesting people whose thought process and how they process things are attorneys
and so – but yeah, definitely went a different direction.
So what happened after college?
Well, I had a stint, I got a look from the Atlanta Braves playing to play baseball.
Because you were on a sports scholarship in college, right?
Yeah, and so – and the Braves were smart enough to figure out that I was going to be able to help them.
So got sent home and then I had a couple of small businesses in my early 20s, a laundromat chain and an auto repair center, because I lived in an area that was economically challenged and those were things – I want to talk about the laundromat, I want to come back to that.
Everybody wants to talk about the laundromats, it's kind of funny.
But yeah, and then from there, I had moved down to Raleigh -Durham and was a partner at a venture fund, a tech venture fund, and then all kinds of things started to happen.
Okay, I want to come back to this point, but I want to rewind a little bit, the laundromats.
Talk to me about that.
You started – you were an entrepreneur?
Yeah, if you want to call it that in my 20s, just trying to figure things out.
But you innovated in this industry as well.
You did. Yeah, so if there's any sort of thematic to my business career, I'm not good at coming up with a new thing.
There was no such thing as social media and I invented social media and now that's a thing.
That's not my skill set.
What I've done okay at is looking at an industry or a business model and saying, okay, where are the points that you could either improve this or make it more efficient or come at it from a different angle.
And that's been sort of a running theme throughout my business career.
So at the laundromat, there were a couple of different things that were, I guess, innovative at the time.
I found a company who was selling the washers and dryers that had a built -in computer and that you could set dynamic pricing.
And the reason that that was important at the time is the laundromats would be jammed on the weekends and more business than you could handle.
And then during the week, there's nobody in there and there are people with their retirees or whatever their schedule allows them to go in.
And so we put in sort of a dynamic pricing model so that you would try to even those things out and it certainly helped the numbers.
How many laundry amounts did you end up with?
I think I had four of them and then sold it.
Was this based on frustration that you were doing laundry and it was, or you just like, oh, I have this idea and I think I can do this better than other people?
Yeah, it seemed like there and the laundromats that were in this area that I grew up in were a little sketchy.
And I thought, if you could just make it clean and safe and then have this different economic model.
And also, when you had the attendant at the laundromat, I mean, certainly when you're dealing with mostly cash, you want to be able to track these things.
So the computer system allowed you to track every nickel that came in, so to speak.
And so that was very helpful for being in a business.
So you knew what the register should have?
That's exactly right.
And what's in the register?
Yeah. And made sure everybody knew that.
So you had this taste of entrepreneurial freedom almost.
It's really, it strikes me as a little bit rare almost that you would go work for somebody else, even as a partner after that.
Well, it was a pretty independent shop.
In other words, you would look for your own deals.
That is one thing I was fairly certain of at a young age, that I'm unemployable.
And I think for whatever reason, just being able to see something maybe a little bit differently and say, this is what I want to do.
And at least if it doesn't work, I certainly have myself to blame.
But one of the things that I enjoy doing, some university and college lectures, which is great for me, I'm not one of the things that I'm asked for advice is to be as intellectually honest as you can be, about not only your skill sets, but what you enjoy, what motivates you.
Because if you're constantly saying like, okay, this is the ideal profile of myself or my projected self, versus no, this is actually the way I'm wired.
This is what I enjoy.
This is what motivates me.
This is something that I'm really good at.
You have to put yourself in a position to be successful.
Otherwise, I think you're going to end up frustrated and not as productive as you can be.
So it's not easy to do I think.
But if you can really be introspective about it and brutally intellectually honest about your own makeup, I think that's very helpful.
How do you do that for yourself?
It's so easy to say that.
I'm wondering what is your process.
It's much harder in practice.
I think the first thing is for me, I always look at mistakes that I've made and try to do true post mortems.
And if you're constantly giving yourself an out, like, well, yes, I probably didn't make a great decision here, but these three circumstances or these things happened and therefore, and what I try to look for is, okay, there are certain times the ball just doesn't bounce your way and you can't dwell too
much on that. But where are the things that I find a common thread in, hey, you're ending up in the same place here and are you philosophically wrong?
Are you not taking in the right information?
Are you being emotional about this?
Are you surrounding yourself with the right people for whatever the job is, so to speak?
And if I find, geez, I keep finding myself back in this spot or that if it's I've put myself in a position to succeed or fail, do I look at it and say, you know, sports is a big part of my life.
So if you're in the World Series and it's the bottom of the ninth inning and you're a relief pitcher and you throw 98 miles an hour, don't get beat on your curve ball, right?
And so I think if you're constantly putting yourself in a position where you're on your back foot, that's hard.
But I think at the end of the day, you have to be willing to look at what has unfolded, what has happened, is there any pattern recognition there?
And then being able to have the sound judgment to say, these are things that happen just because, so I'm not going to beat myself up or read too much into that.
And at the same time, if there are things that are either recurring or you just say, look, we ended up in a tough spot, and here's how we got there.
And I also find that a lot of times when I unpack those things, it can be momentum.
That you've let momentum take you to a place and that you didn't at certain points where you could have jumped off, said, wait a minute, you know, sort of the train is moving.
So you're letting that inertia take over instead of saying, hey, this is not the destination that we want the train going to, and let's stop it.
What example comes to mind when you think of that?
Well, I'll tell you, when I had Legendary and you're making movies 100%, I look back at some of my biggest mistakes were movies that you put together, for example, that you got the directory you wanted, you got a release date, you got the cast, but the script isn't coming together.
For whatever reason, you just kind of feel it, that it's just not there.
But because you've worked so hard, and now there are a bunch of people that are counting on it, and there's a momentum to it, and, you know, all the agencies, everybody involved in the ecosystem now is a stakeholder, and you just kind of, it's tough to put the brakes on.
So I think about that often.
That whole business is one of the more nuanced businesses I've ever been around or involved in.
So you left the VC firm as a partner, you started Legendary.
I want to get into Legendary.
Yeah, so, yeah, basically, what happened there is around 2003, I became fascinated with the media business, but in particular with movies.
I think at the time, it was a $30 billion industry.
It was, I believe, the country's second biggest export.
I'm not sure what it is today.
And, you know, there were a couple of trends that I thought were really interesting.
At that time, there was global expansion.
You had this unbelievable business called DVDs that a lot of the big box retailers were using as a loss leader, great margins.
And I believed very deeply in the ownership of intellectual property, and especially, you know, sort of premium grade A global intellectual property.
And, you know, the thing that struck me is usually with an industry of that size, you will see sort of a institutional capital in and around and among it, right, large private equity or whatever it might be.
And in the movie industry, certainly if you had, if you own Disney stock or News Corp stock, that's available.
But for an industry that size, there was no adjacent capital system.
And I thought that that would be an opportunity.
So I looked very deeply at the data, you know, the previous 10 years of Studio Ultimates, which is the accounting from the movies, and asked myself the following question.
If you hit your plan and you're successful, is there any money to be made?
And I had a bunch of friends that almost had sort of an intervention with me and said, look, you've never been in the media industry.
You don't know anything about this.
You're going to go out to Los Angeles and just get destroyed on this thing.
And, you know, I really had conviction because I had looked at the economics and felt like if you could build it in a different way, you know, and decided very early, I didn't want to have distribution.
I was fortunate enough to partner with Warner Brothers, have them distribute.
And if you could sort of have the right structure and draft off of that global infrastructure, that you could build a nice business.
And then like with anything else, you know, there's certainly luck involved.
I mean, met a young guy at the time named Chris Nolan.
And when our first movie was Batman Begins, obviously he's an incredible generational talent.
And, you know, but there were a lot of things along the way, both, you know, things that worked out remarkably well, and then things that just have so much of a human element and emotion around a business that it's in retrospect really fascinating.
What did you learn about producing movies that you hadn't like, I don't even know anything about producing movies.
Like walk me through what that means?
Well, I think there's a couple of things that I found, or at least that I believed.
First of all, stand as close as you can to absolute talent, right?
And if you can find people that are incredibly talented versus people that were kind of in the right place at the right time, and there is a difference, certainly Chris Nolan is an example of that.
And then you gotta make sure that you're spending an appropriate amount of money.
So if you're trying to make a global tent pole that's going to capture the world's attention, well, you can't spend $30 million on that.
And on the other hand, if you're going to make something that is more contained, you have to spend the right amount of money on that.
And then you have to think about how you're going to get people's attention.
How are you going to market the film?
And each film is like a startup company and has its own fingerprints and so forth.
And then a number of years ago, there were some trends that I started to, that concerned me, as being an independent company.
What were those trends?
There were a couple things.
It used to be if you made a good movie and you tested the movie and had pretty good test scores and you got a good trailer out there, you'd be fine.
And that started to not be the case.
You started to see some corollaries.
And then I think part of it is, when I was growing up and even when I started in the movie business, what else is there to do on a Friday and Saturday night?
You go and it's always since I was a kid, I love movies just as a filmgoer because you go into the theater, the lights go down and you go on this adventure and it's communal and all these other things.
And I think there have been some massive fundamental changes in our society and on entertainment experiences.
I certainly don't think the movies are going away, but one of the things that I would say is that we are clearly in the golden age of television or whatever the expansion of television that this is, and you're seeing some incredibly compelling things being made across not just the traditional folks
in TV, but certainly Amazon, Netflix and Hulu, they've really changed the game.
And part of what that becomes is now you're not in the appointment business anymore, because if you go out to a movie in the theater, well, you have to look it up and say, if I want to experience this, I have to go to this place and it's 740, be in my seat, and that's what it is.
Well, you have an entire generation of people that that's a very foreign concept too.
I have a supercomputer in my pocket and I can listen to any song I want, see any clip I want.
And I think certainly you're seeing the attention span come down, entertainment is coming in faster and faster increments.
And so that makes it much more challenging to get people's attention.
And then the other thing that again, when I was growing up, if you had your favorite movies, you might watch that movie five, six, 10 times.
And I think what happens today is because there is such a glut of high quality entertainment and things to do, and it's not just stuff on Netflix, Xbox Live, watching professional gaming leagues, everything on demand all the time.
And one of the things that I got fascinated with when we had legendary analytics, which we can talk about a little bit, but is I ask our team to sort of build a measurement instead of just what is tracking say we're going to open to for the weekend or what are the ratings of our television division and our
shows and so forth.
I also wanted to understand sort of a meter against your addressable waking hours for media.
How are you making those choices?
And there's only so many hours in a day, right?
So the problem is that if you're trying to keep up with your Netflix queue and you're watching college or professional sports and you look up and it's like, I ask people this all the time who will say, you saw the trailer for the movie and you thought, that's a really good trailer.
I would like to see that.
Well, how many times do you actually go to the movie versus just saying, I'll see it at some other date.
So everybody's doing their job.
Movie is good. The trailer is good.
The marketing department did a good job, but it just boils down to time and attention.
And again, I certainly, the death of the movie business has been described for decades and I don't think that, but I do think it has changed fundamentally and that the business has to shift and change with it.
What do you think those shifts will be in like who wins in the next 10, 15 years?
Well, I mean, I have to, the job that Disney has done is unbelievable.
I mean, they, I think under Bob Iger's leadership and then Alan Horn, who was my partner at Warner Brothers before he went over to Disney, I mean, they went out and cornered the market between Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars with Lucas films and have now, you look at their calendar of releases and it's
basically everybody has to move around Disney.
So I think you're still going to see the big event films worldwide move the needle and be as big as they've ever been.
It's just how many movies for theatrical release are going to come out?
What's the appropriate number and how can you market them in a way that is more efficient, which is something that I got fascinated with and why we had an analytics division.
Just talk to me about that analytics division and what sort of insights you were trying to acquire that you would put into practice with these, not only the movies you were producing perhaps, but the movies that you were trying to market.
So one of the things that became both frustrating to me as well as just okay, we're going to stare at this business model and see if there's another way to do it is our studio partner who would deploy the capital for marketing.
So we would jointly kind of look at the poster and the trailer and all those things, but they would actually go out and decide and they would have buying programs.
So they would go out and buy X number of gross rating points.
What's a gross rating point?
So they would go in and basically buy a block of television that should deliver you X eyeballs and folks, but then I would start to see some of our movies that didn't make any sense.
Like you see a Dark Knight ad on the Golden Girls, that may not be the best use of capital.
And I think we got a $7 million bill on one of the Hangover movies for newspaper display ads.
And I thought that's probably not a great or efficient use of capital.
So I was fortunate.
I'm friendly with Eric Schmidt, who was a chairman of Google and was a shareholder at Legendary.
I went to see Eric and kind of went through with him what I wanted to build.
And we bought a boutique analytics company in Boston with this really sharp guy named Matt Maralda.
And basically what I said is I want to deliver a much more customized message to people.
And I want to be able to insert ourselves into the decision point electronically, both mobile and online.
And if it's clear to me, sort of psychographically that you're not interested in this movie, I don't want to bother you.
And conversely, if you're someone who is persuadable and we could make interested, and so it had a pretty material impact on our business.
We were able to cut out a pretty large chunk of advertising dollars and I think be much more efficient.
We used it across movies and television, then we licensed it to other media companies.
And then other industries came in and it taught me a lot about being able to apply technology and new techniques to spaces that maybe had not had a lot of innovation or had been a little sleepier and being able to get non -linear results on that.
That's fascinating.
What else was in Legendary Holdings?
So there were a couple of pivot points that were helpful ultimately in getting the result that we got.
One was going into China early and before it became fashionable, I guess, and establishing a presence there, trying to build a real brand in China.
We were very lucky that Legendary translates this word, Quan Chi, in Mandarin that means exactly legendary.
And I'm Scottish or symbol.
It was a Celtic knot and it kind of looked.
So those things are just pure luck.
But we spent a lot of time in the market learning about it, hiring a local team.
And we're very successful in putting movies out in that market.
And clearly you have a massive movie -going audience.
Movies were a new thing there and they were building screens and theaters out at an incredible pace and needing content to kind of drive people to the theaters we thought was compelling.
Obviously, we were acquired by a Chinese company, so all those things mattered.
The analytics company I just mentioned was important to us.
We had a television division that had quite a few shows on the air.
We had a company called Nerdist that was an online content sort of aimed at that space.
And it was an incredible experience.
Did you guys ever have a big box office flop?
Oh, yeah. Which one?
Which one comes to mind?
Look, we had Lady in the Water early days with Knight Shyamalan who had done Six Cents and all these big movies.
And that one didn't work.
We had a movie that did very well in China called Great Wall with Matt Damon that was trying to sort of fuse east and west and be kind of a story that was universal and could be told and just didn't connect with audiences.
So, yeah, no question about it.
I think we had a pretty great track record but absolutely had misses.
So when you had misses, how did you go back and extract the signal from that?
Because there's so many variables going on between how you marketed, the time that it comes out, other movies that are coming out, the way that it's produced, the script.
How do you go back and pull out the this is the most probable cause of this failure?
Yeah, I think so there's a couple of things.
First is, was there a fundamental rejection of the concept?
We did another movie that did not connect, was a movie called Black Hat that Michael Mann who's one of the all -time great directors, Chris Hemsworth starred in, all these elements.
And people just didn't want to see a movie about hacking and that being the action step that we're watching Chris Hemsworth hack.
And so I think in some cases you look at it and say, the fundamental concept of the movie was rejected.
And those I think on some continuum hurt the most cause you're like, wow, that just...
You're way off. Connect.
I think other times, you're taking a stack of papers with words on it called a script.
You're creating sort of a mini city when you do a movie and you're sending human beings in to see if they have chemistry.
Whatever's going on in their own lives can sometimes have an impact, how the cast interacts with each other, how the whole thing comes together.
And there's been times where you're like, look, what a great idea for a movie.
It just didn't come together in execution.
And then there's sort of that.
And then I also think there's some things in the zeitgeist that just the mood of the country, so to speak, in the world wants to see that film at that time.
With Universal had a big hit was straight out of Compton and just for whatever reason.
It was a great movie.
Yeah, no, they did an amazing job.
And then I look at something like Jurassic World, which again was a huge hit.
The Jurassic franchise had kind of waned and you capture the magic of Steven Spielberg.
Chris Pratt is suddenly this enormous star and everybody went to the movies.
So I think you just have to look at it and understand what were the things within your control where you made good or bad decisions.
What are the things that look, what are you going to do?
Because movies used to have an opportunity to build an audience and be out for months and word of mouth and so forth.
And because there's so many movies coming out and because there's so much pressure on that opening weekend.
If you're not a success on that opening weekend.
You're gone. So what happens if there's an ice storm in the Eastern United States or opening weekend?
It's just one of those things that when you look at it and kind of unpack what happened, you just have to try to stare at the facts as they are and see what you could do better.
How hands -on were you?
Like assembling a great team is one thing, but were you in there active and like, oh no, we should do this or this would be more exciting or are you more hands off?
It depended on the circumstance.
There were times very, very hands -on throughout an entire project moving.
Certainly. And then you're making a movie with Steven Spielberg or you're making a movie with Chris Nolan, you just make sure you get their catering right.
So you have to know too when to just stay out, right?
And let amazing people do their job.
I think one of the things I used to spend a lot of time on at Legendary was on culture.
And I've always kind of felt like great culture will trump a great business plan every day of the week because you can have an amazing business plan and I guarantee that it'll morph and change and you're going to have to make sometimes big changes.
But if you have a culture that people are excited about working there and you have the right mindset, then making those changes in that journey is going to be a lot easier.
So I spent a lot of time making sure that people were passionate about working there, doing everything we could to be inclusive and to try to be transparent about what we were up to.
I would certainly get up in front of the whole company and explain, look, these are the three things that we're really focused on right now.
And this is what we're trying to do and build.
And it was an amazing experience.
And one of the things that is just crazy about my life and how incredibly lucky I am is all the things that I loved as a kid, Godzilla, Batman, the Jackie Robinson story and then I bled black and gold Pittsburgh Steelers since I was a little boy.
It is remarkable that I got to partake and be around some of the things that I loved since I was a kid.
So it was a pretty remarkable journey.
I want to talk to you about the NFL.
At what point did you buy a part of the Steelers?
Were you still with Legendary or was that post -Legendary?
No, it was. So my first year in the ownership group was 2008 in which we won the Super Bowl that year, which was amazing.
And growing up right on the Pennsylvania border in upstate New York, the first football game I ever saw was the Steelers and the Super Bowl.
And I just mean the steel curtain, the whole thing.
It was amazing. And what had happened is the Steelers had asked to see a print of We Are Marshall, a movie that we did with Matthew McConaughey.
And so when they asked to see it, I was like, I'll go.
I'll take it. And so I came to Pittsburgh and had the opportunity to spend real time with Mr.
Dan Rooney. And we just hit it off right away.
I think he was probably amused by how passionate I was and how much I knew about the Steelers.
We lost Mr. Rooney, I think it's two years ago now.
But of all the people that I've gotten to meet and spend real time with, I mean, he was just a remarkable man.
And so to be part of the ownership group and your team that you've loved and followed since you were a kid is surreal, to say the least.
So you had these ideas coming in 2008, what an NFL team looks like from the inside.
Where were they different?
How did that line up and not line up?
Well, the interesting parallel between being a legendary and then in professional football is you are squarely in the human being business.
So you're around incredibly talented people.
You're around people that are well compensated and come from all different walks of life and maybe motivated in different ways.
And I think the human element behind the curtain is fascinating because you see people, athletes that come into the NFL that are incredibly talented.
There is no question they have the physical makeup.
And you look at success or in some people that come in and aren't as talented, but for some reason, the light comes off their professionalism, their ability to improve themselves, understand the game, whatever it is, and have impact.
And then there are other people that you just sit there and you're like, my goodness, you're fast, you're strong, you have all the ability in the world, but you're not connecting the dots.
And when the lights come on in the game, you're not your highest and best.
What does it mean to be in the human business?
What does that tangibly mean from how you organize things from how you run things to how you think about problems?
Well, I think the first thing that I think about, especially in something that's as physically demanding is the NFL is how do you check the box on everything you can in terms of comfort and performance and saying, look, want to provide an atmosphere in which you have all the tools at your disposal to
be successful. And then also one of the things I can't speak about other teams, because obviously I have only been inside the Steelers organization.
But I've been told by a lot of players who left and came back or left and then you see them in retirement that the Steelers really are different.
It truly is a family -like atmosphere.
And that certainly starts with the Rooney's.
And we try very hard to take care of our guys.
And I've seen a lot of examples of that that certainly are never going to, nor should they make the press and so forth.
And I just think that when you have athletes that are under such tremendous pressure and under the spotlight like never before, I mean, when you talk to the guys that played back in the 70s, there was no social media.
There weren't camera phones.
There weren't. So the scrutiny and the opportunity to make mistakes and whatever is more certainly than it's ever been.
And I think that when I talk about being in the human being business, it's that everybody in that arena is incredibly talented and how do you separate yourself and how do you make sure that your team is not just motivated professionally, but they feel appreciated and all those things I think are those
intangibles are important.
What makes the difference between somebody who comes out and say like the first round, he's got all of the physical traits that you would look for and raw talent.
Like what makes the difference between success or failure in the NFL where everybody's talented and that delta between talent probably matters a little bit.
Is that the most important thing?
What separates people?
It's interesting. I think part of it and this is across business, across any walk of life, but I think particularly in the NFL that grittiness, your ability to overcome things and to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
I look at somebody like Antonio Brown, who was a fourth round pick coming out of central Michigan and I remember having a conversation with him at the end of his rookie year and he just kept asking me like, what else can I do?
And I just hooked him up with a nutritionist, this guy named Chris Talley, who's one of the best nutritionists in the country.
And not only did he go and follow through, but has become like religious about what he puts into his body in terms of food.
And then trains harder than everybody else and just never takes a rep off.
I watch him in practice and I'm like, well, that's why he's the best in the world because - Every rep is a game rep.
You look at other guys that again came in with first round talent or just look like they ought to be able to dominate and whether they're not willing to put the work in, whether they're not willing to do all the little things in terms of taking care of your body.
I'm a huge believer in sleep hygiene, certainly nutrition, training, all those different things that go into maximizing your talent.
And especially in a lot of cases, you have guys that, from the time they walked onto a field were clearly better than anybody else.
And whether they worked hard or they didn't, the results were going to be the same.
And so that's the other thing that I think either kicks in or doesn't kick in that, hey, what got you here may not be enough.
Walk me through what surprised you the most about when you got to peer inside an NFL organization.
I would say, and again, I think, and I certainly have a prejudiced point of view on this because it's not like I grew up a fan of another team and got involved with the Steelers and begrudgingly that, so I know that my point of view is going to be skewed on this, but one of the things that was great to
see is I was a little bit worried because after I had gotten to know Mr.
Rooney for a few years, that when you got a look behind the curtain, that, okay, sort of the folksy right and the image that I have of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the family of it, how they conduct themselves.
And again, the most pleasant surprise was doesn't matter if there's no microphones, there's nobody else around the conduct is the same.
And that's something that I think the organization takes real pride in.
I was a little surprised, and certainly this has come a long way in football and certainly in our own organization, with using data and analytics, which it's a physical, emotional game, so I don't believe you can make all your decisions by slide rule or abacus, but being aware of your own tendencies, self
-scouting, thinking about little ways that you can improve your chances, I think are very, very important.
And now that the NFL has a massive pool of data that it's sharing with all the teams, I think if you're not prepared to take advantage of that, you're...
What does the analytics look like inside of an NFL team now?
Do you know like what your offensive coordinator is prone to call in certain situations of a game?
And is that information available in real time on the sidelines?
Cause it seems like there's like an anti -technology bent on the sidelines.
Well, I wouldn't say there's anti -technology, just the problem in game, things are happening so fast.
I mean, you can certainly make half -time adjustments and other things, but I think it's more in how you prepared.
And one of the things to me is that if we're able to self -scout and pick up your tendencies, well, then probably means that the other teams can as well.
And I think because there's much more information available now, even down to, you know how fast exactly the guys are running on field.
So when you say, huh, I wonder if they're corner, everybody's saying has lost a step or has a hamstring.
Well, you can actually tell.
You can tell. Right?
What's the reaction time?
How's everything going?
And the teams and the athletes are so remarkable now that I think just any little advantage that you can gain is helpful.
So do all teams have the same information?
Do they all use it in the same way?
Where's the edge in terms of analytics and who does analytics really well versus who's still learning?
Again, I would never opine about somebody else's organization.
I think we're very fortunate in Pittsburgh.
We're sitting next to Carnegie Mellon University, which is one of the top in the world for analytics, machine learning, AI.
And so the person who runs our analytics division is from Carnegie Mellon.
And we have tremendous resources there.
Is that the future of sports?
And are those algorithms or sort of insights proprietary now more than they used to be?
Yeah, I think so. And I think that it really is a blend of art and science though, because you still have to be able to think about how, again, human beings are going to function and leverage situations.
And you're going to have to, you know, I think the highest and best outcomes are where you use the information and the technology, but you're able to interpret it and apply it instead of just saying...
To inform your decision.
That's exactly right.
And I think certainly you look at baseball, it has become an arms race.
And for the teams a number of years ago that rejected it and say, we're not doing that, well, you know, it's tough to be playing in October when you don't have the right amount of information.
And certainly baseball is easier to apply analytics because you have a lot of one -on -one match -ups.
Exactly. So it's easier to apply, but football's come a long way.
Do you think we'll ever see like an AI version of an offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator?
Yeah, I mean... Just from calling plays, not from coaching perspective, but it's like this play, we know what's going on on the field.
We have real -time data where...
That would not surprise me.
I mean, or at least, you know, like Jarvis in Iron Man, right?
Like here's what you should do.
I mean, that to me is not far fetched at all.
How far away do you think we would be from that?
That's an interesting question because I always find that technology usually happens slower than you think, and then suddenly.
Because if somebody used it and it worked, it would be like nobody's wearing headsets and able to communicate upstairs and then all of a sudden one person does and that's an unfair advantage.
So I would be completely guessing, but I think over the next five to 10 years, you're going to see remarkable advancements across the board in artificial intelligence.
So... We had a point where we're using analytics to adjust players practice routines in the sense of this player worked really hard, we need to give them more of a rest, this player can work harder, they can go more reps.
How are we using that to inform the individual players outside of games?
I'm not sure we're quite there yet.
There are tests where the guys, you spit in a cup essentially and it says, look, you're low on X, Y, and Z, you should hydrate or you should...
So I know there are clubs using some things like that.
I'm not aware yet of using that level of granularity at practice, but...
Do you think that's where we're going or will it always just be this element of...
I think in the foreseeable future, it will be a tool in the toolbox but not...
The tool. Yeah, but look, like anything else, but sports is a great imitator, so if somebody employed those types of things and won the Super Bowl or won the World Series, you can bet that people are going to emulate it.
What's the difference between, without getting into specifics, but the teams that are perennially good in a salary cap era, which is hard, and teams that sort of build up, they have one or two years of success and then they fall off the clip, is that all salary cap management or is it...
Man, my own personal opinion is it's a number of things.
Again, back to that word of culture, do you have athletes that want to play for you and want to play in that city so that when you're talking about second contracts and people you want to keep, can you make a compelling case?
Certainly salary cap management is important.
I think continuity is huge.
In coaching staff and sisters.
Absolutely. I mean, look, there are times changes need to be made, but I often find it fascinating and remarkable how quickly coaches and coaching staffs get changed out.
The Steelers have had three coaches since I've been alive.
And that's an extreme, obviously, but I think...
Cower Tomlin and who is the...?
Chuck Knoll, obviously.
Chuck Knoll, yeah. Hall of Fame Chuck Knoll.
But I think that you look at the teams over the past 10, 20, 25 years that are constantly competing and in the conversation, in the playoffs every year and relevant, you can't say that that's blind luck, not over that amount of time.
So then you kind of look at what those organizations do differently to keep themselves in that equation.
And then there's other teams that just seem to struggle year in and year out.
Those teams maybe have to ask themselves a different set of questions.
So let's go back to legendary for a second.
Why did you end up selling and what year was that?
It'll be three years ago this March.
So yeah, 2016. Well, I think a couple things.
I had been in the business for long enough that it was, I think it was time for me personally to to think about something else.
And look at the end of the day, my principal job was to make sure that I delivered for our shareholders.
And fortunately that happened in this case.
And we had the opportunity to not only be bought by a company and this is Wanda, a big company in China, but with some of the expansion and some of the opportunity in China as a growth business, it was maybe the right partner and direction to take.
And some of the lessons learned or the things that got me interested, like I mentioned, legendary analytics, that sort of experience led me to Tulko, which is my, you know, the holding company that I have now and what we're up to.
Talk to me about that.
Because you clearly see an opportunity that's not.
Yeah, the idea from Tulko kind of sprang from that experience with legendary analytics and again, taking something that was kind of a stayed business model, but with large numbers and applying technology and getting a pretty good result.
So the thesis is basically it's a holding company.
It's not a fund or a, you know, a two and 20 model.
It's an operating company.
And in the middle of it is Tulko Labs in which we have a bunch of incredibly talented folks in machine learning and AI and data science.
And we'll look to buy companies that are in sort of large, but maybe sleepy spaces and reimagine the way they do business, employing technology and hopefully getting, you know, a pretty big result.
Give me an example of what you're doing.
So there's a company, one of the companies that we own is called Figz and it was started by these two brilliant women and they basically reinvented the medical wear, the scrub and other sort of clothing adjacent to that.
And, you know, anti -microbial, anti -stain did all these innovative things, made it fashionable and breathable.
And so when I first started to get to know the company, when I would talk to doctors and nurses and people in the medical space, they were passionate about it and they had huge cult following.
And then what we talked about is, you know, building an online and mobile platform in which you're selling directly to healthcare professionals.
And they have, you know, were just named by Ink magazine is one of the fastest growing companies and most innovative and they're just doing, you know, a remarkable job.
And, you know, part of our job is to, you know, partner with people like this who have deep domain expertise to provide the capital and the technical wherewithal to help them, you know, really propel themselves forward.
And, you know, so it's going really well and it's a different set of challenges.
And I, you know, I really enjoy it because every day you're kind of looking at new businesses and new markets and saying, you know, how can we kind of employ what we've learned or technology that we have?
And it's kind of cool too to just to have the, you know, the folks in the lab always say to me like, we're not writing white papers, right?
Like we've come up with a solution and in two weeks we get to see if it works and see the results.
So that's kind of exciting.
How do you make these decisions on what companies to buy?
I imagine you're saying no to yourself a lot more than you're saying, yes.
What are the differences between like how, walk me through that process?
Well, for us, I think it's, first of all, is there enough there in terms of scale and size, right?
Because we're not, again, it's not a venture fund, so we're not placing small bets.
We're doing concentrated number of companies and trying to make sure that we have the right size and scale that's appropriate to kind of put your shoulder behind.
And then the second thing is, you know, you've got to find the sweet spot with the management teams that again have our experts in their space, but embrace change.
Because if you find experts in the space, but they say, well, you know, I would certainly love a check from you, but I don't know about this new thing that you want to do, that's probably not going to turn out very well.
And then I think it's a big enough category and being able to see, I always try to ask myself, if you execute, does it matter?
Is there enough sort of there, there, and is there enough, you know, upside and all those other things?
And so, you know, and then the last thing that we aspire to and that we talk about is causing outcome.
So rather than just saying, look, we're going to make some choices and hopefully it works out.
We really try to make sure that if we can't have a clear path to how we think we can help cause the outcome, then, you know, it's not for us either.
So we try to be pretty focused.
Like how do you determine, I guess is a better way to phrase this, like you're giving somebody a check, it's enough money for them to retire.
How do you align the incentives after that point?
Well, in a lot of cases, well, there's a couple of things.
We like it when the management team still has enough skin in the game that it's not, hey, we just bought your company, you don't own any shares anymore and you're just getting a paycheck and running out the clock.
That's not a great situation.
So what we like to do is situations that we can partner with companies, buy them or large majority or, you know, a large stake, you know, buying out previous investors or shareholders, if there are any, certainly allowing them to take some money off the table where appropriate, but then providing growth
capital for the company.
So that's why, you know, I don't think we're going to end up with 40 companies because each case is pretty unique and you want to make sure that you can check those boxes.
Are you having fun?
I am. I mean, look, as I get older, one of the things I constantly ask myself is each day when you go to bed every night and you're like, well, that day's over.
Did you spend the day the way you wanted to?
You know, are you still intellectually curious?
Are you still, you know, excited about what you're doing every day?
And unless somebody's invented something I'm not aware of, the one thing that we can't make anymore of is time.
So I try to be as thoughtful as I can about, you know, how I spend my time and, you know, and trying to do everything I can do.
At this point, I find myself thinking a lot about, like, the most elemental things, right?
You start thinking about your health and wellbeing and, okay, what am I doing, you know, if your workouts are part of your lifestyle versus, oh, I better jump on the tread because I've had a bad week of eating or something, you know, again, sleep hygiene, nutrition, and then certainly spending time
with your family and friends and, you know, and I think, I am certainly an optimist at heart and one of the luckiest human beings walking the planet.
And so, you know, I always believe in the future.
I do think we've come through and are in the middle right now of a time that seems like there's a lot of chaos and uncertainty.
And one of the things that I try to think a lot about is if there's someone that is important to you, whether it's a family member, whether it's someone that's been a mentor, or just somebody that you like, take the time to express that and tell them how important they are to you.
And then I just, I think to myself a lot about all you can ever do is if at the end of the day you say to yourself, look, today at least I did the best that I could and the things that I believe in, like that I really believe in.
Not just, you know, I wrote down on some list that people are going to see, am I living towards that or applying that and, you know, trying to make your way through it.
You have access to some of the best resources in the world when it comes to nutrition and sleep and health.
What have you learned that you wish more people would know or what really makes a difference for you?
Well, there's a couple of, you know, there's a book by Matthew Walker called Why We Sleep that had a pretty profound impact on me.
And I've been fortunate enough to get to know Matthew a little bit, a brilliant guy.
What I'm trying to do is again, find the difference between the easy fad thing or if somebody tells you like, oh, if you lay down on this electrical field, you know, versus things that are tried and true and communities and so forth where, you know, the stakes are pretty high and they've had some results
with things. But, you know, I just think there are so many random things that can happen to you.
And, you know, I have, certainly we all do have friends and family or people that we know that something that's happened to them.
That event is so impactful that their whole life is marked before that incident and after that incident.
You know, last year on The Steelers, our linebacker Ryan Shazier, who I'm very close, he's a remarkable young man, one tackle and one play.
And, you know, he went down and you could tell right away that it was bad.
And for three weeks of watching him every day at the hospital, there didn't look like there was a lot of hope that he would ever walk again.
And through his hard work and commitment, thankfully, he's, you know, he's done that.
I read, I'm not as good at it as I wish I was, but I read a lot of stoicism because it rings true to me.
I read the words and I'm like, you know, I actually think that's right and true.
All you have are your own reasoned choices and those types of things.
Try to take as much of emotion out of this.
I can, which I am clearly not far from perfect at, but I just, I think in life, I've had the opportunity to experience and do things that are beyond my wildest dreams.
And I just think at the end of the day, a lot of it boils down to, you know, your relationships and how you, what kind of a friend are you?
What kind of a, you know, a parent are you?
What kind of a, and, you know, you want to be able to answer to yourself that you've done as good as you can do on those fronts.
That's amazing. One of the ways that we connected a couple of years ago was your intellectual sort of like curiosity and lending on Vernon Street and we've gotten to know each other a bit since then.
Was it always that way or is that something that developed in you after school?
No, I have to say that one of the things that I know made a big difference for me, and I constantly talk to my little guys about this, is reading.
You know, and ever since I was a kid, because, you know, we didn't have a lot, but you could always lose yourself in a book and, you know, be transported to wherever, whether it was, you know, reading Lord of the Rings for the first time or, you know, reading about science or history.
And so I've always been a pretty voracious reader across a lot of topics.
And I just am so fascinated by the way the world works that, you know, I try, it's just involuntary.
It's not even something that I, you know, set out to do.
It's just kind of the way I'm wired.
How do you, as a parent, like what do you actively do to try to instill that in your kids?
You have two twins, right?
I do. Yeah, twin boys.
I would say a couple of things that the first is to encourage them to be intellectually curious and to wonder how things work and ask questions and read and so forth.
And then, you know, you also kind of balance that also.
We talk a ton about character and the things and habits that will carry through.
Like we all do little things each day and those little things add up to who we are.
So I talk to them a lot about that.
And it's one of, I've said to a couple of friends that are recently new parents that it's the one experience I've had that was undersold and, you know, has just been the greatest experience of my life.
I would agree with that.
I think that's probably a great place to end this conversation.
It was a fascinating chatting with you.
Thank you very much for having me.
Hey guys, this is Shane again.
Just a few more things before we wrap up.
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