This is the Gary V. Audio Experience.

All right podcast nation we are back as I said many times with the V friends and a T project exploding I'll be doing less interviews in 2022 but more meaningful ones or

I think people that I think can bring you a lot of value and our guest today is definitely someone who share friends and I've heard really great things but we've never really been able to chop up as a matter of fact this is the first time we're really even jamming together but

Thomas told us with us I'm going to let him kind of give us a three minute five minute two minute kind of comic book number one little bio and how he sees himself or things he's done and then we'll kind of shoot the shit about

some of those themes and kind of where the world is my friend how are you? I'm good I'm good thank you for having me on. I'm happy to do it so for everybody on here that you know when they Google you it says American businessman how do you speak about yourself.

Hopefully very little that's that's always feels awkward strange and you know so look I've been very fortunate in my life there's no no question about it and what I enjoy doing is looking at opportunities markets companies and then applying innovation technology and so forth to hopefully give that company

a chance to do something both different and profitable and I've gone through you know a number of iterations in my career from being in tech venture capital my background is in tech and finance took a big left hand turn in my life I had no media experience but I was fascinated by the way movies and television was financed and the revenue streams

this was back in 2004 and thought I could bring institutional capital to that ecosystem built legendary into a pretty sizable company along the way introduce.

Who's listening what what is legendary a production company?

Yeah so legendary was is a production company that does movies television there was a comic book division there was a digital division you know et cetera I sold the company back in 2016

and one of the things that happened along the way is using data science to do we felt like a much better job of deploying capital not to make film and television or to for dict how audiences would feel and all that stuff I you know I had the chance to partner with Chris Nolan and folks like that so that on the creative side that that worked well

but we were really the first company to use data science to find people who were persuadable to find audiences and talk to them in a very sort of bespoke way in order to cause an outcome and that that made a big difference for the company that led me after selling it to form tall co which I know is not very imaginative in terms of you but it's a holding company.

I'm not going to somebody who's got Vayner Vayner land I mean I'm I like it just makes it easy.

Well in our case the joke of it was they kept asking me to come up with a name and it's a holding company right so it's not a plan right when they kept jokingly instead of calling it new code they call it tall co and one day they're like look man we need to wire money so what's the name of the company and that I'd love to tell you a better story that that's how that happened

and the idea behind tall co was we go and buy either whole companies or usually controlling stakes in them and besides providing the capital and hopefully some business acumen we also had tall co labs which was sort of a you know I was always enamored with bell labs and what bell labs met in turn of innovation so we had practitioners of artificial intelligence machine learning data science

so we would bring those resources to bear in companies that didn't traditionally have a lot of innovation and would not have access to folks like that and it's work well.

You know tell me do you do you think of yourself as an operator?

Well I certainly you know I was I ran legendary and so forth but it's not my it's not my favorite thing to do my favorite thing.

I'm sorry I finished your thought well not just going to say my favorite thing to do is to partner with great operators and provide capital input you know access to strategic financial strategic financial arbitrage.

Yes but I think also if I have any skill sets which is certainly up for debate it's looking at a business or looking at a sector and thinking about it differently right and saying.

I don't see what space see what you know it's funny I mean like let's actually break this down because even just listening to the way you're deploying humility and a little self deprecation because I understand it and I do it at times though I'm a little bit more comfortable being like look I'm really good at this one thing and I suck shit my I usually go with I suck shit at these 99 things but I'm fucking really good at this one thing let's break this down because I now I'm starting to see where I may want to take this we have a lot of people listening.

In 40 I mean what is it really actually in eight minutes what's very clear to me I'm like oh here's my connection point with this other winning player there's a level of self awareness that I am hypothesizing that we share that allows us to squeeze the shit out of the things we like and are good at.

...