Each Blockbuster Is a Startup. The Chocolate River Kills It.

In 2004 a man from upstate New York who had never made a movie, and had never worked a day in television, went to the capital markets and said he wanted to start a film company. Two decades of output later, the slate associated with Thomas Tull and Legendary Entertainment includes the Dark Knight trilogy, the Hangover films, Godzilla, Inception, Jurassic World, and 300. In the same life he led a $50 million seed round to resurrect the woolly mammoth, sits as a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and plays guitar in Ghost Hounds on tour with the Rolling Stones. Lex Fridman spends more than two hours trying to find the single judgment system underneath those parallel lives.

Asked what it takes to make an epic, Tull starts where a fan would: a great story, which means a great director and a fantastic script that can take iconic characters, put a stamp on them, and still respect the mythology. He had zero experience when he started Legendary. Landing five films with Christopher Nolan, who turned out to be one of the great filmmakers of the era, he calls total luck. Nobody knew that yet. Each picture, he says, is its own little startup: its own budget, its own team, its own way of working or failing.

Fridman asks who the CEO of that little company is. Tull will not flatten it to one job. A big movie is a 360-degree effort: digital effects, actors the audience actually believes, a cast that has chemistry even if every name is gifted on paper. You begin with a stack of paper called a script and ask an audience to believe everything you put on screen. The director is the general on the battlefield; a strong, hands-on producer changes the texture again. There is no formula. Without the director and the script as foundation, it is hard to pull off.

The business has changed radically since 2004, when DVDs were still a cash cow. Tull's business reason for starting Legendary was simpler than cinephilia. Movies were a $30 billion industry with no institutional capital around them. Almost every other category of that size had private equity and a cottage industry of funds circling it. He was perplexed and fascinated that film did not. The way the movie business worked, he says, was unlike any industry he had studied. After a long argument with himself that you could actually make money if you were disciplined, he went out and raised from the capital markets — still, he thinks, maybe the hardest thing he has done in his career: walking around with no experience and asking people to believe him.

He was fortunate to partner with Warner Bros., then run by Alan Horn, a creative executive who also had a Harvard MBA and understood what Tull wanted. Horn later ran Disney through Marvel and Star Wars. Between Harry Potter, the Dark Knight films, and the Disney years, Tull says Horn has had as great a career as anyone he has heard of in the business. Legendary's first focus was two concepts: global tentpole films and franchises, and bringing long-term institutional capital to bear.

Institutional capital, for listeners who do not live in that language, is not your successful friends. It is Fidelity, T. Rowe, a sovereign wealth fund, a university endowment: large, organized pools with a long-term point of view. Money from the dentist next door can be recalled when times get hard. Fidelity or Morgan Stanley can say they are looking at five to ten years. Patient capital means fewer counterparties and larger checks. It also means professionals who are largely dispassionate: hit the numbers you promised and they are fine. The idiosyncrasy of movies and television is that everyone has an opinion. Invest in an AI company or a chipset and most institutions lack the technical expertise to second-guess the work. Invest in a film and they will tell you that you chose the wrong actor. Tull treats that noise as a feature of the trade, not a complaint.

What kind of money produces works of genius, in AI or in movies? Enough that you are not nervous about the edges — if you have a hundred dollars and the perpetual-motion machine costs $104, you cannot build it. Patient enough that extraordinary things, which break stuff and leave film on the cutting-room floor, have time. And aligned, philosophically and mechanically, with management on culture, goals, and the metrics you will actually use. Fridman then asks the weirder question: is more money always better? Tull's answer is no. He likes constraints.

If you feel you have unlimited or renewable resources, there is no leverage in the situation. Fail, and you just go get more money. That is a hard way to be resilient, and a hard way to invent new solutions. Starve the oxygen until the team makes short-term, unstrategic decisions to pay the rent, and you have gone too far the other way. The other extreme is an everlasting gobstopper of cash. That erases the friction points he thinks actually produce transformative work. He extends the point to society: hard times force you to do things you do not want to do because you are tired, and that builds the muscle of being comfortable while uncomfortable. He thinks we are losing some of that, with the caveat that you cannot paint with a wide brush.

Fridman adds that difficulty is a filter: most people fail at the hard thing, so hardness is a feature. Tull loves being told something is impossible, because then a lot of people will believe it, which is a chance to be the person who shows it is not — you might be wrong, but if you are not, you stand outside the crowd. Asked for the most expensive film he was involved in, without numbers, he names Jurassic World and The Dark Knight Rises, then draws a line: expensive and irresponsible are not the same. Some visions cost a lot and, on the page, earn it. Dinosaurs are not real, so computer graphics eat a massive share of those budgets, especially if you are inventing as you go. James Cameron designs the plane while it is flying. On Titanic the underwater cameras he needed did not exist, so he invented them, with enough engineering grasp to lead a team that could build them. Tull visited an early Avatar warehouse, heard how they captured performance and could go back later because the environment was digital, and told them this was a genuine leap. Effects in the hands of Nolan, Cameron, or Guillermo del Toro enhance the story until you feel immersed. Effects used to paper over a boring story get in the way.

Tull left the movie business at an interesting time. Asked where the next Godfather will live — film, television, TikTok — he adds a category people skip: truly immersive virtual reality. When there is enough compute to sustain it, when it can be social, when you can take different paths, new storytellers will show up. One version is Ready Player One: you enter a fully rendered world as yourself. Another sits between passive watching and a movable point of view. A third blends games and narrative — a mission, obstacles, immersion, and a story at once. The people who know how to make you feel something in that environment, he says, are not famous yet.

Around 2015 Netflix put out House of Cards, dropped a whole season, and left pacing to the viewer. Anyone in Hollywood who now says everyone thought that was a great idea, Tull says, is not being truthful. Everyone he talked to said they were idiots who knew nothing about movies and TV. What he saw next was more important: Netflix realized there was no moat around the studios. You could actually make good stuff. They started creating their own content, which pulled in Amazon, Google through YouTube, Hulu, then Disney Plus. Some of the largest balance sheets on the planet entered the creative business. If you are an independent, that is bringing a knife to a gunfight. Movies used to be where the big things happened and television was the small screen. Then Game of Thrones arrived at an epic visual and storytelling level, with the budget to match. Creators are no longer pigeonholed into two hours; a three-part or five-part series can do things a feature cannot.

Companies are letterhead; it boils down to people. Ted Sarandos, who ran the Netflix studio and later the company, understood early how to cultivate talent whose motivations are not always capitalistic. Tull will not bury the theater. A darkened room of strangers, lights down, a journey: that is still a different experience. Legendary's Dune, a book he had loved for years and whose rights once made him over the moon, is a movie he thinks you see on a big screen. He wants Avatar 2 that way too. Not all of the ton of content being produced will go there. Fridman wonders whether films stay historic — Oscars, De Niro, Scorsese — while even epic television is forgotten faster. Tull does not refute it. He loves movies, thinks Hollywood had something in the water, and expects multiple formats to coexist over the next five to ten years. Short form is harder because you have less time to set things up; if a moving image still makes you feel something and stay with you, that is just the next evolution between humans and cameras.

Tull's holding company is named Tulco, unimaginatively, because every good name is taken. A fund has a vintage year: raise, invest for a set period, give the money back, which creates artificial time pressure. A holding company is more permanent capital. The idea is to buy whole companies or majority stakes, in spaces that have not traditionally had much innovation, with management teams that want the journey, and then send in a labs group of data scientists, AI practitioners, engineers, and machine-learning people. The pitch is not a check and a pep talk. It is capital plus talent those companies would struggle to recruit on their own.

Why don't large old-line companies just pivot? Two ordinary reasons. Human behavior: if it is uncomfortable, outside your expertise, and you already feel successful, you shy away. And the way public companies are weighed every quarter. You are rewarding managers to hit metrics and be reliable. Standing up to say ignore our projections for two years while we reinvent ourselves, and in five to seven years you will see it was smart, is not how capitalism is currently wired. Yearly bonuses and options tied to stock price, then a request to go break things, is a hard combination. Steering a ship that big is hard, especially if technology is not in the company's DNA. America, he adds, still invents; MIT still feels like Hogwarts; Silicon Valley's energy now has an ecosystem in Austin. That drive is bigger than the machine of capitalism. It is the doing, not the cynical talking.

Two portfolio pictures. FIGS, healthcare workwear, started by two women Tull calls brilliant. Early on Tulco helped build the platform and recruit so that everything at the company embraced technology, while the founders stayed obsessive about doctors and nurses on the line and about the product. When those two things meet, you get the result they got. Acrisure, one of the world's largest insurance brokers, has an AI lab in Austin. Founder-CEO Greg Williams, out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the rare insurance executive who actually understood actuarial science, predictive analytics, and machine learning running every aspect of the business, plus automating tedious back office. They already had a data-collection system and department, which made the pivot easier. There is no one way: sometimes you embed the team, sometimes you help recruit, whatever works. Tull wants to make money. He also asks what you did with your time on earth.

Tull is passionate about America making stuff again — not only the world's greatest blueprints, but actual factories. He has a large personal investment in Rebuild, with people who went through MIT, including former Amazon executive Jeff Wilke. The work is capital and training, aimed at sustainable high-paying jobs, and at making it economically feasible to manufacture here. You cannot just tell companies measured quarter by quarter that it is three times as expensive and they should do it anyway. You have to innovate until the equation balances.

The pandemic made the rest of the argument concrete. He does not think you can be an isolationist in this era; that does not make sense to him. Self-reliance and self-determination do: a nation should never be unable to do basic things because the supply chain lives in other countries, whether because you are no longer friends, because of a natural disaster, or because of a virus. Those are costs of doing business that have to go into the calculus. Resilience is expensive. Once you actually put that cost on the books, long-term domestic high-tech manufacturing starts to look rational.

Where technology is most efficient, he thinks, is the human-machine interface — not automate everything and have nobody work anywhere, which for a long time is neither feasible nor desirable. Enhance jobs, make the interface immensely productive, pair it with training. Robotics, a field he has adjacency to but has not invested in deeply, excites him for dangerous work, for highly repetitious labor that may not be a good thirty-year human experience, for military and rescue, and for the Star Wars-droid version of intelligence plus interaction. AI is happening, he says, slower than most people realize, because standing up without losing your balance is already hard. There is enough private and nation-state investment that it is coming anyway, in software and in the physical world.

He grew up poor in upstate New York with a single mom who worked a couple of jobs. From a young age he shoveled snow and mowed lawns to help keep the lights on in a little place. College was not in the family tree. He did not know what a trust fund or prep school was. His mother, from early on, said he was going to college; that became an expectation. His grandmother was a hospital janitor, a cleaning lady, for fifty years. He remembers being about ten, freezing, and knowing that if he did not go out and shovel six driveways they would not have enough to pay the bill. He is not a psychologist and will not diagnose how that lives in him now. He can name the muscle: I am not in the mood, I do not want to, and the work still needs to be done. No victim speech. It is what it is.

Success makes it easy to get soft. He stays weighed and measured — that is part of why he loves sports, there is a scoreboard — and he is a believer in opportunity and meritocracy as ideals. His little mantra is cause the outcome, as much as you can, without the hubris of thinking you will always cause it, because the universe will kick you quickly. The other practice he talks about in university visits is intellectual honesty, which he calls a superpower. If you make decisions on other people's expectations, or let momentum carry you somewhere you never meant to go, that is a big problem. Some graduates of top schools cannot wait to start a company and want that grind. Others who are just as smart say they do not want to lie awake staring at the ceiling wondering how to make payroll. Square that with yourself. There is a difference between challenging yourself and going against your nature.

Fridman layers it. Intellectual honesty includes admitting that nobody has done the thing you are dreaming, which may mean you are only a dreamer; and admitting, after ten years or a four-year startup that never exploded, that you may need to shut it down — or the opposite honesty of going all in and cutting the distractions. Tull separates reckless from informed. If you go all in, measure twice, cut once. A saying that has stayed with him for years: never mistake a clear line of sight with distance. Seeing it clearly is not the same as being close. Self-awareness is hard; psychologists would say complete self-awareness is rare. You can still work on it, instead of going to medical school because that is what this family does while you are miserable. Gut leaps have unique circumstances. He does not have a deep biotech background, so putting everything into a biotech idea would be a different bet than someone brilliant in their field who sees a wide-open door. Ask how crazy it is on the spectrum, what expertise you have, what the downside is if you fail — young children and a mortgage is one circumstance, just out of Stanford is another.

Tull led the $50 million seed round for Colossal, a de-extinction company using gene editing to restore the woolly mammoth to the Arctic tundra and lost ecosystems — a funny rhyme, Fridman notes, with Jurassic World. Five or six years earlier Tull had met George Church at Harvard, found him incredibly smart and imaginative, and later watched him partner with entrepreneur Ben Lamm. The press grabs the mammoth. Tull, as an investor, is more interested in the work on genes, proteins, and CRISPR, and in being adjacent to Church and his team as those things unfold over the next decade. History's great things are done by people, not logos. After time talking about where the lines are — and knowing that teams in other countries may not have the same checks and are pursuing this regardless — he at least felt Church, Lamm, and their people were responsible. Fridman wants Marcus Aurelius with a PhD from MIT. Tull agrees.

An afternoon with Warren Buffett is something he will treasure. Some immensely successful people, after twenty minutes, look like they were in the right place at the right time. Others are clearly different; drop them at zero and they still end up in a good place. Buffett, in that second group, is intellectually curious and well-read, likes a simple thought matrix, looks for good businesses led by talented managers rather than trying to outsmart the market, and takes in information in a way Tull found impressive. Mid-conversation, talking about Tulco and trying to be smart, Buffett stopped him. Charlie Munger and I, he said, do not try to think of the smart thing to do. We try to think what the dumb thing we could do here is. Tull laughed. Buffett said he was dead serious: what could we do in this situation that later we would call really dumb. It got in Tull's head. He still uses it when he dissects problems.

Fridman does not envy investors in a city of big dreams. If Tull has a lattice for judging, it starts with people, because the business plan is going to change. Very few companies make a widget in one location for thirty years and that is the whole story. Things happen, today at high velocity, and you have to make hard decisions on imperfect information. How will you calculate those answers? How self-interested will you be? What ethics will you apply? Short-term versus long-term? Can you give an honest assessment? Problems are the one thing you can count on. How much elasticity do you have. You also want a shared map of the road ahead, twists allowed, so nobody says this is not what I signed up for.

Honesty and communication are huge. He always tells people, both directions: if something is going on, start with "Lex, we have a problem." Now he is sitting up, full attention. Bad news should travel faster than good news. He can process "I don't know, I have to go figure it out" far better than someone who cannot handle disappointment and kicks the can. In today's environment that is dangerous. Fridman notes it is also a tell about intellectual honesty in the mirror. Tull was not in the rooms that later blew up, but if you unpack many negative outcomes, most people did not start as villains who set out to screw shareholders. He mentions Theranos as the case everyone is staring at. His experience is incremental moves: we will get this right next week, but today we have a presentation, so we tweak a little. That is a slippery slope. You want people you would go into a foxhole with, who will tell you when things happen and try to solve them together.

On the idea itself he asks whether, if the company actually executed, it would matter — whether it moves the needle, and what uniquely positions it. Pitch financials always arrive labeled conservative. He is still waiting for someone to walk in and say the projections are wildly optimistic and they will never hit them. At the end of the day it is still a big risk. You are trying to minimize it.

Ghost Hounds toured with the Rolling Stones in 2019 and were asked back. The Stones are Tull's favorite band, not close, the greatest rock and roll band of all time in his telling. Sharing a stage, taking energy from the crowd, then hearing "ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones" is, he says, incredible. Next year would be their sixtieth anniversary, still packing stadiums, two-hour sets in which every song is an anthem. Nervous? You do not want to screw it up. Individual nerves dissipate when you go out as a group; a solo acoustic set would feel different. Stadiums are cavernous. They use in-ear monitors to protect their hearing, which disconnects you a little from the crowd. When the crowd gets going, the bidirectional energy is like nothing else. With ZZ Top he played 5,000-to-7,000-seat rooms, right on top of people. With Bob Seger, arenas of 20,000 or 30,000, loud and packed. Stadiums are another animal. If he has to pick a favorite size, arenas are the blend. His life, he says, is like a Punk'd episode that no one has burst in on yet.

How does Mick Jagger still have it? Wherever there is excellence, people want the secret. Jagger works out like a maniac. It is the ten-thousand-hours thing, and the day you do not feel your best you still get up and do the routine. Talent plus the brain of an entertainer who can hold a crowd in his palm, plus the work that lets him run around stadiums at his age. A lot of people want the magic trick, the shortcut. Most of the time the answer is there is no shortcut. You work hard on the way there and hard to stay. At that age, with a two-hour show built for younger bodies, it looks like a professional athlete's diet and physical routine. If you want to do great things, you probably have to do hard things.

Favorite Stones songs: *Sympathy for the Devil*, Faustian, a voodoo beat that builds, lyrics that flirt with the trouble caused along the way, playful and dark and dangerous in a way only they pull off. *Gimme Shelter*, and Merry Clayton's studio vocal — they got her out of bed in Los Angeles around ten at night, she said the Rolling Stones what, and killed it; a documentary about backup singers tells that night. *Paint It Black*, a song that builds and, he says, defines a generation.

He was an old-soul kid listening young to Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, B.B. King — five notes from B.B. and it kills you. He never took formal lessons. Other people pick up an instrument and play the record; that was never him. Technique and ear were grind. Rhythm, the right hand, is the closest thing he has to a strength. The band name comes from Robert Johnson lore, the crossroads, and the hellhounds on his trail: what about ghost hounds? He wishes it were a cleverer story. He writes the music and lyrics and has to know the characters; he cannot just match rhymes to a key. In three or four minutes you have to be efficient with language and know what you are building to. *Good Old Days*, a song audiences like on a newer album, came from COVID, from being cut off, and from noticing that reminiscence is often not a big event. It is the summer you went to the lake, who you were with, a pedestrian day that shines later because of the company and the time in your life. We are, right now, living the thing we will reminisce about. These are the good old days.

Greatest guitarist is a ridiculous question he is willing to indulge. Hendrix, a hybrid of blues and rock, is who most guitarists would name; Tull is a huge fan, the fusion with the instrument that pedals still have not explained. Sitting in Austin he has to mention Stevie Ray Vaughan. Then B.B. King, Hubert Sumlin, Clapton still unbelievable on a last tour, John Fogerty, Springsteen after reading the book, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters staying on the one, Chuck Berry. Years ago he made the documentary *It Might Get Loud* with Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White. He came downstairs to a Rolling Stone list of the fifty top guitarists and a financial report showing Guitar Hero as the top video game, and asked what makes the guitar so central to rock and roll. He wanted to ask Jimmy Page why he picked it up. He called Davis Guggenheim, who had directed *An Inconvenient Truth*, then the biggest documentary ever, looking only for advice because he had never made one. Guggenheim said he could not get the idea out of his head; he would direct. They wrote down three names for three eras and styles, and went three for three.

Sitting with Page felt like sitting with Gandalf. Page opened a case, took out the double-neck from *Stairway to Heaven*, and handed it to him: like being handed Excalibur. The Edge is one of the kindest humans he has met. Jack White has that restless, self-pushing energy. They shot three days on a Warner Bros. soundstage they called the Summit. Two things he will not forget: Page starting the riff from *Whole Lotta Love*, and the Edge and Jack White ceasing to be rock gods, fifteen-year-old kids on their faces, the same feeling Tull had; and at the end they did not want to go home, asked to play something acoustic, printed lyrics, sat on the couches, and played The Band's *The Weight*. His own main guitar is a 1959 Les Paul named Hazel — that year is magic, like a Stradivarius — though if forced to pick a shape he says Strat, Hendrix's gravity. Amps: a '59 Fender Twin or a '65 Marshall at home; Two-Rock on the road because vintage tubes are fragile. One old Klon, straight into the amp. He does not drink. He can screw things up plenty without adding anything. Songs start with a riff or a title that tells him where the song wants to live, then he fills in whether the singer is a character or a narrator, happy or sad, where they are in life.

He has bled black and gold since he was little. The first football game he ever saw, in upstate New York on one of three channels, was the Steelers in the Super Bowl: Jack Lambert, Joe Greene, Franco Harris, coming down from Olympus, the Steel Curtain. He met Dan Rooney, whose family started the team in 1933, and was asked into the ownership group at the end of 2007. In 2008 they won the Super Bowl, beyond surreal. The Rooneys are among the most revered families in sports not only for winning. Mr. Rooney helped build the league and, more important, was a civil-rights champion who created what is now called the Rooney Rule, to give minority coaches a fair chance to be hired. The hardest part of the business, Tull says, is not the playbook. It is knowing a player who has done everything asked of him, then having to trade or release him at the end of a career or when the team needs another direction. You have to stand back, somewhat dispassionate, and not be a fan. Jerry Reinsdorf, a fellow baseball Hall of Fame board member, put it: if you act like a fan, you will be sitting with them. Tull immediately draws the boundary. The team belongs to the city and the fans. Owners are custodians. During COVID, with jobs lost and the future uncertain, he watched how sport gathers people again. As a kid with nothing, he poured through box scores and felt ownership of the Yankees and the Steelers. That is a responsibility, not just dollars and cents.

Advice to a high-school or college student who wants a life they can be proud of does not start with changing the world. Intellectual honesty first: who am I, what is important, what do I want to accomplish. Then something like a rules-based philosophy — here is what I will do, here is what I will not — so you can be flexible when you have to be and still have a compass. Absolutes make many decisions come into focus fast: that is not for me, or I am willing to do whatever it takes for this. Then, before the big words, a plainer list. Are you a good friend? Can you be counted on? Do you do what you say? Are you accountable, and do you hold others accountable? Be as intellectually curious and well-read as you can in a world designed to distract you. Sit with your thoughts. Do not decide the fate of the world on two text messages. He has heard resilience and grit described as slightly different and agrees with the split. Life will be tragic and unfair; that is the world. He tries not to enter a victim mindset. We should aspire to a just world. He has not seen that world yet. You still have to function in this one. If you play scared, always afraid to fail, you will not get far.

Out west, in the big sky of Montana and Idaho, he looks up at night with almost no light pollution. The daunting problems shrink. Those stars have been there a billion years. He will be gone. The most famous person on earth two hundred years ago is gone. It is fleeting, so have a good journey. Coming out of COVID, tell the people you care about that you care, keep friendships from turning purely transactional, so that someday, lying there, you can say you were a good family member, a good friend, someone who could be counted on. He reads a lot of Stoicism; he thinks Ryan Holiday has done a good job bringing it back. Memento mori: there is a finality, so contemplate it. Do not fret every day, and do not be so laissez-faire that you think you will live forever. The middle position changes decisions and how you attack things. He would not say he obsesses or that it is omnipresent. Because of the reading, he thinks it is right to pause and ask: there will be an expiration date, and if it happened tomorrow, have I done the things I wanted, and am I the person I wanted to be. Check along the way, not once at the end. Fridman jokes that if talking to Tull were the last thing in his life, he would be all right. The episode closes on Jagger: you cannot always get what you want, but if you try, you might get what you need.