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Please welcome to the stage Alex Rodriguez and Bloomberg's Jason Kelly for a live taping of The Deal.

When we were thinking about who we wanted to be here with us today, we're like, who who embodies all of the things that our power players are the Deal?

You know, what are the brands that we might associate giants Notre Dame and what's the name of that bank that's that's.

Downtowns Yeah, so Wharton Business School.

Wharton Business School.

I think there's literally only one person who fits that, So please help us.

Welcome for this very special taping of The Deal.

Justin Tuck, thanks for being here, Thanks for having me.

This is awesome, all right, take it away.

Chance.

So Justin, I've been such a big fan of yours, and you know, Jason was talking a little bit about, you know, some of the accomplishments you have, some of your history, but you know, being a champions one thing.

Being a champion in New York is another.

And I know that I was very fortunate to be part of one title in two thousand and nine with the Yankees, and it's changed my life, has changed my family, the trajectory of my business.

You got two titles.

How has that impacted your life?

Listen?

I think the first one was just surreal you do it the first time?

And again I was very it was very early in my career.

I think there was year three in my career and you know, your friend, our friend, Michael Strahan was the guy.

So I was just in awe like this whole you know process, and didn't really really didn't hit me into the after the super Bowl, So you didn't I didn't necessarily enjoy like the lead up to the super Bowl because he was you know, you just didn't know.

But that second one, when I was the captain and I had the opportunity of seeing all the things in my life that had changed after we won the first one, and I got to enjoy the process of going through it, whether that was the road trips, whether that was the media, whether that was you know, I had a son at that time and he got the opportunity to experience it.

That type of stuff is just life changing now, not only obviously being in New York and doing it, but just you know, solidifying that like we did it again.

That that was just amazing.

So justin Notre Dame, then undergrad, then you go to business school Warton, then you and two titles with the Giants, and now you're at go Mi Socks.

I mean it's blue trip everywhere.

Yeah, but take me back.

I remember when I was ten years old.

It was the first time that I had a vision for what I wanted my life to be, and I called it the Two Bees.

I was sitting there in New York City watching Heights with my father, watching the Yankees the Mets, and it was at that point that I wanted the Two Bees.

Based on business.

I was driven for those two things.

When did you first start thinking about business?

And which one's harder business or being a Yeah.

I mean listen, I grew up on a pig farm in Kelton, Alabama.

There's probably more people in this room that is in Kelson, Alabama.

I was gonna say, if you were waiting for like Kelton Alabama, No, no.

They're not here.

I'll take I'll take Alabama.

So for me, I think the only thing I thought about was from a sports perspective, is how do I utilize football to provide a phenomenal education that my parents can't afford?

You know, my mom and dad was not going to be able to send me to Notre Dame.

My mom and dad was not going to be able to send me to Warden.

But I knew if I did what I need to do on the football field, and I played basketball and baseball, I knew that was going to afford me the opportunity to go other places.

And so like for me, I never thought about anything other than, hey, play a great football, get a great education.

Time.

And when I started to think about all the other ancillary things that can come off of this, I'm talking.

I'm talking to my cousin at the time, and this is my rookie year in the league, and he said something to me that he had probably heard for someone else.

And this is somewhat of a known phase now, but like he said, the NFL stands for not for long.

And I just started thinking about, all right, if I'm blessed to play four years, and I'm even if I'm blessed to play ten.

I came to the league when I was twenty one years old.

I'd be thirty one when I retired.

What am I gonna do then?

And so I started thinking about that and started really making relationships with people.

I tell all all of my friends that play in leagues.

Now, I was like, make these relationships now while you're hot.

Don't wait till you're like you're the the twelfth year in and you're just hanging on and you're trying to go into some some you know, private acuity owner or some hedge fund founder.

No, do that stuff now while you're hot, while you're winning Super Bowls or you're playing in All Star Games, and then you can they can be a part of your journey.

M right.

I had so many guys that were out of my journey of taking young justin Tuk to think about going to Warden, think about going to Golden Sacks, think about you know, investing in x y Z.

Whereas if I was left to my own advices there, which is fine, I'll probably be back, you know on a form soowre in Alabama, which I love to do.

But I probably wouldn't be doing this if I didn't have those relationships prior to lead me to what the opportunities could be.

Well, and it's interesting too to think about what the what your playbook was, because there are and as there often are in this show, like echoes to you you know, Alex has talked about how you know he would literally like go in his cleats and into Jerry Reins, George's office or you know, other other owners.

You know, my understanding is you were literally like working the suites at at Giants Stadium.

Right?

Is that fair when I say working on networking?

Yeah, for sure.

I don't know if it's uh it's even legal for me to get this information to Beyonce with.

But I had a face.

I had a phenomenal relationship with the Giants, their ownership and people at work, and I was just like, man who owns that?

Who is it?

And most of the time they know that guy he runs x y Z financial Services, or this guy he and his family owns, you know, this real estate group, whatever it looks like.

And like over time, I was just like I just had a good game.

It's Monday, I'm not doing anything.

I should be making relationships.

So I started talking to our staff about, Hey, is there anybody I should be talking to?

So I got names of people who own the suites and started just reaching out to him and just you know, doing a coffee chat or dinner or lunch or whatever it looked like.

And I didn't want anything.

I didn't go in and say, hey, can you help me here?

I just I was interested in how they got to where they got to.

What are some things that you can tell me about your story or your process or your journey that if I decided to go this route, because I don't believe in reinventing the wheel.

I think people have come before all of us that have done on things that we would like to do.

Just learn from them and try not to make the same mistakes they made.

So that was the premise.

And then again overtime they got to see me for eight nine years in the journey of Justin Tuck and now I'm at gold Miss Acts and believe I'm calling those people and being like hey, So that part of it was was phenomenal in my transition because I tell people all the time transition.

If you're thinking about transitioning from something, make it a long transition.

Don't try to just transition, because if you think about I look at me in football, think about how long I played football to get to that point.

So if I'm transitioning to finance, why do I think I'm going to go from being a you know, highly tied football player or athlete and go right into the next transition as that highly tithed person in finance or person in real estate, or person and whatever it is you're doing.

No, no, no, no, you need to get back to being the Pop Warner person over here and go through that process of learning all the ancillary things that's going to make you that Pro Bowl caliber or that All Star caliber business man and not think that our ego is so great that we got to go from here to here.

That's that's not realistic.

Now you're building teams at gold and Sacks kind of the same things you were doing with Giants.

You mentioned you was a captain of the team, right, What lessons and how has that mindset translated to the world of business.

Yeah, I think if I think about things that I would do on a daily basis as a captain of a football team and now as a as a as a managing director of leading teams at Goldman, it's very simple.

To be honest with you, like investing your people around you and football it looks different.

It might be Hey, I'm bringing this rookie and his family into our house and cooking him a meal and making sure I learned everything there is and know about him, his story, his wife, his kids, et cetera, et cetera.

And I used that on the football fields too.

I mean, fourth and one and we need to make a stop.

I know exactly what triggers this person.

I know exactly what his motivations is.

I know exactly what's gonna get him so hyped for this moment right fourth quarter and and we need to get a stop to win a super Bowl and we're tired, and guys are I know exactly how to point those you know the right things.

I knew which guy liked for me to curse amount of the football field.

I knew what God needed to pull to the side and pat him on his back and say, man, it's okay, you're doing this right right, keep doing what you're doing.

I knew exactly how to nagle that.

And the same thing in in in the business and our team's are goldman.

I know exactly how to position our team.

And again, as we bring on new people, you gotta learn that.

But like I know exactly how to position them, what clients they needed to be paired with, and which ones the synergies are right for this person to be paired that that client, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's I think it's very It's it's simple.

If you pay attention to people, if you take a ownership in knowing what your team looks like and what really moves the needed for them, it allows you to make the right decisions around a lot of different things and in the business.

And so from a business perspective, as Alex alluded to, you were blending this early.

You know your interest in business, but you you also had to think about your business as a football player.

How did you think about that?

And you know, I know Alex has had this experience or Alex had this experience of getting smarter about the world of baseball and negotiations and all of that.

How did you do that and how did you think about your deal making as a player.

Yeah, I think I think back to your point about when you win, you get more opportunities.

You get opportunity to sit in some of these rooms that you When I was a rookie, the contract was a contract.

It was you know, you trusted your agent to do the right things for you and get the best outcome for you.

As you got older and you you had more success, you could dictate a little bit more right, and you could you could tell your agent, hey, I want to play for this team or I don't want to play for that team.

I like this, you know.

And then like with the relationships I had with the Maryor family and the Titch family and the gen Ms, I could talk about things around like, hey, here's where I think I'm weak, we're weak.

Here's where I think I can get stronger, and et cetera, et cetera.

Here's where I think the team could get stronger.

And he listened to it.

They didn't listen to me.

To the point was like we were going to just go out and like, hey, justin give us a list of players.

But they listened to us from the perspective they knew, like at the time after Stray left, it was me and Eli's team, so they knew that we owned that locker ship, that locker room.

We like manning for those of you not Eliza Man.

Yeah, yeah, so we owned the locker room.

That locker room was our place, and we didn't allow nonsense in it.

But to that point, we knew the players, We knew what because we were just an extension of coach Coughlin, right, and we knew how to navigate that locker room in a way that we could go back and off season and say, hey, here's where we're strong.

Here is what week.

That was the start of kind of like my deal making or negotiations with when I was thinking about contracts at a later point.

You know, one of the things that we've obviously touched on, but I want to sit for a minute with is you know you do it talk about deals?

You do a deal one day, contracts so you can retire as a as a giant.

Great move.

And then you decide to go to business school.

That's a big decision.

Then you decide to go work for Goldman Sachs.

When you list the sort of places you've been, I think you're one of one.

And so why did you make those decisions?

Why did you decide to go to school?

And then why did you decide to go to Goldman.

There's a lot of decisions there, but like it was probably because I wanted to learn how to be a better steward of the gifts and the talents and the resources God had given me.

Again, growing on where I grew up, not a lot of people get the opportunities that I had, and I didn't want to one of those opportunities, So me going back to business schools to get smarter about, honestly, just managing my own opportunities.

Now that more often to a lot more.

But that was the r that was the the the infancy of the idea.

You wanted to know more about the how to how to run the business.

Of justin absolutely absolutely, cause I was getting inbounds from all different opportunities, right, whether that be on the real estate side, whether that be you know, you know, going into media.

I dibbed in that for a little bit, and then also you know, on the financial financial side.

So I wanted to learn more about that.

Gold honestly was because my grandfather used to say something to me that stuck to this day.

I use it often.

He goes, if you're not if you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

And what he meant by that was there's so many, so many cases in history where decisions have been made for us, and so like, when I think about the relationships and the conversations I had in those locker rooms, and the advice I had to give kids, and I say kids, rookies and younger players is about how to navigate in New York City, whether that was from on the on the field off the fields situation.

When I was really really thinking about what I wanted to do, I started to really think about, you know, how do I represent us at the highest of my ability?

And I couldn't think about any other place that gave me an opportunity to be in these rooms and and be a part of these decisions making deals than in a place like gold Mis Sacks.

And like, you know, I get the opportunity to talk to you know, a lot of our partners of the firm, obviously David and John who are donate absolutely phenomenal jobs.

And John Waldron again is it this guy?

I mean, I mean, you know I called I still call them mister and and and mister and mister They don't they don't like that.

So I'm David and Jones.

But like, uh, I get the opportunity to see that.

And the thing that I always tell my team is I don't really care about owing a bigger piece of the pie.

I care about making pot bigger.

So yeah, that's that's that's what wakes me up in the morning, and I think that's what drives me to continue to be successful.

That's why Goldman Platform platform.

So justin when you think about when you were a rookie and in recent news you saw there was an investor that came in for a Temperacon piece for the Giants at ten billion dollars.

When you were a rookie, it was probably one, two or three.

It's probably four x five x seven x.

A couple of questions there, what do you think is the best investment in sports?

And what do you make of this whole thing?

Where does it stop?

Where does it go?

What are your thoughts?

Listen, I think Roger Goodell and team are doing quick study.

I do you another tip about me?

I listened loudly, but I think Roger's doing a phenomenal job.

And it would be hard pressed to think that there's an investment in sports better than the NFL.

Obviously, I'm biased.

There's a lot of people who represent a lot of sports leagues and sports franchises out there.

They would argue that, and I would take that argument.

But you know, again, where does it stop?

I don't know if it does.

If you think about where media rights are going and now privately acting money coming in the consolidation around, you know, media, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm not smart enough to know where it stops.

I'm not betting on it.

I think I think it is a popular game that's getting popular more popular.

I guess a better question is through if you were the Championship Beer in your second third year, right, if somebody told you the Giants to be worth ten billion dollars in twenty twenty five, would you have said true or false?

I probably said false.

So it'd be interesting to see as we sit here today in twenty twenty five, in twenty thirty five, what this goes.

But I have no reason to think that it has a might have a slowing down power, but I don't think it has a stopping power.

You know, you alluded to something just and you mentioned it private equity coming in.

You know, I had a conversation earlier today with Tom garf Finkland and Mike Garrigetty about Areas investment in the Dolphins.

You know, you are, through your studies and now through your day to day work, very familiar with the power of institutional capital.

How does that change the business of sports in your estimation?

You know, we went through this period where David Blitzer and Josh Harrison, Mark Lasry, et cetera, et cetera.

We're making personal investments.

Now it's fund investments.

How does that How does that alter the landscape, especially for people in this room who are thinking about investing in sports.

When you bring in that much capital in and being able to do a lot of different things, they're going to I think the movement in sports investing is going to be very interesting.

I don't think it's going to stop.

I think you're only going to see more others get involved in it.

And like, I don't just going back to the Giants deal, right, you think about you know, that valuation with no control, no path to ownership.

What's stopping the next team, next owners from doing that?

Like, there's a lot of different issues that I have to deal with on a databasis for clients, whether that's a you know, a state issues, you know, tax issues, et cetera, et cetera.

But like, I just feel like we're at the cusp of this and it's going to start to happen in not only the major league, the major sports leagues, but also some of the smaller ones too, where you know, graduation is a getting so high, what individual can afford these teams?

Right?

And as families like the Marintis family look for liquidity, I think that only the next option is paradactic.

Thinking about the future, the question that I would think about is you know, what would investor pay for Notre Dame football?

Yeah, and I'm just thinking like what world will win?

And how fast is it moving?

But you know as well as I know, right, sometimes this is just a I mean a play of like, forget the numbers.

I just want to own this asset.

So a lot of times Jack can get outragers.

I mean when when when Balmer bought the Clippers at you know, you know what was it?

Two billions billion?

And now it was you were like you're say and now yeah, I mean like so I just I mean, I think, yeah, who knows, right.

But when you think about the college game, I mean, you know we watched, you know you watched.

You watch with much more vested interest.

I watched, just as a college football fan, Notre Dame play University of Miami the other night.

That was a phenomenal game, in part because of everything that was on display, including the transfer portal, nil money, all of those things.

These are the things that didn't exist when you went to one of the premier you would probably say the premier college football programs in the country when you look at that through the Wharton Goldman Justin Tucklan's what do you make of college sports?

These let's I just wish I was eighteen year old, seventeen year old kid, in some cases sixty year old kids, like they're going, it's even diving into college, I mean in high schoolhig school.

Yeah, So, like listen, I definitely did think these athletes deserve to get paid because for those who wasn't a cause athlete, there's not much else for you to do.

The program is so demanding on your time for good reason, right, They're giving you a phenomenal education most places, and you get the opportunity to play the sport you love basically for free.

But like, outside of that, I didn't get the opportunity to really really engage with the student body as much as I would have if I had a few dollars in my pocket, right, and who knew that these athletes are going to be making millions in college.

That's more than a few dollars.

More So, like, I definitely think they deserve to get paid.

I just hope that this thing gets structured around it before it really really gets out of control.

All right, So in our remaining couple of minutes, we're going to do our rapid fire that we do on every episode of The Deal.

First thing that comes to your mind?

Sure?

All right?

Do you seem enthusiastic?

What's one word to describe your deal making style?

Okay?

Truthful?

What's more important to your data or gut?

I would say gut that has been fed the right data.

Who's your dream deal making partner?

Oh?

I don't really have a dream person, but I mean just Alex ros all right, Jason loves out.

What's what's the best piece of advice you ever received on deal making or business?

If you tell the truth is easy to remember.

What's the worst advice you've been given?

You're special?

What is your hype song story behind that?

By the way, what's my hype song?

Phil Collins in there tonight the drum?

So yeah, there you go.

Uh.

You started a literacy nonprofit called Rush with your wife Lauren.

What's your favorite book?

Wow, I'm gonna give a shot to a friend of mine.

I love reading the other Wes More.

Oh, if you're can only watch one sport for the rest of your life, which one is it?

You're all gonna be surprised by this one.

And it's not even about me.

It's about my wife because if I had to watch another sport, I want her right beside me.

So she loves tennis, so I watch.

Oh, there you go.

She's going to see this.

You're not gonna make us cry.

What team do you want to see win a championship more than any notre dame fighting Irish football program?

Just to be very just in case anyone doubted who we were talking about.

All right, what's your advice for one who wants a career just like yours?

Do to work no shit cuts on this work all right?

Well, and on that note, go Irish, Irish?

All right, thank you, justin so much.

The Deal is a production from Bloomberg Podcasts and Bloomberg Originals.

The Deal is hosted by Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly.

This show was produced by Anamazarakis, Stacey Wong, Lizzie Phillip, and Eden Martinez.

Original music and engineering by Blake Maples.

Our booker is Paige Keffer.

David E.

Ravella is our managing Editor.

Our executive producers are Jason Kelly, Amy Keene, Jordan Opplinger, Trey Shallowhorn, Regina Delia, Kelly Laferrier, and Ashley Hoenig.

Sage Bauman is our Head of Podcasts.

Special thanks to Rachel Carnivale, Helena Los Angeles, Nick Silva, Adrian Tuscano, Mark Dawson, Michael Katz, and Mike A.

Rondo.

Joshua Devou is our director of photography.

Rhubob Shakir is our creative director.

Art direction is from Jacqueline Kessler.

Camera operation by Suma Hussein, Stephen Craig, Christopher Dakunha, Michael Terrellas and black Dog.

Taja Smith is our video editor.

You can listen to The Deal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also tune into The Video Companion on Bloomberg Originals and on Bloomberg TV.

Thanks for listening.