Welcome to FinTech TV. The modern NFL is no longer just a sport. It is a high tech wealth engine. Sideline tablets are now crunching real time AI data for in game adjustments, and a new generation of athletes rewriting sports economics by treating their contracts like VC and retiring in their prime. This is where big tech, private capital and Sunday football collide.
Joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange to break down this tech and capital evolution, as well as preview this week's Giants Titans matchup, is two time Super Bowl champion and CBS Sports analyst Logan Ryan. Logan, great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
While we are here at the center of capital in America at the New York Stock Exchange, tell us about retiring early and what lessons you learned from your predecessors out there.
Well, I will say and start that I've been here on this floor maybe like 15 years ago when I was playing for Rutgers University right down the street. And they took us here to get a tour here and ring the bell and do all those things. So it was pretty cool. So it's good to be back.
Yeah, I would say I had a very unique approach to my NFL career. And I think that there is a stereotype of athletes and their money and not knowing what to do with it. And I'm here to say that some athletes know what to do with it. It's not all what you see. It's the athletes going broke, the big headline that we see. It's played on and it does happen.
But there's also athletes that are driving off the field as well. So I'm fortunate to be doing well enough to be here. And I was super financially disciplined, one by competitive nature, kind of early, wanting to save it all and challenge myself like it was a game almost. And then two, learning about finance, learning about investing, being fortunate to make some good decisions and to be able to walk away from the game.
I want to say my prime, a little past my prime, but it's still plenty good enough, and able to transition in my 30s to the next career.
Yeah. And there's this thing called generational wealth transfer, right? And people are living so much longer. So whether you're making five figures or seven figures, you earned $80 million. So that is quite the chunk of change when we're talking about investments. So what did you invest in?
Well, I would say I didn't come from generational wealth transfer at all. I didn't come from that. I'm probably the first generation in my family to touch $1 million. So I didn't necessarily know what to do right away. I wasn't taught. I didn't learn in high school. I didn't learn a lot of financial literacy in college, and my parents didn't necessarily know.
So it's kind of having to learn on the fly a little bit and learning as I went. And I would say I invested extremely conservative at first. I made it a goal of mine not to touch an NFL salary and to live off my bonuses, my off the field money, any type of bonus I might have hit. I would try to spend what I needed and put the rest up where my salary.
So I never touched my salary over 11 years. And when I became a pretty good player in the NFL, the salary got pretty big, but I still had the same habits I did as a young player and did not touch it.
And that really, with a conservative, safe approach for quite some time, allowed me to build a nice base for my money to grow. And then, as I've learned, naturally, as I matured, I learned about finance. I was able to start taking some more aggressive investments into venture capital, into AI, into tech, into startups, into sports equity, and continue to learn more and more.
So I think fortunately, being conservative at first while I was growing and not touching my money, so now I have enough money and resources to earn some power at the table to get some good ownership into young companies has allowed me to kind of grow the money now.
Yeah, that must have required a lot of discipline because you were quite conservative. But I do want to bring in technology into the conversation here because nowadays everybody has access to trading platforms, right? We all have these tablets, these devices, smartphones. So young people out there, they have easier access.
But it also does require knowing what to do and having that discipline. So what do you think of artificial intelligence?
I'm a big fan and I'm a big investor in artificial intelligence. I'm an investor in OpenAI. I'm an investor in Databricks, both not public now, but eventually. And I was able to get into that relatively early and get really excited about that opportunity, really excited about that opportunity.
I've always been a fan of stocks of the Magnificent Seven, of all the tech stocks, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, you name them. I've always invested in them pretty heavily, and they've always, you know, there's ups and downs, but they've always been relatively good to me.
So I think AI is the next version of that. And I'm fortunate to be a part of that. And like I told you, I learned a lot of discipline from my parents' generation, how my parents were very conservative and frugal with money.
But I also have young kids, so I'm like, I'm investing for what their generation is going to want to do. What do my kids use every day? And they use tablets every day. I can't help it. They're going to have access to it. They can learn off it. They can do a lot of beneficial things as well as too much screen time.
So I am almost in the middle of two generations here, and I think there's some good insight from experience on where I want to go next.
Yeah. But I also do want to ask you, you are a CBS analyst, so you know about the role of AI when it comes to analyzing what's happening on the sidelines of the NFL, right? So what do you make of that and its role in the game?
It's been crazy amounts of change. I mean, they put a chip in the football. We have cameras on the first down marker. Every player has a chip in their pads that show you how many steps you took, how fast you ran, how healthy this is, how this or that, how fast the ball traveled. Are you better? Are you better throwing to the left of the field, the right of the field?
Your deep balls, where they land exactly to the inch. So data has allowed our performance coaches, which people have hired on every team, to get the performance better. And football is an old school model now where that's a little bit of a dinosaur of a sport. So how much AI are we allowing to have on the field?
How much of the AI does our fan want to hear? Because as an analyst, I'm talking to the fans at home. So I have screens up there that could tell me the player, the play, the tackle, blah blah blah, but I don't think the fans want to hear computers call the game. I think they want the human element too.
So I got to introduce the AI, but also take it slow and tell the story element behind the game as well. That's where they get paid. Pay me to do the math. And AI is going to take my job and you're going to hear a computer call the game for you pretty soon.
Yeah. And speaking of which, for all of our viewers out there across America that are watching right now, give us a preview of the Giants versus Titans.
Yeah. Look, I'm calling the Giants Titans game this upcoming Sunday, 1 p.m. on CBS. Tune in. Because I'm a former captain of the New York Giants. I'm from the great city of New Jersey, but also I played for the Tennessee Titans as well.
One, you have Brian Daboll, former Giants head coach, coming back, coaching against his old team for the first time. So that's going to be a revenge of the Daboll role right there. It's going to be a pretty cool story to tell. I'm going to sit down, see what that is. I was coached by Brian Daboll previously in my career.
Obviously the Jaxson Dart news is just devastating. You know, as a Giants fan, I hate to see injuries, the worst part of the sport. He's a great young quarterback. Looks like he won't be there for that game for the remainder of the season.
So insert Jameis Winston. A lot of times when backup quarterbacks get brought into games, the offense goes down. They run the ball. It gets boring, short throws. With a week of prep, that's not Jameis Winston.
Jameis Winston is famously known to air the ball out, to try to score points, to put the ball up in the air for his receivers and for his DBs. I'm someone that intercepted Jameis Winston on the other side as well. So I played with these guys, against these guys, only a few years ago. So I get to tell the stories on air, which I think is pretty unique and pretty fun.
Yeah, well, we will be watching you and we are counting down to the game. And while I have you here, I do want to get your take on financial literacy. So how important is that, especially when we're talking about the youth?
Yeah. It's not an athlete problem. It's an American problem. Youth with our kids. We just don't have enough education to handle the money that some of us might touch with young creators and influencers, and people get making money faster than they ever have. Because now with technology, we can make money quicker than we ever have at certain ages.
And you're not ready to handle that. So I had to learn a lot on the fly. I had to hire a great team around me and learn with my team, and I had to have a plan. I had to have a goal.
And my goal was to not touch my salary and live off of bonuses and eventually live off of my portfolio. And if I didn't have that goal in mind, then I wouldn't have the purpose every day of why I'm not buying that, that I could afford to buy.
So I think I had that goal in mind for the future to try to create generational wealth for my family and my kids and my kids' kids and not always fun, not always easy, but it allows me a lot of freedom now. So I'm happy that I've stuck to that. I'm going to continue to stick to that.
Yeah. Logan, finally, before I let you go, speaking of freedom, with all this opportunity, I understand that you are focused on animal welfare as well as community impact. And as an animal lover, as a dog owner, I do want to ask you about the Ryan Animal Rescue Foundation. So tell us about what viewers out there can actually do.
Yeah. So 2017, nine years ago, almost ten years ago soon, started the Ryan Animal Rescue Foundation, RARF, RARF.org, and we raise money and awareness for shelter animals. I have three rescue dogs at home.
I will say I played for some multiple teams in my career. I played for the Patriots, played for the Giants, played for the Titans, played for the 49ers, played for the Bucs. But my animal advocates, they don't care what jersey I'm in. I think we all rallied behind that.
I love animal lovers. I love animal people. And my wife's previous job was a dog trainer at an animal shelter, so I used to go volunteer at the animal shelter on my off days, walk dogs with her, and then eventually I saw how thankless the job was. I saw how hard the conditions were at times.
So I started to feature some of the animals, help them get adopted. I started to raise some awareness, get some money for the local shelters, and then it kind of grew and grew into a foundation organically. I never did it for attention or clicks, even though I would be here nine years in running a nonprofit.
But it was just for the goodness of all those animal advocates. I appreciate you all. You shelter workers, all you volunteers that power the shelters. And I believe that animals deserve a second chance. So please rescue.
Yeah, absolutely. We all know that animals may not be vocal because they can't speak English, but they do so much for humanity. So Logan, appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us today here at the New York Stock Exchange.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
