Bill Gurley — The AI Era, 10 Days in China, & Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld,, and More

1. 0:00 – 0:35

   Preview

   1. BGBill Gurley0:00

      I started listening to Greenlights. There's a story in it from when he was, like, twenty. He'd gotten into the University of Texas. He was pre-law. He met some people at Texas that had convinced him that he should switch to film school, and he had immense anxiety about sharing this with his father. But he finally tells his dad, and his dad utters this very simple phrase: "Well, don't half-ass it."

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:25

      [chuckles]

   3. BGBill Gurley0:25

      And he said in that single moment, he gave him blessing, consent, approval, validation, privilege, honor, freedom, and responsibility. Called it rocket fuel.

2. 0:35 – 2:56

   The book that gave Jerry Seinfeld permission to pursue comedy and inspired Runnin’ Down a Dream.

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:36

      All right. Bill, great to see you, man.

   2. BGBill Gurley0:37

      Good to see you.

   3. TFTim Ferriss0:38

      And I thought we would start with a prop that you brought. So there's a very thick book with a tattered cover, and I think that is as good a lead-in as anything. What are you holding, honestly?

   4. BGBill Gurley0:49

      I'm holding a book called The Last Laugh by Phil Berger. The reason it's tattered is I think it may be out of print. Like, I bought it used, you know, 'cause I wanted to see it and have it.

   5. TFTim Ferriss0:59

      What's the subtitle?

   6. BGBill Gurley1:01

      The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics.

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:03

      Why do you have this book? Are you, are you thinking of making a career switch?

   8. BGBill Gurley1:06

      No, no. [both laughing] No, no, no. So as part of researching my new book, Runnin' Down a Dream, my co-writer and I, we spent six years just diving through stories. 'Cause I had done this speech at the University of Texas, and we wanted to en-enhance it, you know, when we went to the printed form. And one of the stories we came across was Jerry Seinfeld and his decision, you know, to pursue a career as a comedian. And he was in New York. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life. He had an inkling, an inkling that he might wanna be a stand-up comic, but he didn't know what that meant. He didn't know if it was a real career. He didn't know that you could make money. And he read this book, and it profiles, I don't know, looks like fifteen different... You know, it's got Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Robert Klein. It profiled them in a way that was very disinhibiting to him. It gave him permission to go do this career that's not a typical career, right? It like, when you go to college, they don't list stand-up comedian as something that you can go do.

   9. TFTim Ferriss2:18

      [laughs] You know, the guidance counselor-

   10. BGBill Gurley2:19

       No. [laughs]

   11. TFTim Ferriss2:19

       -is not generally putting that on the multiple choice.

   12. BGBill Gurley2:22

       Exa-exactly, but, but this book served as something that granted him permission to go do that.

   13. TFTim Ferriss2:29

       And we're gonna come back to that. I will, [chuckles] I will say that I bookmarked this for future conversations, and of course we're chatting outside of these recordings. But because two years ago, almost exactly when we did our first episode, you mentioned that you were working on a book idea based on the belief that it's easier than ever to rise up because access to mentors and information is unprecedented. So we'll come back to that, of course, and discuss it and the frameworks and the approaches and the stories at some

3. 2:56 – 5:32

   AI bubble or not?

   1. TFTim Ferriss2:56

      length. But I wanted to start with some topical subject matter. AI bubble or not? [laughs] And if so, what does that mean?

   2. BGBill Gurley3:07

      Yeah, so I think this is super interesting. My, my partner Peter reminded me of a book that we had seen a, a while ago by Carlota Perez. It has this very benign title, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It was written in, like, two thousand and two. And what Perez kinda simplifies and notices, which I just find perfect for trying to understand whether there's a bubble or not, is that every time there's been a technology wave that leads to wealth creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite speculators, carpetbaggers, interlopers that wanna come take advantage of it. Think of the gold rush-

   3. TFTim Ferriss3:50

      Mm-hmm

   4. BGBill Gurley3:50

      ... you know? And so people wanna make it a debate. Do you believe in AI, or is it a bubble? And if you say you think it's a bubble, they say, "Oh, you don't believe in AI." Like this gotcha kinda thing. And if you study Perez, and I, I think this is absolutely correct, if the wave is real, then you're gonna have bubble-like behavior. Like, they come together as a pair precisely because any time there's very quick wealth creation, you're gonna get a lot of people that wanna come try and take advantage of that or participate in it. So you get a flood of those types of people coming at it. And so it's odd. There's a real technology wave that's, that's fundamentally changing the world, and there's also massive speculation [laughs] simultaneous.

   5. TFTim Ferriss4:38

      Yeah, they come as a pair. I recall not too long ago, maybe two weeks ago, saw a short interview with your friend Jeff Bezos, and he distinguished between financial bubbles and industrial bubbles and cited, and I'm paraphrasing here, but two thousand and eight as an example of a bad bubble, right, financial bubble, versus let's just say the early two thousands, like ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, two thousand, where a lot of very important technology was created that then was durable after the fact and created new generations of entrepreneurs and a lot of economic growth. And he believes that AI would fall into the industrial bubble category of things. But I suppose given that the dancing pair you described come together,

4. 5:32 – 11:08

   Circular deals and SPV chaos.

   1. TFTim Ferriss5:33

      how would you think about investing in private companies, modern venture capital at this point in time, and just I suppose as it's changed since you were most active?

   2. BGBill Gurley5:45

      A quick comment on that industrial bubble thing. You know, one thing that is surprising to me is that even though I fundamentally believe this is an important real technology wave, the big players, even the Mag seven, have all decided to do things from a deal perspective. You've read about these circular deals and whatnot.

   3. TFTim Ferriss6:06

      Could you explain what you mean by that?

   4. BGBill Gurley6:08

      Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of talk out there, but it all started when Microsoft invested in OpenAI. OpenAI agreed to buy services from Microsoft-

   5. TFTim Ferriss6:17

      Yep

   6. BGBill Gurley6:17

      ... which is called a circular deal-

   7. TFTim Ferriss6:19

      Mm-hmm

   8. BGBill Gurley6:19

      ... because you're giving them money they wouldn't have otherwise.

   9. TFTim Ferriss6:22

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BGBill Gurley6:22

       And when Dario was on stage at DealBook last week, he said, "Oh, I can explain. This is not that hard. Amazon wanted us to spend money we didn't have, so they gave us even more money." [laughs] And I'm like, "Well, that's precisely why this is a questionable behavior." But it's gotten bigger, you know? Nvidia's handing out money, and then Nvidia gave CoreWeave money, but then also agreed to buy any services they have left over. This stuff's not ideal.

   11. TFTim Ferriss6:48

       Mm-hmm.

   12. BGBill Gurley6:48

       Like if you were to say, "What's crisp, clean accounting?" You know, you wouldn't do these kind of things. And some of them say, "Well, it's not material," in which I would say, "Well, then why are you doing it?" I've asked other people to try and understand how even big, sophisticated companies might get speculative-

   13. TFTim Ferriss7:05

       Mm-hmm

   14. BGBill Gurley7:06

       ... using a word from the previous discussion. And I hear things like, well, you know, loss aversion tends to go down when you're winning. Like if you're on a hot streak in a casino, you take more risk, things like that. But it is surprising to me. When it comes to retail investors, I mean, I would be particularly concerned for them at this stage in the AI game because there is a plethora of SPV vehicles. You've heard that phrase, I'm sure.

   15. TFTim Ferriss7:36

       Mm-hmm.

   16. BGBill Gurley7:36

       SPV. This is where someone has an in on an investment and they do a one-off VC fund, if you will. A-

   17. TFTim Ferriss7:44

       Special purpose vehicle.

   18. BGBill Gurley7:45

       Yeah, it's a single entity just for that one deal.

   19. TFTim Ferriss7:48

       We have a chance to invest in X. We have an allocation of however much money, and then they can allow sort of Jane Doe and John Doe potentially-

   20. BGBill Gurley7:56

       And they take a rake on it.

   21. TFTim Ferriss7:56

       Exactly.

   22. BGBill Gurley7:57

       And there's people promoting SPVs in situations where they don't even actually have the underlying stock, or maybe they hope to get it. I- it's the Wild, Wild West.

   23. TFTim Ferriss8:07

       Mm-hmm.

   24. BGBill Gurley8:07

       And most of the people on that edge, uh, I would put in the category of interloper, carpetbagger. These are people that have come to this thing. And I just think you gotta be quite careful.

   25. TFTim Ferriss8:18

       Mm-hmm.

   26. BGBill Gurley8:18

       The, the investments that were made that have already had 100X plus returns were made a while ago-

   27. TFTim Ferriss8:25

       Mm-hmm

   28. BGBill Gurley8:26

       ... you know, before this thing started.

   29. TFTim Ferriss8:28

       Mm-hmm.

   30. BGBill Gurley8:28

       And that's not to say there won't be an incremental AI investment that makes money. I think there will. But your odds right now of, of that being the case are really, really low.
5. 11:08 – 13:42

   Angel investing in the AI era.

   1. TFTim Ferriss11:08

      So if you were... This may be a difficult question, but if you were angel investing right now, how would you be thinking about your approach?

   2. BGBill Gurley11:17

      I'll tell you a funny story. [laughs] When I decided to hang up my gloves, if you will, and stop making institutional venture capital investments, I had a whole bunch of ideas about what I wanted to do next, and one of them was, oh, I'll do a bunch of angel investing.

   3. TFTim Ferriss11:31

      [laughs]

   4. BGBill Gurley11:31

      You know, Bezos did it on the side. You know, this would be fantastic.

   5. TFTim Ferriss11:34

      He did pretty well with his angel investing. [laughs]

   6. BGBill Gurley11:37

      I was explaining this to a, I won't say who it is, but a, a Silicon Valley CEO, very successful, and he said, "What are you gonna do now?" I said, "I was thinking of doing angel investing." He goes, "Why would you do that?" [both laughing] He said, "I got fifty of these things. People don't return my calls." He goes, "I wish I'd never done it." [both laughing] So there is a unglamorous side to it as much as there is a glamorous side, and you've participated in this world before. What would I say? I think if I were doing angel investments, I'd try and find an intersection of people that are super curious and are playing with all these AI tools, but bring a Perspective from a particular industry that gives them an advantage in that area, where they could simultaneously be maybe the smartest user of AI in their genre, in their vertical.

   7. TFTim Ferriss12:32

      So despite the, or maybe because of, because we're, we talked about the pair, [chuckles] the AI bubble, you would still be looking at AI intersected opportunities if you were angel investing?

   8. BGBill Gurley12:44

      Yeah. There's a weird reality out there right now, and if this could end if ever a bubble is popped or whatever, but the institutional investors have zero interest in non-AI ideals.

   9. TFTim Ferriss12:56

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BGBill Gurley12:56

       Zero. It's more black and white than I could be successful and convey-

   11. TFTim Ferriss13:00

       And for people who do not know the term, define the institutional investor

   12. BGBill Gurley13:04

       ... people who are paid both a, a salary and a piece of the return to be active investors of other people's money, using other people's money. But the reason that kind of matters is if you angel fund a deal and have any hope of it raising money in the future, if it's not AI related, right now-

   13. TFTim Ferriss13:26

       Could die of neglect

   14. BGBill Gurley13:27

       ... there is no interest.

   15. TFTim Ferriss13:29

       [laughs]

   16. BGBill Gurley13:29

       I can't state clearly enough how there's zero int- and, and I could, I could simultaneously make fun of that reality, but I could also justify that reality, but it is the reality

6. 13:42 – 17:07

   Why you should be the most AI-enabled version of yourself, regardless of field.

   1. BGBill Gurley13:42

      right now. And by the way, while I mention that, I feel obligated for your audience, like, I don't care what field you're in, you should be playing with this stuff.

   2. TFTim Ferriss13:50

      Mm-hmm.

   3. BGBill Gurley13:50

      Like, it has the potential to impact your role in your career, and the best way to protect against any risk of your career being obfuscated or eliminated from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can possibly be.

   4. TFTim Ferriss14:09

      How would you think about, maybe you can give a hypothetical example, of looking for someone who has very, very sophisticated domain expertise and experience, who's now intersecting with AI and has a unique, because of the combination, perspective on things to invest in as an angel investor, and separate that from something that's just going to be consumed by the fundamental, the kind of fundamental models in these larger companies?

   5. BGBill Gurley14:37

      From a career perspective, or?

   6. TFTim Ferriss14:39

      From an angel investment perspective-

   7. BGBill Gurley14:41

      Ah

   8. TFTim Ferriss14:41

      ... how would you pick folks you don't think are just going to end up working on something that gets replicated in short order by the bigger companies?

   9. BGBill Gurley14:49

      The key is just to stay pretty far away from the edge of whatever... I mean, you can go online and see interviews with the people in Anthropic or OpenAI and what they're working on. Like, if it's the next thing they're gonna do-

   10. TFTim Ferriss15:03

       Mm-hmm

   11. BGBill Gurley15:03

       ... I don't think you're gonna be protected. But as I think about, you know, founders and angel investors, you're talking about a pretty broad array of things. At this point, as I mentioned earlier, you're not gonna back the next big model company. Besides, if, if you were, you'd need a billion dollar [laughs] angel investment to go make that happen. Like, it's just really, the game's changed. There's so much money involved. I think you're gonna wanna be off the beaten path anyway. When I think about these deeper verticals, I don't think it will make sense for OpenAI to go crush every little vertical.

   12. TFTim Ferriss15:40

       Waste management.

   13. BGBill Gurley15:41

       And even if the model's capable of understanding that subject matter, there are workflows, there are data sets that are local to your customer-

   14. TFTim Ferriss15:52

       Mm

   15. BGBill Gurley15:52

       ... and that has, stuff has to be stitched together.

   16. TFTim Ferriss15:55

       Mm-hmm.

   17. BGBill Gurley15:56

       So I think having an understanding of a particular industry and, and one that's not gonna be on the next thing to do list at OpenAI, it would probably be your best bet.

   18. TFTim Ferriss16:06

       Got it. So is it fair to say, if I'm understanding you correctly, that effectively looking for something that would not be a high priority for one of these larger companies and also a proprietary data set of some type?

   19. BGBill Gurley16:17

       Proprietary data sets, the more kind of workflows that exist are, are better because you can build software around those things.

   20. TFTim Ferriss16:25

       What is a workflow?

   21. BGBill Gurley16:26

       The thing that popped in my head, I'm on the board of Zillow. You know, Zillow's been investing for the past five years in tools that help the realtor do their day-to-day job.

   22. TFTim Ferriss16:36

       Mm-hmm.

   23. BGBill Gurley16:36

       They have a tool called ShowingTime that helps you book in-person tours at houses, as an example. But there's putting the mortgage together, getting the sign offs on.

   24. TFTim Ferriss16:47

       Mm-hmm.

   25. BGBill Gurley16:47

       Like, there's just all these tasks that have to be happened that can be automated.

   26. TFTim Ferriss16:51

       Mm-hmm.

   27. BGBill Gurley16:52

       Tasks that can be automated, that can be integrated with AI, the more of that stuff you can build into a system, the better off you're gonna be protecting yourself from a model that just answers questions-

   28. TFTim Ferriss17:05

       Right

   29. BGBill Gurley17:05

       ... which is why, which is why I

7. 17:07 – 18:59

   China deep dive: Ten days, six cities, high-speed trains, and a Xiaomi SU7 factory tour.

   1. BGBill Gurley17:07

      brought it up.

   2. TFTim Ferriss17:07

      Let's move on to big topic, big country, China. [laughs] You spent ten days there over the past summer. What was your experience? What did you see? What made an impression? What did you do?

   3. BGBill Gurley17:22

      I'd been about six times before, so this is, like, my seventh trip. One thing that was different, my daughter is an Asian studies major, as you were.

   4. TFTim Ferriss17:31

      Yeah. [laughs]

   5. BGBill Gurley17:32

      And she spent the summer in Hong Kong. So we picked her up, and then we toured six cities in ten days. And my objective with this trip, i- in the past trips, it was mostly just to meet with entrepreneurs and founders and mutual sharing of information, that kind of thing. This time I was more interested in just kind of being eyes wide open and learning. And so we took two of the high-speed trains-

   6. TFTim Ferriss17:57

      Mm-hmm

   7. BGBill Gurley17:57

      ... you know, just as an experience set. I got a tour of the Xiaomi factory with their new car, the SU7, and was trying to get a feel for what's kind of most recent there. And we, you know, went to Shenzhen, overnight city, which has gone from, I think, less than a hundred thousand people in nineteen eighty to twenty million people-

   8. TFTim Ferriss18:20

      [laughs]

   9. BGBill Gurley18:20

      ... just to see the scale and scope of the whole thing. There's a lot of Rhetoric in the US about what is or isn't happening in China. And I just wanted to have a better feel for it. And, and we're making policy decisions that are gonna impact, you know, the global footprint, and God forbid, you know, we end up in a World War III kind of situation. So anyway, I just wanted a better understanding. I was aided by the fact that Dan Wang shared his book, Breakneck, with me right before I left, and I read it while I was there, which was interesting. And then it came out, and of course, it ended up on the bestseller

8. 18:59 – 22:00

   Communism misconceptions.

   1. BGBill Gurley18:59

      list. But I think China's misperceived in a lot of ways.

   2. TFTim Ferriss19:02

      What are some of those misperceptions?

   3. BGBill Gurley19:04

      The biggest one is that people who have a rudimentary understanding of what is happening there use this word communism to infer a lot of other things. And one of the things that's inferred by communism is top-down, state-run system. And they think, they think of Russia, and they assume, well, that'll always lead to bad capital allocation, no innovation, 'cause they have this picture of, in their mind of these brick buildings, like with snow all around them and not much happening.

   4. TFTim Ferriss19:44

      Mm-hmm.

   5. BGBill Gurley19:45

      And the reality there is just far, far different from that. I think Dan Wang did a great job of explaining how the country puts out this five-year plan within the provinces, which are-- they're a lot bigger than a US state, but they're the equivalent, like it's how the country's segmented. They compete with each other. And the effective mayor of the province, if he, if he does well, has a chance to move up in the system, which is not a reality in the US system. But what that leads to is just a massive amount of competition.

   6. TFTim Ferriss20:22

      What are the metrics by which they're being judged? Do you have any idea on a province level? Is it some equivalent of GDP? It's not the right term, but...

   7. BGBill Gurley20:32

      I'm guessing probably.

   8. TFTim Ferriss20:34

      Yeah.

   9. BGBill Gurley20:34

      Like we could go talk to AI and-

   10. TFTim Ferriss20:36

       Yeah. [laughs]

   11. BGBill Gurley20:36

       ... get a better answer than I have right now.

   12. TFTim Ferriss20:38

       Yeah.

   13. BGBill Gurley20:38

       But yeah, I would think that's part of it, prosperity, employment-

   14. TFTim Ferriss20:43

       Mm-hmm

   15. BGBill Gurley20:43

       ... th-those kind of things. By the way, this provincial competition has also led to overbuild of buildings. Like it's not always positive.

   16. TFTim Ferriss20:52

       Mm-hmm.

   17. BGBill Gurley20:52

       You know, bridges that aren't used.

   18. TFTim Ferriss20:54

       Ghost cities.

   19. BGBill Gurley20:55

       Ghost cities, yes. But you end up with hyper competition. So the-- I think the thing that a lot of people in Silicon Valley love about capitalism is this notion of the invisible hand and competition that leads to innovation and best practice, and the winners rise up, and they're better for it. That is happening there. And if you read about the solar industry or the EV industry or now the, the robotics industry, they have hundreds of different companies competing in these fields, and it's brutal competition. And as a result of that, they're ending up with very innovative companies, which once again, I think people wouldn't prescribe to being possible in a communist, you know, world, and remarkable execution from a industrial standpoint. So the price points of the products, uh, that, that will be sold around the globe are well below anything that could be done in the US.

9. 22:00 – 25:38

   Lei Jun: The Steve Jobs of China.

   1. TFTim Ferriss22:00

      How do you go about getting a tour of a Xiaomi factory? I would think that they would be very closed about that. What's in it for them, and how do they-

   2. BGBill Gurley22:10

      I don't know if you saw this going around the internet yesterday, but they shipped a car to this YouTuber.

   3. TFTim Ferriss22:16

      Oh, yeah, I saw it. Absolutely.

   4. BGBill Gurley22:18

      Which is brilliant. And he did like a fifteen-- That's the SU7. That's the factory I went to. As I mentioned, I'd been there before. So I met Lei Jun, who's the founder of Xiaomi in two thousand and five-

   5. TFTim Ferriss22:29

      Mm-hmm

   6. BGBill Gurley22:29

      ... when he was chairman of Joyo, which was a e-commerce company that Amazon bought. So he's been around a while.

   7. TFTim Ferriss22:37

      Yeah.

   8. BGBill Gurley22:37

      He has evolved into, the best thing I could say is like he's the Steve Jobs of China right now.

   9. TFTim Ferriss22:45

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BGBill Gurley22:46

       When he quit doing Joyo and he had this other company as well, he declared ten years ago he was gonna build a smartphone just out of the blue, "I'm gonna build a smartphone." He didn't have any smartphone experience, but Xiaomi is now the third largest manufacturer of handsets in the globe.

   11. TFTim Ferriss23:01

       Mm-hmm.

   12. BGBill Gurley23:02

       And about four or five years ago, at about the exact same time Apple hinted they were interested in building a car, he said, "I'm gonna build a car."

   13. TFTim Ferriss23:11

       Well, not only did he say, "I'm gonna build a car," but that was a response to sanctions, right? It was an emergency as he-- I, I listened to one of-- Well, I listened to the translation of even though my Chinese is decent, but it's not as good as it once was. His, I think it was twenty twenty-four-

   14. BGBill Gurley23:29

       That's it

   15. TFTim Ferriss23:30

       ... company-wide address where he talked about the sanctions coming in saying, "What if we couldn't make phones? What would we do?"

   16. BGBill Gurley23:38

       That talk is unbelievable, and it, it's translated on YouTube.

   17. TFTim Ferriss23:42

       Mm-hmm.

   18. BGBill Gurley23:43

       And I would encourage people to watch from about minute thirty to about an hour fifteen, which is where he talks about his process for designing the car. I don't know if you saw that part.

   19. TFTim Ferriss23:53

       Yeah, I did.

   20. BGBill Gurley23:53

       But it's crazy. He says he put a note on any car in his parking lot that he had never drove, and he would ask each employee to give him three positives, three negatives, and loan him the car. Said he drove two hundred of his employees' cars. When you hear that kind of stuff, you're like, "Wow, I wonder if anyone at Apple did that." I mean, it's just such a kind of bottom-up, just ground truth way to start the process. But even still, even if you did that, like a bunch of people could do that How do you have the wherewithal to build a factory? He'd never built a factory before. I've been in other car factories here in the US, it was phenomenal. A- anyway, back to your question why I could get in, is I, I knew Lei Jun from way back.

   21. TFTim Ferriss24:40

       What does the process look like? Are there a bunch of clearances and you have to get the okay from the provincial-

   22. BGBill Gurley24:46

       I don't think we went through the whole factory, but no, I mean, they're a public company.

   23. TFTim Ferriss24:50

       Yeah.

   24. BGBill Gurley24:50

       I think they're interested in-

   25. TFTim Ferriss24:51

       The exposure

   26. BGBill Gurley24:52

       ... being well understood.

   27. TFTim Ferriss24:53

       Yeah.

   28. BGBill Gurley24:54

       Which I think hints at why they enabled this. I think they had to send a car to this guy, the YouTuber.

   29. TFTim Ferriss25:00

       Yeah.

   30. BGBill Gurley25:01

       And by the way, d- the president of Ford went over there about six months before I did, went on the same tour, so they let him go there. [laughs] And he had an SU7 shipped to, to Michigan, and he drove it for several weeks, and he's talked about how incredible it is.
10. 25:38 – 28:40

    Jack Ma, ByteDance’s invisible CEO, and the risks of prominence in China.

    1. TFTim Ferriss25:38

       the conversation. So this is a question from X, the artist formerly known as Twitter.

    2. BGBill Gurley25:42

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss25:43

       One of many questions, but I'll ask, what are, what are your top handful of critiques, say, of the Chinese tech ecosystem or CCP after going on a tour there? What would you say they're not doing well, or things that complicate their ability to compete?

    4. BGBill Gurley25:57

       The first one that's, I think, been well-publicized is when an entrepreneur has risen to a level of success and then uses that as a platform, the government seems uninterested in that. So [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss26:14

       Exhibit A-

    6. BGBill Gurley26:15

       The Jack Ma

    7. TFTim Ferriss26:15

       ... Jack Ma.

    8. BGBill Gurley26:16

       Yeah, exactly. And there's a saying that I think I heard while I was over there, "Don't be the tallest tree."

    9. TFTim Ferriss26:22

       Don't be the tallest tree. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down in Japan. They have a totally different system obviously.

    10. BGBill Gurley26:28

        The other entrepreneur outside of Lei Jun is the ByteDance CEO.

    11. TFTim Ferriss26:33

        Mm-hmm.

    12. BGBill Gurley26:33

        And ByteDance probably got the leading position for the consumer AI, like OpenAI, but over there right now, in addition to just incredible revenue growth. This is the company that own TikTok and whatnot. But they're not going public, and you don't see him at all.

    13. TFTim Ferriss26:53

        Mm-hmm.

    14. BGBill Gurley26:53

        You know, which may get to this tallest tree thing.

    15. TFTim Ferriss26:57

        Yeah. I mean, celebrities also disappear over there-

    16. BGBill Gurley27:00

        No doubt

    17. TFTim Ferriss27:00

        ... very mysteriously.

    18. BGBill Gurley27:01

        Yes, and businesspeople.

    19. TFTim Ferriss27:03

        Yeah.

    20. BGBill Gurley27:04

        So yes, that does happen.

    21. TFTim Ferriss27:05

        I will say, and for people who are wondering, right? Because the, there are a lot of... How should we put this? I mean, there are people who are very angry, very hawkish. Some people are very, very supportive, and then their agendas or f- alliances get questioned. I, like you, am just interested in understanding what is happening to the extent that I can, right? What is the actual truth on the ground? What are the details? And frankly, I mean, the innovation over there is, is remarkable. And what they've done in terms of establishing access to rare metals and [laughs] everything-

    22. BGBill Gurley27:40

        Right. Yeah

    23. TFTim Ferriss27:41

        ... they need to manufacture is remark- You go to South America or Africa, and it is Chinese everywhere on infrastructure projects. I mean, they've been very, very smart about it. So I'm deeply interested in, in all of it, and please hold your thought because I wanna hear everything you have to say. What I would say is a, a piece of the three-dimensional chess that I've been impressed with is how well the Chinese government is able to... Well, I mean, of course they're able to integrate with the private sector so that they're able to use, in a sense, products to widen their scope of access potentially, like DJI, for instance, great example. People have a lot of questions around these cars. As spectacular as they might be, are they an extension of surveillance, right? These are open questions that I think are worth asking. But you were about to say something, so I'll let you hop in.

    24. BGBill Gurley28:35

        No, no, no, no. I, I think, let me make one point, and then let's come to that.

    25. TFTim Ferriss28:39

        Mm-hmm.

    26. BGBill Gurley28:39

        So

11. 28:40 – 37:26

    America vs. China (Lawyers vs. engineers).

    1. BGBill Gurley28:40

       there's two other things I wanted to mention. Obviously, infrastructure. So th- they are building new nuclear fission plants, so fission being old school, not-

    2. TFTim Ferriss28:51

       Yep

    3. BGBill Gurley28:51

       ... new school, at one-fourth the price that we do it here in the US. So is South Korea, by the way.

    4. TFTim Ferriss28:57

       Yeah, and the numbers are incredible.

    5. BGBill Gurley28:58

       But, but when we sit here and say, "Oh, we wanna reshore manufacturing," and they can build things at one-fourth the price we can, if you don't solve that, you're gonna reshore something, and we're gonna not be price competitive globally.

    6. TFTim Ferriss29:13

       Mm-hmm.

    7. BGBill Gurley29:13

       And then because you won't import what they have and you're gonna make our citizens buy this new, from this new factory where we're making things way more expensive, it doesn't work, like-

    8. TFTim Ferriss29:24

       The m- the math doesn't math

    9. BGBill Gurley29:25

       ... it, it doesn't work. And, and by the way, I'm not, not sure it brings jobs. The Xiaomi factory was a, a third, based on some numbers I was able to acquire, a third the number of employees per car output.

    10. TFTim Ferriss29:39

        Mm-hmm.

    11. BGBill Gurley29:39

        And I gotta believe in 10 years it'll be a sixth. And so you could calculate the total number of jobs you'd be bringing back if you brought back all this car production, and it'd be hundreds of thousands. It's not millions and millions of jobs. So anyway, that infrastructure thing's for real, and, and I think Dan Wang does a good job of saying that America's run by lawyers-

    12. TFTim Ferriss30:02

        And this is the author of, of Breakneck

    13. BGBill Gurley30:04

        ... of Breakneck. Our country's run by lawyers, and theirs is run by engineers.

    14. TFTim Ferriss30:08

        Engineers.

    15. BGBill Gurley30:09

        And so when you try and build something here, the lawyers just get in the way-

    16. TFTim Ferriss30:13

        Mm-hmm

    17. BGBill Gurley30:13

        ... and try and block it, which certainly when you hear Elon talks about why the Gigafactory's here in Austin and not in California, it all relates to those things. So anyway, that's infrastructure. There's another thing that's, I think, quite interesting, which is the government may not Care about whether or not their companies have really big market caps.

    18. TFTim Ferriss30:33

        Mm-hmm.

    19. BGBill Gurley30:34

        And when I first realized this, you know, you saw what happened when they, they took down Alibaba when they went after Jack Ma, and Ant Financial could've been this big thing, and it got, you know, haircut. And you question, well, do they care? And if you are pushing your companies to be low-cost providers, maybe that's at odds with them being hyper profitable and really big. And then you can turn around and ask the question that, hearing that cause me to ask the question, does America really benefit by the fact that the Mag Seven have $3 trillion market caps? I know the employees of those companies do, but is that a sign of, of our competitive capitalistic society not being truly competitive?

    20. TFTim Ferriss31:20

        On a global scale.

    21. BGBill Gurley31:21

        And, or even within.

    22. TFTim Ferriss31:22

        Right.

    23. BGBill Gurley31:23

        Like, there's a notion you learn about in economics classes called pure competition, and in pure competition, no one has an intellectual property advantage. Marginal profits are whittled down just to the cost of capital, and the consumer benefits because there's no excessive profit capture.

    24. TFTim Ferriss31:43

        Mm-hmm.

    25. BGBill Gurley31:43

        If we have all these companies that are able to kinda have excessive profits, is that a form of market failure?

    26. TFTim Ferriss31:50

        Mm-hmm.

    27. BGBill Gurley31:50

        And does the fact that they exist help America in any way? I, at first, I, of course, I'm a venture capitalist, so I wanna think, yes, of course. But then as I think about it, I don't know that our government or our society or our people are better off because these six companies have $3 trillion market caps.

    28. TFTim Ferriss32:08

        Yeah.

    29. BGBill Gurley32:09

        It, it's not that many people that the percentage of the country that's employed by those companies is small-

    30. TFTim Ferriss32:15

        Mm-hmm
12. 37:26 – 40:08

    Keys for US competitiveness.

    1. TFTim Ferriss37:26

       what, at this point, is it a day late and a dollar short for the US? I know I, I almost promised we weren't gonna go into this, but I, I wanna know your opinion. I'm so curious. What are the keys to the US remaining globally competitive and vibrant as an economy? You hinted to one, which is, I mean, it seems kinda inevitable, nuclear power or more power, so how do you do that? I'm not sure how quickly you can right the ship, although it seems like a, a handful of people have done a pretty good job of changing the narrative.

    2. BGBill Gurley37:57

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss37:57

       What are some of the key things, in your opinion, that the US needs to do?

    4. BGBill Gurley38:02

       One is make it easier to build.

    5. TFTim Ferriss38:05

       Build companies? Build-

    6. BGBill Gurley38:07

       I think build infrastructure

    7. TFTim Ferriss38:08

       ... infrastructure.

    8. BGBill Gurley38:09

       Like, if you're gonna build semiconductor plants, if you're gonna build nuclear plants on time and on budget, that's very hard to do in the US right now. And the glimmer of hope, I would say, is that a few states seem to have governors that wanna get stuff out of the way, and I think it's red tape and bureaucracy and lawyers and litigation that make this stuff so expensive. And so Texas and Arizona seem to be getting their unfair share of data centers and semiconductor plants, and I think because of that attitude. I've seen a similar attitude in Pennsylvania-

    9. TFTim Ferriss38:46

       Mm-hmm

    10. BGBill Gurley38:46

        ... you know, where they repaired I-95 in 12 days. But they literally had to take a bunch of statutes that are on the books and say they, they don't apply right now. So that mindset, I think, needs a lot more momentum.

    11. TFTim Ferriss39:00

        Mm.

    12. BGBill Gurley39:00

        That'd be one thing.

    13. TFTim Ferriss39:01

        Mm-hmm.

    14. BGBill Gurley39:02

        There's another thing that I think's important for people to understand on the China front. There are numerous people with a loud microphone that will say, oh, they know how to scale out plants, but they don't know how to do any innovation, and that's just flat wrong. Whoever's saying that just hasn't been there. They don't know the facts on the ground. These entrepreneurs are every bit as good as the entrepreneurs they are here. There are examples, like in LIDAR, they built a MEMS LIDAR product that's like $130 a car. The LIDAR-

    15. TFTim Ferriss39:38

        What is MEMS LIDAR?

    16. BGBill Gurley39:39

        They, it uses solid state semiconductor technology instead of that big spinning radar.

    17. TFTim Ferriss39:44

        Yep.

    18. BGBill Gurley39:45

        And so the LIDAR on a Waymo is five grand.

    19. TFTim Ferriss39:48

        Mm.

    20. BGBill Gurley39:48

        And it's 130 bucks for MEMS LIDAR they're putting on every car. You can go into ChatGPT and say, "Tell me about MEMS LIDAR innovation in China." It's a great example. Lei Jun's another one. Anybody that thinks there's no innovation is just-

    21. TFTim Ferriss40:04

        Yeah, they're just wrong. That's crazy

    22. BGBill Gurley40:05

        ... they, they got blinders on.

    23. TFTim Ferriss40:06

        Yeah, no, that's not true. That's definitely

13. 40:08 – 41:28

    Bill is bullish on these countries.

    1. TFTim Ferriss40:08

       not true. I asked you two years ago if there are any countries that you're long on. At the time, I'd be curious if this is still the case, you said you're long on the UK. Less regulatory capture.

    2. BGBill Gurley40:18

       Did I say that? [chuckles]

    3. TFTim Ferriss40:19

       Losing party pays in the legal system.

    4. BGBill Gurley40:21

       Yeah, I do, I do love that. [chuckles]

    5. TFTim Ferriss40:23

       [chuckles] Which reduces frivolous litigation compared to the US. Any thoughts on where you're bullish these days?

    6. BGBill Gurley40:28

       Well, I, ironically, Matt Ridley was in town a few weeks ago in Austin.

    7. TFTim Ferriss40:32

       The rational optimist.

    8. BGBill Gurley40:33

       Yes, who I-

    9. TFTim Ferriss40:34

       Other books

    10. BGBill Gurley40:34

        ... I love his stuff, but he would say that I would be dead wrong on that. [chuckles]

    11. TFTim Ferriss40:38

        [chuckles]

    12. BGBill Gurley40:38

        That things, things aren't going well there, so... And he lives there, so I'll just take that as I got that one wrong.

    13. TFTim Ferriss40:44

        [chuckles] Well, I mean, it depends on the timeframe too, right? Is it two years, or is it five years, or is it 10 years?

    14. BGBill Gurley40:52

        One of the things that's been impressive about China is, you know, since Deng Xiaoping kinda brought back capitalism, 500 million people have come out of poverty. And you look at countries that have a very strong work ethic and a high education and a low, currently low per populate income, and you would think more jobs would come their way. So two that would pop for me are Vietnam and Turkey-

    15. TFTim Ferriss41:20

        Mm

    16. BGBill Gurley41:20

        ... who kinda check all those boxes. Hopefully I do better than [chuckles]

    17. TFTim Ferriss41:25

        [chuckles] Check in in another two years.

14. 41:28 – 43:39

    Matthew McConaughey’s “Don’t half ass it” moment.

    1. TFTim Ferriss41:28

       All right, so let's, let's talk about, this is gonna be a segue to talking about Runnin' Down a Dream and all things involved with that. Maybe we could start with an anecdote from a fellow Austinite. Likes to play the bongos, long hair, associated with [chuckles] smoking reefer every once in a while. [chuckles] Matthew.

    2. BGBill Gurley41:50

       Yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss41:50

       We were talking about a short anecdote about Matthew before we started recording. Would you mind sharing that?

    4. BGBill Gurley41:56

       As I was kinda wrapping up the book, I started listening to Greenlights.

    5. TFTim Ferriss42:01

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BGBill Gurley42:01

       And I was told you had to listen to it 'cause of course he reads it, so you get all the great McConaughey affections-

    7. TFTim Ferriss42:07

       Mm-hmm

    8. BGBill Gurley42:07

       ... as you read it. But there's a story in it that just popped in my brain and kinda summarized exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with this book, Runnin' Down a Dream. And he had spent the vast majority of his young a- adult life, so this anecdote's from when he was, like, 20, 21, telling his family he was gonna be a lawyer. And so he'd gotten into the University of Texas. He was pre-law. Every time he went home, he talked about, "Yeah, I'm gonna be a lawyer." And he had met some people at Texas that had convinced him that he should switch to film school. And he had immense anxiety about sharing this with his father. His father, this is all in the book, but his father's a very tough individual. And so reason to be fearful, [laughs] you know, when you're gonna drop some news. I'm no longer gonna be a lawyer, I'm gonna go to film school. And he builds it up a lot in the book. Like, I, I didn't know when I was gonna talk to him. Like, you can imagine being in that situation. You're delaying, delaying, delaying. But he finally tells his dad, and his dad utters this very simple phrase, "Well, don't half-ass it."

    9. TFTim Ferriss43:19

       Mm.

    10. BGBill Gurley43:20

        And he says, you know, of all the reactions he could have had, "'Don't half-ass it' were the last words I expected to hear, and the best words he could have ever said to me." And he said in that single moment, he gave him blessing, consent, approval, validation, privilege, honor, freedom, and responsibility. Called it rocket fuel.

15. 43:39 – 45:00

    Runnin’ Down a Dream thesis: Helping people pursue X instead of A, B, or C.

    1. BGBill Gurley43:39

       And I'd like to believe there are a number of people out there, young adults, maybe even some mid- midlife career, who have this notion that they should be doing something else. But society has put them on a path, or just the way they matriculated through college put them into a career that they just don't love, and that they have this inkling that they could go do this thing. Or maybe you're a young kid and you really wanna do X, but everybody else is telling you to do A, B, and C. Like, I want to help them have the confidence and permission to go do X, to go chase this dream.

    2. TFTim Ferriss44:21

       Mm-hmm.

    3. BGBill Gurley44:21

       And as you hinted at from our last call, I think the amount of your ability to make connections and to gather information and learn on your own pace has never been better. You can literally just sit there and talk to ChatGPT six hours a day if you so choose and learn so much about any particular field. And so, like, your ability to take things into your own hands and to go try and be successful in this thing y- that you feel passionate about, I think has never been better.

16. 45:00 – 46:41

    The 80,000-hour question.

    1. TFTim Ferriss45:00

       Why do you think when you initially gave and subsequently had to go online, Runnin' Down a Dream, as a presentation, why do you think that took? Why did it strike a chord in the way that it did? What do you think it was?

    2. BGBill Gurley45:15

       I think we've built a society, like, nobody's fault. Like, we just have built a society where we love to celebrate people that are successful in a lot of different fields, but when it comes to our own children, we tend to think way more pragmatically about what they should be doing. You know, lawyers, consultants, doctors, computer scientists, like, it's all these jobs that have certainty to the financial component. And I think that's, like, so well-intended. Like, I don't think there's malintent of anyone in the system, and I'm a parent of three, like, I've been through this. You just feel this obligation to try and push them towards prosperity, but it's not intellectual prosperity. It's not happiness. It's, it's financial. Like-

    3. TFTim Ferriss46:08

       Stability.

    4. BGBill Gurley46:09

       Yes, that most people are guiding children towards. This isn't that complicated of math, but most people end up working 80,000 hours in their life.

    5. TFTim Ferriss46:18

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BGBill Gurley46:18

       It's a third of your life. Why do something you don't like? There's Gallup poll data on career engagement, and 59% of people say they're not engaged at work. And this is that whole quiet quitting thing that we hear so much about. And some of these numbers are at an all-time low. It just seems horrific that people are kind of sauntering through life.

17. 46:41 – 50:50

    The self-learning test.

    1. TFTim Ferriss46:41

       What are some of the keys to taking the path less traveled then in this case, right? There are a few I highlighted for myself, but where should we start? I highlighted one for myself. We don't have to start here, but go where the action is. I just think this is so underrated. [laughs] And people, it, further undervalue it maybe in a digital world, but we can start anywhere you want. That's just one that really jumped out to me because I think it's really underrated. But where would you like to start?

    2. BGBill Gurley47:13

       In the book, one of the things that we tie together very early on is the interplay between passion or fascination or curiosity and learning. And the way to be most successful in any endeavor, but certainly if you're gonna go tilt at something that's less pragmatic-

    3. TFTim Ferriss47:33

       Mm-hmm

    4. BGBill Gurley47:33

       ... is to be the smartest, most knowledgeable person you can possibly be. And knowledge is free now, as we've talked about. And I have this test for whether or not you're actually truly passionate about what you're trying to do, which is, do you self-learn on your own time?

    5. TFTim Ferriss47:53

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BGBill Gurley47:53

       Like, would you not watch Breaking Bad and read about this field and be energized by that activity?

    7. TFTim Ferriss48:02

       Mm-hmm.

    8. BGBill Gurley48:02

       If you are, and you know, we have 20, 30 different stories in the book of people that have been successful, almost all of them check that box.

    9. TFTim Ferriss48:11

       Mm-hmm.

    10. BGBill Gurley48:12

        You just have this amazing ability to gain knowledge so much faster than everyone else you would be competing with.

    11. TFTim Ferriss48:19

        Mm-hmm.

    12. BGBill Gurley48:20

        And that's gonna be useful. That's unquestionably gonna be useful.

    13. TFTim Ferriss48:23

        It makes me think of an interview I saw a long time ago, actually. It was quite a few years ago, but it was an interview with Joe Rogan, and he said something that, uh, surprised me and might surprise a lot of people, which was along the lines of he's not good at, it was either willpower or discipline, which is, he's in great shape. Obviously, he's black belt in jujitsu. He's done what he's done with the podcast. He's the undisputed king of podcasting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, "I'm not actually good at," whether it was discipline or willpower, "but I am good at obsession." It's all on or all off, and I've seen that, I'm sure you've seen this, in a lot of the entrepreneurs who actually make it to the other side and create these mega successes. They are just obsessed.

    14. BGBill Gurley49:11

        No doubt.

    15. TFTim Ferriss49:12

        And that gives them a huge, not just knowledge advantage, but endurance advantage. You just go down the checkboxes. It's all advantages.

    16. BGBill Gurley49:21

        I had the opportunity to talk to Angela Duckworth when I was working on this, and her book, Grit, talks about two components, passion and perseverance. And I heard a podcast she had done recently where she said if she could go back-

    17. TFTim Ferriss49:34

        Mm-hmm

    18. BGBill Gurley49:34

        ... she would put far more weight on the passion than the perseverance, because she says we've taught our children to grind.

    19. TFTim Ferriss49:41

        Mm-hmm.

    20. BGBill Gurley49:41

        And so once again, starting in sixth grade, they're told to learn the flute and take lacrosse and do all this stuff, and crush the SATs and take the extra credit classes and all this, and they all do it, and then they go to college and, "All right, how are you doing?" They take six hours of class instead of four, and they're just going. But eventually, she says, if you don't have that passion, you just burn out. And so you're right about the energy part. I think it's both knowledge and you've put in more cycles.

    21. TFTim Ferriss50:11

        Yeah. It makes me think of, maybe this is clichéd in Silicon Valley because it gets so oft repeated, but a, a lot of folks listening will not have heard it, which is if you're looking for the next sort of technological breakthrough or something on the edge, look for what the nerds are doing on the weekends, right? It's not just a great way to find what might be coming around the corner in a few years, it's a great way to find the people to bet on who are already using their excess, their free time, to work on these things.

    22. BGBill Gurley50:41

        No doubt.

    23. TFTim Ferriss50:41

        I think of Repetis and 3D printing. I mean, I can just go down the list.

    24. BGBill Gurley50:44

        And by the way, that's another advantage of going to the epicenter is there's more people doing that all

18. 50:50 – 54:19

    Bob Dylan as music expeditionary.

    1. BGBill Gurley50:50

       the time.

    2. TFTim Ferriss50:50

       Let's talk about, people might be surprised by this, but Bob Dylan, right? I think this is just the, the quintessential example. Why is he relevant to what we're talking about?

    3. BGBill Gurley51:01

       When this idea popped in my head, I had finished a third biography and contrasted it with these other two, and I just saw all these patterns. You know, VC's a game of pattern recognition. I guess my brain's just developed. I was like, oh my God, it's all this kinda lock thing where these three people had all done the same thing, and one was a basketball coach, one was a restaurateur, and the other was Bob Dylan. You know, not people you would... Not industry, "Oh, this is where you should get career development advice," right?

    4. TFTim Ferriss51:28

       Yeah.

    5. BGBill Gurley51:28

       There's a part of the Dylan story that most people wouldn't know unless they had read all the biographies or maybe seen the Scorsese documentary, but the new movie misses the whole thing, which is the pre-New York Bob Dylan was hanging out in Minnesota studying folk music at such a deep level that I feel confident in saying when he left, he knew more about folk music than any other human in Minnesota. And he was borrowing, maybe that's even a euphemism, he was stealing his friend's albums.

    6. TFTim Ferriss52:00

       [laughs]

    7. BGBill Gurley52:01

       He was going into the record store into these listening booths. Like, he knew all there was to know-

    8. TFTim Ferriss52:07

       Mm

    9. BGBill Gurley52:07

       ... and had studied every bit of it. And he's referred to by Scorsese as a music expeditionary, and the people that knew him in New York said he could mimic anyone's song. It's not what you would think of when you hear a Dylan song, that he had kind of mastered the bedrock underneath and then started innovating. Picasso, by the way, same thing, perfect realist painter at age 14. If you go to the Barcelona Picasso Museum, it's in geographic order, and you're kinda shocked at how good a realist this, this kid was before he went and did this other thing.

    10. TFTim Ferriss52:44

        Mm.

    11. BGBill Gurley52:44

        That bedrock knowledge I think is so differentiating-

    12. TFTim Ferriss52:50

        Mm-hmm

    13. BGBill Gurley52:50

        ... for someone to have all the history and then to start doing the innovation.

    14. TFTim Ferriss52:55

        What was the before and after on Dylan, sort of Minnesota, New York City? And why is that such an important piece of the puzzle?

    15. BGBill Gurley53:06

        By the way, and, and just to even pile on more on this kinda studious part of Bob Dylan, he did a podcast series for a while where he just walks through all these different genres of music and-

    16. TFTim Ferriss53:20

        You're talking about Bob Dylan himself?

    17. BGBill Gurley53:21

        Yes.

    18. TFTim Ferriss53:22

        Oh, I didn't realize this.

    19. BGBill Gurley53:23

        You can go find it. He stopped, but he... And then that book he put out of the 50 best songs, the coffee table book that came out two years ago, it's incredible the amount of knowledge he has about songs, you know, outside of his genre, everything. So he's a clear student-

    20. TFTim Ferriss53:39

        Mm-hmm

    21. BGBill Gurley53:39

        ... of what he's doing. I think this is well known and is covered at the beginning of the movie. He went to New York to find Woody Guthrie.

    22. TFTim Ferriss53:46

        Mm.

    23. BGBill Gurley53:46

        Probably the single kinda most deterministic and ambitious mentor pursuit story that I've ever heard of. [laughs] Like, he hitchhiked there with no money-

    24. TFTim Ferriss53:56

        Mm-hmm

    25. BGBill Gurley53:56

        ... and found him and became friends with him.

    26. TFTim Ferriss53:59

        This echoes back to go where the action is also.

    27. BGBill Gurley54:03

        Oh, no doubt. And by the way, he landed, you know, in Manhattan at the center of the folk music scene, and all those people he was studying when he was listening in Minnesota, they were all there.

    28. TFTim Ferriss54:15

        Mm-hmm.

    29. BGBill Gurley54:15

        You know, he got to know them all. If that doesn't happen, I don't think Dylan

19. 54:19 – 1:04:40

    Go to the epicenter where the action is.

    1. BGBill Gurley54:19

       happens.

    2. TFTim Ferriss54:19

       How relevant do you think the go where the action is now considering the access to information using ChatGPT or other tools, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Maybe less so access to mentors, although you can have virtual relationships, but how, how relevant do you think that is? I've got my own opinion, but...

    3. BGBill Gurley54:41

       You could certainly have the type of peer and mentor experiences that are remote. I have a great anecdote about MrBeast in the book that we could talk about that was a remote one, but the benefits of being in and around a whole bunch of people that are chasing the same thing is so high. Like-

    4. TFTim Ferriss55:02

       Mm-hmm

    5. BGBill Gurley55:02

       ... and I think the intuition is- Oh, well, it's gonna be even more competitive, so why would I go? Wouldn't it be better to try and do this in a town where it's less of a big deal? But the problem is, your learning is impacted, your access to peers and mentors is drastically reduced, and then probably most importantly, your optionality gets cut so dramatically. People think that a lot of success stories, they attribute it to luck, but, you know, there's that famous saying, "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity." And when you're in the epicenter, both your preparation and your opportunity go up, you know, 10X. And so your ability to just have that lucky moment where you get brought into something is so much higher.

    6. TFTim Ferriss55:52

       So the lucky moment is, I think, really important to underscore in terms of going where the action is, because there's a lot you can do virtually. But let's just say you're using ChatGPT. You're going to get what you prompt. In other words, like, you're asking for something-

    7. BGBill Gurley56:09

       Yeah

    8. TFTim Ferriss56:09

       ... and that can take you down a rabbit hole. But there, at least in my lived experience, and certainly I still see this happening, when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, and then I look back at my angel investing career, I look back at all these collaborations, the vast majority of them did not come from me going out with an agenda and seeking something. They came from serendipitous bumping into somebody at a coffee shop. I literally met Naval Ravikant because I was hitting on his girlfriend at the time when she was getting her coffee, didn't realize they were together. [chuckles] And then you look at Garrett Camp, Kevin Rose. These are like s- at a barbecue, I met Kevin Rose. And you go down the list and you look at all of these formative, massively impactful, personally and professionally, relationships, they almost all came from serendipity. And you just don't seem to get that density unless you're in the center of the action. And perhaps it's easier to relocate yourself, I'm sure it is, when you have fewer responsibilities. But God, I can't even imagine what my life would have looked like had I not left Long Island and then ultimately moved to Silicon Valley.

    9. BGBill Gurley57:20

       Same for me. I had thought about the notion of venture capital and practicing it, and probably would have jumped at any job I could have got. Like, when I was at McCombs here in Austin, I tried to get an interview at Austin Ventures. Like, I didn't get one, but had they said yes, maybe I practiced there, and I, I'm glad that didn't happen. Going and practicing it where I did was the exact right place to do it. I do think if you can, 'cause there are financial constraints, you know, if you wanna be great at a field and that field has an epicenter-

    10. TFTim Ferriss57:53

        Mm-hmm

    11. BGBill Gurley57:53

        ... I think you should go.

    12. TFTim Ferriss57:55

        And there are different types of epicenters too. Like, you think about, let's just say AI, not to repeatedly bang that drum, but you could just say, okay, AI, first thing that comes to mind, Silicon Valley. But this is gonna be a bit of a digression, but I remember asking Derek Sivers, a friend of mine, amazing entrepreneur, kind of philosopher, programmer, people can look him up. But I asked him, "Who's the first person who comes to mind when you think of the word successful?" And he said, "Well, actually, the most interesting or more interesting question might be, who's the third person who comes to mind?" Because I might say something really obvious like Richard Branson, but is he successful? I don't really know what his goals were, so I'd have to compare his goals to his outcomes. And then you get to the third. S- similarly, with an epicenter, you could say Silicon Valley first, but there might be something that is dense in learning but has other advantages, like I think it's the University of Waterloo, but one of these universities where industry is trying to raid the academic program because it's so strong in terms of teaching-

    13. BGBill Gurley58:57

        Yeah

    14. TFTim Ferriss58:57

        ... the technical side, right? So there's so many different ways to approach it, but let's talk about a virtual example. You mentioned MrBeast. Could you describe that story?

    15. BGBill Gurley59:06

        I actually heard it on a podcast, but I had a... I also got a chance to talk to Jimmy Donaldson, so we got it firsthand. When he was infatuated with YouTube, he was one of the first people that was infatuated with YouTube. His parents were rightfully trying to get him to go to school and college, which he wasn't doing because he was playing around on, on YouTube all day. He met three other people who were equally fascinated with YouTube. And this is a virtual epicenter story, but it's really a peer story. One of my six principles is embrace your peers.

    16. TFTim Ferriss59:43

        Mm-hmm.

    17. BGBill Gurley59:43

        And I think far too many people have sharp elbows to peers 'cause they think, you know, they're climbing the ladder and they've gotta beat these people. And the world's just way too prosperous to have that mindset. Like, you can learn so much and get so much value from co-climbing- [chuckles]

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:00:02

        Mm-hmm

    19. BGBill Gurley1:00:02

        ... that you should definitely do that. And I think it's not taught enough and people don't do it enough. But Jimmy happened on these three people, and they got on a Skype call, he said, 20 hours a day.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:00:14

        Sounds like Jimmy. [chuckles]

    21. BGBill Gurley1:00:15

        For years, they shared best practices-

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:00:18

        Mm-hmm

    23. BGBill Gurley1:00:18

        ... on this call, which apparently in that world, like the color of the icon on the post you do on Instagram to send them to YouTube, like all little... these little bitty esoteric things can impact conversion. And he said when he was talking about this that they all became millionaires. And he said, "If you or any random individual had been a fifth person on those calls, you would have too."

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:00:45

        Mm.

    25. BGBill Gurley1:00:45

        You know, because of, of that. And it's just a wonderful example of how peers... He, on this podcast, said something that was very clever. He took the 10,000 hours thing from Gladwell and said, "Well, there were four of us spending 10,000 hours and then sharing ideas, so you get 40,000 hours-

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:01:04

        [chuckles]

    27. BGBill Gurley1:01:05

        ... of expertise."

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:01:06

        How would you suggest people who are not on YouTube where you can identify outliers perhaps? I shouldn't say easily in this day and age. I mean, it's, it's a sea of participants. But how should people go about seeking peers, and do you rank order your principles in a way? For instance, do you want to first check the box, if you can, of go where the action is and then embrace your peers because the level will be higher? I think about, for instance, my experience in Silicon Valley. It could have just as easily for something else been Nashville or New York City or, who knows, Shanghai. I mean, it just depends on what you're doing. The mentors, let's just say like Mike Maples Jr., who taught me the very basic ropes of angel investing, without him, like I don't go zero to one in terms of having any basic literacy or access.

    29. BGBill Gurley1:02:00

        Yeah.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:02:00

        So that was like the first rung on the ladder. But then once I was in, you look at people who were, in a sense, just getting started at the time. I mean, holy shit, some of them have really exploded. I mean, they've all done really well. Like Kevin Rose, Naval-
20. 1:04:40 – 1:07:08

    Danny Meyer’s pivot.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:04:40

       bias, but-

    2. BGBill Gurley1:04:40

       No doubt, no doubt

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:04:41

       ... but let's talk about Danny Meyer because I wanna give an example of someone who gave something up-

    4. BGBill Gurley1:04:46

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:04:47

       ... to then pursue X instead of A, B, or C. Could you say a little bit about Danny? You know, I've interviewed him on the podcast. I might have met him through you. I don't even remember how I initially connected with him. But who is Danny Meyer, and what is this kinda genesis story of Danny Meyer the restaurateur?

    6. BGBill Gurley1:05:04

       It's funny, when someone asks me who is Danny Meyer, I feel compelled the first thing to say he's one of the most genuine humans on the planet.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:05:11

       Yeah, for sure.

    8. BGBill Gurley1:05:12

       Just a wonderful human.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:05:13

       For sure.

    10. BGBill Gurley1:05:13

        But he is also one of the most celebrated restaurateurs of our time. He was working for a company that sold these devices to clip onto clothes so you can't steal them from a retail store.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:05:26

        Mm-hmm.

    12. BGBill Gurley1:05:27

        And he was making good money. He was making about $200,000 a year, and this is-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:05:32

        At the time

    14. BGBill Gurley1:05:32

        ... forty years ago, so-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:05:34

        Yeah, real money

    16. BGBill Gurley1:05:35

        ... yeah, real money. And he had convinced himself he was gonna be a lawyer. I guess a lot of people convince themselves of that. And he was about to take the LSAT, and he was out to dinner with his uncle. And you know, his uncle was probing him and probing him. And, "Oh, yeah, he's gonna take the LSAT." And he s- I think his uncle sensed a lack of real conviction about this thing, this person, this human was gonna do. And he literally said to him, "Why are you doing this? You know you want to be a restaurateur."

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:06:05

        [laughs]

    18. BGBill Gurley1:06:06

        And when you read Danny's book, he did spend a ton of time in his youth being fascinated with restaurants and to the point where he would take copious notes-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:06:15

        Mm

    20. BGBill Gurley1:06:15

        ... like prior to even doing this. So his family had a reason to know that he had this deep passion.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:06:21

        Mm-hmm.

    22. BGBill Gurley1:06:21

        But it's interesting it's an uncle, right? I don't know that a parent-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:06:25

        [laughs]

    24. BGBill Gurley1:06:25

        ... is gonna jump in and say that. And maybe that's an advantage I have, not knowing the readers of my book, in giving them this permission to do things that aren't necessarily pragmatic. But anyway, his uncle said, "You should start a restaurant." And he took the test. He never submitted the scores to a university, and very soon thereafter enrolled in some vocational restaurant courses and took a job. He took the first job he could get, which was a front office job at a restaurant that was making about a tenth the salary that he was making in the sales job.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:06:59

        And went on to, you know, Gramercy Tavern. I mean, all these iconic restaurants. Then Shake Shack, then, I mean-

    26. BGBill Gurley1:07:07

        Yes

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:07:07

        ... just dot,

21. 1:07:08 – 1:13:16

    Working for free.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:07:08

       dot, dot, dot, dot.

    2. BGBill Gurley1:07:08

       Yeah, and, and we walk through in detail his path once he made this intention And one of the variables that my co-writer and I were looking for as we added stories to the book was this moment of intentionality. We didn't want people that fell into a job and were successful. We wanted people that had made a decision, usually a pivot, to say, "I'm gonna go do this now."

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:07:31

       Mm-hmm.

    4. BGBill Gurley1:07:32

       And once he had made that decision, not only did he take that job, but he, he took advantage of being in that restaurant to learn about the multiple functions. But then he set up a tour through Europe as a stage-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:07:45

       A stage

    6. BGBill Gurley1:07:46

       ... in multiple places where he's working for free, basically.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:07:49

       I'm so glad you brought this up because I wouldn't have brought it up myself, but this is gonna relate in a, in a second. I've run a bunch of competitions for, let's just say, creating artwork for PDFs slash, like, free books I'm gonna put out or whatever, and there's always a big hubbub where folks get... Some folks get very upset, and they say, "Oh, you want people to work for free?" And I'm like, "Well, there's gonna be a winner." It's like, if you don't wanna participate, don't participate.

    8. BGBill Gurley1:08:14

       [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:08:14

       But there's always this kind of shaking of the fist, like, "Ah, it's so unfair. You want people to work, do work for free." When I look at almost every example of someone who became the equivalent of Danny Meyer in their world, they did a lot that was unpaid, almost always. I'm sure there are exceptions, but it's like you-- Staging is a great example in the restaurant world where it's like, okay, you wanna work at a restaurant where, where you're gonna have the highest density of learning and you don't know shit, like, guess what? [laughs] They, they probably don't wanna pay you a whole lot 'cause it's actually gonna be a bit of a drain on their resources to show you around and teach you how to work your station and do all this stuff. So I would just encourage people to not be allergic to that. And the way I got, in a sense, my foot in the door in Silicon Valley was I volunteered at TiE, the Indus Entrepreneur.

    10. BGBill Gurley1:09:06

        Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:09:07

        I volunteered at-

    12. BGBill Gurley1:09:07

        I spoke at TiE years ago. [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:09:08

        I, I volunteered with all of these nonprofit groups and quickly realized that most volunteers are doing the absolute minimum to be volunteers, and if you just do ten percent more, it doesn't take much. I would just refill people's water glasses and stuff after I finished taking their tickets for an event, and suddenly the producers of this event, who were also doing it but had, like, real jobs... I mean, I had a job out of college, sure, and I was working a lot. They were like, "Wow, this kid's a go-getter [laughs] 'cause he's refilling these water glasses. Let's give him more responsibility." And that's how I ended up connecting with all these speakers and everything. Just did some stuff for free on the weekends. It didn't take a lot.

    14. BGBill Gurley1:09:49

        There's a story in the book that's actually hard to believe. We profile this woman, Jen Atkins, who's a hairstylist. It's an incredible story. But the one anecdote, she's rising in her career, and things are starting to work, and she has jobs, and she's getting paid. She would go to Fashion Week in Paris and sneak in the back door and volunteer to do the hair of the models on stage.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:10:19

        [laughs]

    16. BGBill Gurley1:10:19

        Like, snuck in. Like, not supposed to be there-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:10:23

        Yeah

    18. BGBill Gurley1:10:23

        ... just to get reps with these top models in this environment.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:10:27

        Incredible.

    20. BGBill Gurley1:10:28

        It, it sounds unfathomable that someone would do that. She did it multiple times.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:10:33

        And she did it.

    22. BGBill Gurley1:10:34

        Yes.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:10:34

        What ended up happening after that? I don't know her story.

    24. BGBill Gurley1:10:37

        She's become probably the most successful hairstylist of our time. [laughs]

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:10:42

        [laughs]

    26. BGBill Gurley1:10:42

        It's an incredible story.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:10:44

        How do you suggest people who are... Maybe they're doing A, B, and C right now. They're listening to this, and they just say, "All right. I wanna take the leap. I wanna do Z. I wanna do whatever-"

    28. BGBill Gurley1:10:59

        Yeah

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:10:59

        ... "the off-menu option is."

    30. BGBill Gurley1:11:00

        Yeah.
22. 1:13:16 – 1:15:27

    Never too late: Tito Beveridge started Tito’s Vodka at 40.

    1. BGBill Gurley1:13:16

       Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, I, I have an example of someone who just turned it on. We have a chapter called Never Too Late, which is where the Sal Khan thing is 'cause that happened when he was close to forty. Another local Austinite Burt Tito Beveridge started his endeavor in the spirit business at-

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:13:32

       So wild. I was just thinking about him while driving here for no good reason

    3. BGBill Gurley1:13:35

       ... at the age of 40. He's watching a PBS special.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:13:38

       Mm-hmm.

    5. BGBill Gurley1:13:39

       This is also hard to believe. He's watching a PBS special, and back when probably when there were only four channels or whatever, but they said, on the screen, they said, "Take a blank sheet of paper, draw a line down it, put what you love to do on the left and what you're really good at on the right, just a list of those things, and then contemplate what might be in the middle." And he had studied chemistry and a lot of stuff, and he liked going out to bars [laughs] and socializing, and he was making flavored vodka as Christmas presents in his spare time.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:14:11

       What was his day job?

    7. BGBill Gurley1:14:12

       His first career was in seismology and, and like the oil field.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:14:17

       Yeah.

    9. BGBill Gurley1:14:17

       And that dragged him to South America. And then when that became dangerous, both, both in Midland and in South America, he became a mortgage broker.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:14:26

        Okay. [laughs]

    11. BGBill Gurley1:14:27

        He didn't love either of them.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:14:28

        Yeah.

    13. BGBill Gurley1:14:29

        But the reason I brought it up when you said, like, already, I don't know that he was already studying-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:14:34

        Right

    15. BGBill Gurley1:14:34

        ... the spirit business, but once he made that intentionality to go do this, then he studied it writ large.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:14:41

        How did he start? Just out of curiosity, 'cause I was just thinking about him. Tito Beveridge just acquired Lalo Tequila-

    17. BGBill Gurley1:14:47

        Yeah

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:14:47

        ... which I was involved with. That's probably why he popped to mind. But how did he start?

    19. BGBill Gurley1:14:52

        He first started by just studying the distilling process writ large, like read everything he possibly could. And then it turns out there were no distilleries in the state of Texas, and there were laws on the books that made it nearly impossible. So then he had to study that and, and literally rewrite regulation-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:15:08

        [laughs]

    21. BGBill Gurley1:15:08

        ... to make it possible. Interestingly, he did the whole thing on credit cards, so he owns 100% of the business.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:15:14

        Yeah.

    23. BGBill Gurley1:15:15

        Which is a huge business. It's the single largest spirit sold in America.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:15:21

        Didn't realize that.

    25. BGBill Gurley1:15:22

        Yes.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:15:22

        Didn't realize it was that big.

    27. BGBill Gurley1:15:23

        It's huge.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:15:24

        Wow. Good for him.

    29. BGBill Gurley1:15:25

        Huge. Yes. [laughs]

23. 1:15:27 – 1:19:38

    AI sanity checks.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:15:27

       That's so wild. I promise to get to this, and I do wanna get to it. Are there any sanity checks that you would put in place to complement the fascination/obsession/what I'm doing in my spare time or would pay to do or do for free? Like, so I'm wondering if there are any things you, you would take off the table or how you would hone that given the rapidly developing [laughs] technology of AI. So if someone said, "You know, what I love to do in my spare time is copy editing-"

    2. BGBill Gurley1:15:59

       Yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:15:59

       ... I might not suggest that they throw caution to the wind and-

    4. BGBill Gurley1:16:03

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:16:04

       ... burn the ships and go into copy editing. Any thoughts? Because this is something that is-

    6. BGBill Gurley1:16:08

       Well, the first thing I would note is that many of those pragmatic jobs that the well-intentioned parents have been pushing their children towards are at risk.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:16:17

       Yeah, for sure.

    8. BGBill Gurley1:16:18

       So, so comp sci.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:16:20

       Right. It's kind of-

    10. BGBill Gurley1:16:20

        [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:16:21

        Yeah, risky, but as compared to what, right?

    12. BGBill Gurley1:16:23

        Comp sci went from being the, the most least risky major you could possibly get to one that's somewhat risky, like-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:16:30

        Yeah

    14. BGBill Gurley1:16:30

        ... overnight. And so that'd be my first, like, notion. And, you know, the second thing I would add to that, which I already said, is no matter what your endeavor is, you need to be playing with this tool. It's a modern tool.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:16:45

        Mm-hmm.

    16. BGBill Gurley1:16:45

        It's the equivalent of a laptop and Microsoft Word was. It's equivalent of what a calculator was. Like, you don't wanna go out in the world and play without the modern tool set.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:16:56

        Mm.

    18. BGBill Gurley1:16:56

        It's a part of what you need. If you're playing with those things and you're curious, you know where the edge is of whatever you're passionate about and what the technology's capable of.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:17:06

        In order to find that edge and follow that edge, right, which will move, you have to be playing with the tools.

    20. BGBill Gurley1:17:12

        Yeah. And I think in any field, one thing I love to suggest on the, on the learning side is know the history and know the, the new innovative edge. If you bring both of those things to the table, you are highly compelling. That could be true even if you're not chasing your dream job, even if you're just a marketing major. If you walk into an interview at Clorox and you can simultaneously show that you've studied all the historical best marketers and you also understand how TikTok works, that's heavily differentiating in that interview.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:17:47

        Mm-hmm.

    22. BGBill Gurley1:17:47

        Like, you're gonna get the job, I would argue, versus someone else, if you can portray those things.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:17:53

        How would you apply that here? Is that just, I guess, field dependent or are you referring to AI?

    24. BGBill Gurley1:17:58

        I think AI is the leading edge of almost any industry.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:18:01

        Yeah.

    26. BGBill Gurley1:18:01

        So yeah, I'm, I'm saying you should just study what it's capable of. The thing that LLMs are most capable of, it's a large language model, the language type stuff. Uh, your copy editing example, like things that were just wrote moving words around, yeah, it's really good at that stuff. But it doesn't mean that you can't be the person that really understands what it's capable of and then, like, superpower yourself to go attack a particular interest. You had started a question by saying, like, warnings. You know, I think there are a lot of fields where talent really does matter. I don't know that I can make you a singer. I certainly can't make you an NBA basketball player. But in all those fields, whether it be Hollywood or sports or, you know, even in... Danny Meyer at one time thought he was gonna be a chef and he just became a restaurateur. He wasn't a chef. I would say that there, for any artistic field, there are way more jobs that support those artists than there are the jobs of the artist.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:19:04

        What do you mean by that?

    28. BGBill Gurley1:19:05

        I mean, we have an example in the book of a Hollywood agent, and that individual had not thought about a job in Hollywood when they were growing up because they felt they couldn't act.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:19:16

        Mm.

    30. BGBill Gurley1:19:16

        So they're like, "Oh, I can't go do that." But there's tons of jobs-
24. 1:19:38 – 1:22:48

    AI-proof bets.

    1. BGBill Gurley1:19:38

       person.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:19:39

       This makes me think of a interview I was watching recently, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Invest with the Best. He was interviewing Ari Emanuel, so famous super agent.

    3. BGBill Gurley1:19:48

       Yep.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:19:49

       Force of nature. His whole family is just like drinking different water. I don't know what's going on there. But he has raised a ton of money to invest in live events, sports, and so on as an anti-AI or maybe AI anti-fragile bet, right? And there are lots of ways to make money when you raise a lot of money. So putting that aside, any other AI resilient or anti-AI bets that you think are interesting outside of live events, live sports, which are-

    5. BGBill Gurley1:20:21

       I think a lot of the service industries, I think humans enjoy experiences, and I don't think that changes personally that much. Restaurateurs or hoteliers, like I think all those things are gonna thrive and people that know how to really differentiate experiences in that way.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:20:41

       Mm-hmm.

    7. BGBill Gurley1:20:42

       I don't share this thought that we're all gonna go watch movies that we've imagined that are made just for ourselves. I find that hard to believe. I think people enjoy great art in many different forms. They enjoy talking about it.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:20:58

       Mm-hmm.

    9. BGBill Gurley1:20:58

       And they enjoy the community element of having seen the same thing.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:21:03

        Mm-hmm.

    11. BGBill Gurley1:21:03

        And so it may be that if you're a movie maker, you're using AI instead of this expensive CGI tool set. But I think the storytelling and the imagination and the writing, I think all those things will still be real. I really do. And obviously, just general business entrepreneurship. I took my dad, who's ninety-three, fly fishing in, in Montana this summer, and we were at a lodge, and one of the other guests that was staying there is a twenty-eight-year-old entrepreneur from the tip of Texas down near Corpus Christi area. And he had started like three or four businesses, and it was well off. Like, I'm not saying... But he was so enamored with AI. He said, "And then I needed this, and then it did this, and then I needed this, and then it did this, and then, like, I, I wanted to know where to put the next one of these, and I just ask it, 'Where would you put it in the city?' And it immediately gave me answers." This guy was already successful, but he was running triple speed because he had tipped into this stuff, and he was learning what was possible because he had an open mind towards it solving problems.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:22:12

        Mm-hmm.

    13. BGBill Gurley1:22:12

        And I thought, "Holy shit, if other people kinda just leaned at it the way he's leaning at it, they would become super powered themselves." I was like really blown away by that.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:22:25

        Yeah. This makes me think of Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose is spending the vast majority of his free time playing with all these tools, vibe coding, using them endlessly. And I f- I feel like that is probably over the next few weeks where I need to put some more time-

    15. BGBill Gurley1:22:41

        Yeah

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:22:41

        ... and just take a layup with wherever it happens to intersect with someplace that makes it easy to apply.

25. 1:22:48 – 1:26:07

    Sam Hinkie’s Moneyball moment.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:22:48

       Who's Sam Hinkie?

    2. BGBill Gurley1:22:49

       [laughs] Sam Hinkie is a gentleman that about, I don't know, six years ago became maybe the youngest GM in the history of the NBA. He became the general manager of the Philadelphia seventy-sixers.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:23:06

       Why is this story relevant?

    4. BGBill Gurley1:23:08

       He was a amazing student. He grew up in Oklahoma. His father worked for Halliburton. He made good grades, good students, kinda classic, did everything right. Became a consultant. I think he was working for McKinsey.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:23:25

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BGBill Gurley1:23:25

       And, and they moved him to Australia. And he's sitting there, and he's reading other things in his spare time. He's not reading about how to be a better consultant.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:23:36

       [laughs]

    8. BGBill Gurley1:23:36

       And he reads a book called Moneyball, which-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:23:39

       Yeah

    10. BGBill Gurley1:23:39

        ... we all know of, the Michael Lewis book about the Oakland A's. In almost what seems like an instant decided, "I really need to be in sports analytics." And I mentioned that a lot of the stories we found have this intentionality. So that book, just like the Seinfeld, the last laugh did for Seinfeld, that book told him, "I'm gonna go do this." And from the day he read that book to getting the job as, as the head of GM of the seventy-sixers was about ten years. So no experience whatsoever in the field to youngest GM of all time in ten years.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:24:16

        Was he obsessed with sports already at that point?

    12. BGBill Gurley1:24:19

        I think so. You know, this gets back to what I said about maybe your original obsession came from participating or being the talent, but then, you know, he, he's not particularly big. And so he was successful in high school, but there was no path to keep going down that field. So yeah, he had immense passion for the category but had never imagined himself in the field, you know, in one of these other roles until that book kinda disinhibited him and gave him permission to think, "Well, you know what? I could be differentiated on this dimension of understanding analytics." He immediately was applying to business school, and he used that as a pivot point. For those that have the, the needs and the resources, I think an MBA programs can be a great place to switch careers and go chase A different dream. And there's a great interesting anecdote in the book where he's trying to decide between Harvard and Stanford, which is a choice most humans never-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:25:19

        Quality problem [laughs] .

    14. BGBill Gurley1:25:20

        Yeah, exactly. But he went and told them both what he wanted to do, and Harvard basically said, "Well, we don't really have any programs like that." And Stanford, to give Stanford a lot of credit, said, "You know what? That's super interesting. We have, you know, this person associated with the school that does this. We- we'll introduce you to these four people," and were a lot like McConaughey's dad when Sam brought him that, that challenge.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:25:47

        Sounds about right. That checks out for me [laughs] .

    16. BGBill Gurley1:25:49

        Yeah, based on what you know of the two institutions.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:25:51

        Yeah [laughs] .

    18. BGBill Gurley1:25:52

        Yeah. You know, he ended up meeting Michael Lewis because he was in the Bay Area, and some of the Stanford people knew Michael. And so he talked to the guy that wrote the book that inspired him. He hustled his ass off. Like-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:26:03

        Mm-hmm

    20. BGBill Gurley1:26:04

        ... I don't wanna make it sound like... He kinda built his own curriculum,

26. 1:26:07 – 1:37:33

    Competitive strategy, avoiding false failures, and regret minimalization.

    1. BGBill Gurley1:26:07

       but it worked.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:26:08

       For people who are not going to get an MBA, would you still suggest everyone read the first three chapters of Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors?

    3. BGBill Gurley1:26:18

       Unquestionably. Anyone that's gonna do anything in business should read that book.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:26:22

       All right. Wanted to give the throwback to our first conversation.

    5. BGBill Gurley1:26:25

       [laughs] By the way, at the back of the book, I listed about 50 books at the very end.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:26:30

       Just to whet the appetite [laughs] .

    7. BGBill Gurley1:26:32

       Well, I think you did the same thing. In fact, I looked at yours for the structure when I wanted to see how to lay it out.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:26:37

       Oh, amazing.

    9. BGBill Gurley1:26:38

       Yeah.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:26:38

        Amazing. I wanna get your expansion on avoiding false failures. Let me explain what I mean by that. So there's this expression, if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.

    11. BGBill Gurley1:26:52

        Yeah.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:26:53

        Right?

    13. BGBill Gurley1:26:54

        It's in my notes [laughs] .

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:26:56

        But my experience has been it's not always fun, even if you're doing what you love. Sometimes there's burnout, sometimes you go through chapters where things do feel like a grind. I mean, that-- maybe I'm an outlier, but that's been my experience, right?

    15. BGBill Gurley1:27:11

        Yeah.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:27:11

        When, when I realized, for instance, in the case of the podcast, it's like, wow, I've much more sponsor demand than I could ever fill. If I just doubled the number of episodes, I'd double the number of revenue.

    17. BGBill Gurley1:27:22

        Yeah.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:27:22

        [laughs] So why don't I do that? And it started to feel like a bad job. Not a bad job.

    19. BGBill Gurley1:27:28

        I get it.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:27:29

        It's still a great job, but the volume was too high.

    21. BGBill Gurley1:27:31

        Yeah.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:27:31

        And I can imagine if people take the expression I just mentioned, right? If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. They pursue X, whatever that is, the songwriting in the case, and the performing in the case of Bob Dylan, Danny Meyer, whatever it might be, and then they hit a really hard stretch. Maybe it's early on.

    23. BGBill Gurley1:27:51

        Yeah.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:27:51

        Maybe it's later. Maybe they're staging, and so some French guy yelling at them- [laughs]

    25. BGBill Gurley1:27:56

        Yeah, yeah. Certainly

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:27:57

        ... as, as the case with a friend of mine, and they're like, "Wow, God, you know, this, this really feels painful. Maybe this isn't my path."

    27. BGBill Gurley1:28:04

        Yeah.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:28:05

        How do you distinguish between growing pains that are temporary and an indication that you're not doing the right thing?

    29. BGBill Gurley1:28:17

        It's funny. I'll take a short diversion in answering the question-

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:28:20

        Yeah. Love diversions
27. 1:37:33 – 1:41:09

    Purpose, Progress, and Prosperity — the P3 Policy Institute.

    1. BGBill Gurley1:37:33

       Yeah.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:37:33

       Let's chat for a second. People should, should all check this out. I mean, you're, you're such a, an operator. Track record's incredible. Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love. We'll talk about that again. We'll mention it again at the end. What do you want to do after this book? I mean, you, you can't sit on your hands very long. [laughs]

    3. BGBill Gurley1:37:49

       No. As I mentioned when I made the decision to stop the venture career, which I think we talked about on the last podcast-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:37:58

       Little bit, yeah

    5. BGBill Gurley1:37:58

       ... right after we read the Steve Martin book.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:37:59

       Mm-hmm.

    7. BGBill Gurley1:38:00

       But I didn't know. I knew I wanted to do something else, and I, I went on a listening tour and I talked to all these people that had kind of-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:38:08

       Can you just reiterate what a listening tour is?

    9. BGBill Gurley1:38:10

       Oh, I just... I identified several people who had kind of successfully, retired's a strong word, but made a decision to stop doing a job they were very successful at, and then what do you do now, right?

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:38:26

        Mm-hmm.

    11. BGBill Gurley1:38:26

        And it's similar to the Arthur Brooks book, but it was just a personal-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:38:30

        Mm-hmm

    13. BGBill Gurley1:38:30

        ... like, a lot of people angel invest, a lot of people go on boards, a lot of people manage their own money.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:38:37

        Mm-hmm.

    15. BGBill Gurley1:38:37

        I had this list, people teach, and I s- slowly was checking them off, like-

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:38:43

        Just crossing them out

    17. BGBill Gurley1:38:44

        ... scratching them out.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:38:45

        Yeah.

    19. BGBill Gurley1:38:45

        Yeah, like, nah, don't really wanna manage my own money. I don't really wanna angel invest. I don't wanna start my own venture firm. I've done that. And so I found myself crossing them all off, and I couldn't discover something that got me excited and tied into this, what are you doing with your external learning thing? And slowly I've come around to an idea that I made up, so it's not a career that other people have, but I, I think I'd like to start a policy institute.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:39:13

        Mm-hmm.

    21. BGBill Gurley1:39:14

        I've come up with a name, P3, which stands for Purpose, Progress, and Prosperity. When I was doing the BG2 podcast, which I recently stepped away from, we did a episode at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Facility.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:39:29

        Mm-hmm.

    23. BGBill Gurley1:39:30

        And before I did that episode, I spent three or four weeks calling everyone I knew to make sure that I was prepared for that, and that was one of our more successful episodes, and I just really enjoyed that. I look at the shifting mindset around the globe on nuclear energy in the past five years as an example of what's possible with really great policy work. And it wasn't one person. I think, you know, the fact that Steve Pinker was banging the drum was super important, but Andreessen and Elon and all these people started pounding that same drum. Joe Gebbia's wife, you know-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:40:11

        Mm-hmm

    25. BGBill Gurley1:40:11

        ... made this, like, a big life passion project of hers. But it's shocking how quick we went from, "This stuff's bad," to, "Oh, no, we made a mistake. It's actually good."

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:40:21

        Mm-hmm.

    27. BGBill Gurley1:40:22

        And that could have a powerful impact on the planet. And so I don't know how many of those type things there are to find. I don't wanna go grind on state-by-state legislation. I don't have any interest in that. But looking at big problems, looking at US-China relations, US healthcare system has some massive problems. You know, can you come up with ideas that help shift these things? And I've already got to know some really innovative professors who are thinking in very innovative ways, and I, I look to use my financial capabilities to do grant writing through people like that and see what we can go do, see what we can go change. Regulatory capture is another one-

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:41:07

        Mm-hmm

    29. BGBill Gurley1:41:07

        ... that I've spent time

28. 1:41:09 – 1:45:56

    Regulatory capture explained.

    1. BGBill Gurley1:41:09

       tilting at.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:41:10

       So could you elaborate on what... If you're not doing the state-by-state legislative change, what does the work of P3 potentially look like? Like, what is policy work?

    3. BGBill Gurley1:41:22

       We're, we're-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:41:22

       I know that seems like a silly question, but-

    5. BGBill Gurley1:41:23

       We're at day one, so-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:41:25

       Mm-hmm. What might it look like?

    7. BGBill Gurley1:41:26

       Yeah. Here's an example. A professor approached me on the regulatory capture front. What if we put-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:41:31

       Could you define that just for people who didn't hear episode one?

    9. BGBill Gurley1:41:33

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago named George Stigler, he's passed away, who made the very strong argument that regulation is the friend of the incumbent. That-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:41:45

        Mm-hmm

    11. BGBill Gurley1:41:45

        ... large businesses learn how to lobby Washington, and no matter how well-intentioned the policy is that's passed, it ends up benefiting the incumbent more than restricting the incumbent. And he won a Nobel Prize for that work. I, I gave a speech at the All-In Summit that you can go watch on YouTube, it has, like, 5 million views, on this topic, but I think this happens the majority of the time.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:42:13

        It's why ACH takes three days to clear, right?

    13. BGBill Gurley1:42:15

        Yes, yes.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:42:16

        [laughs]

    15. BGBill Gurley1:42:16

        Yes, yes. But stablecoin may solve that. But this professor approached me about making a, maybe a global database that scores countries on how captured they are.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:42:26

        Mm.

    17. BGBill Gurley1:42:26

        And that identifies the best practices from the countries that have the best scores.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:42:31

        Mm.

    19. BGBill Gurley1:42:32

        That kind of thing, like investing in that type of data and transparency is pretty compelling to me. So that, that's an example of what I might go do.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:42:41

        Well, let me chew on that for a second. So let's say you create this, this data set, right? That presents these scores on a country-by-country basis. What is, what are the hoped-for outcomes of that? That countries that have worse scores start to model the countries with better scores? Uh, certainly there might be talent flight from one place to another. I mean, we already see that in some respects. I mean, that's not purely regulatory capture determined, but what would the... When you share that data, what would the hope be?

    21. BGBill Gurley1:43:11

        The hope would be that you can shine a light on the best practices and-

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:43:15

        Mm-hmm

    23. BGBill Gurley1:43:15

        ... and try to get those implemented-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:43:17

        In other places

    25. BGBill Gurley1:43:18

        ... here in the US.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:43:19

        Yeah.

    27. BGBill Gurley1:43:19

        That would be the hope. And also, I think just shining a light on them. I'll give you an example that relates to regulatory capture. After you've been a senator or congressman for a while, you get invited onto committees.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:43:32

        Yep.

    29. BGBill Gurley1:43:32

        The minute you're on a committee, you are in charge of regulation that affects different industries. Well, what happens, and you [chuckles] most... I don't even know if most humans know this. What happens is your local senator or your local congressman who you think is representing your district now starts raising money nationally.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:43:53

        Mm-hmm.
29. 1:45:56 – 1:56:06

    Why the IPO market is broken.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:45:56

       [chuckles] So other problems on your mind. Well, I'll just present a, a list here from some prep notes. We have US healthcare, regulatory capture, intellectual property, US-China, fairness in financial markets, US K-twelve. Could you speak to intellectual property and fairness in financial markets, what those... How you might be thinking about those?

    2. BGBill Gurley1:46:17

       I gotta be a top ten thousand percent supporter of open source.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:46:22

       Yep.

    4. BGBill Gurley1:46:22

       And this gets back to Ridley's book, The, The Rational Optimist, but he talks about prosperity comes when ideas have sex.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:46:31

       Yeah.

    6. BGBill Gurley1:46:31

       And just the sharing of information, in my mind, should be free.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:46:36

       Yeah.

    8. BGBill Gurley1:46:36

       That it, it shouldn't cost anything. And it's very unclear to me that the patent system actually adds value. I, I'm quite doubtful that the human mind wouldn't innovate if it didn't come with a seventeen-year financial protection. Like, I just... I'm doubtful of that. I think there's great scientists at every university working on problems that aren't necessarily being patented, and your ability for hyper-competition and innovation is so much higher when there aren't restrictions in place.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:47:08

       Hmm.

    10. BGBill Gurley1:47:09

        So I think the world's a better place when ideas are, are shared and not protected.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:47:14

        How do you think if we're just, since the [chuckles] we- the system we're working with is the system we're currently working with, how might something like drug development work without patent protection?

    12. BGBill Gurley1:47:27

        Well, here's an interesting thing. The NIH gives out forty billion dollars a year, and a lot of that money goes to companies that end up getting venture capital backing, and then-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:47:37

        Yeah. I've had some very open fights with people about this. Yeah. Yeah.

    14. BGBill Gurley1:47:41

        So why doesn't an NIH grant come with a open source rider?

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:47:44

        Yeah. Yeah.

    16. BGBill Gurley1:47:45

        And so if the VCs wanna fund-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:47:47

        With federal funding, yeah

    18. BGBill Gurley1:47:48

        ... propriety... Yeah, it's federal funding, like-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:47:50

        Yeah, I agree with that

    20. BGBill Gurley1:47:51

        ... and right now, there's a big fight over whether just their research papers have to go on non-private networks instead of the private ones they're on today. I mean, they just want the information out there.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:48:03

        Yeah.

    22. BGBill Gurley1:48:03

        Like, that's a minor step. I would consider a major step. And you don't have to take the money.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:48:08

        Yeah.

    24. BGBill Gurley1:48:08

        But why is the US government giving people money that ends up becoming proprietary inventions? That, that makes no sense to me.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:48:15

        Yeah, whether it's the US government or individual philanthropists or foundations, I mean, on some level, if that, then at some point... Right, I agree with that. But are there industries that, I mean, the only one that first came to mind was, was drug development, where the R&D costs are so high-

    26. BGBill Gurley1:48:32

        That's because they have, they have-- They all cry. The VCs will tell you, "It'll never work. No one will have any incentive if we don't have a seventeen-year protection."

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:48:39

        Yeah.

    28. BGBill Gurley1:48:39

        Our, uh, the entire Silicon Valley-

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:48:41

        I'm not saying I believe that. I'm just-

    30. BGBill Gurley1:48:41

        No, I know, I know. I just... I've lived in a world where if someone comes into our office and talks about patents, we roll our eyes because none of the types of businesses that we've backed at Benchmark in Silicon Valley are ever about patents. Elon has famously open sourced all his Tesla patents. Like, it's such a bold thing to do and so gracious, I think, really to society. But you- His point is, oddly, I was talking to Ted Cruz about this, and he said, "Yeah, Elon thinks the same thing." Like, he views the, the edge of competition is how fast are you moving, how great are your products, do consumers love them, not can I defend them in a court of law? Like, it's just-
30. 1:56:06 – 1:57:54

    Stablecoins putting Visa and Mastercard on notice.

    1. BGBill Gurley1:56:06

       The long kind of prevalence of Visa and Mastercard is just ridiculous, two and a half percent. And stablecoins have so much momentum right now. I think those two companies are gonna be in real trouble within a five-year window. Most of the financial problems are pure regulatory capture.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:56:27

       Mm-hmm.

    3. BGBill Gurley1:56:28

       Like, the reason that there's a problem.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:56:30

       Tell me if I'm explaining this well. I... 'Cause I'm not sure we said it this directly, but basically the incumbents help to write laws and regulations that favor them and prevent newcomers from competing effectively.

    5. BGBill Gurley1:56:41

       After '08, we wrote this thing, Dodd-Frank, and we thought, "Oh, we're gonna, like, make things better," and all you've had is consolidation in banking since then.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:56:51

       Yeah.

    7. BGBill Gurley1:56:52

       And if you look at the offering, especially at the low end for the poorest citizens of the US, free checking went away. The poor people have a hard time paying their bills, so they don't even have the tools to do it because free checking went away. Free checking went away after Dodd-Frank.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:57:07

       Please push back if I'm oversimplifying this, but regulatory capture is not just bad for startups in Silicon Valley who hope to grow and disrupt and fill in the blank. It's, it's also bad for everybody.

    9. BGBill Gurley1:57:20

       Oh, it's horrible for consumers. I mean, the, the US healthcare situation, which seems to be getting worse on a daily basis, is a huge example of regulatory capture. Somewhere in the past 10 years, they just told physicians they can't run hospitals. They just eliminated... I mean, who other than a doctor is gonna go start a new hospital? Like, [laughs] the amount of competition you eliminated in this one swoop is enormous.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:57:48

        Yeah.

    11. BGBill Gurley1:57:48

        Just enormous. Now, that's just a single example, but there's hundreds of them in that, in that area.

31. 1:57:54 – 2:00:26

    Hopes for Runnin’ Down a Dream and parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:57:54

       What would success be for this book? Six, six months after it comes out, what will lead you to have been happy with putting the time in? It's taken a while.

    2. BGBill Gurley1:58:03

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:58:03

       Right? It's taken a lot of work. What do you hope the outcome will be?

    4. BGBill Gurley1:58:07

       It really started as a passion project, and I, I have no financial goals for it whatsoever. In fact, as we get to book launch, I'm gonna launch a foundation that gives grants to people who want to chase their dream job but don't have the financial wherewithal to do it.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:58:24

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BGBill Gurley1:58:24

       And so I'm gonna start working on that in addition to P3. For me, it's all about how many people do I affect in the way that McConaughey's dad did or that this book did for Seinfeld. Some of them saw the talk on YouTube from the UT presentation that I gave and have already reached out and said thank you, and they've shared how it changed their life, but the more people I can do that for, I would just be tickled pink. I'd just be so excited because I think when people get out of this pragmatic lane and go do these types of things, they, they tend to be unusually successful, which I think then has a bigger impact than just on them themselves.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:59:08

       Yeah, for sure.

    8. BGBill Gurley1:59:08

       Like, the number of h- humans positively impacted by Danny Meyer's success is in the thousands, I'm certain, and I'm not counting customers of Shake Shack. [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:59:22

       [laughs] So people, check it out. I mean, I love your writing, Bill. You're not just a commentator, right? You've been an operator. You've observed a lot of operators, studied outliers, and people who've chosen X instead of A, B, or C. The book is Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love. Check it out, folks. People can find you on X, @bgurley, of course. If they wanna see just a landing page, they can go to benchmark.com. [laughs]

    10. BGBill Gurley1:59:52

        [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:59:52

        Anywhere else you'd like to point people or anything else you'd like to mention before we start to land the plane?

    12. BGBill Gurley1:59:58

        No, I'm good. Thank you so much for your time.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:59:59

        Yeah. Thanks, Bill. And for everybody watching and listening, we will have a link to everything we mentioned. We mentioned a lot of things and a lot of references and resources. Just go to tim.blog/podcast. You can check all that out. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. But look for X when people give you A, B, or C or when you think you're limited to A, B, and C. Till next time, thanks for tuning in

Episode duration: 2:00:37