The Tim Ferriss Show - #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Bill Gurley (@bgurley) is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. His new book is Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.This episode is brought to you by:Momentous high-quality creatine for cognitive and muscular supportOur Place’s Titanium Always Pan® Pro using nonstick technology that’s coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “Forever Chemicals”Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail businessCoyote the card game​, which I co-created with Exploding Kittens*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where is my job to deconstruct world-class performers. I interview them to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, et cetera, that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is Bill Gurley. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. But his venture career, his career overall spans a lot. He is invested in and served on the boards of such companies as Next Door, Open Table, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Zillow. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Florida, and then his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. He's had lots of other

careers, but we discussed that in our first episode. We're going to cover a lot more on this one. For more than two decades, Bill has written about technology and other subjects on his popular blog above the crowd and on his social media accounts. His new book is Running Down a Dream, How to Thrive in a career you actually love, and we detail exactly what he means by that, including some incredible stories and takeaways that you can apply. You can find him on X at X.com slash B-G-G-U-R-L-E-Y, and without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with none other than Bill Gurley. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I answer your personal question? Now I would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endosclerosis. Me, Tim Ferriss Show. Bill, great to see you, man. Good to see you. And I thought we would start with a prop that you brought.

So there was a very thick book, a tattered cover. And I think that is as good a lead-in as anything. and what are you holding? 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, because I wanted to see it and have it. What's the subtitle?

The Last Lap, the world of stand-up comics. Why do you have this book? Are you thinking of making a career switch? No, no, no, no. So as part of researching my new book, running down a dream, my co-writer and I were, we spent six years, like just diving,

through stories because I had done this speech at the University of Texas and we wanted to 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 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 want to 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, it looks like 15 different. You know, it's got Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Townland, 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? When you go to college, they don't list stand-up comedian as something that you can go do. The guidance counselors generally putting that on the multiple choice. Exactly, but this book served as something that granted him permission to go do that. And we're going to come back to that. 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 length. But I wanted to start with some topical subject matter, AI bubble or not. And if so, what does that mean? Yeah, so I think this is super interesting. My partner, Peter, reminded me of a book that we had seen a while ago by Carlotta Perez. It has this very benign title, technological revolutions and finance. capital. It was written in like 2002. And what Perez kind of 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, carpet baggers, interlopers, that want to come take advantage of. Think of the gold rush, you know. And so people want to 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 kind of thing. And if you study Perez, and I think this is absolutely correct, if the wave is real, then you're going to have bubble-like behavior. They come together as a pair, Precisely because any time there's very quick wealth creation, you're going to get a lot of people that want to come try and take advantage of that are participating in it.

So you get a flood of those types of people coming at it. It's odd. There's a real technology wave that's fundamentally changing the world. And there's also massive speculation simultaneous. 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 2008 as an example of a bad bubble, right, financial bubble versus, let's just say,

the early 2000s of like 98, 99, 2000, where a lot of very very various. 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, 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. Just 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 Mac 7 have all decided to do things from a deal perspective. You've read about these circular deals and whatnot. Could you explain what you mean about that? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of talk out there, but it all started. When Microsoft invested in Open AI, Open Eye agreed to buy services from Microsoft, which is called a circular deal because you're giving them money they wouldn't have otherwise. And when Dario was on stage at Deal Book 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. And I'm like, well, that's precisely why this is a questionable behavior. But it's, it's gotten bigger, you know, NVIDIA's handing out money and then NVIDIA gave core weave money, but then also agreed to buy any services they have left over. This stuff's

not ideal. Like if you were saying, 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? And I've asked other people to try and understand how even big sophisticated companies might get speculative, using a word from the previous discussion. And you know, I hear things like, well, 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. So when it comes to retail investors, I would be particularly concerned for them at this stage in the AI game because there is a plethora of SBV vehicles.

You've heard that phrase, I'm sure, SBV. This is where someone has an end on an investment and they do a one-off VC fund, if you will. Special purpose vehicle. Yeah, it's a single entity just for that one deal. 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.

And they take a rake on it. And there's people promote. smoteing SPVs in a situation where they don't even actually have the underlying stock, or maybe they hope to get it. It's the wild, wild west. And most of the people on that edge, I would put in the category of interloper, carpet, bagger. These are people that have come to this thing. And I just think you've got to be quite careful.

The investments that were made that have already had 100x plus returns were made a while ago, you know, before this thing started. 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 that being the case are really, really low. Yeah, I would add to that and say this applies to me as much as anyone else. But your actual risk tolerance may differ, probably does differ significantly from your perceived risk tolerance. If you haven't had a huge drawdown, right, if you haven't actually written a few of those waves and see how you respond in those circumstances,

and you should be, I suppose, skeptical of how you view your own intestinal fortitude with some of those things, or maybe the losses you can absorb. So I recall, for instance, I've seen this many, many times, but with these types of SBVs, people get involved. And let's just say they're not typically an angel investor. They don't have the experience of watching 60, 70, 80 percent of their investments go to zero or become The Walking Dead. And they sign off on all of the not necessarily waivers, but they accept, except, except, unlike the SBV terms of service, which all say you could lose all of your investment. This is incredibly risky.

Yeah. But then when it does go to zero, the financial and psychological impact is catastrophic. There's a lot of people, and I think this comes from a very good place. I think they're very well-intentioned who look at the world and say, rising inequality, like, why can't everyone have access to the same things? And then companies are staying private longer. So they say, we need to institutionalize the generic public's ability to invest in private companies. I think there's two problems.

One, you just hinted at, which is most private company VC backed even go to zero, like the majority, which is not something people, they sense that they want the lottery ticket. They want the Uber. They want the one that goes to the moon. But they don't understand that that comes along with it. they don't want to buy losing lottery tickets for 12 years right right exactly and the second problem is the information transparency in the private company game is just low and I think the institutional investors have come to understand that and kind of know what they're getting into and know how to evaluate things but if you come at it with a public market mindset thinking oh every set of

financials I've been handed is audited and is correct and that's just not the case. It's super loosey-goosey. 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? I'll tell you a funny story. 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, I'll do a bunch of angel investing. You know, Bezos did it on the side. You know, this be fantastic. He did pretty well with an angel investing. I was explaining this to a, I won't say

who it is, but a Silicon Valley CEO very successful. And he said, what are you going to do now? I said, I was thinking I'm doing angel investing. He goes, why would you do that? He said, I got 50 of these things. People don't return my calls. He goes, I wish I'd never done it. So there is a unglamorous side to it as much as there is a glamorous side. And you've particularly, anticipated in it. 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.

So despite the, or maybe because of, because we talked about the pair, the AI bubble, you would still be looking at AI intersected opportunities if you were angel investing. Yeah. There's a weird reality out there right now. And this could end if ever a bubble is popped or whatever. But the institutional investors have zero interest in non-AI deals. Zero. It's more black and white than I could be successful.

And for people who do not know that. term define the institutional investor. People who are paid both 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. Could die of neglect. There is no interest. I can't state clearly enough how there's zero and I could simultaneously make fun of that reality but I could also justify that reality but it is the reality right now and by the way while I mentioned that I feel obligated for your audience like I don't care what field you're in you should be playing with this

stuff 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. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. So Our Place reached out to me as a potential sponsor and the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said, send me one. And that is the titanium always. Pan Pro. And the claim is that it's the first non-stick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever

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slash Tim. One more time, that's Shopify.com slash Tim. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. 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, separate that from something that's just going to be consumed by the fundamental models in these larger companies that... From a career perspective? From an angel investment perspective, 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? The key is just to stay pretty far away from the edge. of whatever, you can go online and see interviews with the people in Anthropic or Open AI and what they're working on. Like, if it's the next thing they're going to do, I don't think you're going to be protected. But as I think about founders and angel investors, you're talking about a pretty broad array of things. At this point, as I mentioned earlier, you're not going to back the next big model company.

Besides, if you were, you need a billion dollar angel investment to go make that happen. The game's changed. there's so much money involved, I think you're going to want to be off the beaten path anyway. When I think about these deeper verticals, I don't think it will make sense for Open AI to go crush every little vertical. Waste management. Even if the model's capable of understanding that subject matter, there are workflows, there are data sets that are local to your customer, and that stuff has to be stitched together. So I think having an understanding of a particular industry and one that's not going to be on the next thing to do list at Open AI would probably be your best bet. 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? proprietary data sets, the more kind of workflows that exist are better because you can build software around those things. What is a workflow? The thing that popped in my head, I'm on the board of Zillow, Zillow has been investing for the past five years in tools that help the realtor do their day-to-day job. They have a tool called showing time that helps you book in-person tours at houses, as an example. Like, there's putting the mortgage together, getting the sign-offs on, like there's just all these tasks that have to be happened that can be automated. And so 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 going to be protecting yourself from a model that just answers questions, which is why I brought it up. Let's move on to big topic, big country, China.

You spent 10 days there over the past summer. What was your experience? What did you see? What made an impression? What did you do? I'd been about six times before, so this is like my seventh trip. It was one thing that was different. My daughter is an Asian studies major, as you were.

And she spent the summer in Hong Kong. So we picked her up, and then we toured six cities in 10 days. And my objective with this trip, 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, you know, just as an experience that I got to tour of the Jaume 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, the overnight city, which is gone

from, I think, less than 100,000 people in 1980 to 20 million people. Just to see the scale and scope of the whole thing. There's a lot of rhetoric in the U.S. about what is or isn't happening in China. And I just wanted to have a better feel for it. And we're making policy decisions that are going to impact the global footprint. And, God forbid, you know, 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 Wong 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 list. But I think it's misperceived. I think China's misperceived in a lot of ways. What are some of those misperceptions? 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. I think they think of Russia.

And they assume, well, that will always lead to bad capital allocation, no innovation, because they have this picture in their mind of, I don't know, like brick buildings with snow all around them and not much happening. And the reality there is just far, far different from that. I think Dan Wong did a great job of explaining how the country puts out this five-year plan, but then the provinces, which are, they're a lot bigger than a U.S. state, but they're the equivalent, like the town of the country segment, and they compete with each other. And the effective mayor of the province, if he does well, has a chance to move up. in the system, which is not a reality in the U.S. system. But what that leads to is just a massive

amount of competition. 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 I'm guessing probably. Like we could go talk to AI and get a better answer than I have right now. But yeah, I would think that's part of it, prosperity, employment. Those kind of things. By the way, this provincial competition has also led to overbuild the buildings. Like, it's not always positive, you know, bridges that aren't used. There's a go cities.

Go cities, yes. But you end up with hyper competition. So 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. 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 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 world.

and remarkable execution from an industrial standpoint. So the price points of the products that will be sold around the globe are well below anything that could be done. How do you go about getting a tour of Xiaomi factory? I would think that they would be very closed about that. I don't know if you saw this going around the Internet yesterday, but they shipped a car to this YouTuber. Oh, yeah, I saw it.

Which is brilliant. And that's the SG7. That's the factory I went to. As I mentioned, I'd been there before. So I met Lejeune, who's the founder of Xiaomi in 2005, when he was chairman of Joe Yo, which was a e-commerce company that Amazon bought. So he's been around a while. He has evolved into the best thing I could say is like he's the Steve Jobs of China right now.

When he quit doing Joe Yo and he had this other company as well, he declared. 10 years ago, he's going to build a smartphone, just out of the blue, I'm going to build a smartphone. He didn't have any smartphone experience, but Jalmi is now the third largest manufacturer of handsets in the globe. And about four or five years ago, at about the exact same time, Apple, and they were interested in building a car, he said, I'm going to build a car. Well, not only do you say, I'm going to build a car, but that was a response to sanctions, right? it was an emergency. 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 2024 company-wide address

where he talked about sanctions coming in saying, what if we couldn't make phones? What would we do? But that talk is unbelievable, and it's translated on YouTube, and I would encourage people to watch from about minute 30 to about a minute 15 or an hour 15, which is where he talks about his process for designing the car. I don't know if you saw that part. Yeah, I did. 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. So he drove 200 of his employees' cars. Like, 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 bottomed up, like 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 U.S. It was phenomenal. Anyway, back to your question why I could get in. I knew late June from way back. What does the process look like? There are a bunch of clearances and you have to get the okay from the provincial. I don't think we went through the whole factory, but no, it wasn't that. It wasn't. I mean, they're a public company.

I think they're interested in being well understood, which I think, hence that why they enabled this. I think they had to send a car to this guy, the YouTuber. Yeah. And by the president of Ford went over there about six months before I did, went on the same tour. So they let him go there. And he had an SU7 ship to Michigan, and he drove it for several weeks. And he's talked about how incredible it is. Well, he also, if I'm remembering correctly, has talked about EV production and battery dominance or at least component dominance from China and the sort of risks inherent in that.

And I don't want to bleed too far into geopolitics, but it's hard not to pull it into the conversation. So this is a question from X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. Twitter, one of many questions. But I'll ask, 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? Well, the first one that 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. Exhibit. Jack Ma. Yeah, exactly. And there's a saying that I think I heard while I was over

there, don't be the tallest tree. Yeah, this is, don't be the tallest tree. Yeah, the nail that sticks out, gets hammered down in Japan. They have a totally different system, obviously. The other entrepreneur outside of Lejeune is the Bight Dance CEO. And Bight Dance is probably got the leading position for the consumer AI, like Open AI, 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, which may get to this tall tree thing. Yeah. I mean, celebrities also disappear over there. No doubt. Very mysteriously. Yes. Well, and business people. Yeah. So yes, that does happen. I will say, and for people who are wondering,

Because 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 alliances get questioned. I, like you, am just interested in understanding what is happening to the extent that I can. What is the actual truth on the ground? What are the details? And frankly, I mean, the innovation over there is remarkable. and what they've done in terms of establishing access to rare metals and everything they need to manufacture is remarkable.

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 all of it, and please hold your thought because I want to hear everything you have to say. What I would say is 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 these are open questions that I think are worth

asking. Let me make one point and then let's come to that. So there's two other things I wanted to mention. Obviously, infrastructure. So they are building new nuclear fission plants. So fission being old school, not new school, at one-fourth the price that we do it here in the U.S. So is South Korea about it. Yeah, and the numbers are incredible. But when we sit here and say, oh, we want to reshore manufacturing and they can build things at one-fourth the price we can, if you don't solve, that you're going to resource something and we're going to not be priced competitive globally because you won't input what they have and you're going to make our citizens buy from this new factory where we're making things way more expensive it doesn't work like the math doesn't math

and by the way i'm not sure it brings jobs the xami factory was a a third based on some numbers i was able to acquire a third the number of employees per car output and i got to 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 things for real and i think dan wong does a good job of saying that america is run by lawyers of breakneck our country's run by lawyers and theirs is run by engineers and so when you try and build something here of you know, the lawyer's just getting away and try and block it, which certainly when you hear

Elon talks about why the gigafactory is 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. And when I first realized this, you know, you saw what happened when they took down Alibaba when they went after Jack Ma'an and Ant Financial could have been this big thing and it got haircut. And the 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. Hearing that caused me to ask

the question, does America really benefit by the fact that the MAG 7 have three trillion dollar market caps? I know the employees of those companies do, but is that a sign of our competitive capitalistic society not being truly competitive? On a global scale. No, even within, 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. If we have all these companies that are able to kind of have excessive profits, is that a form of market failure? And does the fact that they exist help

American anyway. At first, of course, I'm a venture capitalist. I want to 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 three trillion dollar market caps. It's not that many people that, like the percentage of the country that's employed by those companies is small on an overall basis. I think they have a different perspective on whether big market caps matter. And I think that is somewhat intriguing. what do you think about the innovation in China leading in some cases to the development of superior technology at a lower cost that is plausibly an extension of the intelligence gathering apparatus of the government is that a real thing i'm not in a good place to know um i would have to imagine me it seems like they would have to be stupid not to use that given the their ability to penetrate private sector i think it's yeah i think it's certainly well known that they do surveillance of their own people. And I know that would be, you know,

particularly upsetting to people like Greg Lukianov that runs fire and is very interested in free speech. The flip side is there's very little street crime. You walk around, you don't worry about that when you're there. Yeah. It's true also in Japan, though. Doesn't, doesn't make it right or wrong. It's just, it is what it is. And I don't know that we have this ability to kind of tell them somehow they have to do it. Now, to the extent that the Huawei stuff where their products are being shipped out and then those are used to gather intelligence out of their country and the rest of the world, of course, that's a problem. But I think the way to deal with it, I'm not a politician, but I think the way to deal with it, I'm more of a believer of the engage, you know,

like engage, talk about what you don't like and what you do like and try and negotiate that problem away, like we're trying to do with the fentanyl precursor. Yeah, well, way back in the day when I was in East Asian Studies major, this was lifetimes ago. And keeping in mind, I was at the Capital University of Business Economics in 1996. That was the bicycle era, these old photographs of Beijing with millions of bicycles with people in their long, green jackets. I had one of those jackets for the winters. It gets really cold. But things have changed a lot.

At the time, I was looking forward and thinking I might be one of those people who could engage in Chinese. is I think the way to do it is in English, frankly, for a whole host of reasons. But even if you speak the other language, like Putin speaks English pretty well. But he does all of his negotiations when he's speaking in Russian for a lot of good reasons. First of all, I do get accused of being like an agent of a CCP or something, even by some of the people that responded to your Twitter thing. I'm not. I've only visited a few times. I don't know anybody in the government.

But I worry greatly that we make bad policy decisions if we misunderstand what's really going on. Oh, I agree with that. I fully agree with that. I mean, I've thought about, I'm frankly, I'm worried about it. I mean, I would take a burner phone and a burner laptop. I've thought about because I want to get a better understanding of the culture of innovation that can be fostered and exactly how things are to the extent that it would be visible to me. How things are developing in China. I've thought about going there.

I thought about doing the same thing in India, too, to go and interview, like, 10 of the top entrepreneurs. But the reason I haven't done it is that I'm just like, I don't know what radar is that's going to put me on, what kind of surveillance, what kind of film the blank, how difficult is it going to be, whose rings am I going to have to kiss? Am I overthinking it or is it straightforward? I think the odds that Tim Ferriss would disappear in China is. Oh, I'm not worried about disappearing. That would be a terrible. Like, the upside downside on that doesn't make any sense. I'm not worried about disappearing.

There are companies that may not speak with you. Like when I was there, deep seek and unitary, the word was kind of out on the street that they're not meeting with Western. Yeah. You know, for reasons that are. Well, I'm sure that's true conversely in the U.S. too. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. And by the way, I think that reflective lens when you think about the country is helpful. Like Alex Karp was just on stage of deal book last week. He was talking about surveillance. And he says, well, of course, our tools are used to surveil the enemy. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, well, my God, the Chinese are surveilling us.

But obviously, we're surveilling them, too. Like, let's be honest about these things. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot easier for a bunch of obvious reasons. It's in some respects a lot easier for them to surveil us than the other way around. I mean, partially just due to the homogeneity of the society over there, right? You can't send a bunch of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, black, Latino, whatever, to China to end up at, like, top universities, top companies, et cetera. It's just a lot harder. By the way, to put a bow on this part, like, I would say there's two other things.

One, you hinted at one, the supply chains are so integrated in China down to the raw material level that even if you brought a factory back here, it'd be more of an assembly shop, and you'd still be sourcing from there, which isn't necessarily. necessarily cost competitive. And to replicate all of it would take a very, very, very long time. Well, including raw materials for staple pharmaceuticals. I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot going on. So what at this point, is it a day late and a dollar short for the U.S.? I know I almost promised we weren't going to go into this, but I want to know your opinion. I'm so curious. What are the keys to the U.S. remaining globally competitive and vibrant as an economy. You hinted to one, which is, it seems kind of inevitable nuclear power or more power. So how do you do that? I'm not sure how quickly you can write the ship, although it seems

like a handful of people have done a pretty good job of changing the narrative. What are some of the key things in your opinion that the U.S. needs to do? One is make it easier to build. Build companies? I think build infrastructure. Like if you're going to build semiconductor plants, if you're going to build nuclear plants on time and on budget, that's very hard to do in the U.S. right now. And the glimmer of hope, I would say, is that a few states seem to have governors that want to 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, and, you know, where they're like, they've repaired 9.95 and 12 days because, but they literally had to take a bunch of statutes that are on the books and say they don't apply right now. So that mindset, I think, needs a lot more momentum. That'd be one thing. There's another thing that I think is 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 like 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 MIMS LIDAR product that's like 100. $130 a car. What is MEMS lighter? It's solid state. It uses solid state semiconductor technology instead of that big spinning radar. And so the LIDAR on a on a Waymo is five grand. And it's $130 for MIMS Lider.

They're putting on every car. You can go in the chat, GPT, and say, tell me about MIMS LIDAR innovation in China. But it's just a great example. Lejeune's another one. But like, anybody that thinks there's no innovation is just, Yeah, they're just wrong. They got blinders on. Yeah, no, that's not true.

That's definitely 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. Did I see that? Losing party pay is in the legal system. I do love that.

Which reduces frivolous litigation compared to the U.S. Any thoughts on where you're bullish these days? Well, ironically, Matt Ridley was in town a few weeks ago. National optimist. Yes. I love his stuff, but he would say that I would be dead wrong on that. Things aren't going well there. And he lives there.

So I'll just take that as I got that one wrong. Well, I mean, it depends on the time frame, too, right? Is it two years or is it five years or is it ten years? You know, one of the things that's been impressed about China is, you know, since Deng Xiaoping kind of brought back capitalism, 500 million people have come out of poverty. 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, who kind of check all those boxes. All right.

Hopefully I'd do better than. Check in in another two years. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. Creatine isn't just for muscle. It's essential daily fuel for your brain, your body, and long-term performance. For me, I have Alzheimer's and dementia risk in my family. The cognitive benefits are the reason I take creatine every single day. And today's episode sponsor, Momentus, is the gold standard in creatine. There's a lot of BS floating around, but I choose them why, because they source creipure creatine,

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Check it out, coyotegame.com. One more time, that's coyotegame.com or anywhere you buy your games. Now, back to the episode. All right, let's talk about, this is going to be a segue to talking about running down to dream and all things involved with that. Maybe we could start with an anecdote from a fellow Austinite. Likes to play the bogos, long hair associated with smoking reef for every once in a while. Matthew. We were talking about a short anecdote about Matthew before we started recording. Would you mind sharing that? As I was preparing, because I was kind of

wrapping up the book, I started listening to Green Lights. And I was told you had to listen to it because, of course, he reads it. So you get all the great McCona Hay affections as you read it. But there's a story in it that just popped in my brain and kind of summarized exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with this book running down a dream. And he had spent the vast majority of his young adult life. So this anecdotes from when he was like, 20, 21, telling his family he was going to be a lawyer. And so he'd gotten into the University of Texas. He was pre-law. You know, every time he went home, he talked about, yeah, I'm going to 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, you know, when you're going to drop some news. No longer going to be a lawyer, I'm going to go to film school. And he builds it up a lot in the book. Like, I didn't know when I was going to talk to him. 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 have acid. And he says, you know, of all the reactions, he could have had don't half asset 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 and i'd like to believe there are a number of people out there young adults maybe even some 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 want to 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, like to go chase this dream. And as you ended up from our last call, I think 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 chat GPT six hours a day if you so choose and learn so much about any particular field. And so your ability to take things into your own hands and to go try and be successful in this thing that you feel passionate about, I think has never been better. Why do you think when you initially gave and subsequently had to go online, run 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? 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. Lawyers, consultants, doctors, computer scientists, like it's all these jobs that have certainty to the financial component. And I think that's 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 financial. You know, stability. Yes. Most people are guiding children towards. And this isn't that complicated of math, but most people end up working 80,000 hours in their life. It's a third of your life. You know, 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 in an all-time low. It just seems horrific. Like the people are kind of sauntering through life. What are some of the keys to taking the path less traveled than in this case? And I mean, there are 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. And people 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? 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 going to go tilt at something that's less pragmatic 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? Like, would you not watch Breaking Bad and read about this field and be energized by that activity. If you are, and we have 20, 30 different stories in the book of people that have been successful, almost all of them, check that box. You just have this amazing ability to gain knowledge so much faster than everyone else you would be competing with. You know, and that's going to be useful. That's unquestionally going to be useful. It makes me think of an interview I saw a long time ago, actually.

quite a few years ago, but it was an interview with Joe Rogan. And he said something that surprised me, it 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 belted jujitsu. He's done what he's done with the podcast. He's the undisputed king of podcasting, et cetera, et cetera, et 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. And that gives them a huge, not just knowledge advantage, but endurance advantage. You just go

down the checkboxes. It's all advantages. 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, she would put far more weight on the passion than the perseverance because she says, we've taught our children to grind. And so once again, starting in sixth grade, they're told to, you know, learn the flute and take lacrosse and do all this stuff and, you know, crush the SATs and take the extra credit classes and all this and they all do it and they all do it and then they go to college and how are you doing it takes 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 yeah it makes me think of maybe this is cliched in silicon valley because it gets so oft repeated but 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. But 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.

No doubt. I think of Repetis and 3D printing. I mean, I can just go down the list. And by the way, that's another advantage of going to the epicenter is there's more people. doing that all the time. Let's talk about people might be surprised by this, but Bob Dylan, I think this is just the quintessential example. Why is he relevant to what we're talking about?

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. It's my brain just developed. I was like, oh, my God, it's all this kind of lock thing where these three people had all done the same thing. And one was a basketball coach, one was a restaurant tour, and the other was Bob Dylan, not industry. This is where you should get career development advice, right?

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. and saying when he left, he knew more about folk music than any other human in Minnesota. And he was borrowing, and maybe that's even a euphemism, he was stealing his friends' albums. He was going into the record store, into these listening booths. Like, he knew all there was to know 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, the same thing. Perfect realist painter at age 14. If you go to the Barcelona, Picasso Museum, like it's in Geographic Order and you're kind of shocked at how good a realist this kid was

before he went and did this other thing. That bedrock knowledge, I think, is so differentiating for someone to have all the history and then to start doing the innovation. What was the before and after on Dylan, sort of Minnesota, New York City? And why is that such an important piece of the most? And just to like even pile on more on this kind of studious part of Bob Dylan, he did a podcast series for a while. where he just walks through all these different genres of music. You're talking about Bob Dylan himself?

Yes. Oh, I didn't realize this. Yes, yes. You can go find it. 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 outside of his genre, everything.

So he's a clear student 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, probably the single kind of most deterministic and ambitious mentor pursuit story that I've ever heard of. Like, he hitchhiked there with no money and found him and became friends with him.

This echoes back to go where the action is also. Oh, no doubt. And by the way, he landed 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, you know, and he got to know them all. If that doesn't happen, I don't think Dylan happens, you know. How relevant do you think the go where the action is now

considering the access to information using chat GPT or other tools, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, maybe less so access to mentors, although you can have virtual relationships. But how relevant do you think that is. I've got my own opinion. You could certainly have the type of peer and mentor experiences that are remote. I have a great anecdote about Mr. Beast 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. And I think the intuition is, oh, well, it's going to be even more competitive. So why would I, 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. 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 chat, UBT.

You're going to get what you prompt. In other words, like you're asking. for something. And that can take you down a rabbit hole. But they're, 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 Ravocamp because I was hitting on his girlfriend at the time when she was getting her coffee, didn't realize they were together.

And then you look at Garrett Camp, Kevin Rose, these were like 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 your. yourself. I'm sure it is when you have fewer responsibilities, but I can't even imagine what my

life would have looked like had I not, you know, left Long Island and then ultimately moved to Silicon Valley. 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 practice there. And I'm glad that didn't happen. Like, going and practicing it where I did was the exact right place to do it. I do think if you can, because there are financial constraints, you know, if you want to be great at a field and that field has an epicenter, I think you should go. 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 It comes to mine, Silicon Valley, but this is going to be a bit of a digression, but I remember asking Derek Siverr, as a friend of mine, an 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. 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, the technical side. So there's so many different ways to approach it. But let's talk about a virtual example. You mentioned Mr. Beast.

Could you describe that story? Yeah. I actually heard it on a podcast, but I had it. 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 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. And I think far too many people have sharp elbows to peers because they think, you know, they're climbing the ladder and they've got to beat these people. And the world's just way too prosperous to have that mindset. You can learn so much and get so much value from co-climing 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. And for years. Sounds like Jimmy. For years, they shared best practices 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 you to like, oh, these little bitty esoteric things can impact conversal. version and he said when he was talking about this that they all became millionaires he said if you are any random individual had been a fifth person on those calls you would have to because of that and it's just a wonderful example of how peers you know he 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 of expertise. 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 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, he definitely, without him, like I don't go zero to one in terms of having any basic literacy or access. 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. Kevin Rose, Neval, Chris Saka. The remaining, the ladder goes on forever, but like 49 rungs after that

initial step up, zero to one, it was all peer-driven. And those guys, we were comparing notes the whole way. See, that's the thing. Like, I would say, first of all, I would practice it wherever you are. I would practice it virtually. I'd practice it locally. And if you can move to the F center, I'd practice it there. I don't know that it's a neither-or thing. You can have multiple groups of peers. You can have multiple circles of peers. But I think there's only two tests. And one is trust. There are people in this world who view everything as a zero-sum game and they will elbow you out.

the first chance they can get. And so those shouldn't be your peers. Those people you should quickly push to the side. So trust and then this shared interest in learning. And if they are equally learning on their own dime in their free time, which is my test for whether you actually truly are passionate about something, if they're doing that also, that's perfect. And those experiences you've talked about. I've had so many of myself, they get excited to tell you what they just learn, right? Yeah. And then you reciprocate. Right. And by the way, Mike's a great example. I have both a passion and a lot of respect for people that are writers in their industry. And Buffett did it and Howard Marks did it, who I benefited greatly from. I tried my entire career to write quite a

bit, but Mike does this. He's a huge share when it comes to his knowledge about the subject matter. Yeah. Pattern breaker's excellent book also. So great. Yeah, Mike, I'm hoping to see him again soon. It's been a minute. We've talked about Mr. Beast, Bob Dylan, in both cases, kind of like poor kids with

nothing to lose, right? In a sense. Not in any destitute sense, but they're starting at like futons and ramen. He was just interviewed a deal book. also and his mother was in the front row who apparently works for him now. So he was telling the story about when he went to tell her, he was dropping out of college. You know, similar to the McConaughey's story, Jimmy's being more abrupt, but, you know, of course she's happy now.

Yeah, it all worked out. I mean, there's always a little survivorship bias. No doubt, no doubt. But let's talk about Danny Meyer, because I want to give an example of someone who gave something up. Yeah. to then pursue X instead of A, B, or C. So 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 kind of genesis story of Danny Meyer at the restaurant? It's funny. When someone asked me who is Danny Meyer, I feel compelled the first thing to say he's one of the most genuine humans on the planet. Yeah, for sure.

Just a wonderful human. For sure. But he is also one of the most celebrated restaurant tours of our time. He was working for a company that sold these devices to clip on the clothes so you can't steal him from a retail store. And he was making good money. He was making about $200,000 a year. And this is at the time.

40 years ago. So real, real money. And he had convinced himself he was going to be a lawyer. I guess a lot of people convinced himself of that. And he was about to take the L-Sat and he was out to dinner with his uncle. And, you know, his uncle was probing him and probing him. Oh, yeah, he was going to take the L-Set. And I think his uncle sensed a lack of real conviction about this thing, this person,

this human was going to do. And he literally said to him, why are you doing this? You know you want to be a restaurateur. And when you read Danny's book, he did spend a ton of time in his youth being fascinated with restaurants to the point where he would take copious notes, like prior to even doing this. So his family had a reason to know that he had this deep passion, but it's entering it's an uncle, right? I don't know that a parent is going to jump in and say that. And maybe that's an advantage I have, not knowing the readers of my book, and 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 you 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. And went on to, you know, Gramercy Tap. I mean, all these iconic restaurants, then Shake Shack, then, I mean, just dot, dot, dot. Yeah, and we walked 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 want people that had made a decision, usually a pivot, to say, I'm going to go do this now. And once he had made that decision, not only did he take that job, but 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 staj

in multiple places where he's working for free, basically. I'm so glad you brought this up because I wouldn't have brought it up myself, but this is going to relate in a second. I've run a bunch of competitions for, let's just say, creating artwork for like PDFs slash like free books I'm going to 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 going to be a winner. It's like, if you don't want to participate, don't participate. But there's always this kind of shaking of the fist. Like, ah, you're 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. Staging is a great example in the restaurant world where it's like, okay, you want work at a restaurant where you're going to have the highest density of learning and you don't know shit like guess what they probably don't want to pay you a whole lot because it's actually going to 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. I volunteered with all of these nonprofit groups and quickly realize that most

volunteers are doing the absolute minimum to be volunteers. And if you just do 10% more, it doesn't take much. I would just refill people's waterglasses and stuff after I finished taking their tickets for an event. And suddenly the producers of this event were also doing it, but had like real jobs. I mean, I had a job at a college, sure, and I was working a lot. They were like, wow, this kid's a go-getter because he's refulling these waterglasses. Let's give them 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. 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. Like, snuck in, like not supposed to be there just to get reps with these top models in this environment. It sounds unfathomable that someone would do that. She did it multiple time. And she did it. Yes. What ended up happening after that?

I don't know her story. Oh, she's become probably the most successful hairstylist of our time. It's an incredible story. How do you suggest people who are, maybe they're doing A, B, and C right now, they're listening to this and they say, all right, I want to take the leap. I want to do Z. I want to do whatever the off-menu option is. Yeah. They might have to have a conversation with parent.

they might have to have a conversation with spouse. They may have to have a conversation with, who knows, whoever the most important people are in their lives. How might they approach that? And we're going to talk about choosing paths in a second because I do have a question about maybe how to sanity check yourself in the world of AI. But how do you suggest having those conversations?

Do you moonlight for a while so it's not either or? Do you make time bound in a sense? You're like, hey, just give me a permission to try this for six months. a year or two years. It's interesting. I think any of those approaches is realistic. We profile Sal Khan in the book of Khan Academy, and he told his wife he wanted to go try it for a year.

He worked at a hedge fund, just like Danny Meyer. He was making real money. I didn't realize that about... And started working with his cousins across the globe online doing these tutorial exercises and ended up posting a few. tube, they started working, and he told his wife, I really want to go tilt at this. He didn't even know what the business model was. And, you know, it went and changed it. Look, I think the real test comes back to this passion element, or we use a lot of different words because passion's been kind of

considered trite, but fascination, curiosity. Like, if you have this deep desire to know so much about this one thing that that curiosity is so high. I think the odds that that's not apparent to whoever these people are you're trying to convince is pretty low. Because if you're going to tilt it something that hard and if you're going to really differentiate yourself by being that learned in that field, I think it'll be hard for someone to tell you not to go do it. It's not going to be easy. I don't want anyone to think that, oh, just read this book and magic happens. Like, it requires effort. And that's why this test matters so much, this test of whether you would learn about this thing on your free time. And maybe are you already learning about this?

Are you already learning about it on your free time? Yes, no doubt. At least to have one. You should be. You should be. I doubt you're going to turn it on. Yeah. Well, actually, I have an example of someone he just turned it on. We have a chapter called Never Too Late, which is where the Sal Khan thing is, because that happened when he was close to 40. Another local Austinite, or Tito Beverage,

started his endeavor in the spirit business. So, while I was just thinking about him while driving here for no good reason. At the age of 40. All right. He's watching a PBS special. This is also hard to believe.

He's watching a PBS special 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 and socializing and he was making flavored vodka as Christmas presents in his spare time what was his day job his first career was in seismotology and the oil field and that dragged him

to South America. When that became dangerous, both in Midland and in South America, he became a mortgage broker. He didn't love either of. Yeah. But the reason I brought it up when you said already, I don't know that he was already studying the spirit business, but once he made that intentionality to go do this, then he studied it writ large. How did he start to study curiosity? Because I was just thinking about him, Thudeau beverage just acquired Lala tequila, which I was involved with. That's probably why he popped to mind. But how did he start? 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 literally rewrite regulation to make it possible. Interestingly, he did the whole thing on credit cards. So he owns 100% of the business, which is a huge business. It's the single largest spirit sold in America today. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize it was that big. It's huge. Wow. Good for him. Yes. It's so wild. So wild. I promise to get to this and I do want to get to it. Are there any sanity checks that you would put in place to complement the fascination slash obsession slash what I'm doing in my spare time I would pay to do or do for free? Because I'm wondering if there are any things you would take off the table or how you would hone that given the rapidly

developing technology of AI. So if someone said, you know, what I love to do in my spare time is copy editing. I might not suggest that they throw caution to the wind and burn the ships and go into copy editing. Any thoughts? 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. Yeah, for sure. So COPSI. Right. It's kind of risky, but as compared to what, right? CompSai went from being the least risky major you could possibly get to one that's somewhat risky, like overnight. And so that'd be my first, like, notion. And 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. It's the equivalent of a laptop and Microsoft Word was. It's equivalent of what a calculator was. But you don't want to go out in the world and play without the modern tool set. 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 is capable of.

Yeah. In order to find that edge and follow that edge, right? Which will move, you have to be playing with the tools. One thing I love to suggest on the learning side is know the history and know 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.

Like, you're going to get the job, I would argue, versus someone else, if you can portray those things. How would you apply that here? Is that just, I guess, field dependent, or are you referring to AI? I think AI is the leading edge of almost any industry. So, yeah, 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, of 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 is capable of and then 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. Like, I don't know that I can make you a singer. or a certainly can't make you an NBA basketball player. But in all those fields, whether it be Hollywood or sports, you know, even Danny Meyer at one time thought he was going to 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. What do you mean by that? 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. So they're like, oh, I can't go do that. But there's tons of jobs in Hollywood.

Within the sector of entertainment. That aren't the talent itself. So if you're passionate about, you know, basketball or you're passionate about, you know, the chef example of a restaurant, like there's tons of jobs you can go do music industry without being that particular person. This makes me think of an interview I was watching recently, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, invest with the best. He was interviewing Ari Emanuel, so famous super agent who, 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. 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? I think a lot of the service industries, I think humans enjoy experiences. And I don't think that changes personally that much. And so, you know, restaurateurs or hoteliers, like, I think all those things are going to thrive and people that know how to really differentiate experiences in that way. I don't share this thought that we're all going to 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. and they enjoy the community element of having seen the same thing. And so it may be that if you're a movie maker, you're using AI instead of this expensive CGI tool set, 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 93 fly fishing in Montana this summer and we were at a lodge and one of the other guests that was staying there is a 28-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 I needed this and then 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. He goes, 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. And I thought, holy shit, if other people kind of just leaned at it, the way he's leaning at it, they would become superpowered themselves. I was like really blown away by that.

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 feel like that is probably over the next few weeks where I need to put some more time and just take a layup with wherever it happens to intersect with someplace that makes it easy to apply. Who's Sam Hinky? 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 76ers. Why is this story relevant? He was a amazing student. He grew up in Oklahoma. His father worked for Halliburton. He made good grades, good students. students kind of classic did everything right became a consultant and he was working for mackenzie 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 and he reads a book called moneyball which yeah we all know of the michael lewis book about the oakland a's and in almost what seems like an instant decided, I really need to be in sports analytics. I mentioned that a lot of the stories we found have this intentionality. So that book, just like the last laugh did for Seinfeld, that book told him, I'm going to go do this. And from the day he read that book to getting the job as the head of GM of the 76ers was about 10 years. So no experience whatsoever in the field to the youngest GM of all time in 10 years. Was he obsessed with sports already at that point?

I think so. He played, you know, this gets back to what I said about. Maybe you, your original obsession came from participating or being the talent, but then, you know, he's not particularly big. And so he was successful in high school, but it wasn't, you know, 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 kind of disinhibited him and gave him permission to think, well, you know what, I could be differentiated on this dimension, 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 needs and the resources. I think in 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 human quality problem. 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 this person associated with the school that does this. We'll introduce you to these four people. and we're a lot like McConaughey's dad, you know, when Sam brought him that challenge. Sounds about right. That checks out for me. Yeah, based on what you know of the two institutions. 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, I don't want to make it sound like he kind of built his

own curriculum, but it worked. For people who are not going to get an NBA, would you still suggest everyone read the first three chapters of Michael Porter's competitive strategy techniques for analyzing industries and competitories? All right. Anyone that's going to do anything in business should read that book. All right. I wanted to give the throwback to our first conversation. By the way, at the back of the book, I list about 50 books. Just to the very end.

Just to wet the appetite. I think you did the same thing. Oh, I love them through your. Oh, yeah. Oh, no. In fact, I looked at yours for the structure. and I wanted to see how to lay it out. Oh, amazing.

Amazing. I want to 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. Yeah. Right? It's in my note.

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. Maybe I'm an outlier, but that's been my experience, right? When I realized, for instance, in the case of the podcast, it's like, wow, I have much more sponsored demand that I could ever fill.

If I just doubled the number of episodes, I doubled the number of revenue. So why don't I do that? And it started to feel like a bad job, not a bad job. It's still a great job, but the volume was too high. 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 and the case and the performing, they're Bob Dylan, Danny Meyer, whatever

it might be. And then they hit a really hard stretch. Maybe it's early on. Maybe it's later. Maybe they're staging and some French guy yelling at them. It's the case of the friend of mine. And they're like, wow, God, you know, this really feels painful. Maybe this isn't my path.

how do you distinguish between growing pains that are temporary and an indication that you're not doing the right thing it's funny i i'll take a short diversion and answering the question because people often ask me you know how do you use a when i was wrapping up the book my publisher and editor said you know i want you to write the concluding chapter and i wrote what i think most people would do, which is I just summarized the whole book, and I submitted it to him, and he said, no, this is no good. And so then I went to chat GPT deep research mode, and I said, tell me about the 10 best nonfiction concluding chapters that you know of. And it went and did like a 20-page report and sent it to me. And what I noticed in reading that was that

Most of these great including chapters were orthogonal. They weren't a summary. They were kind of a different take on the whole thing. Well, my including chapters now titled, It Ain't Easy, to your point. And I went through all of the stories that we have in the book, and I pulled out the darkest hour moments for each one of those people and included it kind of at the end. Because I didn't want to leave people with the impression that it's just all smiles and babies and hugs. I don't think that's true in any field. And I guess my answer would be, you know, do you still feel this natural curiosity to learn the entire time?

Is the impediment something that is truly means you should stop like I can't get around it? Is it something that maybe can be avoided, something I can get around? I push heavily on the peer thing because one of the things a peer group can do is help you in those moments, both just from emotional support, but also to put perspective on whatever the speed bump is and whether it's insurmountable or not. Mentors can help with that too, but I think peers are better for that because you worry about being judged in disclosing this. Yeah, 100%. And so peers, like, don't judge. That's why that trust thing really matters also.

Another reason why it matters. I think they can help you determine whether that is as big a blocker as it may seem like. But there's going to be some of that in any field. I don't think there's any run that's just without pain. I'm also imagining that one of the challenges that I had and some of my friends had at different points in pursuing film. in the blank, starting our first companies, just beginning to invest, having a career in X, right? When I got out of college, it was mass data storage, and hitting these really rough patches

and feeling like you're the first person in the world to experience this, and it's because of your unique flaws or uniquely bad decisions. And I'm just realizing now I haven't tried this. I'm sure it would work. That you could just describe the dark chapter you're going through and to chat GPT or one of these tools and say, can you give me any comparable examples from other people who've succeeded in another field? I'm sure that it will also give you five answers on how to deal with it or get around. But by the way, one thing that's important when we're talking about this is Daniel Pink has this great book on regret and he talks about it as a valid motivator to get you to make good decisions.

And there is a reality that that anxiety may feel. feel may mean you're not in the right lane. And so when you were at that sales job, you got to the point where you're like, holy shit, I don't want to be doing this anymore. And I had two careers before I became a VC. One as an engineer and one as a cell site analyst. I enjoyed both. I think I was good at both. But I reached a point about three years in with each where I was like, I don't want to do this the rest of my life. And so I would say equally with like, don't give up too early. but if the signal is really telling you, I don't want to do this the rest of my life, jump out. That's the precise moment to move on and try something new.

And I spend a ton of time in the early chapters trying to get people to understand that's okay. Most people don't end up in a career that their major was. I think one of the reasons people grind too long is because they think they're supposed to. They just think they're supposed to stay in this lane they're in. How did you conclude it was time to hop in those cases? We don't have to go into tons of the background because we talked about so much your history and decisions and so on, including, I don't want to say stealing palm pilots,

but it's a pretty good story about getting a palm pilot. But was it just a gut feeling? Was it like a disquiet that you felt in your system? Or was it more than that? I'm sure I've overplayed it in my brain, but they feel like very concrete moments where I had, almost near certainty. The first one was I started my third project at Compact Computer Corporation where I was

an engineer, and the projects where these computers were releasing. And the third one was another computer with a little faster clock speed and a better intel chip. But the rest of it was all the same. And we were going to do it again. And I'm like, that doesn't seem that interesting to me. And I'd become curious about other things. So when I was doing external learning, which is what I refer to as this kind of spare time learning, it wasn't that.

Yeah. You know, it was something else. I was reading Peter Lynch's book on stocks and stuff like that. Right. Segway to the cell side analyst. Yes. The thing that happened is a sell side analyst. And this gets into, and I may parley this into something from the Daniel Pink book, but.

this notion of do you want to do this the rest of your life the sell-side job is wonderful you get access so early in your life to so many amazing people but you have to work really hard and you know this classic thing where you're in your 20s and you're working on wall street you know they served dinner at the office like the cafeteria is open that'll tell you something and it was like 1030 or 11 p.m and the entire research department was on the 36th floor of park avenue plaza and I did a loop. The four corner offices were the most senior analysts. And for whatever reason, I popped my head in each of their office,

and they were career salesite analysts. I said, do I want to be this person when I'm 60? It just stuck in my head. I went to the next one, went to the next one. Hopefully, I don't know who those people were, but I was like, no, I don't. Like that night, that night I made the decision that I got to, go do something else. In Daniel Pink's book, he talks a lot about boldness regrets. And this is

where I say, do you want to do this the rest of your life? He says, one of the most robust findings in the academic research and my own is that over time we're as much more likely to regret the chances we didn't take than the chances we did. What haunts us is the inaction itself. Foregone opportunities all linger in the same way. And he says that they've studied this across China, Russia, Japan. it's common across all of them. And you may have heard of this YouTube video where Bezos talks about his regret minimization framework. Yeah.

And so he had the same thing. He's walking around Central Park. Should I stay in this incredible job at D.E. Shaw where he's making tons of money. Or should I take this flyer on this online bookstore I want to do? And he put it in his mind that test, which is when I'm 80 and looking back, I'm going to regret not doing this, you know? Well, it makes me think of, and this is also a dicey proposition quoting Niccolo Machiavelli, but make mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth.

Yes. Right? The same thing. And I do think about that a lot myself. I mean, I'm at a point where I'm trying to figure out my next chapters too, because this podcasting game's getting pretty crowded. It is. And I still enjoy doing it, but that's only because I refuse to kind of play by the incentives that the platforms and algorithms provide, which is like economically punishing but intellectually

rewarding. Because you've had two successful careers as not just a podcaster influencer, but as an angel investor, I would encourage you to read Arthur Brooks book, Strength to Strength. I did. I did. It was great. It was great. It was great.

I think it gives great perspective for kind of a later career shift. Yeah, I should go back and look at my notes from that book again. so let's chat for a second people should all check this out i mean you're you're such an operator track record's incredible running 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 no and i as i mentioned when i made the decision to stop the venture career which i think we talked about on the last i guess where i read to Steve Martin book. But I didn't know. I knew I wanted to do something else. And I went on a listening

tour. Can you just reiterate what a listening tour is? Oh, I just identified several people who had kind of successfully retired to strong word, but made a decision to stop doing a job. They were very successful at. And then what do you do now? And it's similar to the Arthur Brooks book, but it was just a personal. And a lot of people ain't to invest. A lot of people go on board. a lot of people manage their own money. I had this list, and people teach, and I slowly was checking them off, like scratching them out. Yeah, like, man, don't really want to manage my own money. I don't really want to angel investors.

I don't want to 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 think I'd like to start a policy institute. 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 an episode at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Facility. 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 global 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, you know, Andresen and Elon and all these people started pounding that same drum. Joe Gabby's wife made this like a big, like, a big,

like, passion project to 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. 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 want to go grind on state-by-state legislation. I don't have any interest in that. But looking at big problems, looking at U.S.-China relations, U.S. health care system has some massive problems. 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 look to use my financial capabilities to do grant writing through people like that, see what we can go do, see what we can

go change. Regulatory captors is another one that I've spent time tilting at. 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? What is policy work? And that seems like a silly question. We're at day one. So, but I'll give you what might it look like. Yeah, here's an example. A professor approached me on the regulatory capture front. Could you define that just for people who didn't hear episode one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago named George Stigler. He's passed away, but who made a very strong argument that regulation is a friend of the incumbent, that large businesses learn how to lobby

Washington. And no matter how well intention 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 gave a speech at the Allent Summit that you can go watch on YouTube as like 5 million views on this topic. But I think this happens in the majority of the time. That's why ACH takes three days to clear, right? Yes, yes, yes.

But stable coin may solve that. But this professor approached me about making a global database that scores countries on how captured they are. and that identifies the best practices from the countries that have the best scores. That kind of thing, like investing in that type of data and transparency, is pretty compelling to me. That's an example of what I might go do. Let me chew on that for a second. So let's say you create this dataset that presents these scores on a country-by-country basis.

What are the hoped for outcomes of that, that countries that have worse scores start to model the countries with better scores. 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 when you share that data, what would the hope be? The hope would be that you can shine a light on the best practices and try to get those implemented here in the U.S. Yeah. 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 on the committees.

Yep. The minute you're on a committee, you are in charge of regulation that affects different industries. Well, what happens, 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 national. They go around and meet with businesses that because they're on that committee and have influence and they're raising money nationally. Like, I think that's ridiculous, personally.

And you could imagine restrictions against that, transparency towards it. Like, if your congressman represents this zip code in Austin, wouldn't you want to know if they're raising money in Minnesota? Isn't that a little unusual? Well, you shared a story last time we spoke about being asked to raise $100 grand in donations just to get a meeting with a Congress. Yes, yes, yes. Our mutual friend, Rich Barton, talks about shining flashlights and dark places. This technology that we have access to, I think donations should be on the blockchain, quite frank.

Like, there's no reason why this information needs to be in the dark. I think there's a lot of opportunity around data aggregation. Any other ideas that are percolating? I'm enamored by state versus state competition. Part of it pops into my brain from the China experience. experience in the provincial competition. Right. But, you know, you see Newsom and Abbott, you know, fighting back and forth.

And maybe there can be a positive outcome from this. And I think some of the Federalist papers kind of envisioned that different states could try different experiments and we could see what happens as a result of that. But it's seeing some of it. We are seeing so. I think it could be pretty interesting and provocative and could lead to positive change. I'd love to see I have this dream that some state and maybe this state that we're sitting in that has a surplus would do something crazy with teacher salaries like what if a state just all of a sudden said we're going to pay 50% more for teachers yeah think about the dynamic that would create be pretty wild would be so maybe I'll go tilt it down too so other problems on your mind well I'll just present a list here from some prep notes. We have U.S. healthcare, regulatory capture, intellectual property,

U.S. China, fairness and financial markets, U.S.K. 12. Could you speak to intellectual property and fairness and financial markets, how you might be thinking about those? Intellectual property is, I got to be a top 10,000 percent supporter of open source. Yep. And this gets back to Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist, but he talks about prosperity comes when ideas have sex and just the sharing of information in my mind should be free that it shouldn't cost anything. And it's very unclear to me that the patent system actually adds value. I'm quite doubtful that the human mind wouldn't innovate if it didn't come with a 17 year financial protection. Like I just, I'm doubtful of that. There's great scientists at every university working on problems

that aren't necessarily being patented, and your ability for hypercompetition and innovation is so much higher when there aren't restrictions in place. I think the world's a better place when ideas are shared and not protected. Since the system we're working with is the system we're currently working with, how might something like drug development work without patent protection? Here's an interesting thing. The NIH gives out $40 billion a year, and a lot of that money goes to companies that end up getting venture capital back. I've had some very open fights with people about this. Yeah. So why doesn't an NIH grant come with a open source writer? Yeah. And so if the VCs want to fund. With federal funding.

Yeah, it's federal funding. Yeah, I agree with that. 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. Like, that's a minor step. I would consider a major step. And you don't have to take the money. Why is the U.S. government giving people money that ends up becoming proprietary inventions? That makes no sense to me. Whether it's the U.S. government or individual philanthropists or foundations, I mean, on some level, if that, then at some point, I agree with that. Are there industries that, I mean, the only one that first came to mind was drug development, where the R&D costs are so high?

They all cry. The VCs will tell you, it'll never work. No one will have any incentives. If we don't have a 17-year protection, the entire Silicon Valley, I'm not saying, 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 source dollars, Tesla patents, like such a bold thing to do and so gracious. I think, really to society. But 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 edge of competition is how fast are you moving, how greater your products. Do consumers love them?

Not can I defend them in a court of law? And the protection that the drug guys get is so much. No one can really use software patents to, like, get protection, an algorithm. or something like no one even tries but with drugs if i have this particular genome sequence all a sudden like i get this huge proprietary window in the market it's just nutty this is not exactly the same thing but what a service to humanity i was just watching i think the documentary name people can watch it for free on youtube and other places the thinking game about deep mind and demis and his team releasing alpha fold i mean structures of these proteins i mean it's just like

Oh, my God. What an incredible resource for humanity. Right there. The original paper they wrote was open source. Open AI doesn't exist without that discovery, which happened at Google. Yeah. In open source. You know, they just exploited it the fastest. Yeah. Wild. And by the way, this, I mean, not to divert too much back, but right now China has 10 open source AI models that are all. in hyper-competition with each other.

That is a dangerously effective primordial soup for innovation compared to what we have here. How does, I mean, I should probably know this, but I don't. How does China handle, what are the policies around and laws around intellectual property? Interestingly, I found a document online that someone had put together a PowerPoint about the history of open source at China

and it's 20 years old. So it's not like they just, stumbled into it. Yeah. I think when you consider that, you know, go back 20 years ago, the primary criticisms of China was that they stole IP. And so if you're the Chinese government and there's this new thing called open source, you're going to embrace it because there's no fault there because everyone's sharing

and everyone. And so, you know, if you look at the big open source projects, Linux, MySQL, and you go on the web pages, like you'll see. Alibaba, you know, Tencent, like these companies have been supporting these technologies for a while. But every five years, they write this five-year plan, you know, the Chinese government puts it out. Five years ago, they had a huge section on open source. So they're clearly suggesting to the entrepreneurs that the government favors that approach. And going back to Ridley's book and the notion of pure competition, I think this society.

This is a rational optimist. Yeah. I think the society benefits from that. I use this example. Imagine there's two feudal societies that are all agricultural base. There's two of them, though. In one, once a week, the farmers come to market and just trade goods and then they leave. And the other one, the farmers come to market and they're required to share their best practices with everybody else.

And then they leave. Going back to this peer kind of example in the book, that one's going to be much more professional. form it than the other one. And this gets to Ridley's point about ideas, having sex. I mean, open source also, we talked about this a decent amount in our last conversation, but it can be used as an incredible strategy or counterpunch from for-profit companies like Android. I mean, my God, I mean, it's like you can do a lot.

It's an incredibly powerful tool. I think that using open source as a defensive tool instead of an offensive tool is one of the most sophisticated corporate strategies company can possibly do. It's very hard to do because it goes against all of your instincts. But I would suggest that Amazon and Apple and maybe meta, who has toyed with it, should run at the idea of jointly supporting an open source model. I don't think they're doing it, but I think they should because their incumbencies at risk if someone else has a massive proprietary advantage. Fairness in financial markets. What does that mean?

You know, I've been tilting against this insider's game of the IPO market for some time, and I'm very passionate that when you bring a company public. Does that come with the luxury of retirement? Maybe. I mean, if you tilt against the investment banks, you've got to be comfortable not going to conferences, that's for sure. They owe some really nice funds. And so you fall off the invite list real quick. The way that an IPO price is so god-awful, stupid.

They pick who gets the stock and they pick the price. And I've said it over and over again, but a freshman comp-sized student and a freshman finance student, And if you told them to design the IPO, they would just match supply and demand anonymously. Like, it's how every bond is priced. It's interestingly how every initial coin offering works. And so I've become a late-to-the-game crypto enthusiast because I'm so sick of this damn IPO process being broken. Could you say a bit more about how it's broken? Like, just walks through a hypothetical example of why it's broken.

Yeah, when a company's coming public, the bank. bankers, literally, they ask everyone from orders, but then they pick who gets the stock and they pick the price. Supply and demand can automatically pick the allocation and the price. It's not even automatically is the wrong word. Can algorithmically, like, this is super easy. Like, it's not hard. Why don't they do it that way? Because they're handing free money to their clients. There we go. That's what I was looking for. Yeah, no, it's been known for a long time. I uncovered an email from 1999 at Goldman Sachs, which I've posted on Twitter several times, where they're like saying, oh, we can use this hot stock to reward our top clients. They know what's going on.

And the fact that the SEC doesn't get involved really bothers me. But this tokenization thing is a real way to get around it because the crypto community has already decided to use algorithms to allocate and determine price. like the price and the allocation should just be determined it's how a direct listing work like everyone knows how to do it they just don't do it you know it's horrible there's other things too in this category the long kind of prevalence of visa and mastercard is just ridiculous two and a half percent and stable coins have so much momentum right now i just think those two companies are going to be in real trouble within a five-year window By the way, most of the financial problems are pure regulatory capture, like the reason that there's a problem.

And just to tell me if I'm explaining this well, because I'm not sure we said this directly, but basically the incumbents help to write laws and regulations that favor them and prevent newcomers. After 09, we wrote this thing, Dodd-Frank, and we thought, oh, we're going to make things better. and all you've had is consolidation and banking since then. And if you look at the offering, especially at the low end for the poorest citizens of the U.S., like 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. If free checking went away after Dodd-Frank. Right.

So just to please push back from oversimplifying this, but regulatory capture is not just bad for startups in Silicon Valley hope to grow and disrupt and fill in the blank. It's also bad for everybody. Oh, it's horrible for consumers. I mean, the U.S. health care situation, which seems to be getting worse on a daily basis, is a huge example of regulatory care. Somewhere in the past 10 years, they just told physicians they can't run hospitals. Who other than a doctor is going to go start a new hospital? Like, the amount of competition you eliminated in this one swoop is enormous, just enormous. And that's just a single example, but there's hundreds of them in that area.

What would success be for this book? Six months after it comes out, what will lead you to have been happy with putting the time in? It's taken a while. It's taken a lot of work. What do you hope the outcome will be? It really started as a passion project, and I have no financial goals for whatsoever. In fact, I'm going to, as we get to book launch, I'm going to 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. And so I'm going to

start working on that in addition to P3. For me, it's all about, you know, how many people do I affect in the way that McCona Hay's dad did or that this book did for Seinfeld? Like 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 your 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 tend to be unusually successful, which I think then has a bigger impact than just on them themselves. The number of humans positively impacted by Danny Myers' success is in the thousands, I'm certain. And I'm not

counting customers. Fake Shack. so people check it out i love you 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 running down a dream how to thrive in a career you actually love check it out folks people can find you on x at be girly of course they want to see just a landing page they can go to Benchmark.com. Anywhere else you'd like to point people or anything else you'd like to mention before we start to land a plan?

Thank you so much for your time. 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 slash 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. Until next time, thanks. Tune in him. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast

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