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

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Tim Ferriss: Bill, great to see you, man.

Bill Gurley: Good to see you.

Tim Ferriss: And I thought we would start with a prop that you brought. So there was a very thick book with a tattered cover and I think that is as good a lead in as anything. And what are you holding?

Bill Gurley: 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 because I wanted to see it and have it.

Tim Ferriss: What’s the subtitle?

Bill Gurley: The Last Laugh: The World of the Stand-up Comics.

Tim Ferriss: Why do you have this book? Are you thinking of making a career switch?

Bill Gurley: No. No. No. No. So as part of researching my new book, Runnin’ Down a Dream, my co-writer and I were, we spent six years just diving through stories because I had done this speech at the University of Texas and we wanted to enhance it 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 standup comic, but he didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know if it was a real career. He didn’t know that you could make money. And he read this book and it profiles, I don’t know, it looks like 15 different — it’s got Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Robert Klein.

It profiled them in a way that was very disinhibiting to him. It gave him permission to go do this career that’s not a typical career. When you go to college, they don’t list standup comedian as something that you can go do.

Tim Ferriss: The guidance counselor is not generally putting that on the multiple choice.

Bill Gurley: Exactly. But this book served as something that granted him permission to go do that.

Tim Ferriss: 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?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. So I think this is super interesting. My partner, Peter, reminded me of a book that we had seen a while ago by Carlota Perez. It has this very benign title, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It was written in like 2002. And what Perez simplifies and notices, which I just find perfect for trying to understand whether there’s a bubble or not, is that every time there’s been a technology wave that leads to wealth creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite speculators, carpetbaggers, interlopers that want to come take advantage of it, think of the Gold Rush. 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 “Got you!” 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 or participate in it. So you get a flood of those types of people coming at it. And so it’s odd. There’s a real technology wave that’s fundamentally changing the world and there’s also massive speculation simultaneously.

Tim Ferriss: 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, financial bubble, versus, let’s just say, the early 2000s, ’98, ’99, 2000, where a lot of very important technology was created that then was durable after the fact and created new generations of entrepreneurs and a lot of economic growth. And he believes that AI would fall into the industrial bubble category of things. But I suppose, given that the dancing pair you described come together, 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.

Bill Gurley: Just a quick comment on that industrial bubble thing. One thing that is surprising to me is that even though I fundamentally believe this is an important real technology wave, the big players, even the Mag Seven, have all decided to do things from a deal perspective. You’ve read about these circular deals and whatnot.

Tim Ferriss: Could you explain what you mean by that?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. There’s a lot of talk out there, but it all started when Microsoft invested in OpenAI. OpenAI 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 DealBook last week, he said, “Oh, I can explain this. It’s 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 gotten bigger. NVIDIA’s handed out money and then NVIDIA gave CoreWeave money, but then also agreed to buy any services they have left over. This stuff’s not ideal. Like if you were to say, “What’s crisp, clean accounting?” You wouldn’t do these things. And some of them say, “Well, it’s not material.” And 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 previous discussion. And 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 SPV vehicles, but you’ve heard that phrase, I’m sure, SPV. This is where someone has an in on an investment and they do a one-off VC fund, if you will.

Tim Ferriss: A special purpose vehicle.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. It’s a single entity just for that one —

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

Bill Gurley: And they take a rake on it. And there’s people promoting SPVs in situations where they don’t even actually have the underlying stock, or maybe they hope to get it. 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 got to be quite careful. The investments that were made that have already had 100 X plus returns were made a while ago before this thing started. And that’s not to say there won’t be an incremental AI investment that makes money, I think there will, but your odds right now of that being the case are really, really low.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would add to that and say, and 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 ridden 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. Because I recall, for instance, I’ve seen this many, many times, but with these types of SPVs, 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% 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, accept, accept the SBV terms of service, which I’ll say, “You could lose all of your investment. This is incredibly risky.” But then when it does go to zero, the financial and psychological impact is catastrophic.

Bill Gurley: 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 — well, first of all, rising inequality, 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. And the problem, 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 really — 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.

Tim Ferriss: They don’t want to buy losing lottery tickets for 12 years.

Bill Gurley: 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 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.

Tim Ferriss: 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?

Bill Gurley: 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, “Oh, I’ll do a bunch of angel investing.” Bezos did it on the side. This would be fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: He did pretty well with his angel investing.

Bill Gurley: 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?” And I said, “I was thinking of 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’s a unglamorous side to it as much as there is a glamorous side. And you’ve participated in this world before. So what would I say? I think if I were doing angel investments, I’d try and find in an intersection of people that are super curious and are playing with all these AI tools, but bring a perspective from a particular industry that gives them an advantage in that area where they could simultaneously be maybe the smartest user of AI in their genre, in their vertical.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. There’s a weird reality out there right now, and this could end if ever a bubble has 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 in —

Tim Ferriss: And for people who do not know the term, define the institutional investor.

Bill Gurley: 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 —

Tim Ferriss: Could die of neglect.

Bill Gurley: There is no interest. I can’t state clearly enough how there’s zero interest. 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 mention that, I feel obligated for your audience. 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.

PREROLL

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

Bill Gurley: From a career perspective or —

Tim Ferriss: 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?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. The key is just to stay pretty far away from the edge of whatever. You can go online and see interviews with the people at Anthropic or OpenAI and what they’re working on. 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. It’s just really, the game’s changed. There’s so much money involved. And so 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 OpenAI to go crush every little vertical.

Tim Ferriss: Waste management.

Bill Gurley: And even if the model’s capable of understanding that subject matter, there are workflows, there are data sets that are local to your customer, 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 OpenAI, it would probably be your best bet.

Tim Ferriss: 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 dataset of some type?

Bill Gurley: Proprietary datasets, the more workflows that exist are better because you can build software around those things that —

Tim Ferriss: What is a workflow?

Bill Gurley: The thing that popped into my head, I’m on the board of Zillow. Zillow’s 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, but there’s putting the mortgage together, getting the sign-offs on. There’s just all these tasks that have to be happened that can be automated in the —

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.

Tim Ferriss: All right. 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?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. 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 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 just as an experience that I got a tour of the Xiaomi factory with their new car, the SU7, and was trying to get a feel for what’s most recent there. And we went to Shenzhen, the overnight city, which has gone from, I think, less than 100,000 people in 1980 to 20 million people.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: What are some of those misperceptions?

Bill Gurley: The biggest one is that people who have a rudimentary understanding of what is happening there, you use this word communism to infer a lot of other things. And one of the things that’s inferred by communism is top down state run system. And I think they think of Russia and they assume, “Well, that’ll always lead to bad capital allocation, no innovation.” Because they have this picture in their mind of these, I don’t know, brick buildings, like with snow all around them and not much happening.

And the reality there is just far, far different from that. I think Dan Wang did a great job of explaining how the country puts out this five-year plan, but then the provinces, which they’re a lot bigger than a US state, but they’re the equivalent, like it’s how 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 US system. But what that leads to is just a massive amount of competition and —

Tim Ferriss: 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 —

Bill Gurley: I’m guessing probably 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 things. By the way, this provincial competition has also led to overbuild of buildings. It’s not always positive, 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 and best practice, and the winners rise up and they’re better for it. That is happening there. And if you read about the solar industry or the EV industry or now the 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 in the US.

Tim Ferriss: How do you go about getting a tour of Xiaomi factory? I would think that they would be very closed about that. What’s in it for them and how do they —

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

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I saw it. Yeah. Absolutely.

Bill Gurley: Which is brilliant. And he did like a 15 — that’s the SG7, that’s the factory I went to. As I mentioned, I’d been there before, so I met Lei Jun, who’s the Founder of Xiaomi in 2005 when he was chairman of Joyo, 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 he’s the Steve Jobs of China right now. When he quit doing Joyo and he had this other company as well, he declared 10 years ago he was 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 Xiaomi’s now the third-largest manufacturer of handsets in the globe. And about four or five years ago, at about the exact same time Apple hinted they were interested in building a car, he said, “I’m going to build a car.”

Tim Ferriss: Well, not only did he say I’m going to build a car, but that was a response to sanctions. That was an emergency. Well, I listened to the translation of, even though my Chinese is decent, but it’s not as good as it once was. I think it was 2024 company-wide address where he talked about the sanctions coming in saying, “What if we couldn’t make phones? What would we do?

Bill Gurley: But that talk is unbelievable, and it’s translated on YouTube, and I would encourage people to watch from about minute 30 to about an hour 15, which is where he talks about his process for designing the car. I don’t know if you saw that part.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did.

Bill Gurley: 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 them the car. Said he drove 200 of his employees cars. When you hear that stuff, you’re like, “Wow, I wonder if anyone at Apple did that.” It’s just such a bottom up, just ground truth way to start the process. But even still, even if he did that, a bunch of people could do that. How do you have the wherewithal to build a factory? He’d never built a factory before. And I’ve been in other car factories here in the US. It was phenomenal. Anyway, back to your question why I could get in. I knew Lei Jun from way back when.

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

Bill Gurley: I don’t think we went through the whole factory, but no, it wasn’t that. They’re a public company. I think they’re interested in being well understood, which I think hints at why they enabled this. I think they had to send a car to this guy, the YouTuber.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: And by the way, 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 shipped to Michigan, and he drove it for several weeks and he’s talked about how incredible it is.

Tim Ferriss: 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 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, 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?

Bill Gurley: Well, the first one that’s I think been well publicized is when an entrepreneur has risen to a level of success and then uses that as a platform, the government seems uninterested in that.

Tim Ferriss: Exhibit A.

Bill Gurley: The Jack Ma.

Tim Ferriss: Jack Ma.

Bill Gurley: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a saying that I think I heard while I was over there, “Don’t be the tallest tree.”

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Bill Gurley: The other entrepreneur outside of Lei Jun is the ByteDance CEO. And ByteDance 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 owned TikTok and whatnot, but they’re not going public and you don’t see him at all, which may get to this tallest tree thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, celebrities also disappear over there.

Bill Gurley: No doubt.

Tim Ferriss: Very mysteriously.

Bill Gurley: Yes. Well, and business people.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: So yes, that does happen.

Tim Ferriss: I will say, and for people who are wondering, because there are a lot of — how should we put this? 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, I’m 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, 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. 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, 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. But you were about to say something, so I’ll let you —

Bill Gurley: No, no, no. I think let’s come to that. 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 US. So is South Korea, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the numbers are incredible.

Bill Gurley: But when we sit here and say, “Oh, we want to re-shore manufacturing, and they can build things at one fourth the price we can.” If you don’t solve that, you’re going to re-shore something and we’re going to not be price competitive globally. And then because you won’t import 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.

Tim Ferriss: The math doesn’t math.

Bill Gurley: It doesn’t work. And by the way, I’m not sure it brings jobs. The Xiaomi factory was 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 that you’d be bringing back if you brought back all this car production and it’d be hundreds of thousands. It’s not millions and millions of jobs. So anyway, that infrastructure thing’s for real. And I think Dan Wong does a good job of saying that America’s run by lawyers.

Tim Ferriss: And this is the author of Breakneck.

Bill Gurley: Our country’s run by lawyers and theirs is run by engineers. Engineers. And so when you try and build something here, the lawyers just get in the way 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 saw what happened when they took down Alibaba when they went after Jack Ma, and Amp Financial could have been this big thing and it got a haircut, and you question, well, do they care? And if you are pushing your companies to be low cost providers, maybe that’s at odds with them being hyper profitable and really big. And then you can turn around and ask the question. Hearing that caused me to ask the question, does America really benefit by the fact that the Mag Seven have $3 trillion market caps? I know the employees of those companies do, but is that a sign of our competitive capitalistic society not being truly competitive?

Tim Ferriss: On a global scale.

Bill Gurley: No, even within. 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 have excessive profits, is that a form of market failure? And does the fact that they exist help America in any way? 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 $3 trillion market caps. It’s not that many people that — the percentage of the country that’s employed by those companies is small on an overall basis.

And so anyway, I think they have a different perspective on whether big market caps matter, and I think that is somewhat intriguing.

Tim Ferriss: 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?

Bill Gurley: I’m not in a good place to know.

Tim Ferriss: I would have to imagine it seems like they would have to be stupid not to use that given their ability to penetrate the private sector.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. I think it’s certainly well known that they do surveillance of their own people. I know that would be particularly upsetting to people like Greg Luciano 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.

Tim Ferriss: It’s true also in Japan though, right?

Bill Gurley: It doesn’t make it right or wrong. It is what it is. And I don’t know that we have this ability to tell them how 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. 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 precursors.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, way back in the day when I was an East Asian studies major, this was lifetimes ago. And keeping in mind, I was at the Capitol 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. 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, Putin speaks English pretty well, but he does all of his negotiations when he’s speaking in Russian for a lot of good reasons, the same good reasons.

Bill Gurley: I get that. But look, so first of all, I do get accused of being like an agent of the 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.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I agree with that. Yeah, I fully agree with that. I’ve thought about — I frankly am worried about it. I would take a burner phone and a burner laptop. I’ve thought about it, 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 10 of the top entrepreneurs. But the reason I haven’t done it is that I’m just like, I don’t know what radars that’s going to put me on, what surveillance, what fill in 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?

Bill Gurley: I think you’re overthinking it. I think the odds that Tim Ferriss would disappear in China is really [inaudible 00:44:26].

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’m not worried about disappearing. That would be a terrible — the upside downside on that doesn’t make any sense. I’m not worried about disappearing.

Bill Gurley: There are companies that may not speak with you. When I was there, DeepSeek and Unitree, the word was out on the street that they’re not meeting with Westerners for reasons that are —

Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m sure that’s true conversely in the US too, right?

Bill Gurley: Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’m sure that’s — and by the way, I think that reflective lens, when you think about the country is helpful. When Alex Karp was just on stage at DealBook last week, he was talking about surveillance and he says, “Well, of course our tools are used to surveil the enemy.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, my God, the Chinese are surveilling us, but obviously we’re surveilling them too. Let’s be honest about these things.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 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. Partially just due to the homogeneity of the society over there. You can’t send a bunch of blonde-haired, blue eyes, black, Latino, whatever, to China to end up at top universities, top companies, et cetera. It’s just a lot harder.

Bill Gurley: By the way, to put a bow on this part, 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 cost competitive. And to replicate all of it would take a very, very, very long time.

Tim Ferriss: Well, including raw materials for staple pharmaceuticals, There’s a lot going on. So what at this point, is it a day late and a dollar short for the US? 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 US remaining globally competitive and vibrant as an economy? You hinted to one, which is, it seems inevitable, nuclear power or more power. So how do you do that? I’m not sure how quickly you can right the ship, although it seems like a 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 US needs to do?

Bill Gurley: One is make it easier to build.

Tim Ferriss: Build companies? Build?

Bill Gurley: I think build infrastructure. 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 US 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 where they repaired I-95 in 12 days, but they literally had to take a bunch of statutes that are on the books and say that 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 plants, but they don’t know how to do any innovation.” And that’s just flat wrong. Whoever’s saying that just hasn’t been there. They don’t know the facts on the ground. These entrepreneurs are every bit as good as the entrepreneurs they are here. There are examples like in LIDAR, they built a MEMS LiDAR product that’s like $130 a car.

Tim Ferriss: What is MEMS LiDAR?

Bill Gurley: It’s solid state. It uses solid state semiconductor technology instead of that big spinning radar. And so the LiDAR on a Waymo is $5,000. And it’s $130 for MEMS LIDAR. They’re putting it on every car. You can go into ChatGPT and say, “Tell me about MEMS LiDAR innovation in China.” But it’s a great example. Le Jun’s another one, but anybody that thinks there’s no innovation is just —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they’re just wrong.

Bill Gurley: They got blinders on.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Bill Gurley: Did I say that?

Tim Ferriss: Losing party pay is in the legal system.

Bill Gurley: I do love that.

Tim Ferriss: Which reduces frivolous litigation compared to the US. Any thoughts on where you’re bullish these days?

Bill Gurley: Well, ironically, Matt Ridley was in town a few weeks ago in Austin.

Tim Ferriss: The Rational Optimist, other books.

Bill Gurley: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it depends on the timeframe too. Is it two years, or is it five years or is it 10 years?

Bill Gurley: One of the things that’s been impressive about China is since Deng Xiaoping brought back capitalism, 500 million people have come out of poverty. And you look at countries that have a very strong work ethic, and a high education, and a 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 check all those boxes.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Bill Gurley: Hopefully I do better then.

Tim Ferriss: Check in in another two years. All right. So let’s talk about, this is going to be a segue to talking about Runnin’ Down a Dream and all things involved with that. Maybe we could start with an anecdote from a fellow Austinite, likes to play the bongos, long hair, associated with smoking reefer every once in a while. Matthew, we were talking about a short anecdote about Matthew before we started recording. Would you mind sharing that?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. As I was preparing, as I was wrapping up the book, I started listening to Greenlights, and I was told you had to listen to it because of course he reads it. So you get all the great McConaughey affectations as you read it. But there’s a story in it that just popped in my brain and summarized exactly what I’m trying to accomplish with this book, Runnin’ Down a Dream. And he had spent the vast majority of his young adult life—so this anecdote is 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. 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. This is all in the book, but his father’s a very tough individual. And so reason to be fearful when you’re going to drop some news. “I’m 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. 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 half ass it.” And he says, “Of all the reactions he could have had, don’t half ass it were the last words I expected to hear and the best words he could have ever said to me.” And he said in that single moment, he gave him blessing, consent, approval, validation, privilege, honor, freedom, and responsibility, called it rocket fuel.

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. I want to help them have the confidence and permission to go do X, to go chase this dream. And as you hinted at from our last call, I think the amount of your ability to make connections and to gather information and learn on your own pace, has never been better. You can literally just sit there and talk to ChatGPT six hours a day if you so choose, and learn so much about any particular field.

And so 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.

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

Bill Gurley: Well, I think we’ve built a society, like nobody’s fault. 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, it’s all these jobs that have certainty to the financial component. And I think that’s so well intended. I don’t think there’s mal intent of anyone in the system. And I’m a parent of three, 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.

Tim Ferriss: Stability.

Bill Gurley: Yes, that most people are guiding children towards. And this isn’t that complicated math, but most people end up working 80,000 hours in their life. It’s a third of your life. Why do something you don’t like? There’s Gallup poll data on career engagement and 59% of people say they’re not engaged at work. And this is that whole quiet quitting thing that we hear so much about. And some of these numbers are at an all-time low. It just seems horrific that people are sauntering through life.

Tim Ferriss: So what are some of the keys to taking the path less traveled then in this case? And there are a few I highlighted for myself, but where should we start? I highlighted one for myself. We don’t have to start here, but go where the action is. I just think this is so underrated, 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?

Bill Gurley: I think 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 it 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? 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. And that’s going to be useful. That’s unquestionably going to be useful.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, it makes me think of an interview I saw a long time ago, actually. It was quite a few years ago, but it was an interview with Joe Rogan and he said something that 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 he’s in great shape. Obviously he’s black belt in jujitsu. He’s done what he’s done with the podcast. He’s the undisputed king of podcasting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, “I’m not actually good at whether it was discipline or willpower, but I am good at obsession. It’s all on or all off.” And I’ve seen that, I’m sure you’ve seen this in a lot of the entrepreneurs who actually make it to the other side and create these mega successes, they are just obsessed.

Bill Gurley: No doubt.

Tim Ferriss: And that gives them a huge, not just knowledge advantage, but endurance advantage. You just go down the checkboxes. It’s all advantages, and —

Bill Gurley: 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 and the perseverance because she says, “We’ve taught our children to grind.” And so once again, starting in sixth grade, they’re told to learn the flute and take lacrosse and do all this stuff and crush the SATs and take the extra credit classes and all this. And they all do it and they all do it. And then they go to college and, “Oh, how are you doing?” They take six hours of class instead of four and they’re just going. But eventually she says, “If you don’t have that passion, you just burn out.” And so you’re right about the energy part. I think it’s both knowledge and you’ve put in more cycles.

Tim Ferriss: 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 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.

Bill Gurley: No doubt.

Tim Ferriss: I think of [inaudible 01:01:43] and 3D printing. I mean, I can just go down the list. How do you —

Bill Gurley: And by the way, that’s another advantage of going to the epicenter is there’s more people doing that all the time.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe you could, 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?

Bill Gurley: 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. VC is a game of pattern recognition I guess my brain has just developed. I was like, “Oh, my God, it’s all this lock thing where these three people had all done the same thing.” And one was a basketball coach, one was a restaurateur and the other was Bob Dylan, not people you would, not industry, “Oh, this is where you should get career development advice.” There’s a part of the Dylan story that most people wouldn’t know unless they had read all the biographies or maybe seen the Scorsese documentary. But the new movie misses the whole thing, which is the pre-New York Bob Dylan was hanging out in Minnesota studying folk music at such a deep level that I feel confident in saying when he left, he knew more about folk music than any other human in Minnesota.

And he was borrowing, and maybe that’s even a euphemism. He was stealing his friends albums, he was going into the record store, into these listening booths. 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 any one song. It’s not what you would think of when you hear a Dylan song that he had 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, it’s in geographic order and you’re 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.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: You’re talking about Bob Dylan himself?

Bill Gurley: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I didn’t realize this.

Bill Gurley: Yes, yes. You can go find it. He stopped, but he’s — 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. 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 most deterministic and ambitious mentor pursuit story that I’ve ever heard of. He hitchhiked there with no money and found him and became friends with him.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, this echoes back to go where the action is also, right?

Bill Gurley: 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 and he got to know them all. If that doesn’t happen, I don’t think Dylan happens.

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

Bill Gurley: You could certainly have the type of peer and mentor experiences that are remote. I have a great anecdote about MrBeast in the book that we could talk about that was a remote one, but the benefits of being in and around a whole bunch of people that are chasing the same thing is so high. And I think the intuition is, “Oh, well, it’s going to be even more competitive, so why would I go? Wouldn’t it be better to try and do this in a town where it’s less of a big deal?” But the problem is your learning is impacted, your access to peers and mentors is drastically reduced, and then probably most importantly, your optionality gets cut so dramatically. People think that a lot of success stories, they attribute it to luck, but 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 10 X. And so your ability to just have that lucky moment where you get brought into something is so much higher.

Tim Ferriss: The lucky moment is, I think, really important to underscore in terms of going where the action is because there’s a lot you can do virtually, but let’s just say you’re using ChatGPT, you’re going to get what you prompt. In other words, you’re asking for something and that can take you down a rabbit hole, but there, at least in my lived experience, and certainly I still see this happening, when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, and then I look back at my angel investing career, I look back at all these collaborations, the vast majority of them did not come from me going out with an agenda and seeking something. They came from serendipitous bumping into somebody at a coffee shop.

I literally met Naval Ravikant because I was hitting on his girlfriend at the time when she was getting her coffee, didn’t realize they were together. And then you look at Garrett Camp, Kevin Rose. These are, at a barbecue I met Kevin Rose. And you go down the list and you look at all of these formative, massively impactful, personally and professionally relationships. They almost all came from serendipity and you just don’t seem to get that density unless you’re in the center of the action. And perhaps it’s easier to relocate yourself, I’m sure it is, when you have fewer responsibilities, but God, I can’t even imagine what my life would have looked like had I not left Long Island and then ultimately moved to Silicon Valley.

Bill Gurley: Yeah, and 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. I didn’t get one, but had they said yes, maybe I practiced there. And I’m glad that didn’t happen. Going and practicing it where I did was the exact right place to do it. I do think if you can, if you can, because there are financial constraints, and if you want to be great at a field and that field has an epicenter, I think you should go.

Tim Ferriss: And there are different types of epicenters too. You think about, let’s just say AI, not to repeatedly bang that drum, but you could just say, okay, AI, first thing that comes to mind, Silicon Valley, but this is going to be a bit of a digression, but I remember asking Derek Sivers, a friend of mine, amazing entrepreneur, 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. 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. There’s so many different ways to approach it, but let’s talk about a virtual example. You mentioned MrBeast. Could you describe that story?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. I actually heard it on a podcast, but 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 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-climbing 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 —

Tim Ferriss: Sounds like Jimmy.

Bill Gurley: For years, they shared best practices on this call, which apparently in that world, the color of the icon on the post you do on Instagram to send them to YouTube, like all these little bitty esoteric things can impact conversion. And he said when he was talking about this, that they all became millionaires. And he said, “If you or any random individual had been a fifth person on those calls, you would have too, because of that.” And it’s just a wonderful example of how peers — he on this podcast said something that was very clever. He took the 10,000 hours thing from Gladwell and said, “Well, there were four of us spending 10,000 hours and then sharing ideas so you get 40,000 hours of expertise.”

Tim Ferriss: 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, I don’t go zero to one in terms of having any basic literacy or access. That was 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, Naval, Chris Sacca. The remaining — I mean, the latter goes on forever, but 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.

Bill Gurley: See, that’s the thing. 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 epicenter, I’d practice it there. I don’t know that it’s an either 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. 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 are doing that also, that’s perfect. And those experiences you’ve talked about, I’ve had so many of them myself, they get excited to tell you what they just learned, right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. And then you reciprocate. And by the way, Mike’s a great example. I really 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. Mike’s very — he’s a huge sharer when it comes to his knowledge about the subject matter and it’s so great —

Tim Ferriss: He is. Yeah. Pattern Breakers is an excellent book also.

Bill Gurley: So great.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Yeah, Mike, I’m hoping to see him again soon. It’s been a minute. We’ve talked about MrBeast, Bob Dylan. In both cases, like poor kids with nothing to lose, in a sense. Not in any destitute sense, but they’re starting at —

Bill Gurley: It’s funny —

Tim Ferriss: — futons and ramen, right?

Bill Gurley: He was just interviewed at DealBook also, and his mother was in the front row who apparently works for him now. He was telling the story about when he went to tell her he was dropping out of college, similar to the McConaughey story, not quite as abrupt, or Jimmy’s being more abrupt, but of course she’s happy now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it all worked out. I mean, there’s always a little survivorship bias, but —

Bill Gurley: No doubt, no doubt.

Tim Ferriss: But let’s talk about Danny Meyer because I want to give an example of someone who gave something up to then pursue X instead of A, B, or C. Could you say a little bit about Danny? 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 Genesis story of Danny Meyer, the restaurateur?

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.

Bill Gurley: Just a wonderful human.

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Bill Gurley: But he is also one of the most celebrated restaurateurs of our time. He was working for a company that sold these devices to clip onto clothes so you can’t steal them from a retail store, and he was making good money. He was making about $200,000 a year, and this is —

Tim Ferriss: At the time.

Bill Gurley: — 40 years ago.

Tim Ferriss: Real money.

Bill Gurley: Real, real money. And he had convinced himself he was going to be a lawyer. I guess a lot of people convinced themselves of that. And he was about to take the LSAT and he was out to dinner with his uncle and his uncle was probing him and probing him and, “Oh, yeah, he’s going to take the LSAT.” 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 and to the point where he would take copious notes prior to even doing this.

His family had a reason to know that he had this deep passion, but it’s interesting it’s an uncle. 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 him 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 10th the salary that he was making in the sales job.

Tim Ferriss: And went on to Gramercy Tav — I mean, all these iconic restaurants, then Shake Shack, then I mean, just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Bill Gurley: 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 wanted 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 stage in multiple places where he’s working for free, basically.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought this up because I wouldn’t have brought it up myself, but I’ve run — this is going to relate in a second. I’ve run a bunch of competitions for, let’s just say, creating artwork for PDFs/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 shaking of the fist like, “Ah, it’s so unfair. You want people to work, do work for free.”

When I look at almost every example of someone who became the equivalent of Danny Meyer in their world, they did a lot that was unpaid, almost always. I’m sure there are exceptions, but staging is a great example in the restaurant world where it’s like, okay, you want to work at a restaurant where you’re going to have the highest density of learning and you don’t know shit? 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. 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.

Bill Gurley: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [inaudible 01:22:33].

Tim Ferriss: I volunteered with all of these nonprofit groups and quickly realized that most volunteers are doing the absolute minimum to be volunteers. And if you just do 10% more, it doesn’t take much. I would just refill people’s water glasses and stuff after I finished taking their tickets for an event. And suddenly the producers of this event who were also doing it, but had real jobs. I mean, I had a job at a college [inaudible 01:23:00] and I was working a lot. They were like, “Wow, this kid’s a go getter because he’s refilling these water glasses. Let’s give him more responsibility.” And that’s how I ended up connecting with all these speakers and everything, just did some stuff for free on the weekends. It didn’t take a lot.

Bill Gurley: There’s a story in the book that’s actually hard to believe. We profiled 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. Snuck in. Not supposed to be there, just to get reps with these top models in this environment.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible.

Bill Gurley: It sounds unfathomable that someone would do that. She did it multiple times.

Tim Ferriss: And she did it.

Bill Gurley: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: What ended up happening after that? I don’t know her story.

Bill Gurley: Oh, she’s become probably the most successful hairstylist of our time. It’s an incredible story.

Tim Ferriss: How do you suggest people who are, maybe they’re doing A, B, and C right now, they’re listening to this and they just say, “All right, I want to take the leap. I want to do Z. I want to do whatever the off menu option is.”

Bill Gurley: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: They might have to have a conversation with a parent. They might have to have a conversation with a 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 time box it or make it time bound in a sense where you’re like, “Hey, just give me permission to try this for six months, a year, two years.”

Bill Gurley: It’s interesting that 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 had also, he worked at a hedge fund just like Danny Meyer. He was making real money.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. I didn’t realize that about Sal Khan. Wild.

Bill Gurley: And started working with his cousins across the globe online doing these tutorial exercises and ended up posting a few on YouTube. 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 he 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 considered trite, but fascination, curiosity. 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. And if you can show that you’re — because if you’re going to tilt at something that hard and if you’re going to really differentiate yourself by being that learned in that field, I think it’d be hard for someone to tell you not to go do it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: It’s not going to be easy. I don’t want anyone to think that, “Oh, just read this book and magic happens.” 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.

Tim Ferriss: And maybe are you already learning about this?

Bill Gurley: Are you already learning about it on your free time?

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Bill Gurley: Yes. No doubt.

Tim Ferriss: At least have one —

Bill Gurley: You should be. You should be. I doubt you’re going to turn it on.

Tim Ferriss: — data point based on history.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. Well, actually, I have an example of someone who just turned it on. We have a chapter called Never Too Late, which is where the [inaudible 01:27:32] thing is because that happened when he was close to 40. Another local Austinite, Bert Tito Beveridge started his endeavor in the spirit business.

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

Bill Gurley: At the age of 40.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Bill Gurley: He’s watching a PBS special. This is also hard to believe. He’s watching a PBS special. And back 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.

Tim Ferriss: What was his day job?

Bill Gurley: His first career was in seismetology and the oil field and that dragged him to South America. And then when that became dangerous, both in Midland and in South America, he became a mortgage broker.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Bill Gurley: But he didn’t love either. He didn’t love either of them. 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.

Tim Ferriss: How did he start, just out of curiosity? Because I was just thinking about him. He just acquired — well, Tito Beveridge just acquired Lala Tequila, which I was involved with.

Bill Gurley: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That’s probably why he popped to mind. But how did he start?

Bill Gurley: 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.

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t realize that.

Bill Gurley: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t realize it was that big.

Bill Gurley: It’s huge.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Good for him.

Bill Gurley: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: That’s so wild. So wild. So I promised to get to this and I do want to get to it. Are there any sanity checks that you would put in place to compliment the fascination/obsession/what I’m doing in my spare time or 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, “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? Because this is something that is —

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.

Bill Gurley: So comp-sci.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Yeah, risky, but as compared to what?

Bill Gurley: Comp-sci went from being the most least risky major you could possibly get to one that’s somewhat risky overnight. And so that’d be my first 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. 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’s capable of.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So in order to find that edge and follow that edge, which will move, you have to be playing with the tools.

Bill Gurley: And look, I think in any field, 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.

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

Bill Gurley: No. Yeah. Well, 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. Look, the thing that LLMs are most capable of, it’s a large language model. The language type stuff, like your copy editing example, things that were just rote moving words around, yeah, it’s really good at that stuff. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t be the person that really understands what it’s capable of and then superpower yourself to go attack a particular interest.

The other thing, you had started a question by saying warnings. I think there are a lot of fields where talent really does matter. I don’t know that I can make you a singer or I certainly can’t make you an NBA basketball player, but in all those fields, whether it be Hollywood or sports or 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 for any artistic field, there are way more jobs that support those artists than there are the jobs of the artist.

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by that?

Bill Gurley: 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 —

Tim Ferriss: I see what you’re saying.

Bill Gurley: — in Hollywood that aren’t —

Tim Ferriss: Within the sector of entertainment.

Bill Gurley: — that aren’t the talent itself. So if you’re passionate about basketball or you’re passionate about the chef example of a restaurant, like there’s tons of jobs you can go do, music industry, without being that particular person.

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

Bill Gurley: 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 restaurateurs or hoteliers, I think all those things are going to thrive and people that know how to really differentiate experiences in that way, I think are — I personally doubt that — 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, but I think the storytelling and the imagination and the writing, I think all those things will still be real. I really do.

And obviously just general business, entrepreneurship. I took my dad, who’s 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 three or four businesses and 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 did 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.”

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 just leaned at it the way he’s leaning at it, they would become super powered themselves.” I was really blown away by that.

Tim Ferriss: 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 Hinkie?

Bill Gurley: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Why is his story relevant?

Bill Gurley: He was a amazing student. He grew up in Oklahoma. His father worked for Halliburton. He made good grades, good students, kind of classic, did everything right, became a consultant. I think he was working for McKinsey, 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 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.” And 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 youngest GM of all time in 10 years.

Tim Ferriss: Was he obsessed with sports already at that point?

Bill Gurley: I think so. He played — this gets back to what I said about maybe your original obsession came from participating or being the talent, but then he’s not particularly big. And so yeah, he was successful in high school, but there was no path to keep going down that field. So yeah, he had immense passion for the category, but had never imagined himself in the field in one of these other roles until that book 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 for most humans [inaudible 01:41:42].

Tim Ferriss: Quality problem.

Bill Gurley: 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 were a lot like McConaughey’s dad when Sam brought them that challenge.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds about right. That checks out for me.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. Based on what you know of the two institutions.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. And then he just started, 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. I don’t want to make it sound like — he kind of built his own curriculum, but it worked.

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

Bill Gurley: Unquestionably.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Just wanted to —

Bill Gurley: Anyone that’s going to do anything in business should read that book.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I wanted to give the throwback to our first conversation.

Bill Gurley: By the way, at the back of the book, it lists about 50 books. At the very end.

Tim Ferriss: Just to whet the appetite?

Bill Gurley: Well, I think you did the same thing. I’ve gone through your —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Oh, no.

Bill Gurley: In fact, I looked at yours for the structure when I wanted to see how to lay it out.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Bill Gurley: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Bill Gurley: It’s in my note.

Tim Ferriss: But my experience has been, it’s not always fun, even if you’re doing what you love. Sometimes there’s burnout. Sometimes you go through chapters where things do feel like a grind. I mean, maybe I’m an outlier, but that’s been my experience. When I realized, for instance, in the case of the podcast, it’s like, “Wow, I have much more sponsor demand than I could ever fill. If I just doubled the number of episodes, I’d double the number of revenue. So why don’t I do that?”

And it started to feel like a bad job. Not a bad job.

Bill Gurley: I get it.

Tim Ferriss: It’s still a great job, but the volume was too high. And I can imagine if people take the expression I just mentioned, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. They pursue X, whatever that is, the songwriting and the performing in the case of Bob Dylan, Danny Meyer, whatever it might be. And then they hit a really hard stretch. Maybe it’s early on, maybe it’s later, maybe they’re [inaudible 01:44:46] and some French guy yelling at them.

Bill Gurley: Yeah certainly.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the case with a friend of mine. And they’re like, “Wow, God, 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?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. It’s funny. I’ll take a short diversion in answering the question.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Long diversions.

Bill Gurley: Because people often ask me, “How do you use AI?” When I was wrapping up the book, my publisher and editor said, “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 ChatGPT 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 concluding chapters were orthogonal. They weren’t a summary. They were a different take on the whole thing. Well, my concluding chapter is 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 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, do you still feel this natural curiosity to learn the entire time? Is the impediment something that truly means you should stop like, “I can’t get around it. I can’t…” Or 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 this 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 100%.

Bill Gurley: And so peers don’t judge. That’s why that trust thing really matters also, another reason why it matters. And they can help you. 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 paying.

Tim Ferriss: I’m also imagining that one of the challenges that I had and some of my friends had at different points in pursuing, fill 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 into ChatGPT or one of these tools and say, “Can you give me any comparable examples from other people who have succeeded in other fields?”

Bill Gurley: I’m sure that’ll work. It’ll also give you five answers on how to deal with it, how to get around it.

Tim Ferriss: How to deal with it.

Bill Gurley: 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 you may 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 sell-side 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.

Tim Ferriss: 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 of 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 with contact information. But was it just a gut feeling? Was it a disquiet that you felt in your system or was it more than that?

Bill Gurley: 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 were these computers we 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. 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Right.

Bill Gurley: It was something else. I was reading Peter Lynch’s book on stocks and stuff like that.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Segue to the sell-side analyst.

Bill Gurley: Yes. The thing that happened as a sell-side analyst, and and I may parlay 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 this classic thing where you’re in your 20s and you’re working on Wall Street, they serve dinner at the office. The cafeteria is open, that’ll tell you something.

And it was like 10:30 or 11:00 PM 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 sell-side 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, I made the decision that I got to go do something else.

Tim Ferriss: No, it’s one of —

Bill Gurley: If you don’t mind.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, fire away.

Bill Gurley: In Daniel Pink’s book, he talks a lot about boldness regrets. And this is where I say, “Do you want to do this for 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 are 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. 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, am I going to regret not doing this?

Tim Ferriss: 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.”

Bill Gurley: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Bill Gurley: It’s the same thing.

Tim Ferriss: And I do think about that a lot myself. I mean, I’m at a point where I’m trying to figure out what my next chapter is too, because this podcasting game’s getting pretty crowded.

Bill Gurley: It is.

Tim Ferriss: And I still enjoy doing it, but that’s only because I refuse to play by the incentives that the platforms and algorithms provide, which is economically punishing, but intellectually rewarding.

Bill Gurley: Because you’ve had two successful careers as, not just a podcaster and influencer, but as an angel investor, I would encourage you to read Arthur Brooks’ book, Strength to Strength.

Tim Ferriss: I did. I did. It was great.

Bill Gurley: Okay. You already read it?

Tim Ferriss: It was great. It was great.

Bill Gurley: I think it gives great perspective for a later career shift.

Tim Ferriss: 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 such an operator. Track record’s incredible. Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You 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 can’t sit on your hands very long.

Bill Gurley: No. And as I mentioned, when I made the decision to stop the venture career, which I think we talked about on the last podcast —

Tim Ferriss: A little bit, yeah.

Bill Gurley: — where I read the Steve Martin book. But I didn’t know. I knew I wanted to do something else. And I went on a listening tour and I talked to all these people that had —

Tim Ferriss: Can you just reiterate what a listening tour is?

Bill Gurley: Oh, I identified several people who had successfully—retired is a strong word—but made a decision to stop doing a job they were very successful at. And then what do you do now? It’s similar to the Arthur Brooks book, but it was just a personal life. A lot of people angel invest, a lot of people go on boards, a lot of people manage their own money. I had this list that people teach and I slowly was checking them off.

Tim Ferriss: Just crossing out, yeah.

Bill Gurley: Scratch them out, yeah. I don’t really want to manage my own money. I don’t really want to angel invest. I don’t want to start my own venture firm. I’ve done that. 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. Slowly, I’ve come around to an idea that I made up.

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 a episode at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Facility. Before I did that episode, I spent three or four weeks calling everyone I knew to make sure that I was prepared for that.

That was one of our more successful episodes and I just really enjoyed that. I look at the shifting mindset around the globe on nuclear energy in the past five years as an example of what’s possible with really great policy work. It wasn’t one person. I think the fact that Steve Pinker was banging the drum was super important, but Andreessen and Elon and all these people started pounding that same drum. Joe Gebbia’s wife made this a big life passion project of hers. But it’s shocking how quick we went from, “This stuff’s bad,” to, “Oh, no, we made a mistake. It’s actually good.”

That could have a powerful impact on the planet. 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 US-China relations, US healthcare system has some massive problems. Can you come up with ideas that help shift these things? 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 and see what we can go do, see what we can go change. Regulatory capture is another one that I’ve spent time tilting at.

Tim Ferriss: If you’re not doing this state by state legislative change, what does the work of P3 potentially look like? What is policy work? I know that seems like a silly question but —

Bill Gurley: We’re at day one, but I’ll give you —

Tim Ferriss: What might it look like?

Bill Gurley: Yeah, here’s an example. A professor approached me on the regulatory capture front. “What if we put —

Tim Ferriss: Could you define that just for people who didn’t hear episode one?

Bill Gurley: Yeah. There’s a Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago named George Stigler. He’s passed away but who made the very strong argument that regulation is the friend of the incumbent, that large businesses learn how to lobby Washington. No matter how well intention the policy is that’s passed, it ends up benefiting the incumbent more than restricting the incumbent. He won a Nobel Prize for that work. I gave a speech at the All-In Summit that you can go watch on YouTube. It has five million views on this topic, but I think this happens in the majority of the time rather than — anyway, this —

Tim Ferriss: That’s why ACH takes three days to clear, right?

Bill Gurley: Yes, yes, yes, yes, but stablecoin may solve that. But this professor approached me about making maybe 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.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let me chew on that for a second. Let’s say you create this data set 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?

Bill Gurley: The hope would be that you can shine a light on the best practices and try to get those implemented —

Tim Ferriss: In other places.

Bill Gurley: — here in the US.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: That would be the hope. Also, I think just shining a light on them is — I’ll give you an example that relates to regulatory capture. After you’ve been a senator or congressman for a while, you get invited onto committees. The minute you’re on a committee, you are in charge of regulation that affects different industries. I don’t even know if most humans know this.

What happens is your local senator or your local congressman who you think is representing your district now starts raising money nationally. They go around and meet with businesses because they’re on that committee and have influence and they’re raising money nationally. I think that’s ridiculous personally. You could imagine restrictions against that, transparency towards it. 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?

Tim Ferriss: Well, you shared a story last time we spoke about being asked to raise a hundred grand in donations just to get a meeting with a Congress.

Bill Gurley: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Our mutual friend, Rich Barton, talks about shining flashlights in dark places. This technology that we have access to should — I think donations should be on the blockchain, quite frankly. There’s no reason why this information needs to be in the dark. I think there’s a lot of opportunity around data aggregation.

Tim Ferriss: Any other ideas that are percolating?

Bill Gurley: I’m enamored by state versus state competition. Part of it pops into my brain from the China experience and the provincial competition, but you see Newsom and Abbott fighting back and forth, and maybe there can be a positive outcome from this. I think some of the Federalist Papers envisioned that different states could try different experiments and we could see what happens as a result of that.

Tim Ferriss: We’re seeing some of it with Texas and Arizona.

Bill Gurley: We are seeing something. I think it could be pretty interesting and provocative and could lead to positive change. 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. What if a state just all of a sudden said, “We’re going to pay 50% more for teachers”?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: Think about the dynamic that would create. It’d be pretty wild.

Tim Ferriss: It would be.

Bill Gurley: Maybe I’ll go tilt it that one, too.

Tim Ferriss: So other problems on your mind — well, I’ll just present a list here from some prep notes. We have US healthcare, regulatory capture, intellectual property, US-China, fairness and financial markets, US K-12. Could you speak to intellectual property and fairness in financial markets, how you might be thinking about those?

Bill Gurley: I’ve got to be a top 10,000% supporter of open source. This gets back to Ridley’s book, The Rational Optimist, but he talks about prosperity comes when ideas have sex. Just the sharing of information, in my mind, should be free, that it shouldn’t cost anything. 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. I’m doubtful of that. I think there’s great scientists at every university working on problems that aren’t necessarily being patented. Your ability for hyper competition and innovation is so much higher when there aren’t restrictions in place. Anyway, I think the world’s a better place when ideas are shared and not protected.

Tim Ferriss: 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?

Bill Gurley: Well, 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 backing.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve had some very open fights with people about this.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. Why doesn’t an NIH grant come with an open source rider?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. If the VCs want to fund —

Tim Ferriss: With federal funding, yeah.

Bill Gurley: Yeah, it’s federal funding.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I agree with that.

Bill Gurley: 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. That’s a minor step I would consider a major step. You don’t have to take the money, but why is the US government giving people money that ends up becoming proprietary inventions? That makes no sense to me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Whether it’s the US government or individual philanthropists or foundations. I mean, on some level, if that, then at some point — right. I agree with that, but are there industries that — I mean, the only one that first came to mind was drug development where the R&D costs are so high.

Bill Gurley: They all cry. The VCs will tell you, “It’ll never work. No one will have any incentive if we don’t have a 17-year protection.” The entire Silicon Valley —

Tim Ferriss: I’m not saying I believe that.

Bill Gurley: I know. I’ve lived in a world where if someone comes into our office and talks about patents, we roll our eyes because none of the types of businesses that we’ve backed at Benchmark in Silicon Valley are ever about patents. Elon has famously open sourced all his Tesla patents. It’s 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.” He views the edge of competition is how fast are you moving, how great are your products, the consumers love them, not, “Can I defend them in a court of law?” The protection that the drug guys get is so much — no one can really use software patents to get protection, an algorithm, or something. No one even tries.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Bill Gurley: But with drugs, if I have this particular genome sequence, all of a sudden I get this huge proprietary window in the market. It’s just nutty.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. This is not exactly the same thing, but, I mean, 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 DeepMind and Demis and his team really seeing AlphaFold. I mean, all the structures of these proteins, I mean, it’s just like, oh, my God, what an incredible resource for humanity.

Bill Gurley: Well, there’s an interesting example right there. The original paper they wrote was open source and OpenAI doesn’t exist without that discovery, which happened at Google in an open source. They just exploited it the fastest.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wild.

Bill Gurley: And by the way, 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 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, patents, things like that?

Bill Gurley: Well, 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. It’s not like they just stumbled into it. Go back 20 years ago, one of the primary criticisms of China was that they stole IP. 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 —

If you look at the big open source projects, Linux, MySQL, and you go on the webpages, you’ll see Alibaba, Tencent — these companies have been supporting these technologies for a while. Every five years, they write this five year plan, the Chinese government puts it out. Five years ago, they had a huge section on open source. They’re clearly suggesting to the entrepreneurs that the government favors that approach. Going back to Ridley’s book and the notion of pure competition, I think the society —

Tim Ferriss: This is The Rational Optimist?

Bill Gurley: Yeah, I think the society benefits from that. I use this example. Imagine there’s two feudal societies that are all agricultural based. There’s two of them, though. And 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 example in the book, that one’s going to be much more performant than the other one. This gets to Ridley’s point about ideas having sex.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 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.

Bill Gurley: I think that using open source as a defensive tool instead of an offensive tool is one of the most sophisticated corporate strategies a 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 incumbency is at risk if someone else has a massive proprietary advantage.

Tim Ferriss: Fairness in financial markets, what does that mean?

Bill Gurley: 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 —

Tim Ferriss: Does that come with the luxury of retirement or —

Bill Gurley: Maybe. I mean, yeah, if you tilt against the investment banks, you got to be comfortable not going to conferences, that’s for sure. They owe some really nice funds. You fall off the invite real quick. But the way that an IPO’s price is so God awful stupid, they pick who gets the stock and they pick the price. I’ve said it over and over again, but a freshman comp size student and a freshman finance student, if you told them to design the IPO, they would just match supply and demand anonymously. It’s how every bond is priced. It’s interestingly how every initial coin offering works. I’ve become a late to the game crypto enthusiast because I’m so sick of this damn IPO process being broken.

Tim Ferriss: Could you say a bit more about how it’s broken? Just walk us through a hypothetical example of why it’s broken.

Bill Gurley: Yeah. When a company’s coming public, the bankers — literally, they ask everyone for orders, but then they pick who gets the stock and they pick the price. They don’t let supply and demand pick. Supply and demand can automagically pick the allocation and the price. Automagically is the wrong word, can algorithmically. This is super easy. It’s not hard.

Tim Ferriss: Why don’t they do it that way?

Bill Gurley: Because they’re handing free money to their clients.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there we go. That’s what I was looking for.

Bill Gurley: 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. 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’s already decided to use algoriththms to allocate and determine price. The price and the allocation should just be determined. It’s how direct listing work. Everyone knows how to do it. They just don’t do it. It’s horrible. But there’s other things too in this category.

The long prevalence of Visa and MasterCard is just ridiculous, 2.5%, and stablecoins have so much momentum right now. I think those two companies are going to be in real trouble within a five-year window. Most of the financial problems are pure regulatory capture, like the reason that there’s a problem.

Tim Ferriss: 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 from competing effectively.

Bill Gurley: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

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

Tim Ferriss: Right. Just to please push back if I’m oversimplifying this, but the regulatory capture is not just bad for startups in Silicon Valley who hope to grow and disrupt and fill in the blank, it’s also bad for everybody.

Bill Gurley: Oh, it’s horrible for consumers. I mean, the US healthcare situation, which seems to be getting worse on a daily basis, is a huge example of regulatory cap. Somewhere in the past 10 years, they just told physicians they can’t run hospitals. They just eliminated probably — I mean, who other than a doctor is going to go start a new hospital? The amount of competition you eliminated in this one swoop is enormous, just enormous. That’s just a single example, but there’s hundreds of them in that area.

Tim Ferriss: 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?

Bill Gurley: It really started as a passion project and I have no financial goals for whatsoever. In fact, 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. I’m going to start working on that in addition to P3.

For me, it’s all about how many people do I affect in the way that McConaughey’s dad did or that this book did for Seinfeld. Some of them saw the talk on YouTube from the UT presentation that I gave and I’ve already reached out and said thank you and they’ve shared how it changed their life. But the more people I can do that for, I will 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.

Bill Gurley: The number of humans positively impacted by Danny Meyer’s success is in the thousands, I’m certain.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure.

Bill Gurley: And I’m not counting customers of Shake Shack.

Tim Ferriss: People, check it out. I mean, I love your writing, Bill. You’re not just a commentator. You’ve been an operator. You’ve observed a lot of operators, studied outliers, and people who’ve chosen X instead of A, B, or C. The book is Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love. Check it out, folks. People can find you on X @BGurley, of course. If they 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 the plane?

Bill Gurley: No, I’m good. Thank you so much for your time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, Bill. And for everybody watching and listening, we will have a link to everything we mentioned. We mentioned a lot of things and a lot of references and resources. Just go to tim.blog/podcast. You can check all that out.

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 for tuning in.

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Bill Gurley — Investing in the AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More (#840)

2025-12-18 01:14:25

Bill Gurley (X: @bgurley) is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Over his venture career, he has invested in and served on the boards of such companies as Nextdoor, OpenTable, 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. 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 Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.

Please enjoy!

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

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Bill Gurley:

Twitter | LinkedIn

Bill Gurley’s Past Podcast Appearances

Books

Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Love by Bill Gurley
Breakneck: How China Grew Faster Than Any Country in History—And What Happens Next by Dan Wang
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by Michael E. Porter
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life by Arthur C. Brooks
Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth
The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics by Phil Berger
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr.
The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan
The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Perez

Relevant Media

Bill Gurley Presents “2,851 Miles” at All-In Summit
Bill Gurley’s “Running Down a Dream” Talk at the University of Texas
The Thinking Game
Ari Emanuel: The Anti-AI Bet on Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Palantir CEO Alex Karp at DealBook Summit
Breaking Bad
Jeff Bezos and John Elkann at Italian Tech Week 2025
Driving Xiaomi’s Electric Car: Are We Cooked? | Marques Brownlee
Lei Jun Annual Speech 2024 | Xiaomi
We Rebuilt Philadelphia’s I-95 in 12 Days! | Liuna
Joe Rogan on Discipline vs. Obsession | JRE
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour Archive
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at DealBook Summit
MrBeast at DealBook Summit
Inside Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant | BG2 Podcast
The Emergence of Open-Source Software in China | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning
Bill Tweets About the Goldman Sachs Letter from 1999 | Twitter
Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

People

Companies, Organizations, & Places

Technologies, Tools, & Products

Concepts & Terms

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:01:43] The book that gave Jerry Seinfeld permission to pursue comedy and inspired Runnin’ Down a Dream.
[00:03:59] AI bubble or not?
[00:06:33] Circular deals and SPV chaos.
[00:12:01] Angel investing in the AI era.
[00:14:32] Why you should be the most AI-enabled version of yourself, regardless of field.
[00:20:47] China deep dive: Ten days, six cities, high-speed trains, and a Xiaomi SU7 factory tour.
[00:22:43] Communism misconceptions.
[00:25:40] Lei Jun: The Steve Jobs of China.
[00:29:17] Jack Ma, ByteDance’s invisible CEO, and the risks of prominence in China.
[00:32:11] America vs. China (Lawyers vs. engineers).
[00:41:01] Keys for US competitiveness.
[00:43:47] Bill is bullish on these countries.
[00:47:30] Matthew McConaughey’s “Don’t half ass it” moment.
[00:49:45] Runnin’ Down a Dream thesis: Helping people pursue X instead of A, B, or C.
[00:51:03] The 80,000-hour question.
[00:52:47] The self-learning test.
[00:56:58] Bob Dylan as music expeditionary.
[01:00:27] Go to the epicenter where the action is.
[01:10:56] Danny Meyer’s pivot.
[01:13:30] Working for free.
[01:19:37] Never too late: Tito Beveridge started Tito’s Vodka at 40.
[01:21:51] AI sanity checks.
[01:25:59] AI-proof bets.
[01:29:13] Sam Hinkie’s Moneyball moment.
[01:32:37] Competitive strategy, avoiding false failures, and regret minimalization.
[01:43:46] Purpose, Progress, and Prosperity — the P3 Policy Institute.
[01:47:18] Regulatory capture explained.
[01:51:55] Why the IPO market is broken.
[02:01:52] Stablecoins putting Visa and Mastercard on notice.
[02:03:40] Hopes for Runnin’ Down a Dream and parting thoughts.

BILL GURLEY QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“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.”
— Bill Gurley

“Most people end up working 80,000 hours in their life. It’s a third of your life. Why do something you don’t like? There’s Gallup poll data on career engagement, and 59% of people say they’re not engaged at work.”
— Bill Gurley

“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? Would you not watch Breaking Bad and read about this field and be energized by that activity?”
— Bill Gurley

“People think that a lot of success stories, they attribute it to luck, but 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 10X. And so your ability to just have that lucky moment where you get brought into something is so much higher.”
— Bill Gurley

“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. Trust and then this shared interest in learning.”
— Bill Gurley

“I think that using open source as a defensive tool instead of an offensive tool is one of the most sophisticated corporate strategies a company can possibly do. It’s very hard to do because it goes against all of your instincts.”
— Bill Gurley

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Want to hear more from the legendary investor (Uber, Zillow, OpenTable, and more)? Listen to my first conversation with Bill Gurley, in which we discussed investing rules and finding outliers, insights from Jeff Bezos and Howard Marks, must-read books for understanding business, open-source strategies as competitive weapons, why the minute you set a very hard rule you might be setting yourself up for a mistake, regulatory capture, and much more.

The post Bill Gurley — Investing in the AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More (#840) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839)

2025-12-11 01:26:05

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei), the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence. Dr. Li served as the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. She was vice president at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud during her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017/2018.

Dr. Li has served as a board member or advisor in various public and private companies and at the White House and United Nations. She earned her BA in physics from Princeton in 1999 and her PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She is the author of The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, her memoir and one of Barack Obama’s recommended books on AI and a Financial Times best book of 2023.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star

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Tim Ferriss: Dr. Li, it is nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Hi, Tim. Very nice to be here. Very excited.

Tim Ferriss: And we were chatting a little bit before we started recording about how miraculous, and I suppose unfortunate it is, that somehow we managed to spend three years on the same campus and didn’t bump into each other.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I know. And now I’m wondering which college you were at and which clubs.

Tim Ferriss: Oh yeah. I was Forbes. I was in Forbes College.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Forbes College. No, I was Forbes too.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. This is for people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. There are these residential colleges where students are split up when they come into the school. And Forbes was way out there in the sticks, right next to a fast food spot like 7-Eleven called Wawa.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Wawa.

Tim Ferriss: And next to the commuter train. And then there’s something called eating clubs at Princeton. People can look them up. But they’re effectively co-ed fraternity/sororities where you also eat unless you want to make your own meals. And I was in Terrace.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I was not any of that. But for those of you wondering why we didn’t meet, we should say we were very studious students who were only in the libraries.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We were very studious. I actually made my, whatever it was, $6 an hour at Gest library working up in the attic.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Tim, I worked in the same library. I don’t understand why we did not meet.

Tim Ferriss: That’s really hilarious. Okay. Yeah. So, well, now we’re meeting.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Did you change name or something? Maybe we did meet.

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t change my name, but here we are. So we’ve reunited. That’s wild that we didn’t bump into each other. I was also gone for a period of time because I went to Princeton and Beijing and went to the — what was it? Capital University of Business and Economics after that. And so I was gone for a good period of time and then took a year off before graduating with the class of 2000. So still, we had a lot of overlap.

But let’s hop into the conversation. And this is a very perhaps typical way to start, but in your case, I think it’s a good place to start, which is just with the basics chronologically. Where did you grow up? And could you describe your upbringing? Because based on my reading, your parents were pretty atypical for Chinese parents in my experience, certainly.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You know a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Could you speak to that please?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. I would say my childhood and leading up to the formative years is a tale of two cities. I grew up in a town in China called Chengdu. I was born in Beijing, but most of my childhood was spent in Chengdu where it’s very famous for panda bears. And at the age of 15, my mom and I joined my dad in a town called Parsippany, New Jersey. So I went from a relatively typical middle class Chinese family Chinese kid to become a new immigrant in a completely different world, of all places, New Jersey. And to learn a new language, to learn a new culture, to embrace a new country. And then from there on, I went to Princeton as a physics major, but I did take some of the classes you took and then went to Caltech as a PhD student to study AI, and the rest is history.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s dig into — I want to hear about both your parents, but I want to hear a little bit about your dad because he seems like, based on my reading, a very whimsical, creative soul, which is a sharp contrast in some ways to, for instance — I had Bo Shao on the podcast, amazing entrepreneur. And his father was, I suppose, what some folks might think of when they imagine, not a tiger mom, but like a tiger dad. So in the case of Bo’s upbringing, his father was very strict, but if he meaning Bo won a math competition, then he would get extra love and he would be allowed to have certain treats and things like that. Could you just describe your parents a little bit?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So first of all, clearly you read my book. Thank you for that. It is true. As a child, you don’t realize that. As I was just going through my own science memory, I was writing it. The more I wrote about it, the more I realized, oh my God, I really did not have a typical dad. My dad loved and still loves nature. He’s just a curious mind. He finds humor and fun in unserious things. He loves bugs, insects. He loves taking me as a kid. Growing up in the 1980s in China, there isn’t much abundance in terms of material resources. But my city Chengdu was expanding so we lived in apartment complexes at the edge of the city, even though my dad and my mom worked in the middle of the city. So on the weekends, my dad and I would just play in the fields where there’s still rice fields, there’s water buffaloes. I had a puppy and my dad would just — really, all my memory is just like finding bugs really.

And then sometimes my dad and I will follow some — I don’t know. We took an art class. I took a kid’s art class. I will go to the neighboring mountains to draw. My entire childhood memory of my dad is just a very unserious parent who had no interest in my grades or what I’m doing in class. Did I achieve anything? Did I bring back any competition awards? Nothing to do with that. Even when I came to New Jersey with my parents, life became extremely tough. It was immigrant life. We were in a lot of poverty. And even that, my memory is that he has so much fun in yard sales. I would just go to yard sales. Every weekend it was just, “Yay, let’s go to yard sales and just use that as a treasure hunt almost.” He’s a very curious and childlike mind in that way.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m asking about your parents in part because I know you’re a parent and ultimately I’m going to want to ask how you think about parenting and that will come up at some point. But since listeners will certainly be asking themselves this question, and we’re not going to get into any geopolitics because there are plenty of people who want to get into that and fight over that, which we’re not going to do, but why did your parents leave China? What was the catalyst or what were the reasons behind leaving what you knew or leaving what they knew and coming to a very different foreign country? You’re going from Chengdu, which is a city to suburban New Jersey, which is, as I think you’ve described it felt very empty, right? And then you have the language barriers and the financial barriers. There’s so many things. Why the move?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So I’ll give you two answers. The early teenage Fei-Fei would say, “I have no idea.” Because my dad left when I was 12 and my mom and I joined him when I was 15. And those years, you’re a teenager, right? There’s so many strange things in your head. And all I knew is that they said, “Let’s go to America.” I had no idea. I really did not know what happened. There was this vague sense of there’s opportunities of freedom. Education is very different. And I had a hunch that I was not a typical kid in the sense that I was a girl and I loved physics. I loved fighter jets of all things. I can tell you all the fighter jets I love from F=117 to F-16 to all the different things that I loved. So that’s all I knew.

In hindsight, as a grown up Fei-Fei, I appreciated my parents. They’re very brave people because I don’t know this age myself would just pick up and leave a country I’m familiar with and go to — I don’t know. A completely different country that I speak zero language and I have zero connectivity to. And mind you, that’s pre-internet, pre AI age. So when you are going to a different country, you might as well go to a different planet.

Tim Ferriss: You’re cut off. Yeah.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So I think they’re very brave. The grownup Fei-Fei realized that they wanted me to have an opportunity that they think will be unprecedented for my education, and it turned out that’s true.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, certainly looking at your bio, it’s mind-boggling to imagine all the different sliding door events and different paths you could have taken. So we’re going to hop pretty closely along chronologically, but we’re going to ultimately get to a lot of the meat and potatoes of the conversation. But I want to touch on maybe some other formative figures. And I would like to hear about your mother as well, because just with the context of your dad, it’s like, okay, that seems fascinating and very unusual, particularly if you’ve spent any time in China, especially during that period of time.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: He is very unusual that way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Very unusual. So then people might wonder, well, where does the drive come from? Where does the technical focus come from? And I’d love to hear your answer to that and also hear you explain who Bob Sabella was, if I’m pronouncing that correctly.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There are two questions. Mostly, is my mom the one who putting the drive and the technical passion and what role did Bob play in my life? So first one, first of all, my mom has zero technical genes. She really has no — I sometimes still laugh at her. She cannot do math, let’s put it this way. So I think the technical passion is just, I was born with it.

Tim Ferriss: Innate.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: My dad is more technical, but he loves insects more than equations for sure. So I think as an educator for so many decades now myself and also as a parent, you have to respect the wonders of nature. There is this inner love and fire and passion and curiosity that comes with the package. But my mom is much more disciplined person. She’s still not a tiger mom in a sense. I don’t remember my mom ever going after me on grades she really did not. Both my parents never ever cared about me bringing any awards home.

Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but I can tell you in our house, there’s zero wall hangings of anything. Which actually carry to today. Even for myself, my own house, my own office have zero of those decorations of achievements or awards. It’s just my mom did not care about that. But she did care about me being a focused person if I want to do something. She doesn’t want me to play while doing homework. That kind of thing would bother her. She would say, “Just finish your homework.” Say by 6:00 P.M. if you don’t finish your homework, you’re not allowed to do more homework. You have to deal with the consequences. So she instilled some discipline, but that’s about it. She’s tougher than my dad. She is very rebellious. She had a unfinished dream herself. She was very academic when she was a kid herself and Cultural Revolution really crushed all her dreams. So she became a more rebellious person in that sense that I think I did observe and experience as a daughter. So maybe part of immigration is even part of that.

Many years later, she would say, “I had no plan coming to New Jersey, but I think I’m going to survive. I just believe I’m going to survive and I’m going to make sure Fei-Fei survives.” I think that is her strength, her stubbornness, and her rebelliousness.

Tim Ferriss: When does Bob enter the picture and who is Bob?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Bob Sabella was a high school math teacher in Parsippany High School. He was my own math teacher as well as many, many students. He entered my life in my second year, so it was bordering sophomore to junior year in Parsippany high school when I started taking AP calculus. But he quickly became the most influential person in my formative years as a new American kid, immigrant, as a teenager, because he became my mentor, my friend, and eventually his entire family became my American family. And he became my friend when I was a very lonely ESL English as second language student. I was excelling in math, but I think it’s more because I was lonely and he was very friendly. He treated me more like a friend who talks about books we love, talk about the culture, talks about science fiction, and also listened to me as a very — I wouldn’t say confused, but a teenager undergoing a lot of life’s turmoil in my unique circumstance. And that unconditional support made me very close to him and his family.

One thing he did to me that I did not appreciate till later is that when Parsippany High School couldn’t offer a full calculus BC class because it just didn’t have that, he just sacrificed his lunch hour, his only lunch hour to teach me Calculus BC. So it was a one-to-one class. And I’m sure that contributed me, a immigrant kid getting to Princeton eventually. But later as I became teacher myself, it’s exhausting to teach all day long. And the fact that on top of that, he would use his lunch hours to do that extra class for me is just such a gift that I now appreciate more than I was as a teenager.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thank God for the teachers who go the extra mile. It’s just incredible, especially when you get a bit older and you have more context and you can look back and realize.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I really think these public teachers in America are the unsung heroes of our society because they’re dealing with kids of all backgrounds. They’re dealing with the changing times. The kind of stories Bob would share with me in terms of how he went extra miles, not just with me, but with many students, because Parsippany is a heavily immigrant town. So his students are from all over the world and how he helped them and their family. Those are the stories that people don’t write about. That’s part of the reason I wrote the book was to celebrate a teacher like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I have so much I want to cover and I know we’re going to run out of time before we run out of topics. I want to spend more time on Bob and at the same time, I want to keep the conversation moving. So we’re going to do that and I’ll just perhaps hit on a few things and then dig into a number of questions. But certainly at Princeton, you, but also your entire family had to survive. So you were involved with operating a dry cleaning shop in New Jersey as one option, right? You ran that for seven years. So through that it feels like you’ve gained perspective on many different levels that have then helped inform what you’ve done professionally. So you learn to think about not just people who are protected in an ivory tower, but people all the way down across in society, so from every swath of society.

Your mother also, although she was not technical, she imbued in you this discipline and also seems to have had a very broad appreciation and knowledge of literature and international literature. So now you have this global perspective, presumably at the time in Chinese. And then you end up at Princeton.

And I know we’re going to be hopping around quite a bit, but I’m curious to know how ImageNet came about. You can introduce this any way you like. You can tell people what it is and what it became and why it’s important, and then talk about how it started, or you can just talk about how it started, but it’s such an important chapter.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So let me just explain what ImageNet is. ImageNet on the surface was built between 2007 and 2009 when I was assistant professor at Princeton and then I moved to Stanford. So during this transitional time, my student and I built this, at that time, the field of AI’s largest training and benchmarking dataset for computer vision or visual intelligence. The significance today after almost 20 years of ImageNet, it was the inflection point of big data. Before ImageNet AI as a field was not working on big data. And because of that and a couple of other reasons, which I’ll get into, AI was stagnating. The public thinks that was the AI winter, even though as a researcher, young researcher at that time, it was the most exciting field for me, but I get it. It wasn’t showing breakthroughs that the public needs. But ImageNet together with two other modern computing ingredients — one is called neural network algorithm. The other one is modern chips called GPU, graphic processing unit. These three things converged in a seminal work, milestone work in 2012 called “ImageNet Classification, Deep Convolutional Neural Network Approach.” That was a paper that a group of scientists did to show that the combination of large data by ImageNet, fast parallel computing by GPUs and a neural network algorithm could achieve AI performances in the field of image recognition in a way that’s historically unprecedented.

And that particular milestone is — many people call it the birth of modern AI. And my work ImageNet that was one third of that, if you count the elements. I think that was the significance. I feel very, really, very lucky and privileged that my own work was pivotal in bringing modern AI to life.

But the journey to ImageNet was longer than that. The journey to me — ImageNet started in Princeton when I was an undergrad. You were in the East Asian Study Department. I was hiding in Jadwin Hall, which is our physics department.

I loved physics since I was a young kid. I don’t know how. Somehow my dad’s love of bugs, insects and nature translated in my head into just the curiosity for the universe. So I loved looking to the stars. I loved the speed of fighter jets and then the intricate engineering of that eventually translated into the love of the discipline that asks the most audacious question of our civilization, such as what is the smallest matter? What is the definition of space-time? How big is the universe? What is the beginning of the universe? And in that early teenage hood love, I loved Einstein. I loved his work. And then I wanted to go to Princeton for that.

But it turned out what physics taught me was not just the math and physics. It was really this passion to ask audacious question. So by the end of my undergrad years, I wanted my own audacious question. I wasn’t satisfied with just pursuing some of the else’s audacious question. And through reading books and all that, I realized my passion was not the physical matters, it was more about intelligence. I was really, really enamored by the question of what is intelligence and how do we make intelligent machines? So at that time, I swear I did not know it was called AI. I just knew that I wanted to pursue the study of intelligence and intelligent machines. And then I applied to grad school and I went to Caltech. Caltech was my PhD. I started in the turn of the century, 2000. And I think I considered that moment I became a budding AI scientist. That was my formal training as a computer scientist in AI. Then my physics training continued in the sense that physics taught me to ask audacious questions and turn them into a north star. And in scientific terms, that north star became a hypothesis. And it was very important for me to define my north star.

And my first north star for the following years to come was solving the problem of visual intelligence. How we can make machines see the world. And it’s not just by seeing the RGB colors or the shades of light, it’s about making sense of what’s seen, which is, I’m looking at you, Tim, I see you, I see a beautiful painting behind you. I don’t know. Yeah. It was real. I see you’re sitting on a chair. Like that is seeing. Seeing is making sense of what this world is. So that became my north star question. And that hypothesis that I had is I have to solve object recognition. And then that was in my entire PhD was the battle with object recognition. There were many, many mathematical models we have done and there were many questions, but me and my field was struggling. We could write papers, no problem, but we did not have a breakthrough. And then luckily for me, Princeton called me back as a faculty in 2007. It was one of my happiest moment of my life. I feel so validated my alma mater would consider giving me a faculty job. So I happily moved back to Princeton as a faculty this time and I continue to be a Forbes member actually.

So at Princeton, there was an epiphany is that I realized there was a hypothesis that everybody missed, and that hypothesis was big data.

Tim Ferriss: This is the point that I’m so, so curious about. I just want to pause for a second. Also, for people who are interested in some of the history of Princeton, it’s pretty crazy. They should look up the history of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. I remember taking some of those East Asian studies classes that you referred to in classrooms where Einstein taught. And it’s just the aura, the veneer. You want to believe that you can feel it just permeating the entire campus. And it’s fun. In that respect, it’s very fun.

But I’m going to read something from a Wired piece that discussed you at length. And as you mentioned, big data before and after in terms of its integration into the type of research that you’re describing. And as it was written — and please feel free to fact check this or push back on it, but in Wired, they said the problem was a researcher might write one algorithm to identify dogs and another to identify cats. And then you, it says, Li, began to wonder if the problem wasn’t the model, but the data. She thought that if a child learns to see by experiencing the visual world, by observing countless objects and scenes in her early years, maybe a computer can learn in a similar way. And I want you to expand on that for sure.

The question for me is like, why did you see it? Why didn’t it happen sooner?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: We’re all students of history. One thing I actually don’t like about the telling of scientific history is there’s too much focus on single genius. Yes. Agreed. We know Newton discovered the modern laws of physics, but yes, he is a genius, not to take away any of that from Newton, but science is a lineage and science is actually a non-linear lineage. For example, why was I inspired by this hypothesis of big data? Because many other scientists inspire me. In my book, I talked about this particular lineage of work by Professor Irv Biederman, who was a psychologist. He was not interested in AI, but he was interested in understanding minds. And I was reading his paper and he particularly was talking about the massive number of visual objects that young children was able to learn in early ages. So that piece of work itself is not ImageNet, but without reading that piece of work, I would not have formulated my hypothesis. So while I’m proud of what I have done, my book especially wanted to tell the history of AI in a way that so many unsung heroes, so many generations of scientists, so many cross-disciplinary ideas pollinate each other.

So I was lucky at that time as someone who is passionate about the problem, but also someone who benefited from all these research. So yes, something happened in my brain, but I would really attribute to many things happen across so many people’s work throughout their lifetime devotion to science that we got to the point of ImageNet.

Tim Ferriss: I’m so glad that you’re underscoring this because if you really dig as a — I don’t consider myself a scientist, but I love reading about the history of science. There’s so many inputs, so many influences, so many interdependencies.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And the simplicity of the single hero’s journey is appealing in it’s simplicity, but it’s almost never true.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: It probably is never true. Even my biggest hero, Einstein, right? Anybody who knows me, anybody who read my book knows how much I revere him and I love everything he’s done. The special relativity equation is a continuation of Lorentz’s transform. So even Einstein, he builds upon so many other people’s work. So I think it’s really important, especially, I’m sure we’ll talk about it. I’m here calling you in the middle of Silicon Valley and we’re in the middle of an AI hype. And obviously I’m very proud of my field, but I think that when the media or whatever tells the story of AI, it almost always just talk about a few geniuses and it’s just not true. It’s generations of computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and engineers who made this field happen.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For sure. Everyone knows Watson and Crick, for instance, but without Rosalind Franklin and her x-ray crystallography, it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t happen point-blank.

We’re going to hop to modern day in a second, but with ImageNet, I would love for you to speak to some of the decisions or, let’s say decisions or moments, that were just formative in making that successful. Because for instance, if you’re going to try to allow a machine to — and I’m using very simple terms because I’m not technical enough to do otherwise. To learn to identify objects closer to the path that a child would take, you have to label a lot of images. And so I was reading about how Mechanical Turk came into play and then there’s a competitive aspect that seems to have driven some of the watershed moments. Could you just speak to some of the elements or decisions that made it successful?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: A lot of people ask me this question because after you mentioned that many, many people have attempted to make data sets, but still only very few are successful. So what made the ImageNet successful? I think one of the success was timing, is that we truly were the first people who see the impact of big data. So that very categorical or qualitative change itself is a part of the success. But it’s also, as you were asking — the hypothesis of big data is not just size. A lot of people actually misunderstand ImageNet’s significance as well as other dataset significance. Coming with the dataset is a scientific hypothesis of what is the question to ask. For example, in visual recognition, you can make a dataset of discerning RGB, and that would not be as impactful of a dataset that is organized around objects. We can go down a rabbit hole of why. Not because RGB is easier per se, it’s because you have to ask the scientific question in the right way.

So another example is, instead of making a data set of objects, why don’t you make a data set of cities? That’s even more complicated than objects. But then that’s dialing too complicated. So, every scientific quest, you have to have the right hypothesis and asking the right question. So that’s one part of the success is we defined visual object categorization as the right hypothesis. That was one rightness, I guess. Another rightness is that people just think, “Oh, it’s easy. You just collect a lot of data.” Well, first of all, it’s laborious, but even aside from being laborious, how do you define the quality? You could say, “Well, if quality is big enough, we don’t care about quality.” But how do you dial between what is big, what is great, what is good, and how do you trade off? That is a deeply scientific question that we have to do a lot of research on.

And then another decision that is a set of decision that is really hard is what defines quality in terms of image? Is it every image has higher resolution? Is it it’s photorealistic? Is it because it’s everyday ImageNet look very cluttered? Is it all product shots that look clean? These are questions that if you’re too far away, you wouldn’t even think about asking, but as a scientist, as we were formulating the deep question of object recognition. We have to ask this in so many dimensions.

And then you mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk. That is actually a consequence of desperation. Because when we formulated this hypothesis, our conclusion is we need at least 10s of millions of high quality images across every possible diverse dimension, whether it’s user photos or is it product shots or is it stock photography? And then we need also high quality labels. Once we make that decision, we realize this has to be human filtered from billions of images. So with that, we became very desperate. We’re like, “How are we going to do that?” I did try to hire Princeton undergrads and as you know, Princeton undergrads are very smart, but —

Tim Ferriss: They have very high opinion of the value of their tongue.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. And they’re expensive. But even if I had all the money in the world, which we didn’t, it would have taken so long. So we were very, very stuck for very, very long. We thought we had other shortcuts, but the truth is human labeling is a gold standard and we want to train machines that are measured against human capabilities so we cannot shortcut that at that time. So we had to go to what we eventually found out is called crowd engineering, crowdsourcing. And that was a very new technology. Was barely a year old or so by Amazon. They created a online marketplace for people to do small tasks to earn money when these tasks can be uploaded on the internet.

I remembered when I heard about Amazon Mechanical Turk, I logged into my Amazon account, I checked the first task I checked out to do just to try was labeling wine bottles or transcribing wine bottle labels. The task will give you a picture of a wine bottle and you have to say, this is 1999 Bordeaux and all that. So people upload these micro tasks and then online workers, like someone in their leisure time, like me, if I had leisure time, I would just go sign up and get paid to do that. And we realized that was, again, out of desperation, that was a massive parallel processing with online global population to do this for us. And that’s how we labeled billions of images and distilled it down to 15 million high quality images.

Tim Ferriss: So, all right. It’s just so wild when you look at these stories. I just finished a book on Genentech and there were all these little technical inflection points that also allowed things to happen. So if it had been five years earlier, or maybe three years earlier, without Mechanical Turk, oh boy, it presents a challenge. But also as you pointed out, in science, it’s one thing to get answers, but you need the input on the front end with a proper hypothesis or a good question. And even with Mechanical Turk, if you’re only focused on the mechanics of employing that, you can get yourself into trouble because if humans are incentivized to, let’s just say — I think this was the example I read about, identify pandas in photographs and they’re paid for identifying pandas well, what’s to stop them from identifying a panda in every photo, whether they exist in the photos or not?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: So you have to follow the incentives as well. How did you solve for that?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. I know. This is where my student and I had — I cannot tell you how many hours and hours of conversation we have about controlling the quality. We have to solve for that in multiple steps. We need to first filter out online workers who are serious about doing the work. So for example, we have to have some upfront quizzes so that they understand what a panda is. They read the question. And then once they qualify for that, we ask them to label pandas, but there are some pandas. There are some images we have free. We know the correct answer. Some are true pandas, some of them are not true pandas. But the labelers don’t know so in a way, we implicitly monitor the quality of the work by knowing where the gold standard answers are. So these are the kind of computational tactics we have to use to ensure the quality of labeling.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. Yeah. Just incredible. All right. So I’ll actually just put a recommendation out there for a book, Pattern Breakers, by a friend of mine, Mike Maples Jr. He taught me the ropes initially of angel investing. But in terms of identifying inflection points and in some cases, converging technological trends that for the first time makes something possible, which then opens an opportunity for something with the right prepared mind, in your case and those of your collaborators and the people you built upon for something like ImageNet, Pattern Breakers is a really good read for folks.

So let’s hop to modern day then for a moment. And I would love to ask you — because you’ve been called the godmother of AI in our alumni magazine, in fact, and elsewhere, but you’ve had such a — not just technical but historical viewpoint, meaning you’ve over a broad timeline, broad by AI standards, been able to watch the development and forking and perils and promise of this technology. What are people missing? What do you think is eating up all the oxygen in the room? What are people missing, whether it’s things they should know or things they should be skeptical of or otherwise?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Especially I’m here calling you from the heart of Silicon Valley. I think people are missing the importance of people in AI and there’s multiple facades or dimensions to this statement is that AI is absolutely a civilizational technology.

I define civilizational technology in the sense that because of the power of this technology, it’ll have or already having a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society. This is unverified, but I just heard that 50% of the US GDP growth last year is attributed to AI growth. So apparently this number is 4% for US GDP have grown 4%. If you take away AI, it’s only 2%. That’s what it means. So that’s civilizational from an economic point of view. It’s obviously redefining our culture. Think about, you’re talking about the word sucking oxygen out of the room, everywhere from Hollywood, to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, to political campaign, to TikTok to YouTube to ESA.

Tim Ferriss: Taxis in Japan. I was just there and the videos playing on the back of the headset and the taxi were all talking about AI. It’s everywhere.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: It’s culturally impactful, not only impactful, it’s shifting our culture and it’s going to shift education. Every parent today is wondering what should their kids study to have a better future? Every grandparent say, “I’m so glad I’m born earlier. I don’t have to deal with AI,” but still worry about their grandchildren’s future. So AI is a civilization of technology, but what I think it’s missing right now is that Silicon Valley is very eager to talk about tech and the growth that comes with the tech. Politicians are just eager to talk about whatever gets the vote, I guess. But really at the end of the day, people are at the heart of everything. People made AI, people will be using AI, people will be impacted by AI, and people should have a say in AI. And no matter how AI advances, people’s self-dignity as individuals, as community, as society should not be taken away. And that’s what I worry about because I think there’s so much more anxiety that because the sense of dignity and sense of agency, sense of being part of the future is slipping in some people. And I think we need to change that.

Tim Ferriss: Now, I’ve heard you say that you’re an optimist because you’re a mother. And both optimism and pessimism to an extreme can bias us in ways that are unhelpful or create blind spots. And I’m curious, if you try to put your most objective hat on, which is difficult for any human, but if you try to do that, do you think people are too worried, not worried enough, or worrying about the wrong things? For people who are not the CEOs and builders and engineers behind AI. Because you’re right, of course. everybody will agree with this, that a lot of people are very worried. And I’m just wondering if it’s ill-placed. If you talk to some of the VCs who are the biggest investors, of course, they have this sort of, in my view, beyond all possibilities, techno-optimist view of the future where AI solves everything. And it’s hard to believe there’s a free lunch there. And then you have the doomers, the doom and gloom where suddenly it’s Skynet next year and we’re all slaves to robots or eliminated, turned into paperclips. And reality’s probably in between those two. So do you think people are worrying about the right things or have they lost the plot in some way?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: First of all, I call myself a pragmatic optimist. I’m not a utopian, so I’m actually the boring kind. I don’t believe in the extreme on both sides. I travel around the world. Just last month I was in Middle East. I was in Europe, I was in UK and I was in Canada. I came back home in America. I think people in America and people in Western Europe are more worried about AI than say people in Middle East, in Asia. And I think we don’t have to litigate on why they’re more worried, but just to come closer to home, just talk about US I wish I have a megaphone to tell people in the US that you’re known to be one of the most innovative people. Our country have innovated so many great things for humanity, for civilization. We have a society that is free and vibrant, and we have a political system that we still have so much say in how we want to build our country. I do wish that our country has more an optimism and positivity towards the future of using AI than what is being heard now.

I think people like me, technologists living in Silicon Valley has a lot of responsibility in the right kind of public communication. So there’s a lot of things that was not communicated in the effective way. But I do hope that we can instill more sense of hope and self-agency into everybody in our country, because I think there’s so much upside of using AI in the right way. And I want not just people in Silicon Valley or in Manhattan, but I want people in rural communities, in traditional industries everywhere, 50 states to be able to embrace and benefit from AI.

Tim Ferriss: Why are you building what you’re building? What is World Labs? Why decide to do this?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I actually answer this question very often to every member of my team. I built World Labs. There are two levels of this answer from a technology point of view. World Labs is building the next generation AI focusing on spatial intelligence because spatial intelligence, just like language intelligence, is fundamental in unlocking incredible capabilities in machines so that it can help humans to create better, to manufacture better, to design better, to build better robots. So spatial intelligence is a linchpin technology. But one level up, why am I still a technologist is because I believe humanity is the owning species that builds civilizations. Animals builds colonies or herds, but we build civilizations and we build civilizations because we want to be better and better. We want to do good. Even though along the way, we do a lot of bad things, but there is a desire of having better lives, having better community, having better society, live more healthily, have more prosperity and that desire is where civilization is built upon. And because I believe that humanity can do that, I believe science and technology is the most powerful tool, one of the most powerful tools in building civilizations. And I want to contribute to that. That’s why I’m still a scientist and a technologist, and I’m building World Labs for that.

Tim Ferriss: Can you explain to people what spatial intelligence is and what the product is, so to speak, at least as it stands right now that you’re building?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So spatial intelligence is a capability that humans have, which goes beyond language. Is when you pack a sandwich in a bag, when you take a run or a hike in a mountain, when you paint your bedroom. Everything that has to do with seeing and turning that scene into understanding of the 3D world, understanding of the environment, and then in turn, you can interact with it, you can change it, you can enjoy it, you can make things out of it. That whole loop between seeing and doing is supported by the capability of spatial intelligence. The fact that you can pack a sandwich means you know what the bread looks like. You know how to put the knife in between. You know how to put the lettuce leaf on the bread. You know how to put the bread or sandwich into a Ziploc bag. Every part of this is spatial intelligence.

And does today’s AI have that? It’s getting better, but compared to language intelligence, AI is still very early in that ability to see, to reason, and also to do in world, in both virtual 3D world as well as real 3D world. So that’s what World Labs is doing. We are creating a frontier model that can have intelligent capability in the model to create world, to reason around the world, and to enable, for example, creators or designers or robots to interact with the world. So that’s spatial intelligence.

Tim Ferriss: Could you expand on the designers or creatives or robots interacting with the world? So does that mean that you could — and my team has been playing with some of the tools, so thank you for that. What does that mean? If you could paint a picture for let’s say a year from now, two years from now, how might someone use this or how might a robot use this?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I was just talking to someone a couple of weeks ago and it was really inspiring is that high school theaters are very low budget. Sometimes I go to San Francisco Opera or musicals and the sets that’s built for theater are just so beautiful, but it’s very hard for high school or middle school —

Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: To have that budget to do that. Imagine that you can take today’s World Labs model, we call it marble, and then you create a set in, I don’t know, in medieval French town. And then you put that in the background and use that digital form to help transport the actors and action into that world. And of course, depending on the auxiliary technology, whether you’re on a computer or eventually people can use a headset or whatever, you can have that immersive feeling of being in a medieval French town. That would be an amazing creative tool for a lot of creators. That was an example someone and I was talking about it a couple of weeks ago, but we already see creators all over the world. Some of them are VFX creators. Some of them are interior design creators. Some of them are gaming creators. Some of them are educators who want to build some worlds that transport their students into different experiences are already starting to use our model because they find it very powerful at their fingertip to be able to create 3D worlds that they can use to immerse either their characters or themselves into.

Tim Ferriss: And just process wise, if someone’s wondering how this works, let’s just say it’s a public school teacher, let’s just say, who’s hoping to inspire and teach their students going the extra mile.

What does it look like for someone to use it? Are they typing in text, describing the world they’d like to create, uploading assets or photos, almost like an image board? How does it work if someone’s non-technical?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. So they don’t need to be technical at all. They open our page on desktop or in their phone, but desktop is more fun because it has more features. And then they can type a French medieval town, or they can actually go anywhere. They can use Midjourney or Nano Banana to create a photo of a French medieval town, or they can get an actual photo about that. And then they upload it, we call it prompt. And then after a few minutes, our model gives you a 3D world that is say a part of the town. It does have a limit in its range. And then that 3D world is generally 3D because you can just use the mouse to drag and turn around and walk around and see that world. And then downstream, if you want to use it, you could have many ways to use it. You can actually create a movie out of it by using one of our tools on the website to just put cameras and you can make a particular movie out of it. If you’re a game developer —

Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say, it sounds a lot like a gaming engine.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. You can put a lot of characters in it. If you’re a VFX professional — we have a lot of VFX professionals. They can actually take this and put it in the workflow of their movie shooting and have real actors shooting movies. We also have psychology researchers using that immersive world in particular psychiatric studies. We could also use that as the simulation for robotic training because a lot of robotic training needs a lot of data and then use that for generating a lot of different data. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So is it almost like a flight simulator for robots before they go into the real world?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: That’s part of the goal. We are still early, so the flight simulator is not complete yet, but that’s part of the journey.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned psychiatric studies. I think that’s what you just mentioned. Yes. What might that look like?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So we actually got this researcher who called us and they’re studying people who have psychological disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder where they’re triggered by certain environments and they want to study the trigger and also just study how the treatment. But how do you trigger someone who, let’s say particularly have issue with, let’s say, a strawberry field. I’m just making it up.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You can take them to a strawberry field, but what about you want to know if it’s strawberry field in the summer or strawberry field at night, or it’s strawberry, or it’s many strawberry? How do you do this? Suddenly this researcher realized we give them the cheapest possible way of varying all kinds of dimensions and they can test this out and do their studies.

Tim Ferriss: That’s really interesting. Yeah. I could see it being applied to — it might be called exposure therapy, but in terms of — now that you’re describing it, I could see how it could be added into pretty much everything. If you think about how humans operate in the real world.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Incredibly good.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: And the boundary between real world and digital world is less and less. Thinner and thinner because we live in many screens, we live in the real world. We do things in virtual world, we do things in real world. We’ll create machines that can do things in real world and virtual world. So there’s a lot we do in digital and physical spaces.

Tim Ferriss: Who are some scientists or researchers who you pay attention to, who are not necessarily the big brand names and marquee lights that are already very public in the world? Is there anybody who stands out where you’re like, there’s some really tremendous people doing good work who —

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Well, that’s part of the reason I wrote the book is, especially in the middle chapters where I wrote about the journey of doing ImageNet that combines cognitive science with computer science. I actually talk about psychologists and neuroscientists and developmental psychologists in — some of them are still with us, some of them are not. For example, the late Ann Treisman, Irv Biederman, they all passed away in the last few years, but they were giants in cognitive science whose work has informed computer science and eventually AI. There are still lots of scientists around the world. Many of them are in the US who are thinkers in developmental psychology. In AI, I follow their work. Yeah. I think that the world of science, just to name some names, Liz Spelke in Harvard, Alison Gopnik in Berkeley. I love Rodney Brooks, who was a former MIT professor in robotics. And there’s just a lot of them. I don’t mean to just single them out, but you’re asking me for names that are not in the news of AI.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s perfect. Thank you. I would also love to get your perspective on what might be — this is a very strong word. But seemingly inevitable in terms of developments in the near intermediate future. And I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In 2008, 2009, I became involved with Shopify, the company, back when they had like 10 employees. And there were a few things happening around that time. And you could ask questions in the next 10 years or 20 years, will there be more broadband access or less? More. Okay. Will there be more e-commerce or less? There’ll be more. Okay. And when you have four or five of those that seem over a long enough time horizon, absolute yeses, it begins to paint a picture of where things are going. Are there any things that in the next handful of years you think are perhaps underappreciated as near inevitabilities?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You want me to talk about underappreciated? I don’t know if they’re over appreciated, but they’re definitely appreciated. The need for power is appreciated. The trend of more AI, not less AI is appreciated. The long-term trend of robots coming is appreciated. So these are appreciated. What’s underappreciated is — spatial intelligence is underappreciated in the sense that everybody’s still now talking about language, large language models, but really world modeling of pixels of 3D worlds is underappreciated because like you were saying, it powers so many things from storytelling to entertainment to experiences to robotic simulation. I think AI in education is underappreciated because what we are going to see is that AI can accelerate the learning for those who want to learn, which will have downstream implication in our school system, as well as in just human capital landscape, like how do we assess qualified workers? It used to be which school you graduate from, with which degree, but that will be changing with AI being at the fingertip of so many people. That’s underappreciated.

I think AI’s impact in our economic structure, including labor market is underappreciated. The nuance is underappreciated. I think this whole rhetoric of either total utopia post-scarcity is hyperbolic or like everybody’s job will be gone is hyperbolic, but the messy middle is how from knowledge worker to blue collar, to hospitality, to all these changes that’s happening, it’s underappreciated by our policy workers, by our scholars, by just overall society.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the nuances from the job perspective? Maybe this ties into what I promised earlier I was going to ask you, which is what you are telling or will tell — I don’t know their ages. Your children. Or recommending. Let’s just say, I don’t know how old they are, but if we assume that they, just for the sake of discussion, of the age where they’re trying to decide what they should study, where they should focus, things of that nature, how would you think about answering that even provisionally?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I think the ability to learn is even more important because when there was less tools, fewer tools to learn, it’s easier to just follow tracks. You go through elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and then get some training vocationally, and that’s a path. And with that is a set of structured credentials from degrees and all that. But AI has really changed it. For example, my startup, when we interview a software engineer, honestly, how much I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now. It’s more about what have you learned? What tools do you use? How quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools? And a lot of these are AI tools. What’s your mindset towards using these tools matter more to me.

At this point in 2025, hiring at World Labs, I would not hire any software engineer who does not embrace AI collaborative software tools. It’s not because I believe AI software tools are perfect. It’s because I believe that shows, first of all, the ability of the person to grow with the fast-growing toolkits, the open-mindedness, and also the end result is if you’re able to use these tools, you’re able to learn, you can superpower yourself better. So that is definitely shifting. So coming back to your question, what do you tell young people, tell children? I think the timeless value of learning to learn, the ability to learn is even more important now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. It strikes me as we’re talking that it’s only going to get increasingly easier for the ambitious to act as superpowered autodidacts, right? We’ve already seen this. Certainly YouTube has a nice track record now. You can either entertain yourself to death and avoid doing things that help with self-growth and development or you can supercharge it. And similar With AI, you flash forward. We don’t even need to flash forward, but it’s how does a teacher audit that their students are doing the work they’re supposed to be doing?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: On so many levels, it’s getting to the point, there are some exceptions, but of near impossibility. Students can either avoid all work or they can supercharge their own work, but the output might look very similar at least for a period of time. So schooling is going to change a lot. It’s very, very interesting.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I actually think, Tim, if the school evaluation is structured in a way that whatever AI gives and whatever the student gives is the same, there’s something wrong with the structure of the evaluation.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Can you say more about that? That’s interesting.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So for example, English essay. This is not me. This is me hearing a story that I so agree with. I’ll retell the story. As a high school freshman English class teacher, I heard that someone told me the story of their kids’ school. On the first day of school, the teacher actually said to the class, “I want to show you how I would score AI.” So the teacher give an essay topic. Show the students this is what the best AI gave me and I’m going to show you how I think this is good, this is bad, how this is suboptimal, and I’ll give it a B minus. Now I will tell you, this is my bar. If you’re so lazy that you ask AI to write your essay, this is what you’re going to get. But you can use AI, that’s totally fine. But if you can do the work, learn, think, be the best human creator you can and work on top of that you can get to A, you can get to A pluses. And that would be, in my opinion, the right way to structure the evaluation. Is not to pit humans against the AI and then try to police the use or not use of AI. Is that to show where the bar of the tools are and where the bar of the human learner should be.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m going to sit with that example and try to think of more examples. It’s very interesting. And boy, oh boy, I’ve been shocked by how quickly the models improve. But yes, as a thought experiment. I’m going to chew on that. I know we only have a few minutes left. Fei-Fei, I wanted to ask you a question I ask a lot, which is if you could put a quote or a message, something on a billboard, something to get in front of millions, billions of people, just assume they all understand it. It could be an image, could be a question, could be a quote, anything at all, a saying, a mantra, doesn’t matter, could be almost anything. What would you or what might you put on that billboard?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: What is your north star?

Tim Ferriss: Okay. What is your north star? This is of course critically important. And coming back to how you define that or find that for yourself. You were talking about audacious questions and then that leading to a north star hypothesis. Is there another way that you would encourage people on top of that to think about finding their north star?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I believe that’s how that makes us so human and makes us to be so fully alive is that we as a species can live beyond the chasing of just basic needs, but dreams and missions and goals and passion. And everybody’s north star is different and that’s fine. Not everybody have AI as their north star. But finding that goes to the heart of education again. And I don’t mean formal classroom education, it’s just the journey of education. A lot of that is the ability to learn who you are and to learn how to formulate your north star and how to chase after that.

Tim Ferriss: Last question. I was just going to ask, Did your parents ever explain to you why they named you Fei-Fei?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. It’s because when my mom was going through labor, my dad was characteristically late to the hospital and along the way he caught a bird. He let it go, but he did catch a bird. I don’t know if he was just distracted. It was in Beijing, in the city of Beijing. My dad was bicycling to my mom’s hospital. And that inspired him to call me Fei-Fei.

Tim Ferriss: Fei-Fei.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Fei-Fei. Oh wait, sorry. For those who don’t speak Chinese, I forgot — you do speak Chinese, but for those who don’t speak Chinese, fei means flying.

Tim Ferriss: Means flying.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So be inspired by a bird.

Tim Ferriss: Really quick, I’ll just say, because it’s funny. My first Chinese name that I had was [foreign language], which is because I was very blunt and honest, so [foreign language]. But [foreign language]. But when I was first starting, my tones in China were not polished and people thought I was saying that my name was [foreign language 01:21:02], which is airport.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Airport.

Tim Ferriss: So I petitioned my teachers and we changed my name to something less confusing.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: What’s your new name?

Tim Ferriss: [foreign language]. It’s [foreign language] but it’s without the [foreign language] at the bottom.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Oh, wow. Fancy name. That’s way more sophisticated than mine.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I get to script it with my Chinese teachers, so I have an unfair advantage.

Dr. Li, thank you so much for the time. We will link to the show notes for everybody at tim.blog/podcast. They’ll be able to find you easily. And everybody should check out worldlabs.ai and we’ll put every other link, your social and so on in the show links. But thank you for the time. I really appreciate it.Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Thank you Tim. I enjoyed our conversation.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839)

2025-12-10 06:13:01

Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence. Dr. Li served as the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. She was vice president at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud during her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017/2018.

She has served as a board member or advisor in various public and private companies and at the White House and United Nations. Dr. Li earned her BA in physics from Princeton in 1999 and her PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She is the author of The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, her memoir and one of Barack Obama’s recommended books on AI and a Financial Times best book of 2023.

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Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star

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Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Dr. Fei-Fei Li:

World Labs | Stanford | Twitter | LinkedIn

Books & Articles

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Dr. Fei-Fei Li
How Fei-Fei Li Will Make Artificial Intelligence Better for Humanity | Wired
ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks | Communications of the ACM
Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman
Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes

Institutions, Organizations, & Culture

People

Universities, Schools, & Educational Programs

AI, Computer Science, & Data Concepts

Tools, Platforms, Models, & Products

Parenting, Sociology, & Culture Concepts

Tiger Parenting

Technical & Historical Items

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:01:22] Why it’s so remarkable this is our first time meeting.
[00:03:21] From a childhood in Chengdu to New Jersey
[00:04:51] Being raised by the opposite of tiger parenting.
[00:07:53] Why Dr. Li’s brave parents left everything behind.
[00:11:17] Bob Sabella: The math teacher who sacrificed lunch hours for an immigrant kid.
[00:19:37] Seven years running a dry cleaning shop through Princeton.
[00:20:50] How ImageNet birthed modern AI.
[00:23:21] From fighter jets to physics to the audacious question: What is intelligence?
[00:27:24] The epiphany everyone missed: Big data as the hidden hypothesis.
[00:28:49] Against the single-genius myth: Science as non-linear lineage.
[00:32:18] Amazon Mechanical Turk: When desperation breeds innovation.
[00:39:03] Quality control puzzles: How do you stop people from seeing pandas everywhere?
[00:41:36] The “Godmother of AI” on what everyone’s missing: People.
[00:42:31] Civilizational technology: AI’s fingerprints on GDP, culture, and Japanese taxi screens.
[00:47:45] Pragmatic optimist: Why neither utopians nor doomsayers have it right.
[00:51:30] Why World Labs: Spatial intelligence as the next frontier beyond language.
[00:53:17] Packing sandwiches and painting bedrooms: Breaking down spatial reasoning.
[00:55:16] Medieval French towns on a budget: How World Labs serves high school theater.
[00:59:08] Flight simulators for robots and strawberry field therapy for OCD.
[01:01:42] The scientists who don’t make headlines: Spelke, Gopnik, Brooks, and the cognitive giants.
[01:03:16] What’s underappreciated: Spatial intelligence, AI in education, and the messy middle of labor.
[01:06:21] Hiring at World Labs: Why tool embrace matters more than degrees.
[01:08:50] Rethinking evaluation: Show students AI’s B-minus, then challenge them to beat it.
[01:11:24] Dr. Li’s Billboard.
[01:13:13] The fortuitous naming of Fei-Fei.
[01:14:46] Parting thoughts.

DR. FEI-FEI LI QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Really, at the end of the day, people are at the heart of everything. People made AI, people will be using AI, people will be impacted by AI, and people should have a say in AI.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“It turned out what physics taught me was not just the math and physics. It was really this passion to ask audacious questions.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“We’re all students of history. One thing I actually don’t like about the telling of scientific history is there’s too much focus on single genius.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“AI is absolutely a civilizational technology. I define civilizational technology in the sense that, because of the power of this technology, it’ll have—or [is] already having—a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“I believe humanity is the only species that builds civilizations. Animals build colonies or herds, but we build civilizations, and we build civilizations because we want to be better and better.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“What is your North Star?”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

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Want to hear another podcast episode with someone who helped build the computational foundations of modern AI? Listen to my conversation with legendary inventor Danny Hillis (and Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly), in which we discussed pioneering parallel computing at MIT, studying artificial intelligence under Marvin Minsky, building what experts called impossible, hiring Richard Feynman, working with Steve Jobs, 400+ patents, the distinction between “real AI” and imitation intelligence, and much more.

The post Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello ( #838)

2025-12-04 15:02:01

Please enjoy this transcript of another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose (digg.com)! We explore the promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, Kevin’s AI stack and where AI is heading, the challenges of modern dating, wisdom from Anthony de Mello, bioelectric medicine, and much, much more.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

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Tim Ferriss: Kev-Kev, good to see you.

Kevin Rose: Tim-Tim, another episode of The Random Show. Glad to be back.

Tim Ferriss: Another episode of The Random Show.

Kevin Rose: This is awesome.

Tim Ferriss: You look very dashing. For people who can’t see you, you have hair slicked back, jacket with wide open lapels, reminiscent of a leather jacket. You look like a leading man from The Outsiders, that movie back in the day. You just need a cigarette in your pocket and some other goodies, but you’re looking good, looking good. You also have, as you disclosed to me, your secret weapon nearby an IKEA light that is providing very seductive shadows and contours on your face. So, well done.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I think we’re both hacking it together today.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, today has been putting together the boxcar on the way down the hill in a sense, from an equipment standpoint, but here we are.

Kevin Rose: Here we are.

Tim Ferriss: We made it. Now, you asked me to grab a glass of wine, which I didn’t do. I ended up grabbing a glass of Gin, Caledonia Spirits Barr Hill gin. For anybody who’s curious, I do like my gin, B-A-R-R Hill. But this might surprise people and it surprised me because last time we spoke, I think you had hit, what was it, six months or however long it was. Six months sober. So what is unfolding before our very eyes?

Kevin Rose: Well, what’s unfolding is a glass of champagne is what’s unfolding, but I’ll say that I almost made it to seven months, but then I just decided — my original goal was three months, and then I made it to six, and was I going to continue to go on like this? And I had hung out with some friends. We had a dinner in San Francisco, and I thought, “You know, I’m going to have a glass of vino. I’m just going to have a glass of wine because I don’t want to make this…” It was actually, there was a great book. You know the book Awareness, which you’ve recommended to me.

Tim Ferriss: It’s one of my favorites. I have one of my many copies downstairs right now. Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So, Anthony de Mello, Jesuit priest. Correct? Is that right?

Tim Ferriss: Jesuit priest, who is also a psychotherapist who is now since passed, but incredibly, incredibly compelling writing. I’m sure we’ll get more into this because I listened to the audiobook you recommended, so we’ll come back to that.

Kevin Rose: Oh, cool. Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: But all right, so take us back to the story you’re telling. So, you’re sitting there —

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Well, prior to that, I had re-listened to that book and I got it on audio. And one of the things that hit me that he said in the book was —

Tim Ferriss: I know what it was. Can I guess?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, you do. Yeah, go for it.

Tim Ferriss: That abstinence or asceticism. Renunciation is as much a trap, or can be as much a trap as anything else because it ties you, it binds you to the thing that you are from.

Kevin Rose: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. It makes it your lifelong enemy. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And it binds you to it. And so, you’re like, “Fuck it, Yolo. Let’s have some wine.”

Kevin Rose: Well, I want to be bound to it. And then I did that with a glass of wine, so no, but I —

Tim Ferriss: Break those chains.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. But the plan was never to be sober for life. It was to reevaluate my relationship with alcohol and get to a point where I could truly say to anyone that asks, the cravings have gone away. And my goal going forward is something I just call the 2-2-2 rule, which is maximum of two drinks at any given night, never two days in a row, and then two days a week. So, just lightweight. That’s my new thing. And then also special occasions, I want it to be about a celebration of something or a gathering in some way that’s meaningful, not just because a football game’s on or something.

Tim Ferriss: Well, first I have more to say, but cheers. I have my little Japanese mug —

Kevin Rose: Cheers.

Tim Ferriss: — full of Barr Hill gin. Cheers.

Kevin Rose: Wait, wait, straight up gin?

Tim Ferriss: That’s just straight gin. I didn’t have any ice. You’ve inspired me to cut way back on my drinking, so I haven’t really had much. I don’t want to open a bottle of wine that I’m not going to finish with friends or something.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I mean, you finished your bottle of gin.

Tim Ferriss: So I just grabbed what I had open, which stay good for a long while once open, which was this gin. So, I’m not going to drink a full glass of gin, but I will have a sip with you.

Kevin Rose: I think we’re both going to be cheap dates maybe then, because if we haven’t drank in a while, we might get really sloppy really fast.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very, very cheap dates. So, let me follow up on this story and the 2-2-2 plan. How are you intending, if at all, to catch yourself if you start slipping? Do you have people who you want to hold you accountable? Do you have some type of calendar reminder in place? How do you keep an eye on that? Recognizing that you may very well be totally fine, but given the history that you have, it seems like it’d be a good idea to put some guardrails in there.

Kevin Rose: Well, I agree with you wholeheartedly if my issue with alcohol had been one of excess consumption in that, I was never a six or seven drink or even five drink person. For me, it was more consistency. So, the one that is easier to catch is you wake up the next morning and you say, “Okay, I’m just not drinking tonight because you’re catching it in a sober state, which is huge.” So, it’s the big foul that I had over the last few years, especially to start with COVID was just two drinks a night, maybe three, and just continuing that and taking a day or two off a week, that’s not healthy as my liver enzymes would report back. I’m not as concerned about that. But also, I’ve talked to my therapist about this and she’s amazing.

And she’s like, “Hey, I’m going to check in with you and just make sure that you’re truly sticking to this.” But I think an accountability partner is absolutely a necessity, especially when it’s been such a staple of your life for decades.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And I think for you, one thing that immediately hops to mind, which seems super mundane, but I know you have a lot of anxiety around flying, and I don’t think that flying counts as a special occasion, right? So, you’ll need to —

Kevin Rose: Oh, it absolutely does. It absolutely does. That flying —

Tim Ferriss: You fly so much though.

Kevin Rose: We are in the air, we shouldn’t be able to do that as humans. It is an amazing feat of engineering. So, yes, it’s special. Tim, don’t take this away from me, God damn it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Wow, I’m going to —

Kevin Rose: This is one thing.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to call that the yellow flag in the making, but you know what —

Kevin Rose: I’m fine with one yellow flag. I do fly a bit, but you know what’s funny is when I came back from SFO when I actually had that first drink, I didn’t want a second drink on the plane. And honestly, it’s that just like anxiety of the whole process of it all, the security and the packed jets and the people coughing next to you. And once I get settled, I’m pretty good, unless it’s an international flight and I’m with friends. So, yeah, I think it’s that first drink actually goes a long way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. On that note, first drink goes a long way, especially if it’s just straight up gin.

Kevin Rose: There you go.

Tim Ferriss: Where else should we segue? Because we can come back to this, but we have a lot to catch up on. There is lot.

Kevin Rose: So much to catch up on and why don’t we just go back and forth and just have it be an old school Random Show where everything’s random, we have no idea we’re about to talk about.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s go for it. So, I’ll share an update on my side, which folks might find interesting. As you know and long-term listeners know, I have been one way you could put it as an early adopter looking at bioelectric medicine of different types, whether that is legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. By the way, there aren’t many options that would fall in that category, interviewing people like Dr. Kevin Tracey, but also looking at most acutely transcranial magnetic stimulation. So, TMS, which is a form of brain stimulation. I’ll keep it simple, that has existed for decades. But there was an innovation by the very recently late Nolan Williams, sadly, and others called accelerated TMS, where you basically take something like 50 stimulations, like 50 different sessions.

And you compress it into one week, as opposed to doing it over the course of many months. And this type of dense dosing schedule produces some, in many people, incredible effects. And you saw me after my first experience of accelerated TMS, which was with a device called MagVenture device. It uses neuro targeting. So, you need a resting state fMRI and so on to determine where they’re actually going to place this stimulation depending on your condition and your own individual anatomy and activity. So, if it’s depression, they might point it in one direction or in one place. If it’s anxiety or OCD, they might point it somewhere else. And I effectively had, let’s just call it eight or nine out of 10, resting state generalized anxiety.

Kevin Rose: Was this self-reported? Meaning, when you went in there to get the resting state scan, were you like, “Hey, I’m coming in here with ED and general anxiety, I need you to treat this for me.” And then they would —

Tim Ferriss: Did you say ED?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah. I know it’s an issue, but oh, we can cut this if you want. We can cut this.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, nice, nice. Very cute.

Kevin Rose: No, but all the joking aside —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Kevin Rose: — how did you determine the areas? Did you have to tell them, this is what I’m coming in to treat, or is this something they see?

Tim Ferriss: Well, they do interviews and assessments that are qualitative. Let’s just say asking you what your symptoms are, why are you coming here in the first place? Then they would dig into the details and then they would run you through various standardized tests or assessments. So, you might have the MADRS, you might have the HAM-D. You might have the Y-BOCS. They’re different assessments that are accepted as standardized for diagnosing, say OCD or any number of other psychiatric conditions. And then you get an fMRI. So, you get this scan of your brain, which I did at, I think it was Mass General in Massachusetts as you would guess. And based on that, they can do some precision targeting.

And just to give people the upshot of that, I did five days of stimulations and that gave me basically three to four months of effectively a zero on a scale of zero to 10 of generalized anxiety. So, from that point forward, effectively, no anxiety.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: The rumination, the anxious mental loops that I would get involved with late at night, that would then in turn affect my sleep and cause onset insomnia, et cetera, that went to zero for a period of say, three to four months, which blew my mind.

Kevin Rose: Just out of curiosity, were you tracking Oura data and whatnot, so you could see the impact of this as measured by different devices?

Tim Ferriss: I wasn’t looking at Oura at that point in time. I have been tracking with Oura at least for the last three to four weeks. And so, I’m going to be taking a closer look at things like HRB and so on in terms of trending. But the upshot of it is that, and I’ll try to compress this a little bit. But that first time I did accelerated TMS, I had this incredible effect, much more durable in terms of its intensity of effect and relief than even any psychedelic therapy, or psychedelic assisted therapy that I’ve looked into. And those were effectively ended up being the two modalities with the greatest effect size on the psychiatric conditions that I was most personally interested in. And where I have funded a lot of early stage science.

Unfortunately, when I then went to do boosters to do shorter duration, two or three days, nothing happened. So, my symptoms started creeping back in, which seemed to be hereditary. Just to put that out there, right? I recognize objectively, I’m like, “There isn’t really anything I should be so anxious about. I recognize that very clearly. Nonetheless, I get caught in these OCD/GAD, generalized anxiety disorder loops, and I see that in family members. So, it seems to be somewhat genetic. In any case, none of these boosters worked. And then I was like, “Fuck, this is terrible. Okay, well let me go back and do the full five days.” Full five days, didn’t do anything.

And then I was looking back at the calendar and trying to identify anything that might have correlated, or preceded the first treatment that helped make it work. And I did see that I’d spent a few weeks in the Amazon maybe ending about two weeks prior to that treatment. So, since I was ingesting plants of various types that are known to induce some degree of neuroplasticity, I thought, well, it could be that it was a plasticity issue, a preconditioning that helped that first session. So, I tried to replicate that using psilocybin and did another five days, no effect, didn’t have any effect, and was starting to feel really hopeless about this. But then came across some research that this is going to sound pretty wild, and this is definitely early, early stages.

So, to my knowledge, I’m maybe one out of fewer than a hundred people who have been one of the first monkeys shot in the space doing this specifically for anxiety. It has been applied to more people with depression, but decided to try simultaneous dosing with something called D-cycloserine (DCS). So, D-cycloserine, D-C-Y-C-L-O-S-E-R-I-N-E, is very, very interesting. So, it is an antibiotic that historically has been used to treat tuberculosis and urinary tract infections, but it is also now being studied. And for the last several years, people have been looking at this as a cognitive enhancer for treating various neuropsychiatric conditions.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: Now, how they figured this out, I’m not sure. I mean, it could have been working backwards through the purported mechanism of action. So, D-cycloserine has been looked at in conjunction with say, CBT, like cognitive behavioral therapy and all sorts of different things. And part of what people believe makes it effective as an amplifier of effects, although there can be side effects and sometimes the pendulum swings the other direction is that it is a partial agonist at the glycine binding site of the NMDA glutamate receptor. Now, ketamine also works on NMDA receptors, but it’s an antagonist. So, it’s very different in that respect. But I will again try to cut to the punchline.

So, instead of doing five days, I did one day, just one day of basically a stimulation every hour on the hour for 10 hours and preloaded with a lozenge that you just let of melt in your mouth with this D-cycloserine, and it worked one day. It had some side effects. I had insomnia for about two weeks, which seems to happen in some patients who have undergone this. Some people have really bad insomnia for a month and then it goes away. And I was willing to take that risk. There’s some other things that can crop up, like temporary loss of some fine motor control and some other weird stuff.

Kevin Rose: Oh, Jesus.

Tim Ferriss: Tinnitus in some people.

Kevin Rose: Wow, with just the treatment in general. Did the papers that you’re signing and say, this may happen?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, with any of this stuff, you’re writing your life away with some signatures.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s like frontier stuff. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but the point that I’m trying to make here in a pretty long-winded way is number one, it worked. So, that leads me to believe that the original hypothesis that it was around neuroplasticity, so I needed to warm up the Play-Doh before it could be molded properly, could be accurate, right? That could be true. Secondly, and this is incredibly important, most people I know who are really busy, or most people who can’t afford it, can’t take five days off of work. They can’t take a week off of work to do this treatment no matter how bad their symptoms might be. And the fact that this D-cycloserine, like DCS enhanced treatment was able to be compressed into a single day, I feel like it opens up the multitude of people who can potentially use this tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, who knows?

And it should also at the same time really decrease the cost. So, it’s made me even more bullish around accelerated TMS, and it’s been, I’d have to go back and look maybe a month, six weeks, but it’s still sticking, which is remarkable. So, in any case, for people who want to hear more, they can listen to my podcast with Nolan Williams that goes into a lot of detail around this, but very exciting stuff. It turns out a lot of these things might be interrelated and that certain types of TMS when implemented properly actually seem to also stimulate the vagus nerve in some interesting ways. So, this is the next frontier that I’m most interested in exploring right now is bioelectric medicine, right? So, computer chips over pills and so on. I think it allows you, in some respects to get much more targeted.

So, that’s good news for me, but I think it’s also obviously at the edges of medicine right now. But I think that in the next two to three years, I could see this becoming a much more accessible therapeutic for millions of people. And there’s some companies you can watch. I mentioned one MagVenture or Magventures. The other is called Brainsway, and they’re actually a very small company, but publicly traded, and I’m sure there are going to be more entrants. So, super exciting stuff. But now I feel like I have a recipe worth trying to replicate where maybe once a quarter, maybe twice a year, depending on when — I think I see symptoms start to creep back in. I don’t think this is a one and done, nor is any psychedelic assisted therapy that I’m aware of.

So, I expect it’ll be some type of ongoing treatment that I do one, two to four times per year.

Kevin Rose: And when you think of the potential in one and inability to replicate this again in others, I know you put a lot of cash personally into philanthropic things around research and studies, are you curious to push on these buttons and see, can you put together a trial with 50 people and

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.

Kevin Rose: What’s your thoughts there?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would definitely be interested in funding more research. The Brain Stimulation Lab at Stanford, I’ve already funded some research within. Very sadly, Nolan Williams, who helped develop a lot of these technologies died, I mean I want to say it was a month or two ago by suicide, very sadly.

Kevin Rose: Oh, jeez.

Tim Ferriss: And he was a friend and really heartbreaking to see. And I mean it’s hard to put that aside for the moment, but putting it aside for the moment, I did fund research within that lab. I suspect that’s going to take time to implement, particularly given the leadership vacuum that was created by his very, very tragic death. But I am interested in funding more research, and this is an ongoing thing. As you know, my foundation, the Saisei Foundation, has funded all sorts of on the edge research since 2015 or so, I would say. So, this is for sure where I would like to fund more research, particularly looking at these combinations. And that could be something like these, like a D-cycloserine plus stimulation.

And at certain clinics, they have cohorts of say 60 — I think it’s at the time that I did it, there were 60 patients who had been treated for some form of anxiety disorder with this combination. I think that at least at that particular clinic on the depression side, the numbers are larger, probably 200 or so. But it’s exciting, it’s exciting. I mean that’s enough to get a signal, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And sure, you need to check all the boxes and do the randomized placebo controlled studies with multiple arms and all that, but it is enough to start to see a signal, especially when you have treatment resistant cases that haven’t responded to other things. And that’s enough to inform at least the design of a study that would take much longer. So, we’ll see.

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: But I will say that much some people experience with GLP-1 agonists like Tirzepatide, and Mounjaro or Ozempic or whatever, after these treatments and maybe it’s just from really putting the brakes on a lot of the OCD like circuitry, that I had much less desire to over consume caffeine, to over consume alcohol. It made dialing all of those things back a lot easier, which has been —

Kevin Rose: And you know that’s a massive benefit of GLP-1s for a lot of people?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which is huge. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Well, dude, I’m pumped for you, man. It’s like I love to see you getting some relief here, even if just for a few months, and that’s fantastic, it’s repeatable.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. So, fingers crossed. We’ll see. And for people who want to learn more, I would suggest they start with, as eerie as it might be, my conversation on the podcast with Nolan Williams. All right, man, you’re up. What’s next?

Kevin Rose: Speaking of brain-related things, I was out a dinner with a friend and I was lamenting in talking about just my inability to remember faces, names, and then how that extended into childhood for me, which was doing poorly on tests and just I couldn’t quite retain the information the way that my friends could. I just could never explain it. Somebody at dinner, my buddy Mau said to me, “Do you have aphantasia?” And I said, “I have no idea what that is.” And then he said, “Okay, I want you to close your eyes right now,” and this is going to blow some people’s minds right now. “Close your eyes and picture an apple in your mind’s eye. Picture an apple.

What do you see? Do you see a red apple? Do you see water droplets on it? Does it look fresh? Does it look like an HD image?” And that’s what he said to me. I go, “What are you talking about?” And he goes, “Well, what does it look like to you?” And I go, “There’s no apple.” He goes, “What do you mean there’s no apple?” And I said, “Well, there’s like an outline, ghosty foggy thing, maybe-ish.” And he goes, “Oh, you have aphantasia.” And I was immediately jumped, whatever, ChatGPT. And I had no idea that people suffer from this condition and it’s in the low single digit percentage of people, and they have no idea that this is a thing where you cannot picture something in your mind’s eye. Had you heard of this before or no?

Tim Ferriss: No, I hadn’t until you dropped it in one of our group friend text threads. This was, I guess a couple of weeks ago. But Fantasia is spelled like the Disney movie, but actually no, that would be with an F. It’s aphantasia, A-P-H-A-N-T-A-S-I-A, yeah, is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images first described in 1880. Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose: When you close your eyes, what do you see? Because they give you a scale there, and a five is like an HD full on, beautiful apple. What do you see? Do you see a perfect quality apple?

Tim Ferriss: So aphantasia can be considered the opposite of hyperphantasia. I am the exact opposite. I have hyper-visual recall and the ability —

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: — to visualize. So I can probably draw the vast majority of restaurants or the floor plans that I’ve ever visited, right? I can absolutely spec it out and have very, very vivid visualization. So I would be on the far other end of the spectrum.

Kevin Rose: So when you think of a new idea, do you see it in some ways? Because I feel it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You are very similar to my friend Mike, because I remember Mike and I have a lot of shared flight time with psychedelic experiences, and he was describing how he has almost no visual imagery, and it’s almost purely kinesthetic for him. And that is as hard for me to imagine as it is for him to imagine my experience, which is overwhelmingly explosively visual.

Kevin Rose: What’s crazy, dude, is how many things I think I thought were jokes. When people said they counted sheep before they went to bed. I was like, “Oh, that’s funny. Would you count numbers in your head?” But I didn’t know they see sheep. I didn’t know. And if you’re younger, mute the podcast for 10 seconds, I didn’t know the spank bank was a real bank you could visit. I thought I didn’t even know that was a thing. I seriously didn’t —

Tim Ferriss: Well, to be clear, it’s not a bank with tellers and —

Kevin Rose: No, but it is in your head.

Tim Ferriss: — safety security boxes.

Kevin Rose: It’s in your head. You can open up the box and go back and see that. I can’t see any of that. It sucks. My buddy from Diggnation Podcast was like, after we stopped recording, he’s like, “”You’ve got to be kidding me. So, you can’t go back and look at people you’ve dated in the past during intimate moments and see, revisualize that?” I’m like, “No, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And he goes, “Oh, yeah.” He’s like, “Oh,” he felt so bad for me. He was almost starting to cry for me. It’s horrible. It’s horrible.

Tim Ferriss: What do you think you have, if anything, developed in compensation of that?

Kevin Rose: Well, the one thing that I have never been able to explain is that the feeling side of it, everything is that everything is a feeling. So I have a friend of mine, and I’m not this way, but she composes music and she said that she sees in her head music is represented as colors. And so, when I come up with ideas for projects, I’m not seeing something. I’m traversing a feeling of a path, rather than a visual thing. It’s funny you mentioned the fear of flying. I think part of the reason why I have such a vivid fear of flying is that feeling comes so strong of the plane crashing, not that I see the plane crashing. So, it’s just a different thing, but I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

That has served me quite well in investing and seeing around corners early and things of that nature. But when I explain that to people, you feel a new idea. There’s been a bunch of people that have no idea what I’m talking about and something they can’t. I think you can probably have both, but new ideas come from this rising of feeling, not visual, if that makes sense.

Tim Ferriss: Wild. I mean, it doesn’t really make sense to me, but it would make sense to my friend Mike. And thinking about all this and hearing about your friend who I think you said sees musical notes as colors, that’s often referred to as synesthesia. And there’s a really amazing little book that I read ages ago. It’s been around for a long time. I’m looking at it right now. It was published in 1987, but it’s 192 pages. Anyone who’s interested in memory and mind and the vast differences between people might be interested in this, it’s called The Mind of a Mnemonist, I think is how it’s pronounced, like mnemonic device, M-N-E-M-O-N-I-S-T, a little book about a vast memory. The author’s name is A.R. Those are initials, A.R. Luria, L-U-R-I-A. And here the description’s very short, so I’ll just read it.

“This study explores the inner world of a rare human phenomenon — a man who was endowed with virtually limitless powers of memory. From his intimate knowledge of S., the mnemonist, gained from conversations and testing over a period of almost thirty years, A.R. Luria is able to reveal in rich detail not only the obvious strengths of S.’s astonishing memory but also his surprising weaknesses: his crippling inability to forget, his pattern of reacting passively to life, and his uniquely handicapped personality.”

Fascinating, fascinating book that I really recommend to people, but aphantasia, who knew?

Kevin Rose: You know who I should talk to is Joshua Waitzkin, because didn’t he say that he feels chess? And for people that don’t know, he was the guy that was based on the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Searching for Bobby Fischer was originally a book and then a movie, which was based on the childhood chess prodigy chapters of Josh Waitzkin’s life. And Josh hates that term prodigy. He has some unusual hardware to be sure, but he also has a really incredible framework that he’s applied to now four or five different fields to become world-class in all of them. But he does have a feeling about certain things. One of the stories that he has told me is he was playing a simul, which means he was playing, I don’t know what the number was, 30 or 20 to 40 people simultaneously where he is walking around a room and playing —

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, you do it really fast, right? You just look and then move.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he’s just moving from table to table really quickly, and I think was with some very high level high school players, something like that. Maybe they were younger, I can’t recall. But he was going around, he’s playing 20 or 30 simultaneous games in his head. And then at one point, he explained it as it feels like you’re juggling 20 or 30 balls in the air. And then he got to one table and he felt all the balls come crashing to the ground.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: And he said, it felt as though I just missed a ball, and they’d all fallen on the ground, and he couldn’t quite figure out why that was the case. And then he was able to deduce that one of the kids had cheated, one of the kids had moved a piece.

Kevin Rose: Oh, no way.

Tim Ferriss: And it was just a gut feeling. And then that visual that allowed him to figure out which of the kids had cheated. It’s just insane.

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: That people can even do that. Yeah, yeah. Josh. Yeah, if you want to listen to Joshua Waitzkin’s first ever podcast, you were podcast episode number one, and he was podcast episode number two, if I remember correctly.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Wild character. Oh, man. Let’s see.

Kevin Rose: All right, you’re up.

Tim Ferriss: I’m up. Well, I’ll give another medical one that I think is interesting. And I’ve been texting and interacting with Matt Walker a lot on this. Matt is a scientist. He wrote a book, Why We Sleep, and is about as credible as you can be within the world of sleep science and —

Kevin Rose: He’s the best. And he’s a great human.

Tim Ferriss: He’s a great guy.

Kevin Rose: Fantastic human.

Tim Ferriss: Great guy, has the most pleasing dulcet tones with that British accent and kind lilt in the voice.

Kevin Rose: Plus 10 IQ accent, basically.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Plus 10 or 20 IQ points with the accent. But his podcast is also excellent, and we can link to it in the show notes, but he did an episode on a class of sleep medication called DORAs and DORA stands for dual orexin receptor antagonists. And the reason that DORAs became very interesting to me is that I have Alzheimer’s in my family, and it’s left right and center for me right now because I have three relatives currently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I —

Kevin Rose: Holy shit. That’s your APOE e4 negative folks?

Tim Ferriss: It includes APOE e4 negative folks. So, we won’t get too far into the genetics, but people who should not be, based on that particular parameter, should not be particularly inclined to Alzheimer’s, nonetheless have Alzheimer’s. And then there are of course people who have three, four, I don’t think any of them are APOE e33, I am APOE e34. So, compared to a 33 that, at least, as I understand it would predispose me and say 2.5 times.

Kevin Rose: You and my wife and Rhonda Patrick, and Attia, too, actually is a 34.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there you go.

Kevin Rose: All of you guys. I’m the only one that’s not. Crazy.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, in effect, to our current understanding, you want to mitigate the accumulation of two things, is one is beta amyloid plaque, another is tangles that are created by tau proteins. And sleep is really imperative for this. And if you have sleep issues as I have for decades, the onset insomnia, low percentage of deep sleep, et cetera, you’re effectively unable to have your garbage service within the brain clear out these at a rate that offsets the accumulation.

Kevin Rose: But we don’t know if these are causal, right? There’s never been any conclusion whether these are causal. They’re most likely the protective effects of something else gone awry. Do you agree with that?

Tim Ferriss: I would say that, based on our best understanding, if you can mitigate the accumulation of these things, there seems to be, at the very least, delaying of the progression of these diseases. And there are different drugs and fusions like Donanemab and so on that are predicated on that understanding of the mechanism. This is still early days in the world of Alzheimer’s, but it seems very defensible with our understanding currently that the less of this stuff you accumulate, the better off you are.

Kevin Rose: Do you follow Dale Bredesen’s work, by the way?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t. Let’s come back to that.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Let me just quickly tie this up and say that an example of a DORA would be Belsomra. There are many others, or I should say a handful of others, but I have taken as I believe you have — well, actually no, it was too strong for you, but —

Kevin Rose: I gave you some, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, that’s right. You gave me the Belsomra.

Kevin Rose: I gave you a bunch of Belsomra and you were going to give me some other shit back and you never gave me anything good.

Tim Ferriss: Well, hold on, hold on. That’s still pending, but let me come back. So, you gave me the Belsomra, but I said using it, I was going to get it on a prescription. It’s expensive as fuck.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I paid a shit-ton for it, and then I didn’t use it.

Tim Ferriss: And I was like, all right, I’ll take your Belsomra. But the Trazodone, I got off of Trazodone and switched as a sleep medication to, in this case, Belsomra, because it was literally down the street in an Uber at your house, not recommending you use your friend’s bootleg drugs, by the way, talk to your doctor, but —

Kevin Rose: We also have physicians that are looking at all our shit, so it’s not —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, right. But I have been, now, on Belsomra for a few months as hopefully a — it’s too strong to say it’s a preventative strategy, but at least a delay strategy for potentially Alzheimer’s and other associated neurodegenerative conditions. So, I would encourage people, and I’ll link to this in the show notes, to check out Matt Walker’s podcast on this specifically.

Kevin Rose: You know what they did with Belsomra where they tap the spines of people that took it and they noticed there were less tau, the proteins in the spinal fluid?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they cleared a lot more. I mean, I think it was they looked at animal models and then they looked at humans. And in that podcast episode also, Matt discusses data related to comparing, say Belsomra or I should say DORAs to Ambien, right? And not all sleep medications are created equal. A lot of sleep medications effectively sedate you. But in the case of DORAs, orexin, as I understand it, is a wakefulness. Hmm, I think it’s a hormone, but this is effectively inhibiting wakefulness as opposed to sedating. And by using that particular approach, you’re able to create more naturalistic sleep. So it’s preserving sleep architecture, increasing certain things like REM sleep.

In any case, it’s very interesting because as it stands, look, sure, like exercise for a natural release of cloth, watch your diet, blah, blah, blah. There are a handful of things here. Sleep, super critically important if we’re talking about, again, staving off, hopefully neurodegenerative disease, but there really just aren’t that many tools in the toolkit. So, to come across some of this data via Matt Walker was very eye-opening to me. So, that’s —

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: That’s also something that I’m looking at really closely.

Kevin Rose: I will say the scariest test I have done in my life was about three months ago. I went and had my blood work done and had the towel, the full on, you can check your blood now to see if you are producing, or we’re always producing it, but if you’re out of bounds, meaning you’re above the norm in your production of these types of proteins. And if you are, it’s like 99 percent chance you’re on the path to some form of dementia, right? And did you do that test?

Tim Ferriss: I have just done a whole battery of different tests. And —

Kevin Rose: Did you do the p-tau one though?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m going to have all that stuff. So, I will —

Kevin Rose: It’s scary, dude. You come hang with me, we’ll have a drink or something.

Tim Ferriss: I’m looking at all my results in probably two or three weeks because I have a few online batteries that I’m going to do assessments.

Kevin Rose: It is absolutely terrifying because the doctor was like, “Hey, do you want to do this? I have this available.” And I was like, “Sure, go ahead.” And then three days afterwards, I’m like, “I should look up what that test is all about.” And there’s three of them now that can detect these various proteins that are essentially, if you have elevated levels, you’re on marching orders or you’re heading towards some type of dementia. And I realized that and I was like, “Wow, if this comes back positive, this is an emergency situation where high intensity interval training every single morning for an hour. There’s a lot of things you have to get into.” And it’s a very frightening thing. It’s a very frightening thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it can be super frightening. And there’s certain other things that I think are just holistically good for my particular goals, cognitive, psychological, physical, like the ketogenic diet. I recently did a podcast with David Baszucki, the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, and he and his wife have a foundation that it is the largest funder of science related to metabolic therapies with a particular focus on ketogenic therapy. So, I will be doing all of December in ketosis as an example.

Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, just to keep that metabolic machinery humming because I do think it’s plausible that it could help longterm with a lot of the stuff we’re talking about.

Kevin Rose: So, Tim, real quick, just to put a bow on this, Dale. Yeah, so the reason I like Dale, Dale’s a scientist that studies all forms of dementia. He has a book called The End of Alzheimer’s. You’ve probably heard of that book. It’s pretty popular.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve come across his name. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: He’s a little bit different than most of the scientists out there where he believes that Alzheimer’s and these other dementias, they’re not just a one size fits all, one thing went wrong, but it can be a suite of different things that go wrong that lead you down this path.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Rose: And so, it’s metabolic disorder, it’s potential toxins. I think he’s like the four major contributors to different various forms of dementia. And he’s developed this protocol that can stabilize and even reverse a lot of this early cognitive decline if you catch it early enough. And it’s a little bit of throwing the whole kitchen sink at it because it’s everything. And he’s not quite sure exactly what is doing in the fix here, but it’s fascinating, the research that he’s done, two things that stood out to me that he recommends is one, getting this p-tau test done on the blood front and then also recommends the ketogenic diet. And this ketogenic diet is huge for people. And he’s seen that alone stabilize people from mental decline.

And not that they’re not eventually going to get it, but the point is, do you want to go into full decline within five years or do you want it to be 15 years, right? And so, that’s what his lab’s focused on.

Tim Ferriss: Cool. Yeah, I’ll check him out. I mean I’ve seen, not that this is a necessarily sustainable or scalable approach, but with some of my relatives with Alzheimer’s where it’s pretty progressed and they tend to give one word answers or get confused and give the wrong answer to questions, giving them, say, 35 milliliters of exogenous ketones. So, they’re not in ketosis, they’re following the terrible diet they’ve always followed, but give them 35 milliliters of high octane exogenous ketones before going for a walk. And within 30 minutes, they’re speaking in full sentences. I mean, you see some really wild temporary, but nonetheless, very interesting transformations, which comes back to what you said about metabolic syndrome. And there are good reasons why some folks refer to Alzheimer’s as type three diabetes, right?

Kevin Rose: A hundred percent. And that’s what he says in his book. He’s like, that is definitely a contributor, like excess blood glucose levels and all the downstream inflammation effects that come from that. It’s Bad News Bears, as you like to say. That’s Tim Ferriss is —

Tim Ferriss: Bad News Bears. All right, Kevin, what have you got?

Kevin Rose: I wanted to give people a quick little update on the State of the Union around all things AI.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please. I could use it too.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s just such a fascinating time in that every, I’d call it four to eight weeks, maybe a slight bit longer, sometimes less so, we’re seeing leapfrogs in what is possible. And one of the things that I would caution people against is forming an opinion about AI and then locking yourself in time around that opinion. I’ll give you a great practical example. I have a lot of engineers that said, “Hey, I tried AI for coding. It was horrible. My first question is, when did you try it? And they said, “Oh, three months ago.” And I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand. It’s three to four times better than it was three months ago,” right?

And so, we have to make sure that even if you are looking at some of these technologies and say, “Hey, it can’t do X or it’s horrible, it’s hallucinating in this way. It’s giving me the wrong answer. This is without a doubt the massive Motorola block phone version of the iPhone.” We are in that realm of AI, the very first innings of it all and every few months. I mean even Opus four or five came out three, four days ago, whatever, it’s a means —

Tim Ferriss: Explain what that is.

Kevin Rose: Okay, so when you think about frontier models, meaning do you have the bigs Anthropic, you’ve got Google, you’ve OpenAI, OpenAI, and then I’d throw a couple others in there, Meta’s trying in some sense and perplexity and whatnot. But when you think about the big massive models that are running that are at the bleeding edge of all this, meaning they’re the best of the best, the most expensive per query, what happens is they have to train these data sets and then they go in and they eventually release a model, right? And these are typically marked by software versioning numbers know ChatGPT 3 versus ChatGPT 4 versus ChatGPT 5, and then they’ll do 51, 52 or 41, 42 or whatever. So, it’s like software kind of versioning on these models.

And whenever you see a new release, you’re talking a jump in terms of both sometimes the capacity to understand information, and they call that the token context windows. And then also their just natural built-in abilities of the things that they can do well. And so, some things they can do at a graduate level now, some things they can do, their novel ideas is still pretty low down the chain in terms of what they can do around original thinking. But they have all these benchmarks, so they have probably 15 or 20 different benchmarks that they run it against. Can it complete the bar exam is one, right? And so, now they’re able to do it, and then now the question is how quickly can they do it in? It would take them 25 minutes before now it’s five minutes.

So, then there’s a bunch of inference side of benchmarking as well. So, we’re seeing Gemini 3 came out just a couple of weeks ago and it was fantastic. And I will say that I called NVIDIA on here way back in the day. It was 1.8 trillion I think back in the day when I said, “Hey, I think this is going to run, when you and I were talking about it,” and it did because I knew GPUs were just going to be the most precious commodity we have as technologists.

I have seen that Google now is in the driver’s seat here and I’m really excited for them because one, I worked at Google, they acquired one of my companies and I spent a few years there. And I’ve seen inside the belly of the, and I will tell you that they were built for this day and age, the fact that they’ve been training their entire life for this moment.

They have all of the PhDs and all of the folks that they need to go pull this off across the entire suite. And so, what do I mean by the entire suite? And this is where it gets really interesting, Tim. If you think about what OpenAI has to do to compete, they have to go and buy up as much data center space as possible, and they have to buy a shit ton of GPUs from NVIDIA. That’s what they need because they don’t own the stack. They own the software, the training, the engineering, the soft good side of the business, but they don’t own the hardware side. This is a fantastic, really interesting stat. When Gemini three came out a couple weeks ago, it was the first time they had trained a frontier model. The best of best when it dropped, it was the best model in the world exclusively on Google chips.

So, they have these chips called TPUs, tensor processing units. They have the full stack dude, they don’t even need NVIDIA. It’s wild. They didn’t use an NVIDIA chip to train their AI and they have world-class AI. So, it’s just really exciting. This is such a fun time to be alive because right now, you can take someone that is a technologist in the sense that they have a rough understanding of the available tech that’s out there, and you could build and produce and ship any app that you want within a few days now with what we have, and it’s just going to get better and better. So, the creativity and the shipping unlockments that we’re about to see over the next five years is going to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

If you have the idea for an app or a product or service, anything digital, you will be able to take it from ideation and drawing it on a piece of paper to actual shipping something to your customers within, call it less than a week, which is just never been done before at a price that is, I don’t know, $500, right? And so, if Tim wanted his own app five years ago, I’d have been like, “Okay, great. You want the Tim Ferriss fan site/ed help app, then to build that would be 50 grand,” right?

Tim Ferriss: I feel like you have a problem that we need to talk about. You’re just bringing it up so much. After that half a glass of champagne, I feel like —

Kevin Rose: It went straight to my head, number one and number two —

Tim Ferriss: Turning into a mini confessional here.

Kevin Rose: We need to talk about your relationships because one of the things that whenever I get on —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.

Kevin Rose: No, I’m telling you whenever we do a Random Show, people are always like, they send me messages and they’re like, “I love how you give him shit, number one, and number two, we want to hear more about his personal life.” And I know you’ve got a new special someone in your life, which I’m very excited for.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about that. Yeah, nice segue.

Kevin Rose: Let’s jump into that. Now that we’ve covered Google, let’s jump into your personal life.

Tim Ferriss: Hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to ask you for a counterpoint on a previous, I wouldn’t call it necessarily a prediction, but we talked about, I think it was in the last episode of The Random Show, a bit about venture capital. And I wouldn’t say that you said across the board, venture capital would be dead because there are capital intensive businesses that require —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, hardware.

Tim Ferriss: — hardware and build out and wet labs and all this stuff. But I’m wondering if I just put on my future vision goggles, which I wish I had, but let’s just pretend I do and I look forward, it doesn’t need to be five years. I look forward two years. And what you are describing is a reality, right? The barrier to entry, the hurdle is so low that suddenly from ideation to product takes a week. And there is an absolute glut, this just overwhelming tsunami of products. Now, on the positive side, yes, what would’ve cost people millions and millions of dollars to do 10 years ago, let’s say, 15 years ago, suddenly AWS and rentable infrastructure comes along, that cost goes down. Now AI comes along, cost further goes down.

Kevin Rose: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: But I imagine the war for attention is going to get so incredibly expensive. Do you think that products that get traction will nonetheless, if they don’t have the income stream to support it, raise venture capital purely for a marketing war chest and customer acquisition? I’m just wondering if you think you could make the argument that the customer acquisition costs are going to get, or user acquisition costs are going to get so high because everyone, you’re going to have a hundred X the number of bidders now who knows what the form will be. I don’t know if it’ll be Google AdWords, maybe it’ll be something else. What are your thoughts?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I think, well, there’s a couple things there. The best products I’ve ever invested in, period, full stop, have been ones that don’t rely upon paid acquisition to grow. So, they have come up with something that is unique and novel enough to where word of mouth is their number one driver. That said, capital and deployed the right way and spent the right way around. Ad purchases is just fuel for the fire, which is great. And so, the thing VC is dead in the sense that the seed round was like, “Okay, I have a idea-ish. I’m going to go out and take $3 million and I’m going to give away 20 percent of my company.” What happens in the future is not that you don’t need that capital, because I think you’re right.

You will need it for a variety of things. If you’re hitting insane scale, there will be moments where you need to put more warm bodies in seats to help you do all the things, and you may need to raise venture. But the difference is when you have product market fit, you go from raising and selling 20 percent of your business for $3 million to selling 20 percent of your business for $15 million, which is just fantastic for the entrepreneur. So, it’s not that venture is dead, it’s just that what we’re going to see is the entrepreneur is in control like they’ve never been before, which is fantastic. And if they say, “Okay, I’m off to the races and things are going so well, but guess what?

I’m actually charging for my product and I’m breakeven.” You don’t ever have to raise VC. And then now you own a hundred percent of the business and you’re a Jason Fried, which we know is one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time that invented SaaS that just has never taken any external investment. And you are just happy and you don’t report to anyone, which is a beautiful thing as well.

Tim Ferriss: So, do you think it’s just like the killing fields for early stage folks and the value capture just gets pushed to later and later stage.

Kevin Rose: Pushed out.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think largely on just tech, that is it’s understandable by AI. Meaning, if you’re running TypeScript or any of these languages that AI can figure out and write high quality code for, you just don’t need to raise capital. You can do it nights and weekends on your own.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. So, is it fair to say if you had to bet on one horse in the AI race that you would bet on Google? And then I have a follow-up question.

Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: Well, now I know a little bit too much behind the scenes. If you had no stake in any companies, how would you please —

Kevin Rose: Well, I never answer like that. I would always give you the true answer, even if I didn’t —

Tim Ferriss: No, I know. I’ve got to say it, but yeah, where would you put first, second, third bet?

Kevin Rose: Honestly, these valuations, I wouldn’t put a single dollar into the top three or five, largely because what are you going to do? Is Google going to 3X in the next 10 years?

Tim Ferriss: Well, also, it remains to be seen how much AI cannibalizes their current money-printing machine in terms of search and sponsored ads and so on.

Kevin Rose: I’m less worried about that because they own the largest distribution platform on Earth, which is Android. And so, they will find a way in there. And then also I think if Google had to pick their poison and say, “Okay, you can either base the future business off a $25 a month pro subscription to Gemini or a free account that is just ad-driven,” I think they’ll take that hybrid model all day long.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. Interesting. Okay, so you wouldn’t put any money into the big ones. So, do you choose then? Are you trying to find Amazon in 1998, 1999, right? Just in the absolute noise of — AI slop doesn’t just apply to Sora, it also applies to startups, right? There’s so much bullshit floating around. Some of it’s dressed up in very fancy clothing with fancy names, right? So, if you’re investing in AI writ large, how do you even — I mean, this is your job, right?

Kevin Rose: I think there’s three buckets. I think there’s three buckets.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have to think about it.

Kevin Rose: One is power. Without a doubt, we’re all going to need power. Small nuclear reactors are going to be a thing. The United States needs 3 to 5Xs power capacity in the next decade, if not more. And there is going to be a huge push into energy. So, there’s a bunch of plays there. You can look them up. There are even ETFs that track bundles of nuclear-related companies that are out there. That’s one play. I think power is without a doubt, the most important piece of this. And then data centers. There’s publicly traded data center companies out there. There are the bigs like Microsoft and Google and Amazon that are just expanding as fast as they possibly can and buying up land all over the United States.

There’re always going to be a premium on that. They’re going to need that. NVIDIA, they’ve got competition from AMD, they’ve got competition from Google now. Obviously, they have such incredible tooling on the software side, there’s a lot of defensibility there. It’s a name to own. Would I buy in today at today’s prices? I don’t know. But I will say that if you think of this, less about, I’m just going to pick one horse and more like I’m going to pick a basket of things, these are the things that I would be putting into that basket.

And then lastly, I would take large companies that have insane bloat from headcount that can be automated in the next, call it two to three years, where they will reduce sadly, and I hate to see this happen, but it’s going to happen no matter what. They’re going to reduce their headcount. They’re going to automate with AI and their profit margins are going to go through the roof. And I think those companies will reap the benefits of efficiency that comes from AI and their stock prices will as well.

Tim Ferriss: How do you identify companies that have the most bloat with also the fewest hurdles to adopting AI for what you’re describing, right? Because some of them, they may be, who knows, just put in a position where from a process or regulatory perspective or whatever, they just can’t do it, at least in the near term.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, in the near term, it’s listening to earnings calls and it is, I want to hear the CEO e saying that they are absolutely forcing their engineers to use AI forcing. You have to be, it is not optional at this point. To ask your engineers to play with it, you have to be using it every single day in your workflow. And the folks that are doing that, even though it’s not perfect today, they’re going to reap all the benefits 12 to 18 months from now. And so, that’s what I’m looking for more than anything else is who is wise enough? Because a lot of the CEOs are old. Who is wise enough to say it’s true, we know these folks and they just don’t —

If you ask them the difference between Haiku 4, 5, and Sonnet, they would have no idea how to tell you. If they can’t answer those basic model related questions, what are you doing? So, it’s finding those people like the Jack Dorseys in the world and the folks that are just like — well, I wouldn’t want to say young because I want to be Asian, but they have to be leaning into this in a way that they have to believe that their entire business is going to be rebuilt from the ground up over the next, call it five years. And you have people like Salesforce, CEOs doing that. Obviously, Benioff’s on board with this.

There’s a handful of folks that have said, “We are making sure this is a mandate from the top down.” Google did this quite well where they had this red alarm, or thing that they called off probably three years ago, where it said it is all hands on deck AI and Apple did not do that. And now look what’s happening. Most likely, Apple’s going to end up licensing Gemini from Google.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Wild world out there, kids. Wild world.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. It’s a fun time to be alive, man. It’s fun to be playing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, totally. Let’s see. I figure I could give people some maybe holiday gift ideas just in case they’re —

Kevin Rose: Oh, yes, I’ve got some great ones. First thing I can recommend, something you can fit in your pocket. So, this right here looks like a golf ball with little, not quite spikes, but studs on it. They’re flattened. This is called a Rubz ball, R-U-B-Z, and I travel with this. You just roll out your feet on this before you go to bed and I have felt this helped everything from relaxing and just winding down. What I have noticed, and this is something I spoke with Ed Coan about a hundred years ago, long time ago. He’s the greatest powerlifter of all time, phenomenal athlete and very nice guy.

But basically if you address your feet, sometimes you feel it all the way up the kinetic chain, your forelegs, knees, even your low back can sometimes release. So this, I think it cost less than 10 bucks. This is a Rubz ball. You can buy it on Amazon anywhere else. That’s a very easy one. That’s just pocket sized. We can go back and forth. What have you got? What you —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s do it. Okay, so this one is awesome, dude. You have my doc that I sent you right with the links to everything?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I do.

Kevin Rose: I don’t know if you have it up in front of you. So, if you click on the second one down these bonsai Nanoblocks. So, I’ve been talking about Nanoblocks for a while.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you are.

Kevin Rose: Hear me out, dude. This is a fun stocking stuffer. People are going to love this shit. So, it’s $38. It’s these little baby bonsai trees. Nanoblocks are like LEGOs, but they’re like one 10th of the size. So, you need tweezers to assemble them. It is oddly satisfying to build these little tiny bonsai trees. You get all six of them for $38 and if you use the code, Tim — no, there’s no code, but they’re amazing. They’re so fun. Anyway, Nanoblocks are awesome. This is a little fun little pack, great stocking stuffer. They’re super tiny and they’re cute. Look, there’s Nanoblocks up there behind me. See that beautiful tree?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. There it is. So you recommended a book to me. Do you want to mention it? It’s last in your list. I bought the audiobook and I listened to it on my flights recently. I thought the narrator was really, really good also.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s called Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well. It’s by Anthony De Mello, who we were talking about the Jesuit priest and therapist that we talked about earlier. Tim, we had both somehow discovered this book originally. Not this book, but the other one we’re talking about.

Tim Ferriss: Awareness.

Kevin Rose: Awareness. And it was really cool to hear that you were into it because it was one of my favorite books that we did not compare notes and we read this independently. I don’t know how the hell that happened, but we both loved it. And this is another one where I was just like, “This is so good because there’s so many core truths here that apply to my practice on the meditation side and I just loved it.” But it does require a little bit of understanding. It’s not like someone from off the street can totally read this and be like, “Oh, that makes a ton of sense to me.” I don’t know if you felt that way.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like, well, there are two things I would say. Just having read a lot of Anthony De Mello that I think Awareness, subtitle, Conversations with the Masters, it used to be The Perils and Promise of Reality, but they changed the subtitle. I preferred the old one, but Awareness by Anthony De Mello. His last name is two words, D-E M-E-L-L-O is 184 pages and I’ve gifted it to at least 50 people. I mean, I have an entire bookshelf full of this book in my guest bedroom at my house just to give friends.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, same, dude. It’s so funny.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I would recommend people read Awareness first. I don’t think you need anything special in terms of background for that.

Kevin Rose: Well, you do need one thing. You need to know that it is a lecture, so it reads like a lecture. It doesn’t read like a book.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which I like, which I like and he’s very no-nonsense.

Kevin Rose: I gave it to a couple of friends and they started reading it and they’re like, “Wait, is this a talk that he gave?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I should have told you that. It’s an actual talk.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a collection of polished lectures that he gave. So, Awareness would be the first. And then in the case of the Stop Fixing Yourself, I really enjoyed it. There’s a lot of overlap with Awareness. So, there are certain points that get reiterated. The audiobook rendition of Stop Fixing Yourself is very, very good. I disagree with some of the conclusions which are effectively along the lines — I shouldn’t say, this might sound unfair, but in the conclusion, he talks about how ultimate freedom is not depending on anyone for anything and you could be perfectly happy in isolation by yourself. And I was like, “Evolutionarily. I think that’s actually a pretty hard sell.”

But what I would suggest is if you listen to or read these books, as with any book, expect that you’re going to disagree with and maybe even discard 10 percent, 20 percent of it, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. These are really, really helpful books.

Kevin Rose: Well said.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, let me grab another one here. I’ll recommend two others in case people are interested in books. So, fiction, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I think it might just be Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Anyway, it’s tomorrow three times by Gabrielle Zevin, Z-E-V-I-N. It’s a fiction book and it was on the New York Times’ list of the hundred best books of the 21st century. It’s a new one and it is all about entrepreneurship and game design and love unrequited. And when I recommended this book initially in 5-Bullet Friday, my newsletter, one of my attorneys who helped craft the agreement for Coyote, another stocking stuffer, the card game that I made which is 20 —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know this is on a Black Friday sale, by the way, it’s 38 percent off on Amazon right now or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s 7.99 right now. It’s doing super well there. The reviews are great. It’s like 4.7 or 4.8 stars.

Kevin Rose: Man, I’m so proud of you, dude. This is so cool to see you having success here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks man.

Kevin Rose: I thought you were going to do The 5-Hour Body and I was like, “Ah, you probably shouldn’t go there,” and it’s nice to see you doing this.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, it’s been super fun. But my attorney, who helped with the negotiations on deal structuring for Coyote, specializes in video games and he’s been involved with some epic deals and amazing mergers and acquisitions and all this crazy stuff. And he texted me after I put that in the newsletter and he said, “That book is so good. It was eerie because it is so accurate down to the finest detail that it felt like somebody was looking over my shoulder when I was doing these deals.” That is how well researched this book is. You would love it. I really think you would enjoy it.

Kevin Rose: My old assistant, Sarah, who’s amazing, she gifted it to me and it burned in the fire when my house burned down.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, you’ve got to read it.

Kevin Rose: But I need to get it because she was like, “You’ve got to listen to this book.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, it’s so good. Yeah, it’s great. And then the last one I’ll recommend just because we gave some nonfiction, then just gave fiction. I’ll give poetry, which people might not expect, but it’s a little tiny compilation. This also has an entire shelf in my guest room. It’s called Gold, it’s by Rumi. And then the translator, Haleh Liza Gafori, last name G-A-F-O-R-I, 112 pages. And it is just an incredible collection of poetry, of course, originally by the great Persian mystic Rumi, but with incredible new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori, who is an American poet of Persian descent.

So, she’s a native speaker and also, she herself a poet and musician. So, if you read one or two of these poems before you go to bed at night, it just makes everything better. So I would also just recommend. I can keep going with gift recommendations, but I suspect you have more. I would like to mention anymore.

Kevin Rose: Oh, I’ve got some great ones, dude. Yeah, absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: Why don’t we do two at a time? Why don’t you do two and then I’ll do another two.

Kevin Rose: Okay. I’m going to make you a multi-billionaire from how many people buy this next one, I’m going to say with your Amazon affiliate link.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: This right here, my friend, is the best purchase I’ve ever made in my life.

Tim Ferriss: Whoa, that’s a strong statement.

Kevin Rose: Okay, maybe not, but it’s high up there.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay.

Kevin Rose: Have you ever been in one of those situations where you need a small, little screwdriver or a screw head and you can’t find the right one that fits?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: This is 25 different micro, everything from hex nuts to screwdrivers to flatheads, and it’s a magnetic little insert into the actual one. Now you think, okay, who cares? But it’s $7.79 and it acts like a $25 screwdriver. It is the best stocking stuffer in the world.

Once a year or twice a year you’ll get something where it takes two double As or whatever, and there’s a little, tiny screwdriver thing you’ve got to undo.

Tim Ferriss: Totally.

Kevin Rose: Where am I going to find something that fits that? This is that thing. And then when you want to tweak your glasses or whatever, you need those micro screwdrivers. Dude, $7, this thing rocks. It’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: How did you find this thing?

Kevin Rose: It had good reviews on Amazon. I bought it and when I got it, I was like, they should be charging three times as much for this thing. The torque doesn’t actually ruin the bit heads, which is great because oftentimes with the cheaper ones, the bit heads get ruined.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Anyway. You have to have it in every junk drawer in your house. It’s one of those things. But I love these things. Back in the day, when you were doing 5-Bullet Friday where you wanted me to contribute stuff, you would say, “Hey, what’s the best thing under $50, or whatever, that you love?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. This is it.

Kevin Rose: This is one of those things that’s under $10 that is absolutely worth every penny.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, love it. All right. So under $10, I don’t know if it’s $10, might be a little bit more, but in addition to the Rubz ball, I’ll just give a couple of quickfire. There’s something called the Alpha Ball by Tune Up Fitness. It was actually introduced to me by Nsima Inyang, or Inyang, I think is how he pronounces it, but you sent me his video, so you are responsible —

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — for me ultimately connecting with him. But this Alpha Ball for rolling out your hips, for traveling with, it’s about the size of a softball, but it’s just the perfect density and texture, you can get everywhere you need to get, which you cannot do with a foam roller, nor is it easy to travel with a foam roller.

I just love this thing. I use it pretty much every day. So, that’s the two —

Kevin Rose: I didn’t see it on video. Did you hold it up?

Tim Ferriss: No, I have it downstairs in my suitcase actually. But the —

Kevin Rose: Okay, let me look it up. What’s it called again?

Tim Ferriss: Alpha Ball by Tune Up Fitness. You can find it on Amazon. It’s 19.99, more than worth every penny. I can send you a link to it, of course.

Kevin Rose: Sweet.

Tim Ferriss: Then other things I’ll throw in there, this is going to be one of those things. This is my version of your little TED talk that you just gave on the —

Kevin Rose: Screwdrivers.

Tim Ferriss: — $7 screwdrivers where people are like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” This is my version of that, which is the — I don’t know how to pronounce this, Maestri, M-A-E-S-T-R-I. Maestri House rechargeable milk frother. All right.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know. Right?

Kevin Rose: Mine was better than that, but —

Tim Ferriss: Hold on —

Kevin Rose: Keep going.

Tim Ferriss: — hold on, hold on. I have owned so many of these frothers for coffee, for tea, for whatever, protein shakes or whatever, these little hand frothers. They always —

Kevin Rose: They all break. They all suck, dude.

Tim Ferriss: They all break, or the batteries die and then you can’t recharge it, or it’s —

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: — like an outboard motor and you’re like, oh, let me just do this for my tea and relax, and it shoots liquid all over the place.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: There’s so many issues. This thing is like the Lamborghini of milk frothers. It costs —

Kevin Rose: Ooh, I love that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It costs how much? 30 bucks. It’s not that crazy.

Kevin Rose: It’s USB-C 2 charging. That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: It’s USB-C. You basically turn the very top of it to adjust in any increment you want the intensity of the agitation. I have to tell you, I asked somebody on my team to just do diligence and get me a frother that would solve all these problems that I mentioned. He knows how to do a lot of research and this was his conclusion, and I got it and I was like, “Where has this been all my life? Oh, my God.”

Has almost 3,000 reviews, or 2,600 reviews, 4.5 stars. This thing is just amazing. I use it every day. That’s one. When I put this in 5-Bullet Friday, what I wrote was, “It reminds me of Sage Wisdom from Kevin Kelly,” who is the founding editor of —

Kevin Rose: Oh, I love Kevin Kelly.

Tim Ferriss: — Wired magazine. Amazing guy.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. We did a walk with him together.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. He had, at that time, I think it was a draft of a book that he put together, this tiny book called Excellent Advice for Living, which are these pithy little quotes from Kevin that he used to put in his — I think they were his birthday letters to friends where he’d be like, “Here are the 10 things I learned this year.”

One of his pieces of advice is, “Take note if you find yourself wondering where is my good knife or where is my good pen. That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.” I have shelves full of shitty frothers that have been sent to me or that I’ve bought and they’re just terrible, so I just got rid of all of them and replaced them with this thing.

Kevin Rose: That’s so awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Other things, real quick: microphone. I got this microphone for travel called the Elgato, one word.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, I love Elgato.

Tim Ferriss: Elgato Wave:3. It is a gorgeous piece of design. It makes me think of Braun design back in the day, B-R-A-U-N, and it actually solves, somehow, bounce and echo better than even this fancy mic, this Shure mic that I’m speaking into right now. It is really impressive. I don’t know what they do with the firmware, software, whoever the hell designs these types of things, but this has become my favorite travel mic, is the Elgato Wave:3.

Also, not that expensive.

Kevin Rose: Have you seen their prompter by the way? They make a tiny, little prompter —

Tim Ferriss: I haven’t seen it.

Kevin Rose: — if you want to read scripts or anything like that. Oh, Elgato makes this beautiful, little prompt you can control with an iPhone or an iPad. For people that are doing monologues and podcasts and stuff like that, Elgato is some great gear and it’s not that expensive. It’s well priced.

Tim Ferriss: This one, the Wave:3 — I’ll check out the prompter — it’s got almost 10,000 reviews, 4.7 stars, 150 bucks. I rely on it to the extent that I’m professional, a professional loves recording.

There’s a lot more I could jump into. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give one that is expensive, but the best of breed, which is the TANK M3 push sled. This is a sled. It’s literally sitting right outside my door, about 100 feet away. I have tried so many different sleds for resolving back pain, for building all posterior chain development and strength, glute activation, you name it. Pushing and pulling a sled just gives you so many dividends. KneesOverToesGuy also talks about this at length, but the TANK M3 push sled is —

Kevin Rose: Holy shit, it’s pricey.

Tim Ferriss: — bar none the best sled I’ve ever used. Yeah. How much is it? Did you just pull it up?

Kevin Rose: 1,500 on Amazon.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 1,500. Yeah, 1,500 bucks. I would not —

Kevin Rose: It looks amazing though.

Tim Ferriss: I would not trade it. You can easily rotate it. It has mechanical resistance. For instance, I’m pushing it in a gravel driveway. It’s not just skids. You can use this on turf, you can use this on carpets, you can use it indoors without destroying the floor. It’s just an amazing sled. If people are looking for best of the best, in my opinion, and versatility, that’s one.

And then if you don’t want more stuff or you want to give something to friends or family who don’t need more physical things — I am talking my book a little bit here because I’m involved with the company, but The Way App. It’s so easy, right?

Kevin Rose: Henry’s the best, man.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to be doing hopefully another retreat in-person together. It started out as just my hand-down favorite meditation app. It’s the easiest way to get back in the habit. I just used it yesterday morning and this morning. I tend to do 10-minute sessions and then sometimes do an extra 10 minutes of TM or something after the fact.

I think you can get 30 sessions for free with no credit card required —

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — to try it out. And then if you want to give an annual membership, that’s 100 bucks. You can just download the app for free and then tap My Way and share it with people that way with a gift button.

Kevin Rose: I’ll definitely add onto that. And I’ll say that I met Henry, the creator of The Way App, and he’s one of the very few Zen masters that are fully accredited in the United States. It is such a treat to interact with and have Henry as a guide and you get a pocket Zen master.

I don’t want to sell this, but I will say that in the last — I started training with him in terms of meeting with him over Zoom during COVID, and now it’s been a few years, there is no better money spent in terms of — for me it has been more of retreats and things like that that I’ve been to of his. But meditation in terms of my just general anxiety and general way of moving through life, it’s been a game changer. It’s been a game changer.

And Henry, I will give him a ton of credit there. One of the things that he told me early on, it still hits me today, is, “It’s not about, ‘Can I put in an hour a day of meditation?’ It’s better to put in just 10 minutes a day or five minutes a day and do it consistently than it is to try and achieve the mountaintop and go all out.”

Can you just show up consistently? And I think if you do it for the first 30 days, you’ll feel it. You’ll feel it.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, you’ll notice something much earlier, in my experience. Henry has this expression, I’m going to paraphrase it, but basically if you do the practice, even if in some sessions you’re like, my mind is all over the place, I feel like that was a waste of time, “If you walk consistently in the fog, you can’t help but get wet.” is one of his expressions, meaning it compounds over time and even if you feel like individual sessions aren’t doing much, it does actually compound. If people want to keep it simple, you can find a QR code at thewayapp.com/tim and that’ll give you 30 free sessions with no credit card, so people can check that out if they want.

What else do we have, Kevin? You have —

Kevin Rose: I’ve got one more that’s fun. It is on the slightly pricier side. It’s a little over $200, close to $300. Actually, it’s a walking treadmill. My wife, Darya, turned me onto this. It is a very thin, tiny, little walking treadmill that has phenomenal reviews. You just throw it underneath your desk and for under $300 you can set the incline to 10 and it’s all with a little, tiny remote control. There’s nothing to hold onto, because you have your desk. You can just work and it rolls away because it only weighs 50 pounds, and you can just stash it in the corner.

I think it’s the best walking treadmill. We did a bunch of research and it’s the best one under $300. Great way to get some exercise in there. Throw on a weighted vest there and you’re in a really good place.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, that’ll be plenty. I saw that when Darya was showing me her office. I was like, oh, look at that. There it is.

Kevin Rose: That’s right. You got the tour. I wasn’t even home and you came over and stole my sleeping meds and —

Tim Ferriss: Snagged your Belsomra —

Kevin Rose: That’s it.

Tim Ferriss: — took a spin on the walking treadmill and then took off. Yeah, I still owe you a trade for that.

I do see in your notes, do you want to take a second and run people through Kevin’s current AI stack? This is all Greek to me, I don’t even understand what half of this means.

Kevin Rose: Okay, real quick. I don’t know if you want to touch on New Year’s resolutions really fast —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it after the AI stack.

Kevin Rose: AI Stack, one of the things that I’ve noticed is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the space is this idea of an AI assistant that is not your phone, but something that you can call when you need to remember something, when you need to take notes, when you — Tim, I was wearing that little pendant when you and I got together.

Tim Ferriss: Hate it, hate it.

Kevin Rose: It’s always recording, and Tim goes to me, he is like, “It’s always recording?” I was like, “Yeah.” And he goes, “I hate to ask you this, but can you just take it off? It’s too much anxiety for me.” So I had to take off that pendant and put it in my bag.

But I agree with you, in that it is weird. It does cripple our conversations in our honesty when you know there’s something that’s listening all the time, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 100 percent.

Kevin Rose: A couple things, Nothing, the Android phone company, I’m not an investor or anything like that, they make headphones, which I’m wearing right now for this podcast. But one of the things that was really cool, when they released these headphones a month ago, they have a little talk button on the headphones. If you hold down talk as you’re holding your headphones case, I can record anything and it goes into their AI and it creates to-do lists for me, notes —

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.

Kevin Rose: — whatever it may be.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a cool feature.

Kevin Rose: It’s just fun. Yeah. There was a company called Sandbar and we invested. True, it wasn’t my deal.

Tim Ferriss: Quick question. Do you need to have an Android phone to use those?

Kevin Rose: Yes, you need to have a Nothing phone.

Tim Ferriss: Bummer.

Kevin Rose: That’s the problem. But the idea is sound in that it’s not always on, it’s just when you need it, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yep, yep.

Kevin Rose: One of the things that Sandbar did, and I have one of their prototype rings around here somewhere. One of the things that Sandbar did is they created a ring, almost like an Oura ring, where if you just lightly touch it, you can whisper to any notes that you might want and it saves it in the AI cloud on your phone, Android OS, whatever.

If you have headphones in, it’ll respond back to you. So like, “Hey. Remind me, what’s that meeting I have tomorrow?” just quietly. It doesn’t listen to the entire room, and then it gives you that data back in your headphones.

Anyway. Sandbar is not out yet. It’s coming out middle of next year. I highly recommend sandbar.com, checking out. Like I said, it is something that we invest in at the fund level, but it’s not my deal. But I will say, I like where this is going. Even if it’s not Sandbar, something like this that is a little companion, that is not your big ass phone, that can be engaged with when you want to jot something down is quite cool.

Outside of that, I would say AI on the Notion front has been quite good. The agents that they’ve added inside of Notion are phenomenal and that continues to get better.

Tim Ferriss: What do you use that for? How do you use that?

Kevin Rose: Notion, just added note-taking now. If you’re in a Zoom or any type of video call, it will automatically prompt you to record the entire thing. By default, I always say to people, Notion’s not actually recording the audio, but they are transcribing it, and they put the meeting notes and the bullet points into my Notion for me, and then I can ask questions of that transcript later on.

Call it a week or two later, I’m like, “Hey, Tim mentioned some really cool book by Anthony de Mello, which one was it?” and it would, boom, right there, it’s within two seconds. That’s really cool. And then you can ask questions of your entire corpus of data. So, if you’re storing a bunch of stuff in there — I had my EIN number for one of my LCs and I’d be like, “Hey, what’s the EIN number for this LC?” Two seconds later, it’s out. That’s fun.

Tim Ferriss: When do you think Gemini built into G Suite will be good enough to do that for an inbox?

Kevin Rose: It is now. It is now.

Tim Ferriss: Is it?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it is.

Tim Ferriss: Because it was so disappointing as of even a few weeks ago.

Kevin Rose: I just enabled it, this deeper integration. I don’t know if I’m a beta tester, but they let me in, and it does exactly what I just said. It’s within the coming weeks if I’ve happened to be on some beta list and whatever.

Who will do this right now is actually the Gemini — oh, what are they calling it? It’s their AI suite where you can drop documents into it and everything. Everyone’s screaming it right at me. You know what I’m talking about, right? Have you played with this?

Tim Ferriss: No, no. Oh, wait, are you talking about NotebookLM? No.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, NotebookLM. Yeah, NotebookLM is getting better and better. Here’s a fun hack. This is a great one for your audience because they like your productivity, everything. One thing that’s really fun is, imagine there’s something you want to learn that’s new. Insert anything. You want to learn how to do basic Pilates. Go to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever else and say, “Hey, give me a deep research guide on the fundamentals of Pilates,” and then you hit go. You wait five minutes, whatever, it gives you back a whole script.

You copy that, paste it into NotebookLM, and say, “Create me a five-minute podcast on the fundamentals of Pilates,” and you have an instant podcast primer on that thing. I use that for coding technologies. I’ve used that for quantum computing. Tim, do you know how quantum computing works? Do you know how gates fold on each other when —

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: I didn’t. I dropped that in there and then you say, “Explain it like I’m five in a podcast.” Or not five, but you’d say, “Explain it like I’m a —

Tim Ferriss: Fifth grader.

Kevin Rose: — freshman in college.” Yeah, like I’m a fifth grader, whatever. I have aphantasia and I have no way to recall this later. It gives you this great, little podcast and it’s a fun, little way to learn anything new on the go.

Tim Ferriss: I have to give a plug, and I am an investor in this company. It came up in a group thread. I don’t think he would mind me mentioning this. Our mutual friend, Chris Sacca, was like, “My daughter just taught herself about stock trading,” and this, this, and this. He took a screenshot and he’s like, “She created her own curriculum,” and —

It was from a startup called Oboe. If people go to Oboe, that’s O-B-O-E.fyi, so oboe.fyi, it just says, “What do you want to learn about? We’ll make you a course.” You literally just type it out and it gives you everything in one place.

Kevin Rose: Are you an investor in this?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m an investor. Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose: I noticed you had mentioned before — what was it? This would be fun for 30 seconds. When you were pitched this, because you were very — you say no to a lot of things, which is great, as every —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: — investor should. What was it about this that really hooked you in?

Tim Ferriss: There were a few things. It was the people involved. I had some familiarity with the people involved and I had confidence in their ability to execute. Also, this is what I do, right? In the sense that if I have tried to hone any single skill, it is deconstructing and simplifying complex subjects, then putting material in some type of logical sequence, doing 80/20 analysis on the 20 percent of material that makes the difference, and the material beats method a lot of the time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I’ve thought a lot about this and I was like, all right, the thesis and mission of the company makes a lot of sense to me. Will they be the winner? I have no idea. That is a much harder question. That informs bet sizing and things along those lines. But I have a lot of confidence in the founders. The company itself was introduced to me, or the founding team behind it, by another founder who’s had exits, who is an investor, who’s a friend of mine.

And I thought to myself, even if this just goes towards creating a product that I, myself will use — which is really where I start with a lot of my investing. Sometimes I succeed when I stray from that, but my hit rate is a lot higher when — say, in the case of Uber or Shopify or any of these other —

Kevin Rose: Yes, it’s a core competence of yours.

Tim Ferriss: Duolingo, these are — I know at least I am a market of one —

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: — for all of these products, and Oboe would fall in that category. That’s how I decided to invest. With these companies, it’s also not a bet-the-farm scenario, at least not for me. It’s you’re creating a portfolio with the recognition that 70, 80 percent of your investments are going to go to zero.

But I try to answer the question, how can I win even if this goes to zero? How can I win? It’s if I help to in some way support a product and the development of a product that I use myself to learn a bunch of stuff quickly, then given the leverage that I think I can create or find in the world, it’s like, wow. If I have a smooth way, an elegant way to learn more about a few different —

I’ll give you an example. If I’m considering, and I’ve already done this, if I’m doing due diligence on a company that I can’t talk about right now, but it’s innovating in biotech, and I want to learn as much as possible about different types of mRNA therapeutics, I’m not coming from a background that enables me to do that. If I then am able to do due diligence a hundred times faster because I’m not sending out 15 emails to people I think might be able to assist, and I’d still do that level of due diligence, but if let’s just say that 50 K investment allows me to then do due diligence in a way that allows me to place two or three other bets more effectively, I’ve very likely made my money back.

Whether it’s with investing or choosing projects like the card game, Coyote, or anything else, my fundamental, underlying question is: Can this be a win even if it fails with, let’s just say, the primary external metric of sales or exit or whatever it might be? If I’m developing skills and relationships that snowball and transcend any single project, then that’s a vote in favor of doing something. oboe.fyi would fit into that bucket for me.

It made me so happy to see Sacca’s daughter when she’s whatever, 12 or 13, creating her own course. I was like, okay, that’s a good sign that makes me happy.

Kevin Rose: I just clicked on one of the things to create a course for me. It’s pretty cool because right away it said, “Do you want this in podcast format, which is seven minutes?” or, “Do you want this in lectured recording, which is 20 minutes?”

Tim Ferriss: That’s awesome.

Kevin Rose: That’s built into the product from step one.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, from step one. And like you said, this is the blocky, brick, Motorola version. The rate of iteration for something like this is going to be so extreme, it’s going to be head spinning, so we’ll see.

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: I’m excited about it.

Kevin Rose: All right, the moment you all have been waiting for, Tim’s girlfriend.

Tim Ferriss: Thought I —

Kevin Rose: Come on, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Thought I got out of —

Kevin Rose: No, no, no. People are —

Tim Ferriss: I —

Kevin Rose: They want to know what’s up with Tim’s personal life.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not going to dox anyone who doesn’t opt into being doxed, so I’ll skip any identifying particulars. It’s getting serious quickly. She’s incredibly —

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: — sweet, incredibly self-aware, intelligent.

For people who are wondering, of all places, met on Hinge. Have to kiss a lot of frogs or go on a lot of dates, it’s a lot of reps, a lot of swiping and a lot of noise to get to that point. But it did work.

Kevin Rose: What was the first date like?

Tim Ferriss: First date was Greek food, very chill, felt very much — I pay a lot of attention to this. You know that I have a very sensitive nervous system, and I just immediately felt down-regulated and at ease with her. That’s a lot. That’s not a small thing for me. Keeps me on my toes, is very funny, is very good at calling me on my bullshit.

I’m optimistic. We’ll see. We’ll see. Super, super happy. Doing Thanksgiving together and —

Kevin Rose: Oh, wow. Family introduction time and all that shit?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, she met my family already quite a while ago. It’s —

Kevin Rose: I’ve only met her once. One final question then I’ll let you out the hot box. What is the hardest thing for you at this stage? Because you get to this point where there’s this honeymoon phase and then all of a sudden that starts to peel off and it’s in the nitty-gritty of life.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: What’s the hardest, most challenging part about this next, call it, six months?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I have the ability to predict, but my guess would be — I think what I’m about to describe is a plight of modern dating in general, at least as I’ve seen it among my friends and pretty much anyone who I’ve ever spoken to about this or if I ever mention modern datings in the app-based dating world. It’s such a game of roulette.

The apps are designed to be as addictive as possible. I think the challenge for almost anyone who has been part of that playing field is when things get hard, when things are hard, when you have friction that lasts more than a day or a week, to stay the course and do the work necessary to resolve that as opposed to just being like, ah, fuck this, I’m just going to go back to the well.

Kevin Rose: Because the well’s right there.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s 20 seconds away and a swipe away, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: That’s the downfall of these whole things. It’s so easy to move on to the next thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. They are all designed to be, of course, as addictive as possible. And even though they might say they’re designed to be deleted, by definition, since they have a fiduciary responsibility, a legal fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, their business model is entirely dependent on recurring revenue. So, they’re designed to keep you using the app as long as humanly possible. I don’t blame them for that. That’s just the way that this ecosystem works. But it is something to be aware of because they are seductive and they’re designed to be seductive, these apps, in every way conceivable.

I would say that, step number one, take that stuff off your phone. And then number two is, fortunately I feel like over my last few long relationships — I’ve had some very long relationships. Five, six years in two cases — that I’ve developed a toolkit. I can always use more work and more refinement, but it’s like, do you have the basics of something approximating Nonviolent Communication? Do you ask for what you want and do you tell someone if they’re doing something that you don’t want?

These seem like very obvious, self-evident things you should do, but a lot of people struggle with both of those, and then that breeds resentment or people bottle things up and then they explode and they say things they can’t take back. To what extent have you tried to mitigate those things? Do you have a toolkit?

There are very good books out there, very good workshops. I’ve read a lot of these books and I’ve gone to a lot of workshops. As much as I’ve felt like I wanted to poke my eyes out with bicycle spokes at points in these workshops and seminars because I can only take so much of it —

Kevin Rose: Same.

Tim Ferriss: — they do help though. It could be something really small. And there are things you learn along the way, at least I have, as you get older, which is you can have almost anything you want in life if you discuss it openly and early. If you have weaknesses, if you have requests, if you have needs, if you have things that you value that are maybe weirdly out of proportion to most people, just talking about that stuff early sets the stage for success or at least communication.

Very early on in this relationship, having conversations about conversations, if that makes sense, having open communication about how we’d like to communicate the challenges we have with communication. How we’re going to communicate, biasing towards honesty and being direct, even if you need to do a little bit of cleanup afterwards, has just saved a lot of brand damage.

In this case, I think we both have very growth-oriented mindsets. I think both of us are pretty good at taking feedback. There are times when you’re just too sleep deprived or pissed off or bitchy or irritable, and you’re not good at taking feedback. You’re always going to have those days. But overall, I think we’re both eager to improve and we’re good at giving feedback in a way that generally doesn’t come off as too holier than now, judgmental. We’ll see, we’ll see.

But in terms of the challenges, I think the challenges are always — I shouldn’t say always, that’s a big word. Man, so much of it just comes down to communication. Do you have the tools? Have you, say, read or listened to Terry Real? Have you both listened or read Terry Real so that you have some scripts or some shared language that you can use as shorthand? And —

Kevin Rose: The problem I have with Terry Real is that if it’s taken too literally, it can sound formulaic.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Rose: I don’t want to do the formula, let’s just talk, it can be a bit —

Tim Ferriss: Here’s what I would say about that. I’d say that almost anything that works repeatedly is a formula. In the beginning, I think it’s important, as rote as it might seem, to — let’s just say the book, Nonviolent Communication, I think it’s Marshall Rosenberg, it’s a great book, but after a while you’re like, oh, my God, am I really going to say again, “When you did X, as a video camera would’ve recorded it, I felt Y. And the story I make up is X.”

Kevin Rose: That stuff. “The story I make up…” kills me.

Tim Ferriss: But here’s the thing. I know it kills you and —

Kevin Rose: Stop saying, “The story I make up…”

Tim Ferriss: But here’s the thing. As much as you might hate it, what you would hate more is, “Kevin, I fucking hate when you do X. It makes me feel Y, because you always do Z.” That’s worse, I think, right? You might be like —

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — ah, with the formula, but the amount of damage you can do when you veer completely away from it is a lot. And then once you have the, I’d say, basic mastery or fluency with the formula, then you can deviate, right?

Kevin Rose: Right, right.

Tim Ferriss: Then you can start to deviate. But for instance, Terry, as any couples therapist, has certain frameworks and formulas. But there are also underlying philosophical principles that I think apply to a million different things that are outside of formulas. I’ll give you an example.

One thing that Terry says — I think this is in Fierce Intimacy, which is an audio book, you can’t find a print version of it. I highly recommend it to folks. The point he makes is — it’s real simple — objective reality has no place in a relationship. What the hell does that mean?

What that means is if you’re out at dinner and then the waiter comes over and the wife orders and then the waiter walks away and the husband’s like, “Honey, you don’t need to yell at him,” and she’s like, “I wasn’t yelling,” and then it turns into a whole bullshit argument about whether she was yelling or not.

If the husband were to say, “Honey, actually I hired a professional audiologist with the latest cutting-edge technology and recording equipment, and they’re sitting right at the table next to us. If we accept the commonly defined threshold for yelling at XYZ decimals, if you look at these numbers, you can see that in fact you were, by scientific definition, yelling,” is that going to fix the problem? No, it’s going to be a huge fucking mess, right?

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: His point is the stories matter and the subjective matters and very — shorthand for that is objective — he may not word it exactly this way, but objective reality just doesn’t have a place in, let’s just say, an argument. We’re going to make mistakes. Occasionally, especially someone like me is going to try to appeal to some objective measure of God knows what.

But if you can just postpone that judgment even for a minute or two, it just makes a world of difference, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe it makes me sound like I’m really remedial in the EQ communication department. I actually don’t think that’s true. I think I’m pretty good. It’s like going to the gym, it’s like playing pool or shooting archery or whatever, it’s not a one-and-done thing, right?

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: If you don’t practice these things, you will revert to whatever your parents did. Period.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s so true.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I don’t want to model that. That was a goddamn mess.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I found that if my partner gets upset, just sitting down and saying, “Calm down.” is huge.

Tim Ferriss: That works —

Kevin Rose: It just works every time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: Or, “You’re being like your mother.” Those are things that are just really just home runs.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. “Why are you so hysterical like your mother?”

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Works like a charm. I think that’s Terry Real’s second principle. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Just say “calm down” and then you’re good, you’re good. They’ll be like, “Oh, I was being so crazy. You’re right. I should just calm down.”

Tim Ferriss: I think also just expecting there to be bumps. There are always going to be bumps and — we’ll see, we’ll see. But —

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s been great so far. I feel super, super lucky, really, really fortunate.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. I mean, you only date supermodels, so you should feel lucky.

Tim Ferriss: That’s not true. That’s not true.

Kevin Rose: I’ve met her. You have a supermodel on your hands. She’s great.

Tim Ferriss: She’s very pretty, but she’s also very, very smart, knows how to adult, knows how to take care of things in the world. Which isn’t asking too much, but it’s surprising how many aspiring stay-at-home girlfriends you can find out there who have no intention of operating in the world.

I feel very, very lucky, super, super fortunate.

Kevin Rose: I’m excited for you, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah —

Kevin Rose: Can we just spend some more time with her? Our first interactions were great. I’m excited to get to know her better.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, she’s incredibly kind, not a malicious bone in her body, but at the same time, hilariously blunt in some cases and sometimes not so hilariously blunt, but I’ll take it. It’s a package deal, I’ll take it.

Kevin Rose: You’ve got a bit of that too though, right? So, it’s like —

Tim Ferriss: I’ve got some of that. Yeah, I do too. I’ve got some of that, for sure.

Kevin Rose: I’ve known enough of your ex-girlfriends to know that you’ve got a little bit of that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ve got a little bit of that. It’s true. Oh, man. I think I’ve probably checked the box of talking about the girlfriend.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to have dinner very shortly. Happy Thanksgiving, man.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, happy Thanksgiving. I would say the only thing on my side, just to bring people to speed on, is I have a new tech podcast that I’m very excited about that I’m going to launch in the new year. Kevinrose.com for my 4-Bullet Friday, which is a much faster read. No, I don’t — I only put out one email every month and a half or every — but it’s always packed with the latest AI stuff I’m playing with, all that stuff.

Anyway. That’s my only plug of the show, is kevinrose.com, for the newsletter.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, check it out. Check it out, folks. We’ll hit New Year’s resolutions and stuff next time we do a Random Show. Let’s do it. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: We’ll do that, because I need to dust mine off and blow the film that has settled on those and look at them in higher resolution, so I could use a little extra time. And we’ll —

Kevin Rose: Love it.

Tim Ferriss: We’ll get after it.

Kevin Rose: Love you, brother. Always good to see you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, love you too, bud.

Kevin Rose: And thanks for sharing more of the personal side with us. Everybody gets a kick out of that and it’s always fun to hear your adventures. But I’m excited for you marching forward and I have good vibes about this one.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks, man. It’s a fucking jungle out there.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Modern dating, it is simultaneously so fun if you hit your groove in a playing-the-field kind of way, but it’s also so incredibly exhausting and frustrating and can be very demoralizing. And —

Kevin Rose: I don’t feel bad for you, honestly. I’ve gotten some of your texts. I think you had a damn good run. You had a good run.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not complaining. I’m just saying I feel most at home, at ease, at peace when I am with my current girlfriend. It’s qualitatively a world of difference from just running around like some horny bastard with his hair on fire. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but —

Kevin Rose: Not that there’s any hair left, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Not that there’s any hair left. And also just be aware, whether you’re on X or Instagram, but especially on the dating apps because it is selling sex and things that are hardwired to hijack your attention, your faculties are being exploited to the maximum degree possible. It’s just something to be aware of. Really check your state before and after using these things to determine how much you might want to use them or if you want to put safeguards around how long you spend on these things.

All right. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Kevin Rose: Love it.

Tim Ferriss: Cool, brother. Love you very much. Please give a hug to Darya and the girls for me.

Kevin Rose: Will do.

Tim Ferriss: And —

Kevin Rose: Same on my side. How’s Molly doing? Molly’s good?

Tim Ferriss: Molly’s great. Yeah, Molly’s doing great. And —

Kevin Rose: How old is Molly now?

Tim Ferriss: Molly’s 10. I’m actually going to adopt a —

Kevin Rose: Ah.

Tim Ferriss: — puppy. I’m going to get a second dog next month. Super excited.

Kevin Rose: Toaster’s 15 now. You saw him when you came to the house.

Tim Ferriss: I did.

Kevin Rose: I wasn’t there when you were there.

Tim Ferriss: Oh.

Kevin Rose: Isn’t he moving slower? It’s hard to watch.

Tim Ferriss: He was. He also had just come from the vet and his paw was all taped up and he was —

Kevin Rose: Oh, geez.

Tim Ferriss: — drugged out of his mind —

Kevin Rose: I know.

Tim Ferriss: — when I saw him. Yeah, 15, he’s getting up there.

Kevin Rose: I know. We gave him rapa, so I’m hoping for — I mean, we’ve already seen a 20 percent boost in lifespan, so we’ll see.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I need to get Molly on rapa. That’s going to be one of my tasks for December as well. One step at a time.

Kevin Rose: Awesome. All right, brother.

Tim Ferriss: All right, brother. Great to see you, bud.

Kevin Rose: Great to see you.

Tim Ferriss: Everybody listening, you can go to the show notes. We’ll have links to everything at tim.blog/podcast. Random Show, just look for the newest one and we’ll have it for you.

Happy holidays, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

Kevin Rose: Happy holidays.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll see you soon, Kevin. Take care, bud.

Kevin Rose: Peace.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello ( #838) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Random Show — The 2–2–2 Rule, The Future of AI, Bioelectric Medicine, Surviving Modern Dating, The Promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, and Wisdom from Anthony de Mello ( #838)

2025-12-04 05:26:26

Welcome to another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose (digg.com)!

We explore the promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s, Kevin’s AI stack and where AI is heading, the challenges of modern dating, wisdom from Anthony de Mello, bioelectric medicine, and much, much more.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

Qlosi prescription eye drop used to treat age-related blurry near vision (presbyopia) in adults
David Protein Bars with 28g of protein, 150 calories, and 0g of sugar
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Coyote the card game, which I co-created with Exploding Kittens