AI Bubble, Stablecoin Boom, and Runnin' Down a Dream | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner

Pre-Order Runnin' Down a Dream now: https://a.co/d/0oIPPve Open Source bi-weekly convo w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on all things tech, markets, investing & capitalism. This week, they unpack the $3T AI buildout, circular revenue red flags, and whether the boom is becoming a bubble. They dive into the rise of stablecoins and the new financial rails reshaping money, the fight over AI regulation in America, and Bill’s next chapter—his new book Runnin' Down a Dream and what it means to build a career you actually love. Enjoy another episode of BG2! Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:00) Two Years of BG2 (03:45) Bill Stepping Back to Write His Book (06:00) Runnin' Down a Dream (07:00) The AI CapEx Bubble? (09:30) Sham vs. Real Transactions in AI (11:00) Microsoft–OpenAI Credits & Cloud Economics (13:00) Nvidia’s Investments: Healthy or Hype? (17:00) CoreWeave, Hidden Leverage & Demand Risks (19:15) $3 Trillion CapEx: Are We Overbuilding AI? (21:45) The MAG5 CapEx Surge: Too Much, Too Fast? (24:30) Meta’s CapEx Comeback & AI ROI (25:30) OpenAI’s Race for Escape Velocity (28:30) AI Regulation: State Patchwork Madness (30:30) Why Federal Preemption Is Critical (33:15) The Colorado & California AI Acts (35:00) Stablecoin Surge: $18T in Settlements (36:45) Gurley’s Crypto Conversion (38:30) From PIX to FedNow: The Future of Digital Money (41:00) Coinbase, Circle, and the 4% Yield Revolution (43:00) Why Visa & Banks Fear Stablecoins (45:00) Gurley: “I’m Jumping on the Crypto Train” (46:00) Brad on Invest America (Trump Accounts) (49:00) Implementation Timeline & Treasury Update (50:30) Bill’s Book: Runnin' Down a Dream (53:15) The Great Career Reset: Passion vs. Grind (55:00) Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework (57:00) Who the Book Is For (59:00) Gurley’s Next Mission Show Notes: All-In Summit: Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM Plain English: This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-how-the-ai-bubble-could-burst/id1594471023?i=1000728026459 Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ Produced by Dan Shevchuk Music by Yung Spielberg Available on Apple, Spotify, www.bg2pod.com http://www.bg2pod.com Follow: Brad Gerstner @altcap https://x.com/altcap Bill Gurley @bgurley https://x.com/bgurley BG2 Pod @bg2pod https://x.com/BG2Pod

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Bill Gurley?

  I'm applauding the innovation. I'm, I'm, I'm jumping on board the crypto train and I hope, I hope the incumbents aren't able to strangle this thing in Washington.

• 0:21Brad Gerstner?

  Hey, man. Great to see you.

• 0:22Bill Gurley?

  Good to see you, Brad.

• 0:24Brad Gerstner?

  What an incredible weekend of college sports. You know, I have to bring this up. I mean, Texas had that big upset of number six Oklahoma. You had to be pretty stoked about that.

• 0:34Bill Gurley?

  It was a good game. It was fun. People that haven't been to a neutral site game. So like Florida does with Georgia, Texas OU, they meet every year in the middle of the Texas fair. So the stadium's got several hundred thousand people outside of it.

• 0:48Brad Gerstner?

  Oh, my God.

• 0:49Bill Gurley?

  And when you get inside, right on the 50, on both 50s, you know, all one team on the other and all the other fans on the other. So it's loud and it goes back and forth. And it's unlike an experience you get where there's a home team and the crowds all just rooting for one team.

• 1:05Brad Gerstner?

  Oh, that's cool. Well, my Hoosiers, my Indiana Hoosiers, Bill, upset the number three Ducks.

• 1:11Bill Gurley?

  I saw that.

• 1:11Brad Gerstner?

  Going to 6-0.

• 1:13Bill Gurley?

  I have a lot of Duck fans in my, in my friend group, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna refrain from celebrating with you.

• 1:20Brad Gerstner?

  I, I have to, I'm used to celebrating Hoosier basketball, but rarely Hoosier football. But Kurt Signetti has done an unbelievable job turning that program around. My 90-year-old mother was watching that game and sending me play-by-play. So, congrats to, congrats to the Hoosiers.

• 1:35Bill Gurley?

  Well, as long as we're calling out college football teams and then we can move on. UCLA starts the season 0-4, then upsets, upsets Penn State at home with almost no fans there, and wins big again this week. And apparently there was a coaching change after the 0-4. So this could be the biggest turnaround in the history of college football. Go Bruins.

• 1:57Brad Gerstner?

  Pretty incredible. So there's so much happening in the world today. We're gonna unpack a few of those things. We're gonna follow up on some of the issues, Bill, that I raised in the Jensen Pod, you know, the latest AI announcements, all this bubble talk, circularity of revenues, quality of revenues, AI regulation. But we're also gonna do something today and cover something we don't often talk about on the pod, and that's like life and career. Bill, you have a huge book coming out, Runnin Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love. I'm so excited for this book. So we're also gonna talk a little bit about that today. And in the context of that, you know, we're coming up on the two-year anniversary of this

• 2:38Brad Gerstner?

  pod. I can't believe it. Time has flown by, but our, you know, when you and I talked about about doing this, we said our mission, really, we want to talk about markets, investing, capitalism, and companies, but really through the eye of the investment analyst. You and I, more than anything else, I think, are analysts. We try to find the biggest problems, opportunities, challenges in the world, study them deeply. You know, we compare notes nonstop. Occasionally, as an analyst, it leads you to a big investment idea. Sometimes it leads you to a podcast, maybe writing an article, teaching a class, for you writing this book, and sometimes even a major policy initiative like the Invest America Act that actually

• 3:20Brad Gerstner?

  became law. I think you would agree with me, the response over the last two years has been amazing, more than either you or I expected. But, you know, that also creates its own pressure of its own to show up, to deliver those unique insights, and this takes a bunch of time.

• 3:35Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Brad Gerstner?

  So given that, and I don't want to bury the lead here, you have some huge upcoming projects you want to work on, and you're gonna step back from the co-hosting the pod. I'll still talk you in on occasion, maybe to be in a guest, but you're freeing up time to work on your big passions like this book, and going deeper into these topics that people have heard you talk about here, US-China relations, talking about regulatory capture, the dysfunctional state of US healthcare. And for those interested, the pod's mission remains the same. I'm gonna keep the same name. We're gonna keep chopping it up with analysts I respect, sometimes with Bill, and covering topics that matter, you know, like last week's pod with Jensen Huang, or upcoming pods I have with Sam Altman, or

• 4:20Brad Gerstner?

  Satya. This is a moment of, I think, really unique consequence. We both recognize that. We're grateful to have the opportunity to open source these conversations that are truly shaping the future. And I know I speak for you. We do it for the love of the game. Like, this keeps us sharp. It keeps us on edge. You know, and it's a privilege, really, to get on here and chop it up and share something back with the tech ecosystem that gives us, you know, has given us so much. So, Bill, you know, you have anything you want to say?

• 4:50Bill Gurley?

  Sure, sure. Yeah. First of all, just thanks to you, Brad. Like, this has been great going back and forth. I had two primary initiatives coming into it. One, as you mentioned, was to stay sharp. And the other one was to share and give back. And I've been writing my thoughts on, on the tech industry since I was a sell-side analyst, so coming up on 30 years. And always enjoyed thinking out loud. I think it makes us better as analysts and helps us to understand. But, but I also like to share with people. And there's no question in my mind that this got bigger than I ever anticipated that it would. I've been chased down in international cities. Recently, I was, I started talking with someone. They had no idea what I looked like. But the minute they heard

• 5:34Bill Gurley?

  my voice, they're like, oh, you're the guy from the podcast. So it has been popular. And I know there are going to be people that are upset with me. And I can only say, you know, I'm sorry. And I apologize that I'm not going to be doing it anymore. I came across this quote that was really inspiring to me. It said, "Life begins where your comfort zone ends." And there were a number of people that helped push me to write the book. It's taken up quite a bit of time in the last eight years. It's been a very long project. We'll talk about it more later. But I'm feeling a calling to go work on, or at least attempt to work on, some of these bigger issues. So I want to create a platform for that. I want to create room for it and, and move a bit away

• 6:19Bill Gurley?

  from the space that I do know quite well and love quite a bit, but pushing myself, you know, outside of my own comfort zone. And hopefully, You know, having an impact on things that really matter.

• 6:30Brad Gerstner?

  You and I talked about this throughout the entire time I was working on Invest America. I certainly encourage you and push you to do this. I think you have an enormous amount to contribute. And listen, when I, you know, you and I chop it up together every day. I know where you stand on a lot of these issues. I'll bring those opinions to bear for our audience. And, you know, I certainly know that you'll have the burning need to come on as a guest on occasion and, and share some of those views. But, but in the spirit of analysis, let's, let's just dive in. This AI money bubble bill and this Jensen pod, let's start by talking about that. You know, we've had just a flurry of announcements, including another announcement this morning between OpenAI and Broadcom, where OpenAI is going to be building their own inference accelerator,

• 7:15Brad Gerstner?

  amounting to well over a trillion dollars of incremental capex. That's above and beyond what we already knew was going to get built out. I know that you have concerns about the level of capex, the absolute level. And I know that you also have meaningful concerns about how it's being financed. Why don't you walk us through your major concerns?

• 7:36Bill Gurley?

  I think anybody that's been a student of financial history has, you know, studied different types of activities that, that historically, let's just say historically, have created red flags. And the reason that, you know, any AI you talk to would know what you mean if you said circular revenues is because someone has used it in the past in a way that, that wasn't good. And, you know, I had an exercise, which I tweeted, we can put in the show notes, people can find. But I just described, you know, and there's not one thing. There's like six different transactions that have happened now that I would say are non-normal. And I just described those things to ChatGPT and ask it for its analysis,

• 8:21Bill Gurley?

  both as an accountant and as a financial investor. And the AI itself, you know, would, would find its way toward company names like Enron and WorldCom and those kinds of things merely by describing the type of transaction. And so I think that suggests if we believe in intelligent AI, that that's just what historically has been come the best practice and way to think about these things. And I've I've told you before, I think you you have highlighted that some of the multiples are actually not that high. And I think this is part of the reason because there are red flags that people are looking at.

• 8:57Brad Gerstner?

  If you peel that back a little bit more, you know, one of the things that you and I've talked about, the very nature, you know, of round tripping or circular revenues, you know, I think there's this continuum. On one end of the trans, on one end of the continuum is a true sham transaction. There's no underlying demand for the product. I send you a billion dollars, you send me the billion dollars back, right? That's clearly a sham transaction because there's no underlying demand. On the other end, I have massive demand for my product. You have plenty of places you can go get capital and we just happen to have a an investment relationship in addition to that. And I'm buying your product and those things happen all over the place in our economy. And, you know, maybe something to pay attention to, but it's certainly not even close to being illegal.

• 9:43Brad Gerstner?

  And it frankly, doesn't even cause me a lot of concerns about the quality of revenue. And then we have things in the middle, right? And these things in the middle where you can ask a question like, would this much of revenue or product had been purchased? But for this investment, right? And I think that at a minimum calls the revenue, the quality of those revenues into question. So when you look at that, do you discriminate between the types of transactions that have been announced? I mean, you raised this question first 18 months ago about the credit transactions that were occurring with the hyperscaler. So maybe just unpack a few of the different types of transactions.

• 10:18Bill Gurley?

  Yeah, and look, I think it started at the very beginning. And and I think that's one of the things that's causing this is it's become part of the competitive landscape and the competitive dynamic. So. I think there are many boards and many CFOs who have been put in a position where they say, well, if we don't do it, everyone else is doing it, you might fall behind. But it started with the original, from my perspective, with the original Microsoft OpenAI deal where credits go in as a in-kind investment. And then those credits are used back against Azure and Microsoft Cloud Services. And in that case, and I said it back then, I'll say it again now, that's a cashless

• 11:03Bill Gurley?

  transaction. Like, there's no cash, but it becomes an income statement, revenue item for Microsoft. And I don't think that's ideal from an economic standpoint. And that practice has now, I think, happened at Amazon and happened at Google. I think they've made investments in other AI startups with the same kind of thing. And at the very least, it drives usage of their product versus someone else. And in the worst case, it creates revenue that might not have existed had it not been for that deal, or at least not on those terms. But anyway, it started there. It's become quite competitive now.

• 11:46Bill Gurley?

  There's an interesting podcast on Plain Simple, which I don't, Plain English, which is in the Bill Simmons family, with Paul Kudrowski. And he makes the argument that part of the reason these transactions are taking place, I think this is a credible argument he makes, is because some of these players have already put so much CapEx, so much debt on themselves, that they don't want to take the next step. And so in that case, you have reached some level where the company's saying, oops, I feel uncomfortable going further than this. The transaction that comes to my mind when I think of that is there was one where Microsoft,

• 12:28Bill Gurley?

  I mean Meta, agreed to pay for the failure of debt on a facility where they don't own the debt. And to me, that's classic off-balance-sheet financing. If they own the risk of it, just because they don't own the paper, I don't see the difference, really. But this is, like I said, this is happening in a lot of different places.

• 12:50Brad Gerstner?

  You know, one of the things that, you know, again, I've talked about a little bit on All In and other places. If I look at the Nvidia deal as an example, Bill. Nvidia has the opportunity to invest, though not the obligation to invest. OpenAI has the opportunity to use their chips, though not the obligation to use their chips, as evidenced by the fact they just announced their own chip this morning. And they just cut off a huge deal with AMD. And, you know, in the case of Nvidia, you're not talking about a highly levered business. It's a company that's going to generate $450 billion of free cash and is taking a small fraction of that over the next three years and investing in companies that it thinks are good returning investments. I mean, Google and Google Capital have been doing this for, you know, for years, et cetera.

• 13:32Brad Gerstner?

  So again, I think in those cases, you can say for certain that maybe, you know, more of their product is being consumed than would have otherwise been consumed. Right? You know, we saw this announcement last week where they're investing in this XAI with respect to their new round. Most of these companies that they're investing in, I think, have the economic wherewithal to raise the capital in other places. Elon could certainly raise it in other places. OpenAI was well oversubscribed, so they could have raised it in other places. But here's what I think people should be on the lookout for. Okay, so where would I have more concern? Okay, now imagine there's a chip that there's only one customer for.

• 14:16Brad Gerstner?

  So there's not a lot of demand for the chip. And that chip manufacturer gives a customer $10 billion and that customer turns around and buys that chip. Right? So there's no other potential customers and the buyer would not have had the ability to buy it but for that capital. That, to me, raises big red flags. And I do think in this overall ecosystem, the reason I'm happy you're bringing it up, I think one of the things we need to do to keep the wall of worry there, to keep the excesses from emerging, is to call them out. I'm not concerned as a shareholder in Nvidia with what I'm seeing Nvidia do today. I like how they're deploying their cash on their balance sheet. But I do think that-

• 15:00Brad Gerstner?

  As you go further and further out the risk curve, right? Further and further to the startup neo clouds or further and further to startup chips, you know, etc., where people, to your point, are a little bit more desperate for capital, don't have the balance sheets, don't have the market leadership position. I would not be surprised at all in this moment to see more of those yellow flags emerge.

• 15:22Bill Gurley?

  There's a couple of things, you know, that I would say in response. One, there's a reason we know about a lot of these things and that's because some auditor somewhere made them disclose them, like they felt that it was abnormal enough to require disclosure. Second, I heard, I listened to you and the all in team talk about this issue. I do think investment is riskier or more risk seeking than customer loans, which it was compared to. And Cisco got in trouble just with the customer loans because they were giving loans to startups who really didn't have the wherewithal to pay them back. But when, that's really the issue for me, though, when you switch from a loan to an equity, you no longer have to pay it back. So in some ways, it's easier on the purchaser

• 16:07Bill Gurley?

  than if you had a loan themselves. But here's my, here's my bottom line. I think what this does, this, this overall situation is, first of all, I think it's driven by competition at this point. And like the first, the first step into the gray zone was way back at the beginning. And so now I think we're, we're fairly pregnant with it. So I think it's a competitive dynamic. I think it increases the chance that we go over the top, that we end up over provisioning. And I kind of felt like that was unavoidable anyway. But now I think it's higher. And, but I think it maybe pushes out when we find out that happens because you've, you've just created more virtual leverage on the whole

• 16:47Bill Gurley?

  system and you might be hiding some of the signs that would tell you things are slowing down. I'll give you a great example. One of the more peculiar of all the deals is, and this was disclosed in a core weave filing, was Nvidia has promised to buy any of core weave's service availability that they can't sell to anyone else. That is very unusual. That's not. The same as making an investment that could easily help CoreWeave with their debtors and getting more debt financing. But it also means as an investor, we don't know what's going on with real demand for CoreWeave because we probably won't be told if they start moving into the world where they're offloading to Nvidia or not.

• 17:32Bill Gurley?

  And if you'd have said to me, what would you look for to see if we've, you know, kind of reached a point where things are slowing a little bit, you'd say, well, let's look at one of the pure plays. And so now that's muddy.

• 17:44Brad Gerstner?

  I can see how it could be, but I would expect that every analyst on every CoreWeave call for the next, you know, eight quarters, maybe thanks to you just raising the flag, is going to be asking the question, right? Do you see any slowing? Are you having to send any of your of your demand to Nvidia, you know, as a result of this? I mean, one of the things I like about this as well, right? These are public companies, both CoreWeave and Nvidia. It is a disclosed transaction. It's not like this stuff's occurring in the dark of night. People can ask the questions of this, you know, this with regard to demand. And I will tell you, there is the amount of money that is being spent to track every

• 18:27Brad Gerstner?

  single part of this supply chain from Taiwan to the United States. I mean, look at Dylan Patel's business at semi-analysis. The thing has exploded. The amount of money people are spending just to stay on top of this. And the second they see something that smacks of any, you know, leakage in demand, boom, stocks fall and warnings go up. So I think it's a good point, but I think, let me transition because I do want to talk about this question of demand. So on the one hand, there's this question about quality of revenues. On the other question is, are we overbuilding? So let's show this chart again. This is basically the $3 trillion of build out expected over the next five years. This is the capex chart that we've shown here before.

• 19:11Brad Gerstner?

  To put that in perspective, Bill, that's about 60 gigs, right? Because we now are normalizing everything to gigawatts of data center. So that's about six. 60 gigs, it's not all incremental, a lot of that is replacement or upgrade. Keep that in mind. The second is this chart of Nvidia revenues. This is the Nvidia sell-side forecast, okay? Forecast this year is for about 200 billion in revenues, growing to about 350 billion in revenues over the next five years. So this year, that means that they're selling about four to five gigs worth of compute. And again, most of that's incremental, but it's not all incremental. And that would grow to nine gigs of compute, nine in 2029, 2030.

• 19:56Brad Gerstner?

  So that's 350 or 400 billion. That's the Nvidia consensus revenue forecast, right? And I asked Jensen on the pod about this, and I said, "What is the chance that we get into a glut over the course of, you know, the next four or five years?" And we'll play the, you know, the piece, but he basically said, "There's zero chance over the next two to three years, because all the build-out will go to the biggest hyperscalers with the biggest balance sheets in the world, and they're building it to run their core businesses. We haven't even got into the full amount with respect to these new generative AI workloads." What is the percentage probability that you think we'll have a glut, we'll run into a glut in the next three or four or five years?

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Until we fully convert all general-purpose computing to accelerated computing and AI, until we do that.

• 20:54Brad Gerstner?

  Yes.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  I think the chances are extremely low.

• 20:57Brad Gerstner?

  Okay. So here's a question I have for you. Did you hear anything in the last couple of weeks that caused you to believe that we're on the verge of some bubble bursting, or we're greatly overbuilding, or anything else? Or is it just the flags are up and now it's a wait and see?

• 21:13Bill Gurley?

  Yeah, so it's funny, they had Howard Marks on CNBC this morning. I'm a huge Howard Marks fan and they asked him this question and he, he said, look, multiples are too low to, for this to be, you can't be on bubble watch if the multiples aren't high enough. And you've been making this point for a long time. And I would say, like, you'd have to be a fool not to notice that these numbers you're talking about are so remarkably unprecedented from anything we've ever seen before. They are massive. You know, I've talked about, you know, to see the Mag 7 go from being massive cash producers to where they're, many of

• 21:54Bill Gurley?

  them are taking the majority of their free cash flow in CapEx. It's, it's, it's totally new. And clearly, everyone believes that this wave is maybe bigger than the previous waves we've seen that have led to so much value creation. So, all that's happening. I like to believe that it's okay to recognize that the market's great and still think that these transactions shouldn't happen this way. And I'm able to keep both those things in my head at the same time.

• 22:24Brad Gerstner?

  I think, I think it's a super fair point. By the way, you just mentioned it, so we'll include this chart. This is Mag 5 CapEx as a percentage of their operating free cash flow bill. And if you look at it in 2025, so that's this year, they'll spend about 66% of their operating cash flow on CapEx.

• 22:46Bill Gurley?

  Yep.

• 22:47Brad Gerstner?

  Right? And if you look at the, the consensus forecast for their CapEx relative to their operating cash flow, this is the peak, around 66%. It has it going down to about 45 or 50%. Now, embedded in there is they're going to keep growing their operating free cash flow at 15 to 20% a year, right? So, there's still room for them to, to grow with that coming down. But I think that is another thing to keep your eye on. How much are they spending? And by the way, just give you an order of magnitude, Bill. In 2023, their total CapEx was 156 billion. And this year, it's 379 billion.

• 23:27Brad Gerstner?

  Right, so radical step up in your point's a good one. And just remember, a couple of years ago in 2022, when Meta stepped up their capex spending on reality labs, the stock got obliterated because people said, what the hell are you doing? This is all about free cash flow for share, per share, including myself. And I was saying, you know, let's get fit here. Let's drive more free cash flow out of the business. You know, so much so that the CFO sent me a hat that says free cash flow, right? So they got real about free cash flow, but there's a difference between investing that free cash flow in data centers and AI than there was in reality labs. As an investor, let me just tell you my own perspective.

• 24:09Brad Gerstner?

  The reason Meta's stock's doing great, notwithstanding going back to high levels of capex spend, is because now the investors understand it and believe in it. We're seeing the benefits, right, in the earnings of the business. They're growing the earnings of the business. They don't have to hire a lot of new employees. And so it's fundamentally different than the capex that was going into reality labs, where investors were saying, well, hold on a second, we're going to spend 100-plus billion dollars over the next five years? We don't even know what we're building, right? We don't know what it will be worth at the end of the day. So I think for now, at least, there's enough belief in the byproduct of generative AI, because people are using ChatGPT, they're seeing the utility in the enterprise that

• 24:52Brad Gerstner?

  they're going, you know, that they're willing to tolerate these companies giving over half of their free cash flow into these build outs.

• 25:00Bill Gurley?

  I do think another dynamic is the race condition created by the competitive dynamic. And it appears from where I sit, and you don't need to comment because you're an investor and maybe have more information than I do, probably have more information than I do. But it appears to me that OpenAI, through all these partnerships and announcements, is trying to create escape velocity, you know? And that could be against the model providers, it could be against a hosting provider, depending on how you think the market plays out. It could be on the consumer side, it could be on the API side. But it creates an interesting stress test for anyone else in the ecosystem to say, are you going to lay chase?

• 25:42Bill Gurley?

  Because of all the numbers you laid out there, they're gargantuan. And it'll be interesting. That's my opinion. It just feels like they're daring people to follow them. And I suspect a bunch don't. It may work.

• 25:56Brad Gerstner?

  Well, you've seen this before, I know. We've talked about many times on here. This was in Lyft.

• 26:03Brad Gerstner?

  Ultimately, I think a couple of things to remember. These announcements are frameworks. It allows people to begin working, but they're not etched in stone. These are not contractual obligations. You know, everybody's got to deliver their parts. If the demand comes in lower, then these people are not going, you know.

• 26:19Bill Gurley?

  Doesn't the Oracle one have to be contractual for it to be RPO? Yeah, you know, you may know.

• 26:25Brad Gerstner?

  Well, for sure. I shouldn't say that they're all right frameworks, but I know, for example, like in the case of AMD, they're going to have to deliver a workable chip, or you're not going to build six gigs worth. Right? In the case of this Broadcom announcement, obviously, they have to build a workable chip. So I think your speculation, and again, it makes sense to me. If you said, what are the advantages of getting out there and locking up all of these deals? Right? I can't imagine, it doesn't help a lot with recruiting. All the best researchers in the world want to work at the place that has the most compute. And so you want to lock up the compute. I have to imagine it helps with the supply chain.

• 27:04Brad Gerstner?

  Because, you know, now you're locking up that supply. So I think your speculation is a pretty big one, a pretty good one. But at the end of the day, if you add up all these deals, I tried to do this, and we may be, we may be off by a bit, and I'd encourage people who have a better estimate to let me know. But if you add them all up, it looks like to me OpenAI would be on the hook for like 150 billion of CapEx in 2030. Okay? And so like, the question is, Bill, how much revenue do they need in 2030 to justify 150 billion in CapEx? Well, I think you would need at least 150 billion of revenue. Right? And, you know, like at a minimum, we just talked about Meta and these companies spending 66% on CapEx.

• 27:47Brad Gerstner?

  But if they had 150 billion of revenue, then the question is, is it plausible? They could have 150 billion dollars of revenue in 2030, and I would argue as an investor that it's more than plausible, that they could have 150 billion in revenue. But I think it makes it very, very difficult for anybody else other than the hyperscalers. Obviously, Google's going to be there. Obviously, Meta's going to be there. Obviously, Amazon, you know, can be there. But it makes it very, very difficult for anybody else in the ecosystem. Right? Who believes this is a game of scale compute, compete. So I think your point's a good one.

• 28:24Brad Gerstner?

  Maybe, maybe shift a little bit, you know, the area of passion for both you and I, which is this AI regulation. We've talked on the pod many times about the concerning patchwork of these emerging state regulations that, under the guise of doing good, and maybe they're even well intentioned, cause a hell of a lot more confusion at best. And at worst, they set back our leading frontier labs, you know, and, and really hamper us in the race to, to stay in the, in the lead in global AI. Well, it's gone from more theoretical to now more, more problematic. I tweeted over the weekend in particular about this Colorado AI Act, which is now passed into law, signed into law. It defines something

• 29:07Brad Gerstner?

  called algorithmic discrimination by outlining these 12 protected classes, of course, age, color, religion, but also limited proficiency in English language, reproductive health, and basically said if the algo provides info, right, if the chatbot provides information that's used to discriminate, then there's liability back at the frontier model level, right? And just this morning Gavin Newsom signed SB 243, which mandates safety protocols for AI chatbot companions and gives any consumer a private right of action to sue these companies for any emotional harm that comes out of a chatbot. I mean, I shit you not, you can't

• 29:51Brad Gerstner?

  make this stuff up. You said recently that China is so competitive with the United States because it's run by engineers and America's run by lawyers, and that's the greatest risk we have. Talk to us about the need for federal preemption and, you know, again, just let's dive back into your concern about these two laws that were just passed.

• 30:13Bill Gurley?

  As an aside, I just consumed Jonathan Haidt's book, Anxious Generation, where he talks about what he believes is some social harms caused by some of the apps on the internet ecosystem. And I do think A lot of the passion for writing some of these states laws comes from that place. Like, there are local congressmen that feel like they should have been out in front of social media more, and so they want to get a jump on this. And I think some of that comes from there. You run this massive risk of trying to regulate a brand-new technology at a state-by-state level. And, you know, you could ask yourself, you know, and by the way, I've said this

• 30:57Bill Gurley?

  a lot about policy, the intent of the policy is different from what happens once the policy is implemented. And so people can come in with great intentions, and this goes back to my speech at All In on regulatory capture, and you can end up with the exact opposite outcome of what you intended, because you just don't know enough about the way you write the, like, regulation. Right now, a lot of people believe we're in this global competition to see, you know, whose tech stack for AI is used on a global basis. And if we implement 50 different state rules that these companies have to jump through, and companies that are competitors, that

• 31:41Bill Gurley?

  are competing in the broader world, don't have any of them, there is zero chance that's not going to create mud and slow down the US players. There's just zero chance. And I'm certain the people that are writing these laws don't understand that there might be some global, you know, consequence of what they're doing. But it's bad. I mean, I can remember when Obama was excited about removing some of the state-by-state requirements on, like, hairstylists and whatnot, because it makes it such that they can't move between states, and it's kind of ridiculous that they would have different laws and different licenses. This is, like, if that's a problem, this is really a problem. And so, you know,

• 32:25Bill Gurley?

  from a global competitiveness standpoint, I would certainly hope that they're able to federalize this and preempt it. I don't know if there's too much, you know, water under the bridge or not. I don't know enough about what it takes in Congress to make that happen. But I think this is bad for... I think it's bad for the US and I think it's bad for innovation broadly. It's going to make it harder for startups to do things just because they're going to have to worry about all this stuff.

• 32:54Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, it's way worse for little tech, right? Because smaller companies don't have phalanxes of lawyers. They can, you know, go out and comply. You know, I think the other thing is, listen, we already have the Civil Rights Act, we have the Fair Housing Act, we have the American with Disabilities Act. Of course, we don't want discrimination. But this just seems like broad overreach. It's no, like, I don't even know how you comply or enforce. And so it just ends up bogging down the entire system in uncertainty and litigation. And again, it's important to say, this isn't even about whether or not AI should be regulated. It's just a question of who should regulate it. And what we're saying is that, you know, there is ample opportunity for this administration

• 33:35Brad Gerstner?

  and Congress to get together and write legislation to the extent it needs to be written, right? To provide a national, these are inherently interstate technologies. There's no way to keep it in a single state. And so write a piece of national legislation that allows us to continue moving forward very quickly, but all of a sudden, at the same time, addresses any of these concerns. I frankly think we need a moratorium on all state laws. Postpone all state laws until the federal government has time to act. And if states are going to pass these laws, Bill, then I wonder whether or not OpenAI or some other company should consider blocking the citizens of those states until it's resolved at the national level.

• 34:18Brad Gerstner?

  Somebody needs to get the attention of these states that they can't do this on a state-by-state level. It's bad for the companies, it's bad for the country. But hopefully, we'll get action out of Congress soon. I think there's good momentum. We almost had it passed as part of the, I think, the big, beautiful bill. And so I think there's a lot of movement afoot in order to do it. I wanted to highlight it because I think it's it's one of the high priority issues facing the new Congress. All this AI all the time stuff, Bill, and you pinged me and you said, hey, I want to talk about stablecoin, right?

• 34:49Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Brad Gerstner?

  We have this parallel development in the world. So I think if we have three major trends in the world, AI is clearly the largest super cycle going on. The reindustrialization of America is massive, all these critical supply chains. And I would say the third one is kind of the digitization and tokenization of finance. It's going on as a result of the administration basically turning 180 degrees from where the Biden administration was, total support of crypto and the bipartisan genius act. So here are a couple of facts and figures, you know, to throw your way, and then I'll let you take it over. Total stablecoin supply is now over $300 billion, up from basically zero in 2021.

• 35:31Bill Gurley?

  And this is dollar for dollar backed stablecoin.

• 35:34Brad Gerstner?

  Correct.

• 35:34Bill Gurley?

  Adhering to the new policy.

• 35:36Brad Gerstner?

  Yep. And total settled is now over 18 trillion. Monthly stablecoin senders is now close to 30 million. And Circle and Tether are issuing 15 billion of stable per month and becoming the largest buyers of US treasuries.

• 35:53Bill Gurley?

  So that's how much they're increasing the pool of capital they hold to to back up the

• 35:59Brad Gerstner?

  Stable.

• 36:00Bill Gurley?

  Stablecoin. Yes.

• 36:01Brad Gerstner?

  Correct. And I will show this Visa dashboard, you know, it's really cool for tracking all of this activity. Of course, Stripe, after the purchase of Bridge, has gone all in on stable. They just unveiled this new stablecoin issuance tools and expanded into AI commerce with OpenAI that could have some stable implications. So what are your spidey senses telling you about the consequences of what I think is a dramatic change in where we're headed?

• 36:26Bill Gurley?

  Well, one thing, I think that many people who listen to the podcast might say, oh, look at Gurley jumping on the crypto train, because I have not been a bull. And so to them, you know, kudos, you know, for getting it right. I had no idea you would have this dramatic a shift in policy. It's probably one of the biggest shifts we've ever seen in in financial policy. And quite frankly, I've always felt like, and this, I think, is still to play out, that the financial incumbents in the US are really good at regulatory capture and preventing themselves from getting disrupted, which is part of why I've been surprised. Something that really raised my eye, that made me pay attention to this, which seems

• 37:08Bill Gurley?

  far away, there was a move by the Trump administration to criticize Brazil for the success of PICS. And I've talked about PICS in the past. PICS is a digital, clears immediately, interbanking product offered by the Brazilian government that didn't exist five years ago and is wildly successful. It was mirrored after the same program that was built in the UK 17 years ago, called UK Faster Payments, that we've talked about. And these programs exist in China and India as well. And because of the regulatory capture, none of this has

• 37:47Bill Gurley?

  ever happened in the US. Your ACH takes three days to settle. Your wire costs $25 for domestic, $50 for international, and you have to fill out pages and pages of crap, sometimes get a verbal. And it's, you know, we are so behind. I am going to go out on a limb and say, I hope someone, whoever agitated this to happen in the Trump administration is someone who is kind of caught in a regulatory capture position, getting lobbied by somebody. I think if the Trump administration studied this, they shouldn't be critical of PICS, they should be envious of it. We should have done this a long time ago with Fed Now. But

• 38:28Bill Gurley?

  we may be on the verge of stablecoin just being able to do this anyway. And the rails have tons of transaction on them, as you've talked about. We have this interesting situation where Coinbase and Circle have done this deal where Coinbase will allow you to earn 4% on your stablecoin balance, which, you know, to get that kind of return at another bank, Even a neo bank, you have to have your direct deposit go there. Here, whether it's 10 bucks or a million bucks, you know, you put it in stablecoin with Coinbase and you start earning 4% daily. And on top of that, and this gets back to the pick thing, you can transact immediately out of that account.

• 39:11Bill Gurley?

  So you don't have to like move it from your savings to your checking to get it to do ACH. But you can send stablecoin immediately in microseconds and it'll cost you a few pennies. It is, the rails are there, they're ready and it's working. And I think the UI is a little difficult, but there's no reason why that won't get better and faster. And so I look up, you know, and I just, I wonder what the team at Meta, like they might just be kicking themselves, like with all the money they spent on that coin, everything they wanted to do on WhatsApp, like they should be running back at it. Like, I don't know.

• 39:48Brad Gerstner?

  So maybe they should, you know, remember the guy who did the Libra network, David Marcus has started the Lightning network now it's a startup. Maybe Meta should go buy, you know, should go buy Lightning and bring David back in house. Because, you know, all the things they talked about, all the things they talked about are now what's happening, Bill. And let me tell you, I think you're on to something big here. But one of the challenges we still have, I think first, anybody who looks at our current system, right, knows that is dreadfully behind the rest of the world, right? And we know it's the result of regulatory capture by not only card issuers, but the banks and everybody else who likes, who benefit from the status quo.

• 40:30Brad Gerstner?

  But if you look at Visa and Mastercard today, I think that they're doing something like 50,000 transactions per second. And I checked with our good buddy, Vinnie Lingam. And he said, you know, on both Salon and ETH today, they're still under 4,000 transactions per second. So they're trying to come up with these solutions to actually make the rails have the functional throughput and efficient settlement required to really become a consumer product. But I think you nailed the other one that, you know, Patrick Collison had a tweet on this that I replied to, which is, you know, when Genius Act was passed, there was massive lobbying by the banks to prevent the crypto companies from paying interest on stablecoins.

• 41:12Brad Gerstner?

  So the settlement was that they could pay rewards, not interest. Okay. And but the way in which it's manifested itself, because Coinbase is not the issuer, Circle is the issuer, and they did this deal. So Coinbase is promoting it as though it was interest. So from a consumer perspective, a reward and interest, if it's 4% is indistinguishable.

• 41:35Bill Gurley?

  No doubt.

• 41:35Brad Gerstner?

  Right? So I put my money.

• 41:37Bill Gurley?

  And obviously, Brian's been out on, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase has been out on X, like arguing his side of the argument. So he's clearly, he's either getting opposition or expecting opposition on the regulatory front. And when I see, you know, whether, you know, whether it's Visa or NASDAQ or any of these people kind of run at the tokenization, I always worry like, because if you look at the history of like the debit card versus the credit card, it was supposed to be disruptive. It was supposed to be an alternative that would change things. But they just, they just run at it and strangle it and mix it up a little bit, and then it's not as disruptive as it was. That's their go to move. But, you know, when I read this thing on PICS again, like, I'm going to read this out

• 42:21Bill Gurley?

  loud. As part of its aggressive economic and political campaign against Brazil is investigating PICS, accusing the payment system of unfairly undercutting US financial and technology companies like Visa and Apple. I mean, that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Undercutting Visa? Like, do they realize they have Visa and MasterCard have like the top two operating incomes in the history of American business? Like, like, there's, there's no one that needs less protection than these guys. If anything, there should be an investigation.

• 42:55Brad Gerstner?

  Were those guys at the dinner at the White House?

• 42:56Bill Gurley?

  In the cabal? I don't know. I just like, it's, it's so bizarre to me. I'm so thrilled to see this kind of disruption. I think that it's super interesting what's possible. I suspect all of the big guys should be paying attention to this. Apple, Google, Amazon, anybody that might have payment under rails.

• 43:18Brad Gerstner?

  I'll go out on a limb, Bill. You're going to see the, you're going to see the hyperscalers. You're going to see Amazon and Meta and these guys back involved in the stable business. At the end of the day, we know money is a network effects business. And the challenge of Circle and some of these stables, from a consumer perspective, is Visa and MasterCard are universal. So you got to get to all the merchants. Well, who has all the merchants? Amazon and Meta. Right? And so I think they're in a great position to partner with or do some of these things themselves. Clearly, they have the instinct to do it. That's why they did Lieber in the first place.

• 43:50Bill Gurley?

  It's also amazing for innovation. And one of the reasons why I think those bigger companies should run at this is if you look at the history of the PICS-like alternatives I mentioned in the UK and China and India, the startups that do financial innovation scale up way more aggressively and successfully on those rails that are cheaper and faster. And if anything, the having more rigid, high-friction, high-transaction-cost rails makes it harder for a startup to think about, you know, using one of those technologies. And so the success of WeChat Pay and Alipay, which, as I described for my China chip, are universal, they're

• 44:33Bill Gurley?

  the only way people pay in China, happened because of that government instant pay product, not in spite of it. And the same thing, I talked to the CEO of New Bank, he said PICS was huge for his business. So it's probably bad for a laggard bank, but for a bank that embraces it, it just becomes a better feature. And I think the same thing about Coinbase and what they're doing here. So I'm applauding the innovation. I'm jumping on board to Crypto Train, and I hope, I hope the incumbents aren't able to strangle this thing in Washington.

• 45:05Brad Gerstner?

  Hear, hear, hear, hear.

• 45:07Bill Gurley?

  As we move towards the end and talk about my book and what I'm going to do next, I do want to share with you that both my book and the next project are outside of what I've spent my career doing. And as I mentioned, you know, that's kind of moving outside my comfort zone, but it's also, you know, trying to have an impact and give back in areas that I don't know as well, but with a hope towards having an impact. I've said this to you before, but I've been just inspired, frankly, to go do this based on your success with Invest America. And when you first told me about it, you know, I had doubts that you could

• 45:46Bill Gurley?

  get it done, real doubts. And I've watched other people in your shoes try and do these types of things over decades and be unsuccessful. So you made it look easy. I know it's just getting started, but I wanted you to know how much that Inspired what I'm gonna go do and and could you give us an update on where things are?

• 46:07Brad Gerstner?

  Well, that means a lot, Bill. Maybe to talk about it first is just a reminder, you know, we I think you and I agree, we kind of have this battle for the soul of America when it comes to capitalism right now. Right? And that's fundamentally because too many people feel left out and left behind. 60% of people will never own assets that compound. Mandami's winning the mayoral race in New York City and you know, they're doing it by being anti-capitalist. But if you look at these two charts, I've shown them many times before. It just shows you that free market capitalism is the most productive force in the history of the world. Right? This first chart just shows that GDP on a global basis went parabolic. At the exact same time that capitalism was really introduced and started taking off.

• 46:51Brad Gerstner?

  And you know, reminder, like GDP is important because it's that surplus for humanity. With a fixed amount of labor and capital that then leads to better schools and better hospitals. And and and drugs that save lives and all the things that make our lives better. And you can look at this chart that shows the results. Fewer mothers die in childbirth. The average age, you know, of life is extended, the quality of life is higher, literacy rates are higher. Bill Gates extols upon this in his in his annual letters, so. It's not just an investment account. This is really a much, much bigger battle. Over where we want the country to go. And I was very concerned, as you know, a few years ago. That we were headed down this path.

• 47:37Brad Gerstner?

  Right? And the path is that you can't have so many people left out and left behind. So I think the answer to socialism, which has not worked for Europe, right? Europe's in a disaster relative to where they were 30 years ago. On a on a global competitive basis and China, as you well noted, have pulled themselves out of poverty by leveraging capitalism. Right? So the answer to this drift into socialism is more capitalism. And the Invest America accounts, now known as the Trump accounts, right, are more capitalism. They make every child a capitalist from birth, a private owner, gives them a thousand bucks in a 401k-like account that they own and control, their family has on their phone. And so I think that's a game changer,

• 48:21Brad Gerstner?

  you know, but you're right, we just got it passed. So where are we now? The Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, has to implement this. And by the way, this is one of the largest consumer launches in the history of government. So at the start today, there are 65 million kids in the country qualified for an Invest America account, every kid under the age of 18. And every kid under the age of two will automatically get a thousand bucks in their account. Right? So you'll probably hear a launch starting in maybe early December. Well, they'll launch the website, people can sign up for this. Remember, the accounts have to be funded and established by our 250th birthday, July 4, 2026. That's only nine months from now.

• 49:02Brad Gerstner?

  And I can tell you, I've been blown away by the Secretary, Secretary Besant, the Assistant Secretary, Luke Pettit, and the team at Treasury, working with the White House. They're attacking this the way I would attack, I would expect a Silicon Valley startup to attack the problem. They've gotten a great, great group of technologists, Joe Gebbia helping to design the front end of this, of course, from Airbnb. So, you know, we're, we're on the verge now of some major announcements, the start where people can start signing up their kids, you know, and then the goal is, once we launch this, all these kids will have these accounts, they'll be able to roll them over into their favorite, you know, bank, whether it's Schwab or Fidelity or JP Morgan or what have you.

• 49:44Brad Gerstner?

  And starting on July 4th of next year, Bill, as close to automatic account creation as possible. So you have a child, the child's born, they get a social security number, and they get an account seeded with a thousand bucks. From a kid's perspective, it's going to look like I own a little bit of Microsoft, and I own a little bit of, of United Healthcare and Nvidia and whatever. We're going to be able to teach this. In fact, you know, your buddy Tim, who's teaching financial literacy, you know, we now have 30 states require financial literacy requirements. We're going to have this embedded in the schools. Every kid's going to have this on their phone. So at any rate, it's going incredibly well. I give, I give them a very high score, but we got to get it done. So. Let's talk about your book. I've been a huge fan of the speech you made on this,

• 50:28Brad Gerstner?

  but I love the title, Runnin Down a Dream. What's the thrust of the book? I remember, you know, kind of that lecture, but what really compelled you to write it?

• 50:38Bill Gurley?

  So I was years ago, and this is probably going back 10 years, I was reading a lot of biographies, and I noticed certain patterns among people with extraordinary careers. And as VCs, we see a lot of patterns in businesses and pattern recognition. And I just saw patterns with people. And in the back of my mind, I always wanted to do this presentation. I kind of kept notes on it like I would a unwritten above-the-crowd blog post. And I had an opportunity, I got invited, I had an opportunity to give the presentation to the MBA class at the University of Texas. And so I, you know, I worked on it and put it together, made it nice, and gave that presentation. They ended up putting that on YouTube.

• 51:20Bill Gurley?

  And many people have come to me and said that it's changed their lives, encouraged them to do different things. Certain people in the media industry noticed David Sinra, who's got the new podcast where he interviewed Daniel Ek and Michael. He's a big fan of the presentation, talks about it a lot on his podcast. James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, maybe one of the best self-help, personal development writers out there. He retweeted it and put a transcript on his own website. And then a few people who are influential in my life started prodding me. You should turn that into a book. And so eventually I got convinced. We talked to publishers, they were interested. And so I started working on this.

• 52:03Bill Gurley?

  Now, it took a long time. And the thing I would say about it is that I hope that that time equates to quality. Like, I was out there really wanting to make it great. And so the book has an interesting kind of novel architecture. We combine what I call profiles, so stories of success with principles, tools of success. So they alternate. So you get a story, maybe about someone you didn't know, and how they started at the very bottom and became successful. And then the types of things they did. And I do, I do think that the principles, these tools that are in the book are things people can use. And I really want it to be great.

• 52:43Bill Gurley?

  It's done. I still need to record the audio version. All the podcast fans of ours tell me I have to do it. It has to be my voice. So I'm gonna do it. I hope people love it. I hope it changes their lives for the better. And what I really want to encourage is people to take a chance and do what they really love.

• 53:02Brad Gerstner?

  I think it's such an important topic. You know, one of the things parents are asking me so much these days is, you know, what should my kids do particularly? There's a lot of anxiety in the world, right? Today about future careers. And so maybe just talk a little bit about why this is so important now, because I think the timing is really profound here.

• 53:21Bill Gurley?

  So in the introduction chapter, we unpack a lot of this. And I don't think anyone will be surprised when I read some of this. But Gallup Poll does a career engagement study. They've been doing it for a long time. I think in the 2023 one, only 23% of people said they were thriving or engaged at work. And 59% were unsatisfied. And that's just a big, universal survey. Everyone seems aware that we've kind of moved to this gauntlet that we've put our kids in as they approach college and go through college. In the Coddling of the American Mind, Hyten Lukianov called a resume arms race. And we really taught them to be grinders. But Angela Duckworth

• 54:02Bill Gurley?

  highlights that if you have persistence, but not passion, you eventually recognize you're in a grind. And when you come out of that, you're in a really tough spot. And so we've got people, we've got these kids on this runway. We were telling them, like, they have to pick a major even in their application. So they're 17. What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to do? And they really don't know. And one thing we stumbled upon doing research on the book, I was working with a researcher, we did this survey and asked people, if you could start your career over again, would you do things differently? And in that survey, 70% of people said yes. And we did it again with Wharton, just to make sure we had.

• 54:42Bill Gurley?

  You know, a true academic survey going on and they did a lot more people and that number was still six in 10. Six in 10 said if they could start a career over, they'd do it again. And there's a, there's a great book. I read a lot of books in writing my book, but there's a great book called The Power of Regret by Daniel Pink. He's, he's a well-known author, but he, he has this thing he calls boldness regrets. And he said, "One of the most robust findings in the academic research and on my own is that over time, we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn't take than the chances we did." He says, "Again, the surface domain, whether the risk involved, our education, our work,

• 55:22Bill Gurley?

  our love lives, doesn't matter much. What haunts us is the inaction itself." And so I think that, I think that ties really nicely with this idea that if people could start over, they'd do some, they'd do something different. There's a great video that, that Pink references that we can put in the show notes, where Bezos is asked about the decision to leave D E Shaw and, and start Amazon. And he said he used a regret minimization framework. He said, "It's only a nerd could do that." But he said, um, that he imagined himself being 80 and would he care that he left D E Shaw and maybe for win a bonus, you know, or would he, or would he care more that he didn't take this chance, this kind of instinctive

• 56:06Bill Gurley?

  chance that he felt like he had to take? And he immediately after thinking about it and know in that way, wanted to go do it. And so-

• 56:13Brad Gerstner?

  Hey, hey, Bill, I have Bezos's regret minimization framework taped to my computer monitor.

• 56:21Bill Gurley?

  There you go. I didn't even know that.

• 56:23Brad Gerstner?

  It's literally taped to my monitor. Yeah. Powerful.

• 56:27Bill Gurley?

  Yeah. So, so that's, that's, that's what this is about. That's what this book is about. That's who it's for. And I want more people to take a flyer and go do what they love. You know, we have a phrase I use in the book, "Life is a use it or lose it proposition."

• 56:42Brad Gerstner?

  Totally. One-shot deal, man. Well, how do you plan to promote it?

• 56:48Bill Gurley?

  It comes out in February, late February, and so I'm just getting started in that process. If people have ideas they want to share with me, please reach out and let me know.

• 56:56Brad Gerstner?

  Book Club, I'll host a book launch event, Bill.

• 57:00Bill Gurley?

  Okay, all right. We've got, we've got a lot of fun stuff planned, but, but, but, uh, but I need to record the audio book. I know that's going to take a lot of time. I'm excited. There's a handful of people that have read it, maybe, maybe 50 in the publisher and whatnot, and nearly every one of them tells me that they immediately thought of three or four people they want to give it to. And so I hope there's kind of a viral component to it because people have that reaction. But, you know, if you're feeling stuck in your career, you should read it. If you're a teenager, young adult who feels overwhelmed by people telling you, where do you want to major in? Where do you want to go? What are you going to do with your... Like, I think this book won't put more pressure

• 57:42Bill Gurley?

  on them. I think it'll actually relax them and give them a framework that feels like a lot more personal to themselves and like they're a lot more in control. If you're a parent that wants to help a child on that journey, I think parents sometimes overly push kids into the lawyer, doctor, banker framework. I'm not sure that's healthy, especially in this AI world where those jobs may be under risk as well. And then maybe if you're, you know, an administrator or someone in the type of role that guide people in career decisions, hopefully you'll like it as well. But we'll put the preorder link in the, in the show notes. I will put it on my X feed. Please go out and preorder the book. I think it'll help it be, reach more people and be successful.

• 58:24Brad Gerstner?

  Well, I think it's, uh, it's going to be hugely impactful. And it's the type of stuff of consequence. I'm, I'm just, you know, I'm thrilled that you're doing it. I'm thrilled that you're taking the time to do it. I know that's not the only thing that you're, you're thinking about. You have these other, you know, big topics that you're thinking about as well, Bill. We've talked about them here and I'm sure we will continue to. Regulatory capture, US healthcare, nuclear, et cetera. What are you thinking about, uh, with respect to those things? You're going to write a book on every one of them?

• 58:56Bill Gurley?

  No, I that's well, I could, but it's not, it's not my goal. My, my goal is to just go spend more times on these really big problems and see if I can be helpful in any way. I've spent a career kind of breaking down and analyzing different situations. I mean, two, two of my favorite podcasts we've done, and, and I hear, I hear about this from the community as well. The one we did at Diablo Canyon and then the one about around my China trip and those types of, of work are very rewarding for me, but they also were learning expeditions. You know, I went out and put in more hours for those episodes than others.

• 59:35Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 59:35Bill Gurley?

  And the, the nuclear one in particular, you know, one of the things people ask me, why would I want to go do this? You know, we, we were a small part of a movement to kind of change the mindset on nuclear energy. And there were, there were people that put a lot more effort into us. I'm not trying to take credit for it. But, you know, the fact that Steve Pinker was out there, Elon, you know, our stuff, like it eventually happened, like overnight, seemingly overnight, we went from a very negative mindset towards nuclear energy to recognizing that it's very clean energy and something that can really help save the planet. And so that type of meme flip, if I could go achieve more of those in these other areas, I would consider it a win. So that's what's motivating me. I'm

• 1:00:20Bill Gurley?

  really looking forward to it. I'm kind of fired up and nervous at the same time, but, but that's what, that's what I'm thinking about. There'll be more to come on that in terms of what the actual platform looks like. I'm still working on it, but for now, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sprint into February to make sure the book does well.

• 1:00:35Brad Gerstner?

  I couldn't be more stoked for you. There's been a total blast. You and I have been chopping it up for, you know, for a couple of decades, but doing this the last two years together, pounding out these has been a lot of fun for me. I'm sure we'll continue to chop it up every day. And, you know, I'm sure that you'll find some topic that you can't live without exploring.

• 1:00:54Bill Gurley?

  Can't resist talking about.

• 1:00:55Brad Gerstner?

  Exactly. So we'll, we'll get you back on, but I'm going to give you the last word, Bill. It's awesome. Awesome to hear about all of this and I'm super excited for the book.

• 1:01:03Bill Gurley?

  Well, I would, I would just, you know, in the way I started, Brad, thanks to you. It's been fun working together on this and, and, and doing it every week. It does force you to stay fresh. You have to read everything you possibly can, which I'm sure is super helpful to you as an investor. And then thanks to, thanks to all our listeners, like I, I'm sure some of them are gonna feel like I'm letting them down and I feel the weight of that, but hopefully they'll recognize that I'm gonna go try and put my work effort to good causes.

• 1:01:45Brad Gerstner?

  As a reminder to everybody, just our opinions, not investment advice.