YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Gurley

lines on the record: 153
first: 2025-12-17
most recent: 2025-12-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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. Quality problem. Yeah, exactly. But he went and told him 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think so he played, you know, 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 he was successful in high school, but it wasn't, you know, there was no path to keep going down that field. So yeah, he had a mint passion for the category, but it never imagined himself in the field, you know, in one of these other roles until that book kind of disinhibited him and gave him permission to think, well, you know what? I could be differentiated on this dimension, on this dimension of understanding analytics. He immediately was applying to business school, and he used that as a pivot point for those that have the needs and the resources, I think an MBA programs can be a great place to switch careers and go chase a different dream.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was an 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 Money Ball, which is... We all know of the Michael Lewis book about the Oakland A's. And in almost what seems like an instant decided I really need to be in sports analytics. I mentioned it 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 a head of.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sam Hankey is a gentleman 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Open mind towards it solving problems, and I thought, holy shit, if other people kind of just leaned at it the way he's leaning at it, they would become superpowered themselves. I was like really blown away by that.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think all those things will still be real. I really do. And obviously just general business entrepreneurship. I took my dad who's 93 fly fishing in Montana this summer and we were at a lodge and one of the other guests that was staying there is a 28-year-old entrepreneur from the tip of Texas down near Corpus Christi area and he had started like three or four businesses and it was well off like I'm not saying but he was so enamored with AI. He said and then I needed this and then it did this and then I needed this and then it 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 he goes this guy was already successful but he was running triple speed because he had tipped into this stuff and he was learning what was possible because he had an”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of the service industries, I think humans enjoy experiences. And I don't think that changes personally that much. And so, you know, restaurateurs or hoteliers, like I think all those things are going to thrive and people that know how to really differentiate experiences in that way, I don't share this thought that we're all going to go watch movies that we've imagined that are made just for ourselves. I find that hard to believe. I think people enjoy great art in many different forms. They enjoy talking about it and they enjoy the community element of having seen the same thing. And so it may be that if you're a movie maker, you're using AI instead of this expensive CGI tool set. I think the storytelling and the imagination and writing.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basketball, are you 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he just became a restaurant, too. 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”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think AI is the leading edge of almost any industry. So, yeah, I'm saying you should just study what it's capable of. The thing that LLMs are most capable of, it's a large language model, the language type stuff. You're copy editing example, like things that were just wrote moving words around. Yeah, it's really good at that stuff, but it doesn't mean that you can't be the person that really understands what it's capable of. superpower yourself to go attack a particular interest. You had started a question by saying like warnings. You know, I think there are a lot of fields where talent really does matter. Like, I don't know that I can make you a singer or a, I certainly can't make you an NBA basketball player. But in all those fields, whether it be Hollywood or sports, you know, even at Danny Meyer at one time thought he was going to be a”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comp sign went from being the least risky major you could possibly get to one that's somewhat risky like overnight. And so that'd be my first notion. And the second thing I would add to that, which I already said, is no matter what your endeavor is.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lala tequila, which I was involved with. He first started by just studying the distilling process writt 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, 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”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His first career was in seismatology and the oil field, and that dragged him to South America. When that became dangerous both in Midland and in South America, he became a mortgage broker. didn't love either of them.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No good reason at the age of 40 He's watching a PBS special. This is also hard to believe. He's watching a PBS special back when probably when they 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 Christmas presents in his spare toes.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You should be. You should be. Yeah. Well, actually, I have an example of someone who just turned it on. Have a chapter called Never Too Late, which is where the Saul Khan thing is because that happened when he was close to 40. Another local Austinite Bert Tito Beverage, Started his endeavor in the spirit business.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone to tell you not to go do it. It's not going to be easy. I don't want anyone to think that, oh, just read this book and magic happens. 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”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, you know, went and changed it. Look, I think the real test comes back to this passion element. We use a lot of different words because passion's been kind of considered trite, but fascination, curiosity. Like if you have this deep desire to know so much about this one thing that that curiosity is so high, I think the odds that that's not apparent to whoever these people are, you're trying to convince is pretty low. Because if you're going to tilt it something that hard and if you're going to really differentiate yourself by being that learned in that field, I think it'd be hard.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting, I think, any of those approaches is realistic. We profile Sal Khan in the book of Khan Academy, and he told his wife he wanted to go try it for a year. He worked at a hedge fund just like Danny Meyer. He was making real money.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a story in the book that's actually hard to believe. We profile this woman, Jen Atkins, who's a hairstylist. It's an incredible story. But the one anecdote, she's rising in her career and things are starting to work. And she has jobs and she's getting paid. She would go to fashion week in Paris and sneak in the back door and volunteer to do the hair of the models on stage. Like snuck in. Like, not supposed to be there just to get reps with these top models in this environment. It sounds unfathomable that someone would do that. She did it multiple times.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we walk through in detail his path once he made this intention. And one of the variables that my co-writer and I were looking for as we added stories to the book was this moment of intentionality. We didn't want people that fell into a job and were successful. We wanted people that had made a decision, usually a pivot, to say, I'm 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you read Danny's book, he did spend a ton of time in his youth being fascinated with restaurants to the point where he would take copious notes. Like prior to even doing this. So his family had a reason to know that he had this deep passion. But it's interesting it's an uncle, right? I don't know that a parent is going to jump in and say that, and maybe that's an advantage I have not knowing the readers of my book and giving them this permission to do things that aren't necessarily pragmatic. But anyway, as Uncle said, you should start a restaurant. And he took the test. He never submitted the scores to a university. And very soon thereafter enrolled in some vocational restaurant courses and took a job. He took the first job you could get, which was a front office job at a restaurant that was making about a tenth the salary”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he had convinced himself he was going to be a lawyer. I guess a lot of people convinced himselves of that. And he was about to take the L set and he was out to dinner with his uncle. And, you know, his uncle was probing him and probing him. Oh, yeah, he's going to take Dell Sett. 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 restaurant tour.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of our time, he was working for a company that sold these devices that 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, similar to the McConaughey story. Jimmy's being more abrupt. But, you know, of course, she's happy now. Yeah, it all worked out. I mean, there's always”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was just interviewed at Deal Book also, and his mother was in the front row who apparently works for him now. So he was telling the story about when he went to tell her he was dropping out of college.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experiences you've talked about. I've had so many of myself, they get excited to tell you what they just learned, right? And then you reciprocate. And by the way, Mike's a great example. I have both a passion and a lot of respect for people that are writers in their industry. And Buffett did it and Howard Marks did it, who I benefited greatly from. I tried my entire career to write quite a bit. But Mike does this. He's a huge sharer when it comes to his knowledge about the subject matter. Pattern makers.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See, that's the thing. Like, I would say, first of all, I would practice it wherever you are. I would practice it virtually. I'd practice it locally. And if you can move to the FCenter, 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. So trust and then this shared interest in learning. And if they are equally learning on their own dime in their free time, which is my test for whether you actually truly are passionate about something, if they're doing that also, that's perfect.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For years They shared best practices on this call, which apparently in that world, like the color of the icon on the post you do on Instagram to send them to 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. He said, if you are any random individual had been a fifth person on those calls, you would have two because of that. And it's just a wonderful example of how Piers, you know, 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I actually heard it on a podcast, but I had it. I also got a chance to talk to Jimmy Donaldson, so we got it firsthand. When he was infatuated with YouTube, he was one of the first people that was infatuated with YouTube. His parents were rightfully trying to get him to go to school and college, which he wasn't doing because he was playing around on YouTube all day. He met three other people who were equally fascinated with YouTube. This is a virtual epicenter story, but it's really a pure 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-client.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Macombs here in Austin I tried to get an interview at Austin Ventures like I didn't get one but had they said yes maybe I practiced there and I'm glad that didn't happen like going and practicing it where I did was the exact right place to do it I do think if you can because there are financial constraints you know if you want to be great at a field and that field has an epicenter, I think you should go.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opportunity. And when you're in the epicenter, both to 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could certainly have the type of peer and mentor experiences that are remote. I have a great anecdote about Mr. Beast in the book that we could talk about that was a remote one. But the benefits of being in and around a whole bunch of people that are chasing the same thing is so high. And I think the intuition is, oh, it's going to be even more competitive. So why would I, wouldn't it be better to try and do this in a town where it's less of a big deal? But the problem is your learning is impacted. Your access to peers and mentors is drastically reduced. And then probably most importantly, your optionality gets cut so dramatically. People think that a lot of success stories, they attribute it to luck, but there's that famous saying luck is when preparation meets.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, no doubt. And by the way, he landed in Manhattan at the center of the folk music scene, and all those people he was studying when he was listening in Minnesota, they were all there. You know, he got to know them all. If that doesn't happen, I don't think Dylan happens, you know.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best songs, the coffee table book that came out two years ago. It's incredible the amount of knowledge he has about songs outside of his genre, everything. So he's a clear student of what he's doing. I think this is well known and is covered at the beginning of the movie. He went to New York to find Woody Guthrie, probably the single kind of most deterministic and ambitious mentor pursuit story that I've ever heard of. He hitchhiked there with no money and found him and became friends with him.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just like even pile on more on this kind of studious part of Bob Dylan, he did a podcast series for a while where he just walks through all these different genres of music.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And maybe that's even a euphemism. He was stealing his friend's 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 kind of mastered the bedrock underneath and then started innovating. Picasso, by the way, the same thing. Perfect realist painter at age 14. If you go to the Barcelona Picasso Museum, like it's in geographic quarter and you're kind of shocked at how good a realist this kid was before he went and did this other thing, that bedrock knowledge, I think, is so differentiating for someone to have all the history.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This idea popped in my head, I had finished a third biography and contrasted it with these other two, and I just saw all these patterns. You know, VC's a game of pattern recognition. I guess my brain's just developed. I was like, oh my God, it's all this kind of 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 industry. This is where you should get career development advice, right? There's a part of the Dylan story that most people wouldn't know unless they had read all the biographies or maybe seen the Scorsese documentary. But the new movie misses the whole thing, which is the pre-New York Bob Dylan was hanging out in Minnesota studying folk music at such a deep level that I feel confident in saying when he left he knew more about folk music than any other human in Minnesota and he was borrowing.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No doubt And by the way, that's another advantage of going to the epicenter is there's more people doing that all the time.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truly passionate about what you're trying to do, which is, do you self-learn on your own time? Like, would you not watch Breaking Bad and read about this field and be energized by that activity? If you are, and we have 20, 30 different stories in the book of people that have been successful, almost all of them check that box, you just have this amazing ability to gain knowledge so much faster than everyone else you would be competing with. And that's going to be useful. That's unquestionably going to be useful.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. You know, why do something you don't like? There's Gallup poll data on career engagement. And 59% of people say they're not engaged at work. And this is that whole quiet quitting thing that we hear so much about. And some of these numbers are an all-time low. It just seems horrific. Like the people are kind of sauntering through life.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we built Society, like nobody's fault. Like, we just have built a society where we love to celebrate people that are successful in a lot of different fields, but when it comes to our own children, we tend to think way more pragmatically about what they should be doing. Lawyers, consultants, doctors, computer scientists, like it's all these jobs that have certainty to the financial component. And I think that's so well intended. Like, I don't think there's malintent of anyone in the system. And I'm a parent of three. Like I've been through this, you just feel this obligation to try and push them towards prosperity, but it's not intellectual prosperity. It's not happiness. It's financial, you know, stability. Yes, that most people are guiding.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People out there. Young adults, maybe even some midlife career who have this notion that they should be doing something else, but society has put them on a path or just the way they matriculated through college put them into a career that they just don't love and that they have this inkling that they could go do this thing or maybe you're a young kid and you really want to do X but everybody else is telling you to do A, B, and C. Like, I want to help them have the confidence and permission to go do X, like to go chase this dream. And as you hinted at from our last call, I think your ability to make connections and to gather information and learn on your own pace has never been better. You can literally just sit there and talk to ChatGP.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT