DeepSeek, Open Source, Tariffs, DOGE, Market Impact | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

**Brad Gerstner** (0:00)
And I think you make a good point and a good defense for globalism, but I think the exact response would be if you're the president of the United States, you're not looking out for the standard of living for all humans or for all people around the globe. You're looking out for the standard of living of people in the United States who you have a constitutional oath to.

**Bill Gurley** (0:17)
No doubt, but my point is that even with that lens, you have to think about the dynamics around the globe, and pulling up the wall, and trying to get people to make a $40 microwave, and America is gonna fail.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:45)
Hey Bill, it's great to see you.

**Bill Gurley** (0:47)
Good to see you, sir.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:48)
Are you gonna apply to run the Sovereign Wealth Fund? Or actually, better yet, can I, will you give me permission to nominate you to run the Sovereign Wealth Fund?

**Bill Gurley** (0:55)
I, you know, I would think there are people that I've met through my days that are LPs at rather large funds that have way better experience for something like that.

**Brad Gerstner** (1:05)
Yeah, I think you would be a hell of a choice. Certainly on, maybe on the board of the Sovereign Wealth Fund, but it's gonna be a fascinating experiment. One observation I had as we're getting ready for the pod today is last night, I was helping Lincoln study for his AP history exam. And, you know, he's studying the Gilded Age and more importantly, kind of the McKinley presidency. And it's all about the McKinley tariffs. And I said to him, it's pretty amazing that you and I are working on the same thing. You know, I'm reading on chat, GBT about the McKinley tariffs. And he said, yeah, but dad, don't worry about it. You don't have to take the test. And I said, no, worse yet. I have to figure out how much money to be exposed to the market. What are risks going to be in the hedge fund? I said, don't worry.
I get a scorecard on that too. Yeah.

**Bill Gurley** (1:53)
A little weightier than the test.

**Brad Gerstner** (1:55)
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, you and I could go full Lex Friedman today. And by the way, his five hour show pod recently with Dylan, those guys was great. But we're going to try to keep this pretty tight and jam quickly on DeepSeek, on tariffs, on Doge, on maybe with the market reaction. It might be to all of these things. And as I was thinking about this setup, Bill, I thought it would be helpful. You and I got into this and we said we wanted the pod to be about this intersection of tech and markets, investing in capitalism. And we specifically kind of wanted to stay away from Washington and politics. But it's really impossible at the moment to talk about capitalism and markets, and what's happening without talking about the big things occurring in Washington. So we're going to do that, but really going to try to stick to the economic and market lens of the events that are happening, rather than the political lens. They're incredible pods you can listen to to give you kind of the political analysis of all of this. So maybe we just dive in.

**Bill Gurley** (2:51)
Yeah, that'd be great. And listen, I mean, when you expand the lens to include that, and you look at the ridiculous pace of innovation in the AI space, I don't ever recall a single time in my career where it feels like you could just have your ear to the ground 24-7, and you're picking up something new constantly.

**Brad Gerstner** (3:16)
No doubt about it. No doubt about it. Speaking of, you know, we covered DeepSeek last week, Bill. It seems like it was just yesterday, but a lot's happened since then. For one, these usage charts for DeepSeek are really quite amazing. And Driesen tweeted this, you know, which shows the percentage of DAUs relative to chat CPT. You know, they're top GOs. I think they have something like 15% in India and like 10% in China, 8% in Indonesia. It's really a global phenomenon. You know, one of the things that struck me after all of this is you tweeted, it's a better world if the most disruptive LLM model is foreign and open source versus domestic and proprietary, right?
You said it's better for safety, for security, for free speech, et cetera. So talk us through where you think we stand today based on a little space now reflecting on R1. You know, and we know that you and Benchmark have been like the staunchest proponents of open source over the course of the last few decades. Help us understand how you think open source versus closed source is going to evolve.