Brad Gerstner
Investor
72
APPEARANCES
18
PODCASTS
Oct 21, 2026
39:40
... and to the singularity, and you think this two-page document protects us from that?
Brad GerstnerGUEST
I've been deeply involved, uh, in the safety and regulatory regime in Washington.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
You know, in a lot of schools today, in particular colleges on the East Coast as well, you know, there's this, people don't really know what to do with AI.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Like you can't consume enough AI today because it doesn't, you know, it used to be you go to this school, you get a job with a place like Grok or Altimeter.
28 MINS LATER
speaker_6ADVERTISER
Admirez.
Scott WapnerHOST
You've got the data center debate, which is now f- still feels like it's escalating.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Yeah, I mean, uh, I think there were some probably some weak hands that got funded by venture capitalists, maybe even some in the public market.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Um, but the fact of the matter is, I think CoreWeave, like I said, Mike In- In- Intrator, who runs that business, one of the best.
6 MINS LATER
Brad GerstnerGUEST
So you're managing your own money, and when you think about portfolio allocation, are you thinking about it in the way you did when you ran your fund? Are you looking for specific high alpha events or startup or disruption and really going long behind those and not really thinking about competing with the market?
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Well, I mean, I think the thing with Silicon Valley is that it kind of happens a lot.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Um, and you know, it's, it's sort of hard to pinpoint what is a patent versus what is, you know, retained knowledge.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
I, I'm not excusing it or I'm not saying I, I know ex- anything that happened, but, um-
Unknown podcast
Martin Shkreli: Big Pharma's Blind Spot, Betting Against Quantum & What Prison Taught Him
Oct 12 · 25m
Brad GerstnerGUEST
So you're managing your own money, and when you think about portfolio allocation, are you thinking about it in the way you did when you ran your fund? Are you looking for specific high alpha events or startup or disruption and really going long behind those and not really thinking about competing with the market?
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Well, I mean, I think the thing with Silicon Valley is that it kind of happens a lot.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Um, and you know, it's, it's sort of hard to pinpoint what is a patent versus what is, you know, retained knowledge.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
I'm, I'm not excusing it or I'm not saying I, I know ex- anything that happened, but, um-
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Well, I mean, obviously, we had a lot of controversy at the end of last week, you know, that I was quite critical of on Friday.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Then we had the Dario essay that I thought was, you know, a good path forward around independent monitors on Saturday.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
We're here to talk about superintelligence, um, and, uh, uh, we have this historic meeting between two of the most important economies in the world.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
So that in and of itself is an extraordinary level of dialogue, including on issues like, uh, superintelligence.
13 MINS LATER
Scott WapnerHOST
Uh, just h- how, how has the conversation changed in a much more positive way, do you think? What are investors rewarding here?
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Within the next month, all kids under the age of 18 are automatically going to have one of these accounts.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
And now we have all these incredible philanthropists who you know and tons unannounced.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Michael Dell's account, you know, and you can see how easy it is to donate to that phone.
6 MINS LATER
Molly O’SheaHOST
How did we get to that? Why is cholesterol? How did cholesterol become the key marker? And like, where did we go so wrong?
6 MINS LATER
speaker_0HOST
Brad has had unbelievable career starting five companies, so he's got a very different mentality than your sort of classic hedge fund guy.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
He's an amazingly successful guy, and he's put up a tremendous amount of money.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Every child in America, all seventy million kids under the age of eighteen deserve to have one of these accounts.
speaker_0HOST
Please welcome Brad Gerstner.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Thank you, guys, and thank you for so much love yesterday, especially on the Trump accounts.
Unknown podcast
Brad Gerstner: No AI Bubble, Semis Eat the Nasdaq & AI's Take Off Problem
Sep 17 · 18m
speaker_0HOST
He's an amazingly successful guy, and he's put up a tremendous amount of money.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Every child in America, all 70 million kids under the age of 18, deserve to have one of these accounts.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
This would not be a law if Brad Gerstner did not pursue it with absolute dogged determination.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
It is the largest unlock of direct philanthropy in the history of the country.
speaker_0HOST
Please welcome Brad Gerstner.
Unknown podcast
JD Vance on AI, Entitlement Fraud, Iran War, Israel, H-1B Abuse & the Midterms
Sep 15 · 27m
14 MINS LATER
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Y- you're working for somebody who's the most incredibly entrepreneurial and risk-taking president perhaps in the last 50 years.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
I just had a, at a, you know, personal level, how is it working with somebody who is willing to take the risk that, you know, some people, you know, Jason criticized some of the things that haven't happened in the first 20 months.
Scott WapnerHOST
Now multiply that risk by tens of thousands of users." How would you respond to all that?
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Well, well, first, Scott, I would say that we should always have open debate about the risk and reward of technology, and this discussion's been going on for a decade.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
In fact, I've not talked to a single person in AI who says, "Full steam ahead, disregard safety." It turns out we all care about kids.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
We know the massive benefits it offers, but we also wanna take the extra time to make sure that we do this safely.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
But what I, what, what I didn't like this week is these hyperbolic scare tactics, which I think are hiding behind a political agenda.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
I mean, listen, the same thing's going on at Microsoft, right? Satya is out this week saying, you know, citing Morgan Stanley's report and saying they're seeing over a thirty percent return on invested capital in tokens as a service, right? So in the infrastructure business.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Those are such good businesses, right? You, you, you deploy capital, everybody's renting it from you.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
But the scientists who wanna be involved in super intelligence, who wanna cure cancer, who wanna be on the frontier of these models, right? They're sitting there dealing with this channel conflict at Google because, you know, uh, uh, Google Cloud wants all of the compute in order to rent it out to Anthropic, and those fr- those building the frontier models internally want that compute in order to compete with Anthropic.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
So you have this inherent channel conflict, uh, between those wanting to build the models.
14 MINS LATER
Unknown podcast
Google's AI Brain Drain, SpaceX's Huge Quarter, Airtable's 90% Collapse, US Data Fuels China AI
Aug 8 · 1h 15m
Jason CalacanisHOST
So what's your take on the downward pressure on token pricing? Or is this just great for consumers and enterprises? Listen,
Brad GerstnerGUEST
We have Chinese open source, domestic open source, frontier national labs that are doing what they're doing.
Unknown podcast
More Trillion Dollar IPOs, Anthropic $3T, Zuck's Price War, China Ends Open Source?, Trump Accounts
Jul 11 · 1h 42m
Brad GerstnerGUEST
The legitimate concern is that a company that had not been through the process of being vetted post-IPO, there's a lot of volatility.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
You've seen that chart, Jason, that the peak to trough drawdown in the six months post-IPO is 50%.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
So you don't want to jam it into an index at the peak and then have a 30% drawdown on top of people, which often happens in IPOs, because people get excited, it runs ahead of itself.
1 HR 21 MINS LATER
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Right? And so the reason the rules had previously existed is because most companies coming public were younger, earlier, less tested, less revenues, less profitable.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
It's traded well, and so I think that that provides a bit of a blueprint for Anthropic.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
But just in s- in, in terms of the enthusiasm, i- is, is Altimeter or is it Fidelity or is it T. Rowe an enthusiastic buyer of Anthropic based upon the things we know today around profitability and model improvement and revenue growth, et cetera? Yes.
9 MINS LATER
Jason CalacanisHOST
This is, "Hey, we're sending engineering in to work with your top systems architect, and we're going to, you know, try to find that ROI," yeah?
Brad GerstnerGUEST
I started this when my oldest child was 13 years old coming out of COVID, 2021.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
And I showed them the custodial accounts that I had opened, um, at birth and added to over the years, and they had compounded into a fair bit of money.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
And my oldest son Lincoln said to me, "Dad, this is incredible, but what about all the other kids who don't have these?" And that really was the conversation around our dinner table that led to the birth of Invest America.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
At 18, kids can use up to 25% of this to buy a home, start a business, go to college.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
If they don't use the money for that purpose, it automatically rolls into an IRA and is subject to the IRA rules.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
So yes, you can take it out, but it will be subject to a stiff penalty if you take it out at that point in time.
Becky QuickHOST
It's for real, and it's going to continue like that." The other is, "Look, AI is here, but you may not see the earnings continue to grow in some of these, uh, other companies around it." W- Explain which camp you're in and why.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Well, I mean, listen, the question coming into this year, Becky, and remember, we had two 25% drawdowns in AI data center semiconductor stocks over the last 18 months over this question.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Would the AI revenue justify the investment in CapEx, the extraordinary $1.2 trillion annual investment in CapEx that we're seeing? People came into this year very nervous.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
In fact, on my podcast, my partner and I, Bill Gurley, were on opposite sides of this debate.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
In January this year, we saw Anthropic's revenues with Opus 4.8 beginning to take off, and then they went totally parabolic.
6 MINS LATER
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Companies like Micron, Sanjay announced this week $250 million going to a million kids in the communities they serve.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Of course, everybody's familiar with the $6.25 billion gift from the Dells, but we have Ray Dalio in Connecticut, me in Indiana, Harold Hamm in Oklahoma.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
And I can tell you, I have billions and billions of announcements in queue for the kids.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
What did we talk about on that first show? Why do we need this so badly? Because 60 to 70% of Americans aren't feeling connected to the American dream.
9 MINS LATER
speaker_12SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
This is an IPO that raised 75-
Brad GerstnerGUEST
We can take a look in real time to see what the stock is doing now, but that was, uh, just a few moments before 12:00 noon.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
We have about a 21.5% gain, so it's really been holding in, again, I just cite what Leslie Picker, uh, was reporting earlier, the so-called sweet spot, and this thing seems to be anchored, uh, to that.
Brad GerstnerGUEST
We also noted, you know, guys, what some of the firms on Wall Street are, are saying now about the prospects for this, uh, price targets and what I told you that Wolfe Research came out with.
13 MINS LATER
Brad GerstnerGUEST
... we're in like five years, right? Where a lot more is going in than is coming out.
15 MINS LATER
Unknown podcast
Inside the Private Stock Market Boom: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI & the Rise of Secondaries
Jun 7 · 39m
Brad GerstnerGUEST
I said, Gavin, do you know we're talking about secondaries? He's like, what do you mean? And I said, okay.
31 MINS LATER
32:26
Something you don't own, but if you have the chance to buy a secondary, you would.
Unknown podcast
The IPO Comeback: Why Tech Giants Are Finally Going Public | All-In Liquidity IPO Panel
Jun 6 · 32m
Andrew FeldmanGUEST
And so I think what we've seen is Your employees have a party, everybody's really excited, and you put your head back down, you
Brad GerstnerGUEST
Aside from just being a warrior who weathered a decade worth of storms that would have taken out any normal human being, the path to going public for Cerebras was a particularly challenging one.
24 MINS LATER
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