This Week in Startups
00:13:46 · Jason Calacanis
There's been a lot of hand wringing in the Northeast around these self driving cars, autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, Waymo's, Tesla, and then Zoox, Avride, etcetera. I think there's a a nonzero chance that we're gonna see a wave of anti self driving go across the country. And that we're gonna... And that's terrible because self driving saves a lot of lives. But if you're trying to save jobs, that's a place where I don't think you can win the argument, D. A, that there's some great benefit to self driving for employment.
00:14:22 · D.A. Wallach
[00:14:22] S1: Ultimately, we want every person doing something that is worth their precious life, right? And as soon as you can have a robot drive a car perfectly well, it's sort of a waste of time for a person to do that. Now, of course, realizing that also requires you to have a new job for them to do that's better than the job they were doing. And I think there's this interesting tension right now in that, you know, kind of like the Robin Hood bros are also Uber drivers. That's what they do at night. They do Postmates, they do Uber, they do whatever. And then they go on Robinhood and they trade Tesla stock and they trade Uber stock and they listen to All In. So it's like navigating all of these conflicting interests among these constituencies is gonna be really challenging for politicians. And I think the backdrop of it all, and you're seeing this play out in Europe in a big way is that the intergenerational war is the true winter that is coming. Winter is coming, the social security trust fund's gonna be insolvent in 2032. And the truth is that the people who own equities that are really gonna be the beneficiaries of Uber and Tesla and SpaceX and autonomy and data centers are old people. And those old people are not driving Uber. Okay. Those old people are chilling in Boca Raton and checking their Schwab account every day and feeling good about how great things are going. And meanwhile, the 22 year old Uber driver is looking out at a future where their job may be taken. They can't buy a house. It feels like everything's gotten more expensive. And that's why irrespective of whether they voted for Trump or Kamala last time, they turned out yesterday and they said, no, this isn't working for me. No one is out here actually giving a shit about me and my future.
00:16:23 · Jason Calacanis
[00:16:23] S0: Well said, intergenerational concerns here, Elana. And we have the M and A concern, jobs, data centers. This is just going to be a tough setup, I think, for the technology industry. I guess my question is, can the Dems actually find a middle ground here between being anti capitalist, anti progress, being D cells, and getting economic growth. Because if they do take this position that young people or socialists want them to take, well, we're getting into Ayn Rand kind of territory. We're getting into who's going to create these jobs? Where are they going to come from? If you slow things down too much, this could be quite problematic. So your thoughts there on Dems maybe finding a middle ground here?
00:17:14 · Elana Gold
[00:17:14] S2: Yeah, a few things there. And I know we were talking before the podcast about, okay, people who can't even drive cars, people who can't afford a car, well, suddenly now they could get somewhere so much cheaper, maybe even further away for less of the cost than they were before. And I think like that's a huge opportunity to be like, Hey, now they could go somewhere that's further away because they didn't have a car. They're not waiting for a bus that will take them two hours to get to the job site. It will take them twenty minutes by going and getting a robotaxi. So I think there are a lot of opportunities there. I don't think our country will go and look at China, look at other countries that are building and continue to go and really take in the technology that's being built and be like, nah, we're actually just slowing it down here. We'll let you guys have the self driving cars. We'll let you guys have the robots. But here in The US, we just wanna keep driving our own cars, not have robots even though that we have the technology to do so. I think as a country, we're scared of it. Like you always hear thought of AI is taking over, jobs are done, nobody's going to have anything to do anymore, and there will be no way to make money because AI and robots will be doing it all. And I think with all this, there are more opportunities. When horses stopped and cars came, opportunities came up too. And so I think it's scary. I think we're living in a world where AI agents are doing 50% of the jobs that were before and all the manual work you no longer need. But I think that there's still opportunities in there. Who's actually going and building the robots? And you're seeing blue collar jobs continue to grow and more and more is necessary. And so all in all, think like as a country, we probably need to change our sentiment around technology because we are gonna have to embrace it, and we're, as a country, I don't see us just watching other countries continue to succeed and not go and really embrace it here.
00:19:07 · Thomas Tunguz
[00:19:07] S3: Jason, you have an amazing perch. Like, who is telling the positive? Like, I remember going to Disneyland and seeing, the house of the future, right, like in the 1950s, right, and looked like the Jetsons. There was this view that we would be landing rockets and we would have Rosie who's a household... Like who? We have movie stars telling this positive story of AI. Have you seen anybody actually with that rosy scenario?
00:19:31 · Jason Calacanis
[00:19:31] S0: In America, I think if you look at Zuckerberg, as crazy as it seems, he created a program for Generation Tool Belt to train people for free to become plumbers, electricians, etcetera. So he's got such a bad... The corporate reputation at Meta is the worst of almost every company, right? And they have really good comms people there, who are like, how do we turn this around? And that was, I think, one of their efforts. And, they started that program. Then they're doing a lot on landing pages about data centers. So you constantly see them putting up these landing pages around, Hey, data centers are great. Look at the tax. Look at the short term jobs, the midterm jobs, the long term jobs. We're gonna have 4,000 people there building this data center in Waco, Texas or whatever, El Paso, and here's all the downstream effects, plus we're gonna pay for your kids' new soccer field or whatever it happens to be. And then Muse. I think the thing that's gonna turn this around as crazy as it seems is when the stay at home mom or dad, the teacher, everyday American starts using an agent, and the agent starts making their life better. And the agent says, you know what? I went through your emails. You're paying for Netflix twice. Can I unsubscribe from one of those? They're like, yeah, I don't have time to do that. It's done. And then they say, oh yeah, and by the way, you know, you have your small plumbing business. I went through all your emails. You missed these two quotes. Is one in your spam filter? And I took the time to write a quote to the person. Would you like me to send it on your behalf? And then, you know, Joe the plumber and, you know, Susan, with her small business, they start actually experiencing gains that we're all experiencing. I did a tweet earlier this week, I'm spending as a company $40,000 on Claude, on Grok, Cursor, Lovable, 11 limbs, this long tail of things. And I calculated I'm getting $2,000,000 in value. How did I calculated it? I looked at three different software projects we're doing internally. One to build essentially AngelList, Elana, for the syndicate. We left AngelList to do our own thing, we were a little bit too big for it. And now that platform, I always wanted to build. It would have taken four people, five people to build it in two years. And we built it in three months with no developers and no designers.