This Week in Startups
00:21:53 · Jason Calacanis
And it works. And it's getting better every day. We did the same thing for our programs and our accelerator, and we did the same thing for the podcast and the media business. Each of those would have been 12 full time employees at, call it, one hundred to one hundred and fifty ks each. Once that trickles down to not a 20 person venture capital firm, but a two person mom and pop shop, that's like, how do we make more money? And it says, Oh yeah, by the way, there's these three other services. I could take your inventory and the photos from your camera roll and put this stuff on eBay for you automatically. And then you'd have two ways to sell from your store. And do you know about Etsy? I could set up an Etsy store for you, and I'll manage the Shopify store for free. And you're currently paying $4,000 to some vendor to maintain your Shopify store. I can do that all for free. That's the kind of stuff that's gonna make people feel great about it. If their kids can get a job because their kids embrace the tool and the kid learns how to play guitar or be a plumber or be a ranch hand or be a chef because not just of YouTube, but their agents kind of help them fill in that knowledge. When everybody gets their own personal tutor, when the price of homes goes down significantly, when the price of health care goes down because AI is providing it, that's when I think we could turn this around. There's nobody leading that charge.
00:23:19 · Thomas Tunguz
[00:23:19] S3: No, nobody has that narrative. And I think this will happen much faster than we expect. I mean, you look at the Muse numbers, you have 10,000,000 people in the first quarter downloading it. Two and a half million people are daily active. You can imagine, okay, let's wake up in twenty four months, and now we actually have some meaningful fraction of Americans, three thirty million Americans. Let's say we have 30 or 40,000,000 people on Muse every day. All of a sudden, we're outstripped of capacity because even now, some of these systems are having problems. And then we are, in The US, a importer of tokens. I think one of the narratives that we need to start talking about is, just like oil, just like diesel, are we in that importer of tokens or are we in that exporter? And I wonder, you need that positive science fiction view of the world before you can actually have this conversation because there needs to be enough domestic demand and will for us to be producers of tokens to change this data center narrative, which is absolutely essential.
00:24:12 · Jason Calacanis
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00:25:20 · D.A. Wallach, Jason Calacanis
[00:25:20] S1: narrative. I think I I think there's the there's the digital domain, and then there's the physical real world. Right? And if I look at my monthly credit card bill or my bank statement, all the expensive stuff is basically physical stuff. It's my rent, it's healthcare, it's school, it's a babysitter, it's all that kind of stuff. It's a car. And there's this interesting moment we're at right now where it's like AI is here and it can solve a bunch of business problems for business people. But the question is, can it actually solve these problems that are material to an average person's life? And as I was just hearing you guys talk about this, what occurs to me is like, unfortunately the real problems that need to be solved in the average person's life are today largely problems that require public policy. And so I actually think the way that AI can be most helpful would be if it helps us as a society to be less partisan and more constructive in our politics. And I don't know that AI had anything to do with the election results yesterday, but just imagine that everyone going to the polling booth is, you know, gonna be using their AI assistant to help them understand what they're voting on and what would actually be good for them. I mean, fundamentally, the importance of this technology is that it should make you smarter. If you're not that smart, which, you know, I'll be the first to admit, I'm not that smart. I got it in math in high school. [00:27:03] S0: There's multiple types of intelligence as well. You have artistic, emotional, and pure IQ. Have all three.
00:27:03 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach
[00:27:03] S0: There's multiple types of intelligence as well. You have artistic, emotional, and pure IQ. Have all three. [00:27:09] S1: Well, keep it coming. Keep it coming, Jason. I like that. But here's what I would say. When I get the ballot, okay? It's impossible for me to manage this thing. Okay? It's like a 100 decisions. It's so complicated. Never heard any of these people. I get one sentence on each of them. So, of course, I went on, you know, Gemini in this case, and I just... Every single one, I typed in the candidates names. And I said, here's what I care about. Tell me who to vote for. [00:27:36] S0: Love
00:27:36 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach
[00:27:36] S0: Love [00:27:36] S1: it. So imagine that what AI does is it basically is the infrastructure for us to be smarter as a people and stop shooting ourselves in the foot on all of the issues that we need to deal with. Like we have to deal with, you know, permitting issues for construction. You've seen obviously in Texas where you are, how much they've been able to move the needle on this in cities like Austin or Houston. Like it's not as if we don't know how to solve our big problems. Lurie's doing it in San Francisco. You've got great mayors and governors who are trying things all over the place. That is the beauty of federalism. We get to try things all over the country, figure out what the best ideas are. And then if we were smart, we should just take those best practices and scale them up. And like being partisan is just a huge impediment to doing the smart stuff that we should do. So I think that's my hope. It's like AI helps us be smarter, being smarter helps us fix our actual problems, which AI can't solve on its own. It takes us to do that. [00:28:44] S0: Yeah. You need to have the meat layer between the AI that's soft. [00:28:49] S1: -The meat layer. You love this meat thing. [00:28:50] S0: -I love the meat thing. I didn't eat breakfast, so I'm kind of hungry here, but I need to [00:28:54] S1: -You're a meat boy.