This Week in Startups
00:47:48 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:47:48] S0: I need to sell these two domains, mahalo.com and inside.com. The auction on my own auction software didn't really work too well. It didn't hit the reserves. I'm gonna put it... I think I'm just gonna put it on GoDaddy. You ever heard of this GoDaddy? I've heard of GoDaddy. Yeah. GoDaddy is amazing. I do all my register and domain names there. They also have all kinds of services around it. Like, you wanna set up a website, wanna set up mail, you wanna redirect it like, just go in there, .com. That's right. And I just redirect it to somebody disgraceful as a bet on all in. Yeah. And, you know, it's just it's just sitting there in my GoDaddy, and I just redirect the beep beep boop, and it's done. Two secondes. Alright. Listen. Thank you to our friends at GoDaddy. Godaddy..com. [00:48:33] S1: That's where to go. [00:48:34] S0: That's the best register. And you you know, you want something that's safe. They'll lock that they'll lock that ish down. Like, you would not believe. I got that locked down, like, Knox. I never lose anything. If my credit card goes bad, they call me. They email me. Hey. Your credit card is... Because I... You know, if you're there for twenty years, every four years, car goes dead. [00:48:52] S1: Yep. I get [00:48:54] S0: the certificates. So then you could put in a backup card. You know? That's a good feature too. You put a backup card in. Like, if it doesn't hit this one, you hit this one. You never wanna lose a [00:49:01] S1: Yeah. I don't wanna [00:49:02] S0: lose I just got an alert from the [00:49:03] S1: Very important.
00:49:03 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:49:03] S1: Very important. [00:49:04] S0: Yeah. I just got l o a a, Loa. Loa. When I was in my Hawaiian domain names. What does that mean [00:49:11] S1: in Hawaiian? Loa? [00:49:13] S0: Loa, l o a a, is to get, obtain, receive, or find. So to find something. L O A apostrophe Like L O I received the letter, I found the letter is I received. Found. Without the X-ray A has a different meaning. It means far. Like a long mountain, a far distance, secondly. So I was like, when I was doing mahalo, which was like, thank you and a heartfelt thank you, appreciation, I got Loa first to find, right? Like a Google competitor. [00:49:50] S1: Right. Was a search company, so that makes total sense. [00:49:53] S0: Yeah. Man, talk about being ahead of your time. Can you imagine everything we did is like the perplexity surge?
00:49:53 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:49:53] S0: Yeah. Man, talk about being ahead of your time. Can you imagine everything we did is like the perplexity surge? [00:50:01] S1: Data centers, Jason, they remain consistently unpopular, and opposition is strongest when people are asked about building them in their own communities. I pulled a few, little bits of data. The, ABC Washington Post Ipsos poll from October 2026 says 66% of Americans supposed data centers being built anywhere in The US, 30% support them, and support peaks among 53% among MAGA Republicans specifically, 80% opposition to data centers among people 30 years old and under. Now Axios reports that OpenAI is planning a PR push for after Tuesday's midterm elections. The idea on the table would be AI speed limits pushing The US to help write global AI standards. Selling AI is something that empowers people day to day, and here's the best one, renaming data centers as quote AI compute campuses. OpenAI, chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told Axios that the midterms will be a bit of a movie trailer for 2028 when he expects AI to be the signature issue of the presidential election. Jason, my question's for you. Do you agree? Is AI the thing we'll be debating for the next two years into 2028? And two, is it too late for an AI data center rebrand? Can we call them compute campuses? Do you think that's gonna that's gonna fly?
00:51:25 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:51:25] S0: It is going to certainly be the topic of the rest of our lifetimes. So not just this midterm tomorrow. Check out the all in livestream tomorrow night. That'll either be a bunch of Republicans crying in their coffee and people on the left celebrating the two most unpopular... The most unpopular political party versus the most unpopular president Yeah. Of our lifetime. It's gonna be pretty wild to watch. [00:51:53] S1: Will say that we've... The expectations now, if Republicans sneak away with even a halfway decent showing, they're gonna... They they win. Like, they can win without winning at this point because the perception is that it's gonna be this democrat blowout.
00:52:08 · Jason Calacanis
[00:52:08] S0: And I don't think it actually matters when it comes to the data centers and AI and superintelligence who wins this midterm. And I don't even think it matters who wins in 2028, I'll be honest. Because the person... The people who win are going to be the ones who are the most pro human and anti superintelligence. Why? Because right now, people correctly realize there's going to be significant job loss to this technology. Now, what we all jump to as technologists, and we've had this conversation endless times in the last three years, is new jobs will be created, new opportunities. We're going to retire certain work, we're going to have more work. Obviously, that's all true as well. But I think you will selectively pick this argument based on where you sit in the capital stack. We sit in the top half of the capital stack. I sit in the top half of capital stack, 10% of the top capital because I'm investing in the companies. You know, I hit a unicorn. You know, a bunch of money comes dropping from the ceiling on my head, and everybody says, wow. He's just a luck box. He's got no skill. He's just gotten lucky 14 times, which, you know, like maybe that's possible that somebody could get lucky 14 times. I kind of think after 12, you've got to give the person some credit for at least one or two of them. And then if you're on the bottom half, you're probably looking at this technology and you're seeing that you don't own the stocks, therefore, you didn't get in on SpaceX or Anthropic or OpenAI or whatever the next company is, so you are not connected to the equity wealth creation, then you probably know somebody who drove for Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash who had their job replaced by Robotaxi, Waymo, Zipline, DoorDash's delivery vehicles, automated delivery vehicles. So that's what's gonna happen over the next three, four, five years. And then you're gonna have both sides of the equation. The libs on the left who can't put their graduate degrees to work and are gonna be like, well, I got a $250,000 graduate degree undergrad loan. And all the work I did can be done by a bot. And I actually don't have judgment. I certainly don't have motivation to do things. I don't want to start a company. I want to be overpaid, pay down these loans, and, yeah, be a unique snowflake in the world.
00:54:33 · Jason Calacanis
And then on the right, it's gonna be like, well, I had this physical job that now Optimus is doing, Figure is doing, some robots doing. And the robots could also be self driving, obviously. And so that's gonna start hitting both sides. And unless we have some way to make the bottom half feel like they're part of this, which, you know, Trump accounts, invest America on a margins is starting to, We're gonna just need to really do a full on effort. This is why I told my friends who are involved in Trump, and I I said it on the All In podcast where I talk about politics more than I would prefer. Just do three things. Make a ton of homes. Make trade schools free, a fixed education, and then have a baseline for... And use this technology to lower the cost of health care dramatically and give people a baseline of technology... Technologically delivered health care, and you could turn this around. If people didn't have abject fear about those three issues, we would be a lot further along. And I know that to be true because I live in the great state of Texas where the home issue has been taken off the table. People feel great about housing here. If they're complaining, it's like little nitpicky things. And they feel actually great, Lon, about college because UT is free for anybody in the state who makes... Who's... Have a household income. I think it's gonna be a 100,000. If your state income... It used to be 60 or 70, but now it's a 100,000. If you're under 100,000, you can go to UT or any of the the state schools for free. And if you have to pay for it, is it 10,000 a year or something absurdly cheap Yeah. That anybody could afford? So you you put those two things together. Now health care, we don't have figured out. But man, if you go to urgent care here, it dirt cheap, no weight. I've been to it. And it's pretty... Quite reasonable. So Yeah. That's I think is gonna happen.