This Week in Startups
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.
00:56:33 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:56:33] S1: I think the companies think that they can just do the same kinda like what we used to call, like, cause washing or greenwashing, you know, when the companies would be like, they take out a bunch of ads touting their environmental record and you wouldn't necessarily see any of the results, but you'd be like, well, Chevron says they're cleaning up the lake, so I guess I should trust them. I think that's what's happening now. Pull up that pull that up, Jacob. If you live in Texas, you see these ads all over the place for Meta. Like, we're not just building up data centers in El Paso. We're pumping money into El Paso. We're making El Paso a great place to live in. Like, I I I don't live in El Paso. Maybe it's true, but it doesn't seem like... It it feels like this is marketing, and I don't feel like there's a groundswell of people in El Paso, Texas who really feel like, thank God, Meta is here and building these data set is because El Paso is a much better place than it used to be. And I just feel like I don't know if we've crossed that chasm where the the companies are actually spending the money in a way that is felt by everyday people as opposed to building websites where they talk about how they're gonna do that. [00:57:42] S0: I mean, if you're building a data center in one of these towns like El Paso, it's going to have a major impact eventually. It may not have the impact today. The website might be a bit, you know, manipulative. They're running commercials for
00:57:42 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:57:42] S0: I mean, if you're building a data center in one of these towns like El Paso, it's going to have a major impact eventually. It may not have the impact today. The website might be a bit, you know, manipulative. They're running commercials for [00:57:58] S1: this too, where it's like guys in hard hats, and they're like, everybody used to have to move out of El Paso to go get a good job. But now that the data center's here, we all work for Meta, and it'll be like a guy with a bulldozer. And, you know, like, they're they're girly... They're all in on the idea that, like, Meta is gonna save the town of El Paso with this data center. And, like, I haven't talked to a lot of El Pasoans. Maybe they do feel that way, but I'm skeptical. [00:58:21] S0: Okay. So there is do no harm. Like, don't make my electric bill go up. Right. That is table stakes and it's done. Yes. Don't be selfish and take something from the community. That used to be what we did ten years ago in the industry. You would bid one city off another to get tax breaks. And remember Amazon did it, and I was on CNBC talking about it, and they were gonna, like, have their second headquarters somewhere, and they wound up splitting it between two cities. [00:58:46] S1: So it be this, like, long ongoing, like, maybe we'll put it here, and then they would see what the city council would offer them. Right. Exactly.
00:58:46 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:58:46] S1: So it be this, like, long ongoing, like, maybe we'll put it here, and then they would see what the city council would offer them. Right. Exactly. [00:58:53] S0: Right. And that's ended because that felt like... Correctly so, people were like, Well, wait a second, what are we getting out of this? Now, if you said 10,000 jobs, great. Okay. But when you talk about a data center, you're talking about very few jobs after the thing has been finished. Right, [00:59:08] S1: building it, and then once it's there, there's a bunch of savings. The next. [00:59:11] S0: Unless they're gonna continue to build. So we went from we're gonna extract something from the local community to we're not gonna do any harm, we're gonna pay our way for the electricity, to now we're going to subsidize this town, we're going to train people to be electricians and HVAC folks for free, which Meta is doing, so give them a lot of credit for that. We're going to pay for the local stadium, we're going to lower your electrical cost, we're going to lower your water cost. And I think they need to be more explicit of that. When I look at this website, investing in El Paso, 300 operational jobs is nothing. I mean, it's not nothing, it's something I don't know how many people live in El Paso, or how many people are working in El Paso right now, but I don't think it's that much. 4,000 skilled workers on-site at peak construction. Again, they're in and they're out. They're probably causing as much of a ruckus at the local bars as they are contributing. [01:00:02] S1: It's alright.