This Week in Startups
01:01:15 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:01:15] S1: Like, why isn't there... Why aren't they getting, like, the Meta El Paso Arena? You know? Like, it's just, like, do do something visible that everybody in town is like, well, Meta built that. It's great. I love it. We go to the Meta Dog Park every week. You know? Like, I feel like it's [01:01:30] S0: always really do that kind of stuff. I I would argue the other side of that, which is don't do the, like, hand wringing signaling stuff because I feel like that's a little bit performative. I think just giving a certain amount of cash and taxes at a minimum, we're going to do a minimum, instead of it being it says $80,000,000 in taxes, and who knows how to get to it. We're just going to give $25,000,000 a year in taxes as our minimum tax payment for the next ten years. So as long as we're here, we're going pay twenty five minuteimum in taxes. And if you don't have a way to give us that money, we're just going to gift it to you. They know the economic value of this thing. So I think they should just give and pick a number, give it to the city council, and then let the city council have arguments of how to spend it. Because they might say, you know what? The football stadium is the priority. No. We think training is the priority. No. We think this bridge is the priority. [01:02:22] S1: Yeah. [01:02:22] S0: What... Whatever it happens to be. [01:02:23] S1: Teachers to move to El Paso
01:02:23 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:02:23] S1: Teachers to move to El Paso [01:02:25] S0: or something. I... You know, I... One of the things that happens, you know, with these local communities, there is an interesting phenomenon in rich communities. And I've lived in, how many times have I lived in an affluent community? Twice. Brentwood and then Brentwood. Then in The Peninsula. Yeah. Yeah. In The Peninsula. What happens is you have a lot of expensive homes. You get charged a percentage of the home value, and the local schools are run by that district, they become overfunded. And people who are in there who are affluent send their kids to private school. So the people who do send their kids to the local school have, I'm not kidding, a five to 10 to one teacher to kid ratio, is better than the private school ratio. They get overfunded, in other words. That would be what I would do if I was Meta. I would overfund the school system and say, your school system is going to have a five to one kid to teacher ratio because of what we're [01:03:20] S1: doing. That's [01:03:21] S0: That would be... That would resonate with people. [01:03:23] S1: Visible that people can feel that's visceral that's not just a commercial or, like, guys in hard hats, but, like, something that people are like, okay. It's super valuable. I'm glad Meta's here. That's what I
01:03:23 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:03:23] S1: Visible that people can feel that's visceral that's not just a commercial or, like, guys in hard hats, but, like, something that people are like, okay. It's super valuable. I'm glad Meta's here. That's what I [01:03:34] S0: I gotta say on the self driving front, listen, and I'm invested in, like, every self driving company from Uber to Tesla to neuro... Not neuro. You know, all the publicly traded ones, WeRide, Pony, Rivian, Lucid. I have little pieces of everything because that's a basket I made of, I think this is going to change the world. I think... So I'm working against my own book here. I'm not opposed to throttling the pace of automation and self driving. Because I do think what we're seeing here in Texas is that these companies can go a bit faster in Texas than other locations. We're going to lose all those jobs real quick, man. The pace these things are going at, Waymo is expanding, Uber's expanding, Zoox is expanding, Tesla obviously is expanding very quick. I mean, are you taking Uber or are you taking Robotaxi Waymo? What are [01:04:25] S1: you If taking on when you Waymo is an option, every time. Every time I would do a Waymo. I I prefer the Waymo experience to these drinks. [01:04:34] S0: Because it's quiet and it's... You're alone?
01:04:34 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[01:04:34] S0: Because it's quiet and it's... You're alone? [01:04:35] S1: No. Like, nobody nobody buys me. You don't get that chatty. What out of every four to six Uber drivers, they're bored. They've been on the road all day. They wanna have a little chitch at. I don't wanna do a little chitchat. You don't have to worry about that with Waymo. You don't have to tip with Waymo. And, honestly, I find it... I I find it relaxing. I I like being alone on [01:04:54] S0: the road. It's it's very It's moment of zen. [01:04:57] S1: I could get things done. I I prefer it significantly. I would take a Waymo every time. [01:05:01] S0: There should be two there should be two additions to the ride sharing Lyft, you know, Grab and Uber and everything. Number one, when you set your preference... You can set preferences for, I think, Uber Black, but I don't think they have it for UberX. [01:05:14] S1: Right. They don't. [01:05:15] S0: They should... They gotta make setting preferences for UberX a thing. Temperature, music, no music. Then they should put small talk. [01:05:22] S1: Yeah. I just [01:05:23] S0: No small talk? Love that. Love small talk. Yeah. Don't care. [01:05:27] S1: I am big U. [01:05:28] S0: And then when you reported at the end, they should have cleanliness of vehicle as an option. It was very... It was pristine. It was tidy. It was messy. Then they should have smells. It was, neutral, or it was... It it, it had some smells that were offensive. [01:05:50] S1: Over one time had a real smelly Uber situation. That's
01:05:50 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:05:50] S1: Over one time had a real smelly Uber situation. That's [01:05:54] S0: really not I have two versions of this. One, the perfume things they put everywhere, I'm very sensitive to, so I start sneezing. So I just have to ask the guys. And you know what? The black cars have that more than anybody. They put like three of They them on every [01:06:06] S1: want it to smell nice. Yeah. [01:06:08] S0: And they put that in the blower. So you put air conditioning on, it's blowing it. So now you're basically got a wind blowing machine with peppermint or lemon scent blowing in my face. Literally so sensitive to it. My eyes can tear and I start sneezing. They should have scents. I prefer no scents, etcetera. So they should put that at the front of it. Because it's very easy to actually get rid of the scent. You just put those things away. [01:06:35] S1: So Anthropics' Andrej Karpathy got fed up with YouTube's recommendations. Over the weekend, he built his own YouTube. It is called HackerTube. He had Claude go through 43,000,000 hacker news comments going all the way back to 2,007. He pulled out the YouTube videos people kept recommending year after year, so the result is a customized library of 6,454 videos across a 150 topics. No login, no algorithm chasing your clicks. Said it took about two hours of Claude code with Opus 5.5 to build it, and he calls it a significantly better viewing experience. Have you have you tried out HackerTube, Jason?
01:06:35 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:06:35] S1: So Anthropics' Andrej Karpathy got fed up with YouTube's recommendations. Over the weekend, he built his own YouTube. It is called HackerTube. He had Claude go through 43,000,000 hacker news comments going all the way back to 2,007. He pulled out the YouTube videos people kept recommending year after year, so the result is a customized library of 6,454 videos across a 150 topics. No login, no algorithm chasing your clicks. Said it took about two hours of Claude code with Opus 5.5 to build it, and he calls it a significantly better viewing experience. Have you have you tried out HackerTube, Jason? [01:07:15] S0: I I pulled it up. It's it's awesome. It's just great to make new interfaces for datasets. YouTube should be thrilled because if you click on these, it's going to still have the ads embedded in it. What you've done is you've removed the cruft. And I think this is going to be a very interesting moment in time. Anybody could have built this in sixty days with two developers and a designer, but nobody would take the time to do it. I did something similar this same past week. I've talked before about my frustration on Amazon in just trying to get to a product to buy. [01:07:55] S1: The real product below all the ads and sponsored whatever whatever. Yeah.