Techno Optimism, Explained

I cannot wait for the day where my daughter and son say, "Oh, 45 minutes to Tokyo? That's so slow!" I can't wait.

Hello, this is Dalton, post-Michael, and today we're going to talk about why we are optimistic about the future.

So, to be clear, at YC, we fund a lot of startups, and even though we try to do a very good job, most startups fail. Yeah, if you look at the numbers, we know a lot more about failing and failed startups than successful ones, by an order of magnitude. Yeah, yeah, that's just how the numbers work, right?

And so we see failed startups every day. We live it; we breathe it. This is just the job that we have. We're experts on failure. Well, and just so you don't think, "Oh, well, you know, they're going to be optimistic because they're like rolling in the dough," the ones that work take like 12 years to work, right? So it's like, even for the ones that do well, you don't make money fast being an early-stage startup investor.

So why is it a situation where it takes a long time to make money and a lot of startups are dying all around us every day? Why are we optimistic? I think it's this. I think if you zoom all the way back, all the way out, it's weird to talk to young people and have them be pessimistic about the future. Yes, it's weird. It is weird.

And so part of the reason we want to do this video is to give you some reasons to be optimistic yourself. Yes, and I think it comes down to perspective, Michael. Yes, I think it's all about perspective. If all you do is read the news every day, you get bombarded with negativity, especially around technology. Yes, there's a lot of, the biggest technology stories right now are some version of like, "This is bad, these people are bad, like, people are being exploited." Bad, bad, bad, bad, right?

And so it's not hard, if you're just consuming the news and not zooming out, to be like, "Yeah, you know, things were better back 50 years ago or 100 years ago." Don't point to me; I was young, you know?

Um, and I, I'm again, I'm not sure that's true. I think there's a perspective thing. So again, like, so walk with us here; let's talk about perspective. Yes, let's talk about the things that have improved since the '90s when we were like teenagers. Yes, let's go through the list. We thought through the list, right?

So the '90s were supposed to be boom time America, and if we think about what's better now than the '90s, I think I would start with like, availability of information. I remember in the mid-'90s getting the CD-ROM called Encarta. Yep, and I remember my uncle, who's 20 years older than me, being like, "Oh my God, the encyclopedia is in your house versus having to go to the library. This is incredible. You could just search it. It was on one disc.”

Exactly. It was easy to search, and like that now, God knows how much more information than that is like for free. The internet, everything, it's textual information is a search away. Yes, and video—freaking YouTube itself—crazy.

There's a website where anyone can record any video of like any length on any topic for free, and you can watch it for free forever. That is like mind-blowing to me, yes. How incredible this is. Again, if you zoom out, if you think like you're an alien and you just have no context on this stuff, yes, this is incredible, incredible, and none of this existed.

Well, and this isn't like—we're not talking about 50 years ago, right? We're talking about like 20, 25 years ago. Yep, this didn't exist, right?

All right, next, communications. Uh, I don't know about you, but we started with one phone line in the house, yep, and that was it. That was communication. Again, people are like, "Well, but it must've been so great; there were no phones, and like it was so much easier to be a teenager."

All that. I mean, no, maybe, maybe no it wasn’t great. Like you know, you couldn't be like on the internet and on the phone at the same time. I don't know if anyone's ever taken that for granted.

Like so now when people like, you know, I open up the messaging app folder on my phone, and there's like 17 apps with video, audio, text. I can text people all over the world for free. I can call people anywhere in the world for free. Like that’s better. It's like a lot better.

It used to cost money. We lived in New Jersey; it used to cost money to call New York right next door. You got to talk fast when you called—that was long distance.

So yes, communications—a little better. Transportation—freaking Uber, ride-sharing, travel, crazy. Maps! Do you remember printing out MapQuest? Dude, do you remember just having to buy maps, physical maps, to drive around a city? And your dad would have a bunch of maps in the car for all the places you might want to drive to in the future.

So transit's gotten a little better. Yeah, a little better. What else has gotten better? Healthcare. I mean, people are living longer; they're living better lives. Yes, standard of care, infant mortality, yes, life expectancy around the world, people making more money, being raised out of the poverty line.

I mean, just look at all the stats. You can look it up, viewer. Um, actually, like zoom all the way out and look at this stuff for yourself. Yes, it's pretty cool. The number of people living in extreme poverty is less. The number of kids living longer—once again, we're not talking about the difference between like the Civil War era and today. This was like 20, 30 years ago. This isn't even our whole lifetime.

Yep, we're half of our lifetime. All right, what else? So we got entertainment.

Yeah, I mean, think about it. There's like an infinite supply of things to look at all day. Infinite, infinite, any movie you want to see, any television show ever created, any book ever created. If you want to pirate things—like if we include piracy in here—the sum of all human creative content in the history of time is available at your fingertips for free. Yes, and the only thing that limits it is your willingness to go find it.

Yes! Like it's, your appetite is the limiting factor; not, you might have to watch ads. Yeah, you might have to watch ads but there's no—it's post-scarcity on this stuff. Your only limiting factor is your imagination of what you want to watch. Exactly, it's all there.

Okay, so we sound like boomers here, but the point, the reason to enumerate this stuff is that in the moment when all this stuff was happening, it wasn't immediately obvious that the world was changing. It was just kind of normal, like, "Oh, this new thing came out, oh, that's cool.” And even at the time, some of this stuff, people were against it, or they were like, "This doesn't seem so great."

No, and but when you gain perspective of looking back 20, 30 years later, it's way more obviously earth-shatteringly awesome. Yes. And so, well, and I think what's cool is that that wasn't a particularly special period of time. I think they were on the cusp of a bunch of new, interesting stuff, right?

Um, you know, hilariously, like I remember when Starlink was like an idea, yeah, and it was kind of a funny idea—Internet access anywhere, going to satellites. And it was like, theoretically it's possible, but I just remember it being like, “Well, first Elon has to figure out how to make his rockets not explode. But once he does that, he's just going to launch satellites around the earth.”

Have I—I remember that being like, "Oh sure." And then like I remember the day Starlink launched. I was like, "I guess the rockets work. It works!"

Yes, like you can use it. You can use it. Cruise—perfect example. I remember getting into a cruise car with Kyle driving down 101, and he said to me, "Uh-oh, there's a shadow in the road. Uh, let's see how we handle this."

And I'm like, "I—oh, this is an MVP." Shadows? I haven't thought about that. Yeah, I haven't thought about shadows in ever—when driving.

And I remember when Cruz did their kind of first open launch, and I got into a cruise car with my wife, and it just drove us to where we were going. And I remember for the first minute 30 being like, "I can't believe this is the same."

Yeah, I can't believe this is on like a continuum that started with me being afraid of shadows and now it's like, "Well, and again, I actually care about that stuff a lot."

If I just think about, you know, growing up about just the number of people that I knew that died in car accidents and the number of people that every day get seriously injured or die in car accidents, I think we're going to look back and be like, "That was crazy, barbaric."

That was like having surgeons that didn't wash their hands—like, and that era is, I think, how we'll look at some of this transportation stuff. Yes, right?

And we're right on the precipice. It's not like everyone's even excited about self-driving cars. Like, it's like, "Oh, I don't know about this whole self-driving car thing. Drunk drivers aren't that bad, are they?"

It's only tens of thousands of people who die a year in America. It's like whatever. And so you should—I would expect people to be like pretty excited about this. Yeah, but it's seen as sort of this like neutral or divisive issue instead of something that's kind of awesome.

It's happening! I mean, another one is renewable energy. I had a friend who was working on a startup, and he said something to me that I thought was a lie. He was like, "Oh yeah, based on where you live in America, you can choose to just buy your energy from like a renewable source, like hydroelectric or solar."

And I was just like, "It doesn't exist!" He's like, "Yeah, it's—and I'm like, oh, well, it must be like 10x more expensive." He's like, "No, like right now I think like 10% more expensive."

And I was like, "What? Like that’s happening?" Like, we went from solar being the future in the '90s to just being the commonplace reality that no one thinks too much about.

And it feeling economical for a lot of people is like, "Oh, you live in a sunny area? Yeah, you're going to save some money." It did not feel that way in the past. We're in a solar-powered building right now. Like, this is solar power powering this lighting. There are solar panels on the roof.

Okay, whatever, do we care? No, no, it's like it's happening right now.

So, you know, to me, the one that's like we're probably a little bit more off the cusp on, but like when this happens, I'm going to be so pissed.

Right? Everyone talks about rockets and going to space—the whole, like, when rockets are reliable, you can go anywhere in the world in 45 minutes. Like we could commute to Tokyo. Yep! Like when that happens, like it changes the world in so many ways.

And that was like in the '90s, we were watching space shuttles, yeah, go up, and like half of the shuttle was basically like getting ejected into the freaking ocean.

And whenever you did the math, it was like, "Oh, that cost us more than building a rocket from scratch and blowing it up." Like that's where we were in the '90s, and now, like, we actually have a path to I can go anywhere in 45 minutes. Like, it's pretty cool.

And again, what this makes me think of—I don't have this graph handy, so I hope I'm not misquoting—but I remember the graph being referenced of the cost per pound to put something in space, and it looks like Moore's Law where what's happening is that there's this Moore's Law looking graph, yeah, on how cheap—how much cheaper it is getting to put something into orbit. Yes, and how if you just believe in the Moore's Law continuing to happen here, the amount of cool stuff that will happen in space in 5, 10, 20 years, it's just mind-blowing.

Yeah, and we're at—it's getting really cool!

Yes. So I think what's so cool is like not only have things gotten so much better since the '90s, things are getting better. So if all of this stuff's great, why are people so pessimistic? Well, I think it's hard to have perspective, man.

Yes. I think when you're really caught up in the moment, everything gets polarized into political stuff or tribal warfare about who's on what team. And so if your team is the thing pushing for the thing, you celebrate it, but if the other team is screwing people—exactly!

Yeah, so it's very—everything is polarized. Yes. I also think there's this weird expectations game, right? Like, it's magical thinking to think that we get all the things we spent the first chunk of the video talking about and there's nothing bad.

Yep, that's magical. That's like, that's not being an adult. There's going to be trade-offs. There's going to be trade-offs, right? Like the trade-off on having, you know, 60-second videos that are exactly what I want that I can swipe anytime I want is like, you know, maybe 2 hours of swiping I should be going to bed.

You know, like there are a lot of different trade-offs, and like I just feel like when people treat themselves like children versus treat themselves like adults, it's like, you know, a child doesn't acknowledge a trade-off exists. Right? A child can think magic. They want only the perfect, you know, it has to all be good with no bad, with no bad.

Yes, you know, cut the crust off. Exactly! Cut the crust off! Right? And for a while, adults kind of create that world, and after a while, adults explain to their kids, like, "That's—I can't cut the crust off the world," or like, "You need to cut your own crust off."

I mean, if you want to do that, you can, but I'm—not doing that anymore. No, world is crusted, and like, you know, technology is crusts.

Yeah, right? Technology—with the good comes some bad, right? So that's a big one. I also think that like there's this weird thing where the pacing is inconsistent, right? Like, um, sometimes you get a lot of innovation in one part of the economy and then sometimes you get a lot of innovation in another part of the economy.

It's not reliable, yep. And so, you know, and it's so easy. It's this debate thing where you can say, "Well, what about X problem?" like no matter what good thing happens. Yes, and they're not wrong.

"What about, like, you're right, X is a problem. Like, that's totally fair." But if you want to tear down anything interesting that happens by saying, "Well, X over here isn't solved yet," it's easy to just get trapped in the mud; you tear down everything, yeah?

Right? So I'll say this, right, in reflection. You know, we both have young kids, and I am super excited that my kids get to grow up now.

I cannot wait for the day where my daughter and son say like, "Oh, 45 minutes to Tokyo? That's so slow! I can't wait." You know, in my day, this isn't so great.

What's so great about that? It's really rocky—it's really a bumpy ride. I am so excited about the world that they're going to join, and I'm confident they're going to get even more over the next, you know, 80 years than we're getting, which is really fun.

And think about it; we all—you all get to create this future. Yes! And there's this thing where it's cooler and edgier and more punk rock to be like, "Everything is..." and that's a good high horse to be on if you want to be cool.

But if you're actually building things and you want to be a part of creating it, yeah, it's much easier and more fruitful to be optimistic and think about all the things you can do and think about what you personally can do and what you can work on.

Yes, versus just being like, "Burn it all down because of X." Well, you know, think about it. If you really care about those problems, you have to be optimistic to try to solve them.

And like some of the people who are like the big social critics or the biggest revolutionaries or the biggest change agents in our society were default optimistic. Yep, because they believed it could work. They believed effort wasn't a waste of time.

You have to believe enough to invest yourself into something, exactly. And so I’m only to bet none of your heroes were the cool, snarky folks who never did anything and just bitched about how the world was. Like none of your heroes were that. And so don't be one of those people.

Like you can choose to not be one of those people. All right, great chat. Great! [Music] Thanks.