This Week in Startups: Loop Golf's automatic tee time booking for golfers, plus: Cruise robotaxi suspension & more | E1836

And so we give them the power to basically set and forget it, let us do the work for them,

and book a tea time for them in their sleep, which literally happened for me last night.

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All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. As you probably know,

golf is one of the most valuable sports in the United States right now. Last year,

more than 25 million people played golf at an actual golf course that that sink in.

That's about 10% of the population. And there are about 10,000 golf courses

open to the public here in the United States since COVID hit.

Man, golf has exploded even more with the last three years being the three biggest years on

record for golf in America. So we have a founder who is innovating in the golf space,

specifically in getting those tee times, booking those really coveted tee times.

Loop Golf helps golfers book tee times automatically. And the CEO and co-founder

is Matt Holder. Welcome to the show, Matt. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having us.

So I met you through Founder University, our program. I'm just curious,

before we get into what you're doing at Loop Golf, you went, I think, to cohort five.

We're on cohort six now. Maybe you just tell everybody how you found out about Founder University

and what the 12 weeks was like briefly. Sure. Yeah. So I mean, how I found out about the

program was actually mentioned that I think a couple of times on the All-In podcast, which,

you know, I listen to every week, big fan. And, you know, when I heard about it and I took a look

and the description of the program just sounded like exactly what we needed. 12-week program,

lots of high energy, lots of accountability to just make rapid progress. And at the end of it,

it was just like, found it to be a really fantastic way to just spend 12 weeks and get

a good crash course and kind of like everything in startups that,

honestly, I think everyone in tech should probably take at some point in their life.

But you've been an entrepreneur before, so you knew a lot of the information in the program.

But you spoke a little bit about accountability there. Maybe just before we get into Loop Golf

here, just talk a little bit about how that manifests itself in a 12-week program like Founder

University. As you know, as a part of the program, giving updates on a weekly basis

is a core part of it. And that just gives built-in accountability for making sure that

you are doing the things on a day-to-day basis and an hour-by-hour basis to make that rapid

progress so that you have a growing trajectory of updates to give, as well as the community that

you guys foster with each of the cohorts and the extended family of cohorts. There's a lot of just

kind of natural community accountability as well, because you want to be able to share

wins with each other. And there's a lot of activity in the community there on that as well.

So it was really great. Awesome. Yeah, and it's great to be part of a group, right? Because it's

kind of lonely being a founder. And if you're in the group, I find. Absolutely. Other people are

suffering through product market fit and that really hard journey, trying to get product

philosophy going, which is hard. You got to get a team that's willing to prank. I actually read

your updates. It's one of the things people don't know is I hang out in the Founder University

database and I look at who's sending updates. And I just peruse them. I'll just spend an hour

looking at them. You did 8 of 12 weeks, 67% of your updates. And I liked watching each week. We

asked people for their one simple sentence. And you started like, and you try one week was like

kayak for golf. You know, by the end, it was like, oh, the easiest, the quickest way to book a tee

time. And then it was in the United States. But you know, the easy way to book a tee time, it was

just such an elegant way to explain it. So let's talk a little bit about what loop golf is

and why the world needs it. Awesome. Yeah. So loop is, as I said, the quickest and easiest way to

book a, book a tee time at your favorite course in the US. What we've built is a way for golfers

to tell us what their preferences are, whether from selecting a course to choosing which date and

time they want to play. And then as soon as they book with us, we monitor the course 24 seven,

automatically booking a tee time as soon as that one appears, which as golfers know in some markets,

especially like LA, San Francisco, Denver and others, it's nearly impossible to get a really

great tee time and a great course. And so we give them the power to basically set and forget it,

let us do the work for them and book a tee time for them in their sleep, which literally happened

for me last night at a, at a course as well. So it's sort of like there's this inventory that

could pop up and you manage that remnant inventory or last minute inventory, which I think is just

so brilliant. And then how do you make money from that? We charge on a per transaction basis.

There's a nominal fee that golfers pay as part of that that turns out to be, you know, a couple

bucks more on a, you know, 50 to 60 dollar, you know, per player greens fee, which the feedback

we're getting from, from our users is probably not enough and that we should probably charge more,

which is great validation to hear from, from our customers because golfers don't pay unless

until we successfully book them, there's, you know, literally no risk to them other than missing

out on an opportunity to golf by not booking through us. And so it's a marketplace in a way,

an on demand marketplace as this stuff becomes available. Now, what about the tee time software?

There's a lot of existing tee time software out there in the world that you can describe for me,

like how do golf courses manage their tee time? So they're using a book or they have it online,

it's like open table and it's kind of jangy, right? A lot of the stuff is old software,

I understand. Yeah, it's a lot of old software that was created, you know, 15, 20 years ago that

golf courses have been using and it's just kind of been built upon over time. So it's really

cumbersome actually as a golfer to use because golf courses in the Bay Area or LA use a handful

of different systems. And as a golfer trying to book a tee time, you end up having to create

three different accounts and search for different websites in order to try and find that tee time

at like midnight just to be able to book the one, the one that you want to get. And so what we've

done is we've done integrations with all of those different disparate services and centralized it

all into one, one place so that as a golfer, you don't have to do that. You don't have to,

you know, have your wife irritated that you're up every night trying to book golf courses.

I tried to snipe those last minute. Exactly. So what do they charge for that software? I wonder

like how much do they charge for golf courses for that tee time management software?

You know, it's interesting. It's, I think some of the courses and the way that others do it is they

charge probably, you know, about 10 to $20,000 a year, something like that for courses to do that.

And, you know, they're about five to 10 in the US that dominate most of the market.

So it's fairly saturated, but, you know, dealing with courses, they do,

they consider changing their systems on maybe an annual basis. So it's a very long,

very long sales cycle. Like education, you know, or healthcare. These tend to be pretty hard,

you know, you have incumbents in there, but does seem like there's a lot of room for you to grow.

So maybe really quick show it, show us the UX here and the design of the products. You know,

one of the things I really liked about what you're doing and attracted me to the team and

I'm investing in the company. So I'm super excited about that. Thank you for letting me invest.

That's why we do Foundry University. We want to help people, but we wind up investing in the top

in our 10% of graduates or so. So here I see we're on loopgolf.co, right? Or .co.

.co, correct. Yeah. So I see here Los Angeles, Tea Times, Rancho Par, Encino Golf Course,

Balboa, Wilson, a bunch of different golf courses there. So how does it work?

Yeah. So, you know, all golf for us to do is come to loopgolf.co, perform a search for,

you know, their local market, find the course, their favorite course that they want to play,

simply tap book Tea Time. And then they're brought into our wizard, which basically allows them to

select their preferences of when and where they want to play. And the beauty of this is that

most golf courses have a booking window of like seven to 14 days in advance. You can book it as

far in advance with us as you want. You could do it every Saturday for the next two years if you

are so inclined and just have a standing Tea Time going for you. We'll monitor it just the same as

the last minute Tea Time. With that in mind, like, I don't know, I guess the week of Thanksgiving,

maybe we want to play on Black Friday. So we'll select that date. You select your time window.

So what we're finding is a lot of golfers, they have a specific time in mind, but they actually

have a willingness to play between, you know, an hour or two hour range on those days. So we give

them the opportunity to set that however they want, select how many players they want from one to four.

So let's just do four because I like to play with buddies. Set their budget. So sometimes the courses

have, sometimes they're charging 50 bucks, sometimes they're charging 60 bucks, depending on the day.

So we give you the opportunity to tell us what your budget is. We'll use that to determine whether

or not we can give you that Tea Time. We have to at least have a budget equal to what the course

is charging. So let's just say 75 for now. And then you tell us here when you want us to stop

looking for a Tea Time. So we will monitor it from the date, from the second it the Tea Sheet

opens all up until, you know, 24 hours prior to the Tea Time, six hours prior to Tea Time,

depending on what your preference is. You know, most courses allow you to cancel with no penalty

up to usually like 24 to 48 hours prior. If you want something that's shorter, you just need to

let us know and recognize that this is going to be a non-cancellable Tea Time. But let's put this to

36. And then once you've done all that configuration, you get to the checkout page, summarizes everything

that you've chosen, what the course is, all of your preferences. And you can see here that you're

going to pay up to the amount of your budget. We will charge you whatever the golf course itself

charges. And then your fee to us, which is only payable when we're successful in booking your

Tea Time. And then you pay the balance of it at the course, which is what golfers are used to.

They typically show up to the pro shop and just pay their Tea Time once they check in.

And then once it's done, we're now monitoring for this Tea Time. And as I said to you earlier,

you know, last night, I was able to successfully book a Tea Time. And it happened while I was

sleeping. It was 11, 11 p.m. A typical golfer might be, you know, scouring Tea Times late at night.

I didn't have to do that. I went straight to bed and while I was sleeping, I got a Tea Time for

myself through Loop. And the power of being able to do that is just game changing for golfers.

And a lot of our customers are saying the same thing. You can always tell when you have a good

idea that it sparks a lot of feature requests. I'm wondering if folks have said, you know,

I'm willing to play at these four courses. I want to play in Los Angeles. Tell me what's available

for, you know, 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. And, you know, give me like a, you know, options instead of just

guarantee me paying. Maybe you tell me, hey, there's two options. Pick which one you want. Have

you thought about that? Like split possibilities, giving them a little window of time. I know when

I book tickets for the fancy movie theater, you know, where they charge 15 bucks and have like the

food in the seats, they give you like five minutes when you're booking the seats to kind of make your

decision on which seats you want. And then they'll hold them for you while you type in your credit

card. Is there any concept like that here? Absolutely. So you actually hit on something

that we're seeing in the data itself. We're seeing golfers book the same course, you know,

on multiple dates, even though our UI doesn't really conveniently handle that yet. And they're

booking different courses for the same date, giving themselves optionality to have hopefully at least

one place that they can play. And so we do know and we've built some user experiences at other

marketplaces that my co-founder and I have been a part of that have worked really well to do that.

So we have a few different feature ideas on how we make that a really convenient user experience

for golfers so that they can book a backup and at least have somewhere to play on the date that

they want to play, as well as, you know, empower them to book, you know, the same place multiple

times just so that it's a lot more convenient to get on the golf course whenever they want.

Fantastic. And then in terms of building the company, hard time to build a company, right?

You can't get a lot, you can't raise a lot of money. It's not easy. How are you running the

company and like running it lean? And is the goal here to get to break even profitability quickly,

raise a bunch of capital? How are you thinking about the market right now? That's been a big

topic of discussion. So you've got a new startup here, you know, obviously I'm putting a little

bit of money in at this time. I'm an investor, but how do you think about the market and the new

reality of running a startup in 2023? That's a great question. Yes, it's hard. And I think that

the key to right now is running as lean as possible. You know, other companies in the really

great years of the past 10 years, like they get money and they really deploy it really quickly

and start really accelerating everything that they're spending on and hiring,

we're trying to employ like from a marketing standpoint, as many kind of like grassroots

criminal type marketing campaigns to make our dollars go a lot further. At the same time, you

know, it's actually part of the fun part of being at a small stage startup and a really

state small startup is is doing things that are really, you know, grinding away and doing things

that, you know, I think if you had a lot more money, you wouldn't be willing to do. And it

actually gets you a lot closer to your customers, which I think is fantastic because we get to

hear straight from straight from our customers, what they what they love and what what they wish

work better. And you're referring to, hey, you don't have a lot of money. So maybe you're doing

things in terms of marketing that are more gorilla, you know, meeting customers and just

telling them about the product and getting that first 100 customers into the product.

Yeah, so some things that we're doing are just going to golf ranges,

courses that we that we work for and showing up and just saying, hey, here's what we're doing,

would you give us feedback on the product and having just a gentle way of introducing the

product concept to them and hearing from them, you know, directly, like what they use it,

do they want to give a shot? What do they love about it? What can we improve? And we're leveraging

all of that as, you know, data for us to iterate on the product and make it better for our customers.

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In terms of golf, usually there's like 2 million new golfers every year. I see that like there's been

3.3 last year in terms of the number of new people who took on golf. Is this because of top

golf? I keep hearing people talk about top golf and that becoming a bit of a phenomenon. Is it

television? Is there like some new Tiger Woods I'm not aware of? What's causing this golf craze?

Or was it do you think just some sort of hangover from the pandemic? Because

I thought the idea was like young people maybe wouldn't want to play. It's expensive. It's for

old people. You know, it's just time consuming. They want to be on TikTok. But it seems like a

lot of young people are really, really into golf all of a sudden. What's behind the surge?

It's multi-dimensional. One of it obviously was COVID and golf was one of one of the activities

that you could actually do. And so a lot of people started taking to it. And golfers,

people who are already golfers were just doing it like me. We're doing a lot more of it

during that time. But then you had also the introduction of top golf. Like Tiger Woods

has a new golf league that's coming out that's going to be very focused on media. I think Steph

Perry just invested in a team based in SF. So there's a lot of money coming into it.

Oh, it's like tell me about that. Yeah, tell me about that Tiger Woods one.

Yeah. So it's like Tiger Woods and Rory McElroy are putting together a golf league

that is meant to, I believe, be kind of like focused on the between the months that the

PGA Tour is an active and be something that keeps golf as an all season, all year evergreen kind of

like media sport. And so they're going to be playing with new formats of how you play golf.

I think it's going to be nighttime, which is going to be really cool. Oh, super cool.

And kind of like a short format, not 18 holes, but maybe three, six or nine holes. So

most people don't know most know a lot of information about the concept, but what we

do know sounds pretty exciting. But then from a kid's perspective, you also have

over these past 10 to 15 years, a lot of parents, I've got young kids myself,

kind of going away from some of the more high contact sports. Ah, hockey, football. Exactly.

And so soccer and golf would be lower tennis. Exactly. So a lot of kids and parents are steering

their kids into golf. So the surge in golf is really led by these younger golfers who are,

you know, Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen Z, and even younger who are coming and pouring themselves into the

game. So there's a really interesting, awesome opportunity to have this generational shift

in participation in golf that if we do things right in the golf industry can be sustained for

you know, decades. How are the golf courses liking what you're doing? I would, I would suspect

that some of them love it. They have extra capacity. You're helping them. I suspect other

ones that are crowded, maybe they are control freaks and they want to control the whole experience.

They don't want you intercepting their business or their customers. So how do you think about

building a marketplace where, you know, maybe some people love you and some people maybe don't,

or maybe I'm just projecting into that. You know exactly, you know, where we are,

like there's, there's love hate relationship that's developing with the golf courses. And

we went into this wanting to be a positive force, not only for golfers, but golf courses as well,

because let's face it, like as a golfer, I want to go play a course that's well-funded,

takes care of their playing conditions and the course itself so that I can, you know,

continue to play there and enjoy my time there. So we've purposely built our product such that

golf courses retain 100% of the green fee that they, that they market so that they're not losing

out. That's something that is new within the golf industry because, you know, existing players

have the complete opposite. They actually take money from the course in order to market their,

you know, market their business. And a lot of golf courses over the years have grown to kind of

really, really hate that model. And so we're trying to completely flip it on this head and be,

be, you know, a positive incentive line partner, not only with golfers, but courses as well.

And we think that over time, we'll be able to develop really close relationships with them.

Did they track the, the golfers on the golf course in real time and know their spacing and

stuff like that with any kind of technology? I was just thinking, like the marathon, I used to

run the marathon and when we ran the marathon, everybody started at the same time, but you cross

the starting line, you know, in the New York City marathon, maybe at minute 10 or 15, even 20, if

you're the last people, then I understand they put like, you know, RFID things on people's sneakers

and they would, you know, tell you your minute miles and everybody had a custom start time as

it were. And so do they track? I mean, I would think the golf carts, they track, but I don't

know if they do, that would be expensive, maybe to put an IoT on it. How do they manage the flow?

There is some management there, as you said, like the golf course, golf carts are kind of like

the most obvious way to do that tracking, but not everybody takes a cart. And so that makes it a much

larger, more difficult to solve problem in terms of knowing what the pace of play is,

where the bottlenecks are on a course, who's where and things like that. So behind that is

obviously like a problem with playability of a course. And a lot of reasons golfers want

early tee times as they know that they can play it in four and a four and a half hours versus

if they get out in the afternoon or midday, they might have a six hour round, which is just

wow, very time consuming. And a lot of it has to do with pace play and how people navigate the

course and different abilities of golfers at different times. So it's one of the people's

smartphones, you know, if you had your smartphone on you and you had booked from loop golf,

then you have GPS. And so if they said, Hey, check in when you get to the golf course, you could

know that I checked in and that my phone, where my phone is, I could share my location with you.

Does anybody do that yet? Funny enough, we do, we actually do a little bit of that. We do have

an app that we've built that takes kind of the concepts of an app like Strava,

which as a runner, you might, you might have used or a cyclist and combine it with golf. So

using, you know, a smart watch or your phone, just in the background, while you play in an

unintrusive way, we're following everywhere that you go on the course, when you book ground,

we're giving you live GPS distances to the front, back and middle of the green,

ways of keeping your, ways of keeping your score and your stat performance stats.

And then at the end of it, we put your path of everywhere you've gone on the course,

over on a map that's shareable with, with your front, with your golf buddies

into the broader loop community. Behind that, you know, at some point, we can,

you know, obviously use that to give courses better, better intelligence about what's happening

at different times on the course, as well as do things like build strategy maps that golfers can

use to better understand how to navigate their way around, around each hole on the course.

And hopefully it leads to better scores for them. So.

All right. Well, listen, I'm super excited. Thanks for coming to Founder University. Thanks

for letting me invest. And thanks for coming on this week in startups. Good luck building it out

and encourage everybody to just go try lubegolf.co. Is there any specific geos that you're

targeting first where you have, you know, more density of courses? Because I know like you're,

you're just rolling out, right? This is early days.

Right. Yeah. We're, we're currently focused on the Los Angeles Metro. So if you're a Los Angeles

based golfer, please go to lubegolf.co, give us a try and, and give us feedback. Tell us what

you want to see us do next with loop golf and we're listening. So.

And in the other markets, you can sign up and like join a waitlist or something.

Yeah. Other markets you can, you can join up. You can let us know which markets you want to

cover and we might want your market next. Yeah.

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I think it would be super cool if like you were in LA, if there was just like a,

if you were like a member, like maybe you could become a have a membership to loop golf,

if I was a VIP member, they just told you like these are the courses that have availability

and you gave me kind of a heat map almost like, you know, there's a cool feature on Google

flights where you can see a grid and then it shows you, hey, because I do this, you know,

makes no sense. I know, but sometimes I have flexibility in my travel and I'll just tell

my assistant like, hey, when you book my ticket, just look the day before the day after if the

ticket prices are radically different. And like, you know, when I went to Italy, I could choose

my days. So I was like, oh, let's leave on this day versus this day because, you know, business

class was $1,000 cheaper if I left on a Tuesday instead of a Monday or something. And I don't

understand why, I guess, you know, popularity of certain days, but you could do some really

interesting stuff and like educating me like, Hey, by the way, you know, you put in Saturday at 10am,

not a great time, but you know, if you could figure out how to go on a 7am,

Tuesday and Wednesday, those are open 16% of the time or whatever, just some sort of system of like

educating people. Have you thought about doing something with like real time education of

golf in tea times? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like on a course basis and day by day and hour by hour,

there's differences in demand and supply. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot, there's obviously

a lot we can do. The first step is that we're taking is just organizing, like collecting the

data and centralizing the data just so that we have the ability to do some, do some of those things.

Obviously, like there's a big AI revolution happening right now too. And I think the golf,

the golf industry is kind of not evolved enough yet to really take advantage of that because the

data isn't centralized in a way that makes it usable for those models. So I think we have,

you know, in doing that, we have an advantage of being able to then make that evolutionary step

into doing some AI stuff like that. For example, like golf travel and being able to say like,

Hey, I wanted to go do a bachelor party or a bachelor party in Scottsdale. What are the

best courses to play? Build my itinerary and get me the two times. So that is booked.

All right. You know, everybody's probably thinking this and I was obviously involved in

Uber, which had a very controversial feature, surge pricing. And then there's an app in New

York called Dorcia. It's like pay 500 bucks a person in advance to, you know, secure a car

bone or something on a Saturday night. And I love the reference. Yeah, it's pretty sick.

And you pay that Dorcia like $1,000. And then when you go there, if you spend 600, if we went

there and we, you know, didn't order a bunch of wine or whatever, the $400, you still have to pay.

So it's kind of like, you know, premium service. Have you thought about surge pricing

or had like to offer this amount, you know, to secure a time and, you know, I'm willing to pay

a little extra? We have thought about that during my time. So I was a director product at Zillow

back. And we had some, we had some things that we did in terms of how we sold ads to real estate

agents that had to prioritize waitlist based off of willingness to pay for certain markets.

So that's something that we definitely are going to explore at some point. And

as a part of that, like there's an opportunity also to leverage that to partner more closely

with golf courses in a way that they went to from that. So it's, we've started testing out a little

bit. And we know that we know that that golfers have a much higher willingness to pay for preferred

two times. So there's a big opportunity there for us to do that is finding the right mechanism to

make it a fair system. Yeah, well, and if you have a bunch of, well, I don't know that it needs to

be fair necessarily. But, you know, if they have some premium times, if you said, Hey, we'll guarantee

you that we'll take that time and we'll give you the extra $100 or the extra 25 a person or 50 a

person. And then if you just put it into your system, you could take the risk of paying the

extra 100. And then you just email everybody and say, Hey, we've got this extra inventory,

just like somebody who's, you know, you know, a ticket broker or something might take a little

bit of risk on having some Taylor Swift tickets or something, but it could be really powerful

for you to just guarantee some inventory. And then you have a certain number of emails in Los

Angeles, you could just send it to people and say, Hey, we've got this tea time. This is the

best tea time of the week. Who wants it? I love that idea. Yeah, like that's almost,

yeah. Anything else coming up in the product that people should look forward to you,

keeping it close to the vest. I don't want to, I don't want to give away all your secrets,

but anything you want to disclose that's coming soon that people can look forward to.

Mostly keeping it close to the best to me. We're, you know, launching an LA is, is the first kind

of like big step towards us getting our marketplace by will going. And I think, you know, what,

what we're investing in is trying to, as successful as possible, get as many people

who order through us back on the golf course in the most effective and most convenient ways.

So a lot of our focus right now is just in the guts of the product, making sure that that

works to a point where we feel like really confident that we can go not just, not not LA,

but beyond that and launch multiple markets through 2024. So that's, that's, it's the

unsexy stuff, but it's the important stuff to get done. All right, keep grinding. Everybody

check out loopgolf, L-O-O-P-G-L-O-F dot C-O. Go ahead and check it out. One of my latest

investments. Super excited. If you want to come to Founder University, go to Founder dot University.

We're going to do our seventh cohort. Can't believe we're at seven cohorts already

in the program. We'll give a $25,000 investment, Prince and family investment. If people need

that first check and, you know, my name's helpful to get that first check on the cap table, or

sometimes we invite people from founding university to come to the launch accelerator,

or sometimes we just directly invested them like we did here with loopgolf. All those things

are possibilities at Founder dot University. And yeah, join the family, join the fun,

come learn how to build a startup and make the world a better place, or make the world

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there's some big news. Earlier this week, California's DMV suspended cruise's robo taxi permit

due to the company allegedly. And this is where it gets interesting with holding footage after

the incident in San Francisco a few weeks ago. This means crews can no longer operate its robo

taxis in San Francisco. They're still live in Phoenix, although given what's happened here

in California, if it's true, I could see them pulling Phoenix's license as well. Okay, now,

I am a big fan of waiting to get all the facts, but we're starting to assemble the facts here.

So let's just go through what we know. On October 2nd, there was a hit and run.

That did not involve the cruise vehicle directly. Somebody got hit, a woman, apparently, and they

were propelled, sadly, tragically in front of a cruise vehicle. So crews did not do the initial

strike on this woman. The woman apparently, and I'm sorry that this is a big graphic trigger

warning if you've been in a car accident, I know it's triggering for some people,

but the cruise car slammed on the brakes and reportedly stopped on top of the woman. Okay,

this is something that happens when I worked on an ambulance and we saw car accidents. This is

something that happened with pedestrians. You get hit, you could get hit by two or three cars.

It's not the first one that kills you in some cases. It's the person swerving around the car

that got in the accident that hit somebody and clips them. That's why if you ever get in an

accident on the highway, many, many people who die on the highway, it's not from the initial

accident. It's because they get out on an active highway and they're disoriented and they walk

across the highway and then they get struck a second time or the car gets rear-ended after

it's been in an accident. So crews reported that the vehicle stopped on top of the woman and that

they kept the vehicle in place until the first responders could arrive to assist the woman.

This makes sense. And I talked about this before on the All In podcast. I think one of the best

practices is you don't move the car until the emergency people get there because if you move

it, you could cause more damage. Okay. And if somebody has updated information on how EMS handles

this, my information is 30 years dated here. So the police instructed crews to brick the car

while on top of the woman. And again, that's standard operating procedure and that's been

confirmed now. But what they didn't mention, and again, this is allegedly, was that the vehicle

also pulled the woman forward 20 feet. Now, this has been confirmed by crews.

Crews mentioned this is in a detailed review of the hit and run published this week. Again,

they did not do the initial hit, but this week they published a detailed review.

Okay. So now here's where it gets a little dicey. The California DMV is claiming that crews

withheld this footage of the woman being dragged 20 feet from them in an accident review that took

place the day after the accident. Here's the quote from the DMV's order of suspension.

During the meeting, the department was shown video footage of the accident captured by the AV's

onboard cameras. The video footage presented to the department ended with the AV's initial stop

following the hard braking maneuver. Okay, great. Footage of the subsequent movement of the AV to

perform a pullover maneuver was not shown to the department and crews did not disclose

that any additional movement of the vehicle had occurred after the initial stop of the vehicle.

The department only learned of the AV's subsequent movement by discussion with another

government agency. The department requested crews provide a copy of the video with additional

footage which was received by the department October 13, 2023. If this is true, this is really

bad for crews because when deploying and being part of the beta, crews is building trust with

these agencies and the agencies and crews have a lot to lose. They're in partnership and putting

this new technology out there. Part of that is to own what happens when accidents occur and accidents

will happen in cars. We all know that. You have to be absolutely transparent and you cannot in

any way lie. This is that simple. Why has this video not been released is my question. If you

were crews, and again, now I'm going to get into speculation. If crews did a good job here,

they would have released the video. Now, you can blur out the individual, but you would release

some portion of the video if you were in the clear. I think you would do that. Now, there might be

lawyers who say, don't do it because it could incite the public or something or there could be

some more damages that would occur possibly. But yeah, I think for society, these agencies

and the car companies should release the footage and the data. This way, multiple parties can see

it. What they're doing right now, all the parties involved, is making us all wonder what is the

truth. And in a vacuum, and I've said this before, when not presented with the facts in a vacuum,

people will go different places. And the place people are going here is that cruises car, drag

the woman, and that they hit it on purpose. That's where your mind will go if they're not

forthright. Now, another group of people will say, hey, these agencies are anti-tax or they've got it

in for crews, and they'll go down that conspiracy rabbit hole. Just release the videos. You want

to be crystal clear about what you did right, what you did wrong, and then fix it. The fact that

none of this data is out there points to me, one of two possibilities. The cruises that fault,

and they were ashamed of it, and they were hiding something. There was a cover up, in other words,

or maybe it's a jump ball. And I suspect that's the actual situation here. I bet you it's one

of these things where it's not clear how bad this is, and maybe somebody made a very poor decision

to hide this footage. But if the data was conclusive, my opinion is you would release it quickly.

Now, of course, big companies can behave strangely. They can get caught up and say, hey, we don't have

to, there's some loophole here. They only asked for us to give them the accident information.

They didn't ask us to give us the post accident information. There might be some weasel lawyer

who told them, oh, technically, we don't have to give them what happened after the accident.

They only asked for the accident. So just give them the accident.

Jason, I think that's just a break in here. I think you're exactly right. I think that's

exactly what happened. Because in that quote from the DMV's order of suspension, they mentioned

the department, meaning the DMV, only learned of the AV subsequent movement via discussion with

another government agency. So Cruz did show this footage to another agency, but they just

hid that part of it from the DMV. Right. Okay. So there it is, producer working with me.

Jay Cal slash Colombo in figuring this out. So, you know, it's...

I think the part about this that's so stupid, though, especially in San Francisco,

is you have this total contingent of like anti-tech. These things are horrible.

They're throwing traffic cones on top of them to brick these things. You have just validated

all of those people by appearing like this, you know, like this sets them back a decade.

I was about to say, I think this sets it back five years, maybe even a decade, who knows.

But I think, you know, self-driving cars in San Francisco, at least from Cruz are over.

I don't think they give Cruz their license back. And you know what? If they did hide it,

I can understand their argument, you know? Because what happens, I mean, if you're hiding this,

what else are you hiding? Right? It makes them look like the tech overlord, the corporate evil

overlord. It makes them look like that. That's literally what it does. It makes it look like

they're trying to get away with something. So just whoever made the decision here at Cruz,

if this is in fact true, again, I got to put that disclaimer in there because there's weird

stuff going on right now. It's hard to find the truth. You know, maybe there's some mix up here.

Maybe they gave them the second part of the video. They didn't see it. I don't know. But

this is a mess. This is sloppy on all sides. And yeah, this is just tragic for the industry,

because the truth is these things are going to save people's lives. What a disaster.

You know, it's just, and that's the real problem here, as a free bird pointed out on All In when

we discussed it. You got to take some risk to get the reward. The risk here is that, you know,

hey, the car might drag somebody, right? But who knows if this had not been a Cruz car,

you know what I'm saying, Nick? And it hit them. It may have not done the aggressive

braking. It might have killed the person. And that's where transparency matters. Remember

I said before that a lot of times in the accident, it's the second hit that kills people. You either

the rear end or they, you know, they get out of the car, they start walking around,

they try to flag somebody, and then somebody clips them. And you always see that, right? Cops

got forbid. They're going up to the car and they get clipped by somebody who's on their phone.

Maybe if you put this information out here, somebody would have said, hey, by the way,

this thing stopped on a dime. A human couldn't have done that. Boom, it would have hit somebody.

This reminds me of the movie Flight. You remember, not Flight, Sully, remember Sully?

I didn't see Sully, but I do love Flight.

Flight, that's up there. But in Sully, another great pilot movie, they put people in a simulation,

right? And they try to say he could have gotten to Tito Barrow, but that was like math,

could have gone to Tito Barrow, maybe technically, but when they actually put pilots in the simulation

and they had them do a double bird strike, they all died. Yeah. And this guy landed in the Hudson,

you know, Sully's the hero. So anyway, it's just said, did you see this other thing that was trending

on, did you see I got into a little bit of a Twitter beef again, Gen X versus Gen Z?

Oh, man, you are, you are getting, you are getting flamed right now. Crazy.

I mean, it's a generation who've never commuted. I guess it's triggering to commute,

but there's a video online right now. Let's just play the clip first and then you can react to it.

I don't play the whole clip because not the whole thing. All right. There was a clip on TikTok

that went viral on X of a young woman who just graduated and just got her first job crying

about how much she hates her commute. But I will say in the clip,

everybody's kind of framing it as, oh, nobody wants to work anymore. But in the clip,

she does say, I love my job. I would have no problem with it if I could walk to work.

I can't afford, and I think she's talking about Manhattan. She says, I can't afford to live in

the city. So I have to live at home and I have like an hour commute plus each way.

Yeah. So did I for a decade. And then I made money and then I moved to Manhattan.

Did you ever feel like the life was being sucked out of you from a really long commute when you

get home at like eight o'clock and it's dark out? I mean, I took the R train into Manhattan back

and forth. It was long. Sometimes it took an hour, 15, sometimes it took 45 minutes. And

you know, I got a slice of pizza. When I get off, I would get a cup of coffee on the way in,

grab some... But you had some days where it was a hard long day and it sucked, right?

Yeah, of course. And you were like, man, this commute sucks, right?

Did the commute suck sometimes? Yes. Right. That's the point.

Was it cold? I bet I didn't get on TikTok and cry about it.

You couldn't get on TikTok and cry about it. There's no TikTok.

There's a TikTok blog post. I don't actually think any of the

points she's making are that bad. And... Okay, but just play it. It's the

intense, the screaming entitlement. Oh, now you want to play it. Okay.

Now you want to play the clip. I'll tell you the part I want to play.

Okay. The part I want to play is where she says, I have to leave my house at 7.30 and I don't get

back to 6.15. Yeah, that's funny. It's funny. That's a little rough.

Yeah. I know I'm probably being so dramatic and annoying,

but this is my first time. Yes, you are. My first time.

She even admits that she's being dramatic and annoying. Okay, fine.

After college and I'm in person and I'm commuting in the city and it takes me forever

to get there. There's no way I'm going to be able to afford living in the city right now.

So that's off the table. Like, if I was able to walk to work and it'd be fine, but I'm not.

Okay. It literally takes me, like I leave here, like I get on the train at 7.30 and I don't get

home till like 6.15. Yeah, that's not that bad. I would also ask.

I thought it was like 6 a.m. and you get home at like 8 p.m. Come on, man. Your dad,

my brother, your dad, producer Nick. Right. But you saw him leave the house at 6 o'clock.

Yes, of course. But you have to understand. But

guess what? Yes. But guess what he also did? He would come home and say, oh my god, that commute

sucked. I want to cry right now. That's literally what he would say. Okay. Everybody thinks commuting

sucks. It's awful. And I think her larger point is it is so expensive to live in Manhattan right

now. And you're not even putting into this. This is a whole other thing, but this is a young woman.

And right now, if you want to live in the city, in Manhattan, in San Francisco,

you might have to live in maybe not such a nice neighborhood. And guess what? I lived in San

Francisco for two years. I had a lot of guy friends. I had a lot of friends that were women,

young women. And guess what? You know who gets messed with by homeless people and drug addicts?

Is it ever young men? No. It's women and it's old people. So they have a whole other thing to

worry about about living in like. I get that piece. That's a separate issue. But yeah. I mean.

I think there's a confluence of things going on here with this. Do you think it's real? Let me

ask that. Is it real? Or is this person doing engagement farming? Maybe a little bit of both?

I'm not really sure. I don't know. Maybe I got the sense a little bit of both. Well, I feel like

I want to do something like this. I feel like I want to do a J. Cal meltdown

video and release it, but not tell people I'm doing it. Like, what could I have a meltdown?

I don't know. But what I need you to do in order for you to actually talk about this video

is I need you to have like an hour commute for a month straight every single day.

And then I want you to just talk about how much it sucks. The office is 10 minutes from where

I am. Exactly. You haven't had an hour commute since 1992. No, no. It would be a long time.

I know. A long time since I had an hour commute. Yeah. No, no, that sucks.

And you say that she makes some valid points. Can you just admit that?

Yes, she does make some valid points. But the part that's triggering is

with her disclaimer. Yeah. Maybe I did pile on because she did give the disclaimer.

She says, I'm being annoying. I know. And she says, if I could walk to work,

I wouldn't. I'd never complain. But the 730615 got me. That was funny. Yeah, that was good.

I didn't realize that on the first viewing. I was thinking, wait a second.

730, you get to work at 8.39 and then you're leaving at 5. So you're actually working a

literal 9 to 5, 8 hours. I wonder if she's eating at her desk, but she's going to pay for 40 hour

week. She's literally doing the bare minimum. Let's be honest here. And then she's like,

I don't get to go to the gym and I don't get to date. And I was like, wait a second.

I had an even worse schedule. I worked like maybe I'd leave at 7, work at 8, 8.30, worked

till 6.37, went to the gym, which just appears that I might go on a date or I might go have dinner

at 10 o'clock, get to bed by 12, you know, one and get six hours of sleep. Yeah. But here's the thing,

you could jump on the R train at any time of the day. If you're taking Metro North home,

if you're taking New Jersey transit like she is to the suburbs, those trains only leave at

certain times. Oh, did we find that out that she's doing this? Okay. Here's, from what I

survive, she's either in North Jersey, she's in Westchester or she's on, she's in Long Island

somewhere. You know, when it's New York accent, there's a mitigating factor. Yeah. And I think,

you know, those, and now we're getting totally into the weeds and this is completely ridiculous,

but I do think that. Well, no, it's a double commute. She's got to get on the New York City

subway and then you got to get on the path. And you have to transfer. And when you're leaving

those trains to kill her after a certain time, like the R train, you could jump on it runs every

five minutes, right? It's really slow, but it runs every couple minutes. 10 minutes,

five minutes, whatever. But you know, Metro North, you miss your train, you're at,

you're basically going to have. The next train you're getting is an hour later, right? So it's

like a whole, yeah. No, I had friends. I think logistically, I don't think her points are that

crazy here. Someone who's crying and I get home too late. Here's what I think, if I'm going to,

I'm going to give some prescriptive advice. Commuting sucks. What I did was I very quickly

just got the smallest possible apartment in Manhattan and, you know, split rent.

And, you know, it's like, get a tiny place and live in the city. That's my best advice.

Better to live in a studio, the tiniest possible apartment, but have the shortest commute

because your quality of life will go up. Totally. I understand that. Yeah, I get that.

Literally living in a studio apartment where like your bed and your kitchen are on the same thing,

it's totally fine because you can, when you're in Manhattan, you're in a major city, you're

going to be out anyway. You're a young person, you go to the gym, etc. Much better, much better.

Well, you do what I did. You have a sick loft, but it doesn't have heat on the weekends and you're

living illegally in a commercial. I just think the affordability problem in Manhattan right now

is so crazy. Well, that's why I, that's why I hacked it when I was her age. I have friends of mine

that are now 28 years old that make good money that are like, I want to live in a two bedroom,

but everything in Manhattan in like a decent neighborhood is $6,000 and above.

And I have to go to Williamsburg now. It's crazy. Yeah. Did you see the other one of the person

crying about she was, had to go surf sushi, but her, she can't get a marketing job because she's

up against people who have more experience. And then she says the degrees, the experience. No,

I didn't. Did you see the degrees, the experience? You didn't see the degrees, the experience?

No, no, nor do I care. Come on. What do we, there's, everybody can make a video now about

anything. Do we really need to ingest everyone's thoughts about the world? Like, come on. Who

cares? Yeah, just in nature of these guys, the woman is driving to like serve sushi and she's

like, my first job, I make more as a server than I do at my first job. And then she's like,

and I got a degree and I went $80,000 in debt for the marketing. And I'm like,

oh, there's the mistake. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time on This Week in Serbs.

Go check out the new website, thisweekinsterbs.com. We're playing with some AI. We'll enjoy it.

And yeah, shout out producer Nick. Welcome new guy to the team. And we'll see you on next time. Bye,

bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.