This Week in Startups - Best of This Week in Startups: Week of August 24th, 2020

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

E1100 featuring Clearview AI's Hoan Ton-That: https://rb.gy/r1dofh E1101 featuring Acquired's Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal: https://rb.gy/qqoju5 E1102 featuring Zero Mass Water's Cody Friesen: https://rb.gy/rt6lps Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

Wontan Tat is the CEO and co-founder of Clearview AI, which is involved in facial recognition in order to help law enforcement catch criminals. The company has had a little bit of, let's call it, controversy or notability around the technology and the fact that it exists. My opening preamble, this technology has existed for a long time, facial recognition, and Anybody who's involved in a crime or a victim of a crime, I should say, would very much like to have the perpetrator caught. And if they were caught on a CCTV, a closed circuit television system, which we have all over the place now in cities, London has, I think, more CCTVs than people, you would want that person caught and brought to justice. However, we all know that any system that can be abused will be abused, and you don't want people having access to a tool like this who might be a stalker or might want to harass somebody. And certainly the same technology used by a group of people in an authoritarian country, let's say China, could be used to round up hundreds of thousands and millions of people in a certain demographic to be sent to re-education camps. A re-education camp in China might be viewed by the majority of the Western world as more akin to a prison or a concentration camp, where people are tortured and where people are starved and where people are abused because of their views of the world where something as simple as religion.

So with that backdrop, Juan reached out to us actually and said, hey, I'd love to talk. I guess you're a fan of the podcast. and you wanted to come on and talk about your technology and what you're working on, how would you prevent a police officer, a detective, rather, in this Anytown, New York, from taking a picture of their, I don't know, ex-girlfriend, their ex-wife, whatever it is, or just somebody they wanted to harass, a friend of theirs ex-wife or something, and putting it into the system and saying, show me every picture of this person, and then finding out, oh, this woman who I used to date,

was, is now in a photo on somebody else's Instagram that you scraped or Facebook you scraped or some other public photo and then using that to harass them. How would you prevent that from happening? Just like we see in every detective novel or every crime procedural television show, you know, somebody's like, hey, I know a detective. I know a private investigator. I can get them to run that license plate, right? Like the running of the license plate for a friend or for some mafia guy who leans on a cop to run a license plate. How do you prevent that from happening with your software? Yeah, it's a great question. And our goal is to get the best out of the technology and minimize the abuse completely. So for each police department that uses it, they are nominated a someone who audits the logs of every

search. And they can opt to say, every search must have a reason or a case number with it. And these, that kind of transparency where the police officers, they know, they've trained, these are the searches, is what you can use it for. It's not evident. in court, and by the way, please get us an administrator so they can oversee your So they're aware that there's an audit log. Absolutely. And I think that's the key thing here is to build systems that are secure and can be audited. And just knowing that exists can make everyone feel at ease in terms of how it's used.

Yeah, you would be less likely to run the license plate if you knew that it was tagged to your login. Now, of course, the issue would be is if there's a shared login and a bunch of different people, could use it, maybe somebody could sneak it in and say, I didn't do it. Yeah, but there's also ways to get around shared logins. All these logins are from the same IP or device. We can detect that. Eventually, I think that because of the power facial recognition, there'll be, you know, how you have two-factor authentication, which we do have now for our service. There'll be three-factor, you know, your email, your text, but also your face. So I think that... So the person doing the search

would then have to turn on the webcam, have their picture, taken to say, I am a detective, I'm Detective Callicanis, and I'm doing the search, and my picture is taken by the computer that does the search. We don't have that yet, but we've thought about- That would be pretty great. I think that's going to be the future of a lot of authentication, because you can have account takeovers with SMS and email, but it's hard to take over a face. Do you have a central log file? In other words, I hear that you have like an ambassador on the local police force or a budsman,

as it were, an auditor. But do you keep a log? Like, in other words, if that any town, Albany, did these searches, can they, is that log file something that you maintain as well?

So if they try to alter their log file, there's some conspiracy locally, you still have the backup to it, or do they maintain their law? Right now it's a SaaS service on our service. It's very hard to deploy on-prem because we have billions and billions of photos, but we do not look at the logs.

It's up to the agency to enforce their... So you don't keep a log of the... their what their usage is. Yeah, we don't look at it, but it's, it's on, no, but do you keep it is what I'm saying. Do you keep, do they, because then that would be a two layer of it, the local police department knows and the police officers using that system know that there's a local level, but then if there was, like we've seen many times in the United States, there's a conspiracy at a local level where DAs and police are in cahoots, then they would know, hey, wait a second,

clear review has a log of everything. Do you have a log of everything in case there's local abuse like that or not? Yeah, it's all on our service at this point in time. So you would know. But we don't, it's not our job to really police the police. Right. But a judge, if a judge came and said to Clearview, hey, listen, we've got a dirty cop and a dirty prosecutor in this region, which has happened before where they've railroaded people. Yeah.

We need to see the Clearview logs and see what they did. You would be able to produce that. We would comply with any legal orders. we want to be compliant with the laws. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's your boy, J-Cal. And I am so excited to have back on the program. Two of my favorite guests, yes, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal are back on the pod. You know them because they have a great podcast called Acquired FM.

This is not just a fight with Epic and Fortnite. This carries with it the possibility that anything unreal related, at Unreal the engine could get in on this fight. Yeah, I mean, they are in on this fight, whether they like it or not. And the thing about Tim, like, so Tim owned, he owns a little less than half of the company, but he controls the company. It's a private company. Tim lives in North Carolina.

He's not married. He doesn't have kids. He doesn't hang out with celebrities. He has, like, some fast cars that he drives every now and then. But basically, he just works on Epic. And, like, that's all he cares about. He drinks Diet Coke and he eats like Bojangles fried chicken. Like he told the Wall Street Journal.

Like that's mostly what he does. So there's this like epic, literally epic YouTube video of like MTV Cribs style tour with him from the like 2008. Right Ben? And it's just so classy. He's just like an engineer. He's like this is my dining room. I've never eaten in it. I just work all the time.

So he's like a legit principled guy as a way of saying this. So how does that contribute? been to his positioning of this. And do you believe that this fight was timed with a Tim Cook, Tim Apple being, you know, grilled, Tim Apple being grilled, barbecue? No comment on where Tim Apple comes from. But the, so was it timed with Apple's antitrust hearing? Absolutely. Like, I think that is, they, they perfectly planned it. But is Tim a principled idealist, Tim Sweeney here, of course, we have the battle the Tim's. Is he a principal idealist who's doing this for some greater good?

Also, yes. Right. This is... It's not just about money, because what percentage of Fortnite's rev... Because Fortnite is a desktop game mainly. I don't know how many... 12% from iOS. All right, so this is chump change for him, because if it's 12%, then he's talking about 30% of 12%.

So it's 3%. It's chump change, but it's 200 million per year. Which is exactly chump change. It's 3%. So he, it's not, in other words, if you were hey.com, you, if you're not on an iPhone, there's no way for people to use your product. You're done. It's like literally it's 80%.

This is 3%. Right. So he can fight this fight. So no, what it's about for Tim. And he wants to give all that savings back to players anyway. He doesn't want that extra revenue. What this is about is having an open app ecosystem, app store ecosystem, and not just store, but like all of the infrastructure and services to run games, to run experiences,

to run entertainment, that's what he wants. And that's what Apple has not been providing. Like there's a reason why the most innovative, you know, besides Fortnite and PubG, which runs on Unreal Engine, the most innovative games and experiences of the past, you know, 10 years, League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch. There's a reason these things aren't in the app store. and it's this. Wow.

Today, we're going to talk about something that everybody needs and everybody is literally the foundation of our lives, which is water, right? And so welcome to the program, Cody Friesen from Zero Mass Water. Hey, great to be with you, Jason. Have you met Elon before, by the way? Yeah, we've met a couple times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fascinating guy.

Well, you know, I've talked to him a lot about water. And we were, we were, just a decade ago we were talking. I was like, why can't, if this is such a, why can't we combine solar with, you know, pulling water from the air, condensation or desalinization. And if you were to build this, could you not, and I'm going to ask you the same question, at the rate your technology is working, if you and Elon took your panels, and some solar panels and just have this unlimited energy water, could we not terraform a desert?

And who knows what impact that has ecologically? But let's say we're deforesting some rainforest some places, for whatever reason. Could we not take a swath of land in the middle of this country from a desert and over the next hundred years, terraform it into a rainforest? Of course. Of course we could.

Yeah, of course you could. And this makes me ultimately hopeful because the cost of almonds, one of the most dense foods is water. Am I wrong? This is what I hear is that the entire cost of nuts is water. Therefore, if water is free and we have more landmass than we know what to do with, whether it's in Australia or it's in the United States, we literally are on the cusp in our lifetime of having free water, free energy, and free nutrition, because nutrition is a function of those two previous items, correct? Exactly. And when you get sort of the kind of advanced agriculture layer, in there, right? Food cost and CO2 associated with food and all the other things, all the

nutrient outflows from growing food and monoculture and all that stuff goes away, right? So that first layer, right, Mazel's hierarchy, food water shelter, right? All of a sudden, we're done, right? And just going to start to layer on top of that. We can't get to, you know, you can't get to social justice, politics, can't get to women and girls empowerment, right? Think about just, just in African continent alone, women and girls fetching. water the tune of 40 billion hours a year. Let's talk about the free water that is fetching, right? Like you want to talk about, okay, well, how does economics of water work? Of course, if you have cubic meters of water coming to your home, that's free effectively and taste

good, right? That's not what I'm talking about. Let's say in India, right, the GDPPP per hour, right, the kind of value of human existence is about $3.40. If you're walking in India for water, the average distance that a woman walks, it corresponds to that water costing about 63 cents a liter. Crazy. And that's add. It's not potable. It's not potable. And then so if you get, you know, diarrhea two to four times a year, that's about $2 to $400 a year costs directly to the Indian government.

So free water is a massive headwind economically. Forget the knock-ons of obviously education and social justice, all the other things that we have to nail. But again, we're stuck, we're stuck here at the first layer. You see, there needs to be, you know, when we think about how we want to change this world, you know, a lot of what Bill Gates has been doing in the developing world in terms of, you know, he had this great quote at one point where he's just like, I know Zucker, he was kind of like, he wasn't shading Zuckerberg, but he's like, yeah, if Zuckerberg wants them getting people internet, that's fine.

I want to get the mosquito nets first and get them water first. And really, you know, if we can say, solve those problems and remove that human suffering and just the the way to judge a society I've always felt is how they treat the most vulnerable people. And the ability to give people clean water, which then gives them free agriculture, I think it would be amazing in our society, America. People talk about K through 12 education being free. Great. We're talking about health care. What if we had a system in America where produce, a base level of produce, was free for everybody.

Right. And so nutritious food was available for free. You could literally go just like we can turn on our tap and essentially get free clean water. It's basically, yeah, resource UBI, right?

So resource UBI. It's awesome. Yes, it would be produce UBI, resource UBI, because we do it for education. We're going to do it for healthcare eventually. People are demanding it and there's no reason not to do it.

We do it. We kind of haven't done it for electricity, but we're kind of on like, I would say we're cuspy on that, right? Yeah. Wi-Fi, we're on the cusp of