This Week in Startups - Blue Origin picks Pete, NYT launches Telegram channel, Clearview AI in Ukraine, Semiconductor pains | E1408

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

It's an all-news show. We discuss Blue Origin selecting Pete Davidson to go space (2:47), Clearview AI offering their facial recognition services to the Ukrainian government (24:58), the NYT launching a Telegram channel and semiconductor slowdowns forcing Ford to ship Explorers without rear AC controls (44:00).  Show Notes: (00:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s topics: Blue Origin & Pete Davidson, NYT Telegram, Clearview AI (02:47) Blue Origin sending Pete Davidson to space 3/23 (14:41) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (16:00) NYT launches Telegram channel for war in Ukraine (23:38) Boast - Get your R&D tax credits without the hassle at https://boast.ai/twist (24:58) Clearview AI giving Ukraine’s defense ministry free access to face recognition search engine (38:48) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (40:00) Surveillance companies and crime (44:00) Companies face more production issues FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, we've got an amazing show for you today. It's all news. It's Monday. There's a lot going on, including Pete Davidson, who seems to be at the top of everybody's trending topics three days a week, is going to space. A incredibly shrewd marketing move by Jeff Bezos. And Chad is going to space. What else do we got on the docket moment? Okay. We literally thought we could avoid the Pete Davidson news, but he came for us even here in the world of technology.

update on the technology industry and what it's doing in the war. Clearview AI is apparently offering its facial recognition services to the Ukrainian government. We have a skepticism-filled conversation about that. Yeah, is that a good idea or not? Here's a great idea. The New York Times just launched a telegram channel where they're publishing so that people maybe in authoritarian countries might get access to their coverage of what's happening in Ukraine. and what a great idea to do with that channel.

Good innovation. And then semiconductor slowdowns keep impacting automakers and they are getting worse because of shutdowns over COVID in China. Ford is actually shipping their explorers now without rear air conditioning controls. Why go on? Oh, my Lord. No rear air conditioning controls. You have to ask the driver to change the temperature.

Oh, my Lord. It's like the olden days. What next? What to do? But it's a big deal. It's a big economic story. We do have issues with the supply chain and the sadly, it looks like, outbreaks in Shenzhen of COVID that could, again, create the never-ending supply chain issues that have been dogging the world for the last two plus years. It's going to be a great show nonetheless.

Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Lemon. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. Boast. If you're a startup developing new software or R&D, you may be owed up to $250,000 in cash back from the government. Boast helps you get that money quickly and easily.

The first 50 customers will get 10% percent. off their first year by mentioning promo code twist at boast.a.i slash twist. And Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR, CROWD.com slash twist. So space tourism just continues to get bigger and bigger and more celebrity drips. Because this by God is America. The latest announcement is that Blue Origin has chosen Saturday Night Lives

Most Effective Attention Getter in History, Pete Davidson, to go on its next New Shepherd flight on March 23rd. It's fascinating. I mean, I think you got to give Bezos a lot of credit because he puts a celebrity on each one of these. I think he was on the first.

Yep. He had William Shatner on one. Now he's got Pete Davidson and this is the fourth flight I think So it is yeah It's Blue Origin's 20th mission But I think the fourth one With commercial flight

Yeah at least famous people Yeah I think you counted by the number of famous people And he also had the famous female Astronaut I forgot her name Yeah no the woman who was an aviator Who had wanted to be an astronaut and couldn't And so then she got to go She you know I mean she did become a really famous

Aviator but then she got to go on the flight And that was a little, it was a weepworthy. It was a good one. So this will include, let's see, Marty Allen, Pete Davidson, husband and wife duo Sharon, and Mark Hagle, Jim Kitchen and Dr. George kneeled. A bunch of rich people, right? And is it still 50 grand to go, 100 grand or something? It's, I don't know what it cost to go up in this thing. But I feel like when this hits 100,000 or less, like basically the cost of a private jet across the country is like, I think 30, 40 grand.

I've never done it. But that's my understanding. So when it gets to kind of that price, I think it's going to become very popular. I think this is going to become like the bucket list item. And I don't know. Would you do this after, you know,

they have 100 successful flights? Is this on your bucket list, Molly? I don't know if it's on my bucket list. I wouldn't say that it's not exactly. Well, I guess that means no, right?

If it's not specifically on my list, then I guess it's not on my list, but it's not not on my list. I would certainly, I think, take the opportunity. It's like one of those interesting questions, though,

you know how like you're waiting for the bus and the bus doesn't come for a really long time and then you start to have a sunk cost situation about the bus, like, well, it's eventually going to come. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is four times doesn't feel that safe, but then a hundred times, you're just getting to the point where things are starting to break down.

So, like, what's the most comfortable moment to be... I think it's the opposite. I don't think these things like break down. I think they get like, yeah, more cemented in, like, and they get better and dialed in. So for me, it's somewhere like... I would do it after 250 to 500,

successful missions. And it feels to me like they're going to be doing these weekly. And then you have Virgin has theirs. And the Virgin Galactic one is interesting. I don't have any equity in it, even though my friend's backed it. But I saw Virgin Galactic ads on Twitter, which I thought was the sign that this is now ready for serious commercialization. Wow.

Because they had, now. They had, I think, two or three hundred RSVPs. I think they're looking for more RSVPs because this means. that they want to fill seats and they expect they're going to have opening soon and they're going to get through those 200 or 400 RSVPs. Yeah. So it's pretty cool. I think it's good.

So the chat is talking about like Francis Centaur in our chat is talking about Tokyo and 90 minutes being heaven. Like I sort of wonder at what point could we use this sort of near orbit access and speed to maybe actually take us places on Earth faster? That's what I really want. You know I'm an efficiency minded person. So I'm like, that's kind of cool. that I could go into near orbit or whatever and be like a pseudo astronaut and stuff.

But like what I really want is something like rocket ship Concord. Yes, that's what I want as well. I tweeted. It's interesting that you bring this up because that's what I tweeted this weekend. When I saw the ad, I was like, for me, the big win is what SpaceX is doing. They're going to do point to point in the world. And I think they can hold 300 people on theirs, which is bonkers. I think that'll be five or 10 years out.

Yeah. But that's like truly going to space. And they said one hour or less anywhere on the globe. Because the higher you go, the curvature of the earth, I guess, becomes narrower then. So you're not like flying over an arc. You're kind of going straight up and straight down, right? Because the aperture would be so narrow that, you know, if you're in Texas, you go straight up some number of, you know, distance. And then coming down to, let's say, Tokyo or Fiji or Antarctica.

I'm thinking like really hard to get to places. See, that would be incredible. Imagine being in Antarctica in one hour. I mean, that would be bonkers from Texas. And that's like, that's a total, like, really interesting adventure. And I think that's five to ten years away. But it's going to be absurdly expensive. I think it becomes like this crazy bucket list item for people.

I think the reason it's not on people's bucket list items because this generally has not been available. Right, exactly. And there's a, I mean, I guess bucket list item. often include a high risk of death, depending on who you are. And I... Certainly, certainly.

I have friends who just started doing... I have friends who just started doing skydiving. You know, these guys get to 50. And they're like, you know what? I made a bunch of money. What's an interesting way for me to, you know, go out? That's kind of pedestrian at this point, skydiving. Like, come on.

I mean, it is amazing how humans tend to think of like more and more incredible ways to die, though. I actually, I read, there was a piece about William Shackleton, who was the Antarctic explorer. That's the ship they just found. Yes, Shackleton. They found his ship. And it's in perfect shape.

And it's in perfect shape. And then I went and read this very long read about that expedition. Yes. The one where the endurance sank. And it is the most bananas survival story. There were like 55 guys on that ship. They all ended up surviving, but they were split up across the continent. Shackleton and they were like, I'd eat their sled.

Like, it's pretty insane in what people can survive. That was a huge departure from all things tech. But in 1915, it's a really cool story. It became frozen. The reason people are really into Shackleton in the entrepreneurial community is they like to take, you know, it's pretty much three metaphors for startups and entrepreneurship. War, team sports, and then being an adventurer. And for good reason, because, you know, most of the companies don't work out, die if you want to attribute it that way. But yeah, they were, they departed South Georgia for the Wendell Sea on December 5th.

And they encountered a bunch of ice and they grew worse. And on January 15th, it became frozen in the ice flow. And so. And then the ice crushed it. Crushed it. And everybody had to get out of, can you imagine you're like in the middle of ice and you got to get out and get on life rafts or whatever? Yeah. And they're pulling like life rafts across the ice.

I mean, it's pretty bananas. The whole story is bananas. And then, like, they're all, they had to take a, one of these crappy little lifeboats, like 80 miles to get to another island and then try to like, and then like walk across, you know, this, that huge island. It just is like, I don't know. It's, I'm all over the place here. But it's basically like, it is the human way to push the envelope just for the sake of pushing. And, you know, I mean, I think we get a lot out of it over time. But this is what you are.

see, this is the want ad. It's so funny these guys, this is good producing guys because I literally have it up on my screen at the same time. So the reason I've brought this up before

is, you know, I've told a lot of folks when you're doing a startup, you want to be candid with the people you're hiring of exactly what the odds are. And frequently in startup land, we reference the famous Shackleton ad

where it says, men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, birichold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.

Ernest Sackleton, for Burlington Street. For Burlington Street. It's so great. That's remarkable. I just love the last line. Honor and recognition in case of success. Just in case.

It's basically describing startup land. Thank you, producers, by the way, who also multitasking put in Wally Funk. That's the name of the woman aviator who now gets to say an astronaut at 80. To her. Two years old. Yeah, I mean, I have no problem with this. industry commercializing to sort of become more and more mainstream and normalize the whole concept.

And also at some point, one of these things is probably going to blow up and somebody famous is going to be on board. And I don't know what that does to the industry. We'll see. Like, they're ready. I am in no way trying to suggest that these companies are not ready to be doing what they're doing. And it's also a pretty dangerous business. So like, there will be a, yeah, there'll be a moment like that for sure. And the question is, like self-driving for any new technology, VTOLs will have this moment as well. Can society deal with that dissonance? New, safer, new and safer, but somebody just died. And, you know, that is, and there's actually a seminal case right now of somebody who ran a red light while using autopilot. And I think it was

like an early version of autopilot, like the one that just is like level two, keep your car in the lane and go a certain speed. So, like, who's responsible for that? It's like, I think we know it's responsible. Well, like, you know, it's literally you're doing adaptive cruise control and not looking for red lights on the street. Well, yeah. Yeah. Totally. Like, you know, there are people who will stand on the top of their motorcycle, like on YouTube. You can see.

100%. People doing crazy stuff. So you have to kind of discount them. Well, it's kind of like the American way, though, to blame somebody else and sue them for the thing that you caused. So that's what's so interesting here is like it's, you've got this natural tendency and all this, you know, this sort of like ambulance chasing law industry. waiting for the opportunity to blame someone else for a thing that happened to you. So then when it ends up being something really big and explodey, I mean, I agree, we'll see, right?

It's like part of the process of normalizing it is going to be knowing that something like this will happen and how will we deal when it does. In related news, Kanye West is trying to buy one of the five other seats on the... Exactly. And related news, Kanye West is going to be like, shining a laser at it as it takes off. I mean, mental illness plus social media is such a bad combination. I mean, I've said it before, but like this, and I don't want to get into like the blow-by-blows,

but this weekend was like my entire Twitter feed was, and Instagram was Kanye West and Skeet fighting. Just crazy. It's kind of sad to watch people, especially because when it involves parenting, that's like the heartbreaking part. It's like, can somebody who's friends with this individual pull them aside and say, like, just stop talking about your kids? on social media.

This is like, this is like therapy questions, like couples therapy, mediation stuff. Don't put it there. But I, I, I'm excited to do the transportation one

and then, let's see, the cost here. Virgin, 150K deposit, 450K total price. They got 100 tickets sold, 15 million,

wow, sales from deposits. That's like a good start. And, you know, this is going to quickly go down. So if it's 450, you think of it like getting the first Tesla Roadster

was 160, I think. and now they're down to 60. So I would say this goes down by a third in 10 years. So if it goes down by a third, you know, lower, it goes down by two thirds, rather. It's one third the price. I think you can see people doing this for 100K or less. And I think that's when it becomes like people will crowdfunded or they'll be giving it

away on the Zboarding zoo. Go to space. We're going to have a space race. Well, brought to you by. I mean, it will literally be, I think there'll be sponsors doing this and all kinds of interesting stuff. When you're scaling your startup quickly, hiring engineers can slow you down like nothing else. We all know that.

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which I thought was super interesting. The New York Times has launched a telegram channel. For people who don't know, Telegram is exceptional at groups, it seems. And when a lot of the alt-right was kicked off of Twitter, they started their own groups. So people like Milo Yanopolis, who, but 15 years ago was like a normal journalist working, I think, at the Guardian or the Times of London, and he kind of went off the alt-right deep end. He got banned from Twitter. I think Alex Jones, Trump, all of them set up shop on Telegram. So you can have like a really big groups, but New York Times, Brazilian Bureau Chief Jack Nickas,

I hope I'm pronouncing that correct, said, this is important, the New York Times just launched a telegram channel, and for now it will broadcast our reporting about the war in Ukraine. It'll hopefully be a powerful new source of free, reliable information for many people. You can follow it here. For those who don't know, the short

URL system for EFere Telegram, rather, is T.mee. So it's t.mee. So it's T.m.m. slash New York Times, and you just add the group. It also works really well on your So what's really neat about this is if they wanted to, you could have replies in here. It could be two-way. They could, you know, you can have all kinds of different permutations of groups as you do on the web.

But this will be a little bit censorship resistant, I think. And you can also access it through the Tor browser if you don't know what that is or Brave. A tour is an anonymous relay system that theoretically can't be tracked, but it might have been made by the FBI and the CIA, they may have actually built it. So take it for what it's worth. So it's hard to say, hard to say. It's hard to say, but they do seem to catch a lot of predators on there and crazy people. It's interesting, though, because in many ways, the biggest barrier to free and reliable information and say what you will about the New York Times, but, you know, they have a lot of boots on the ground in a lot of places is the paywall.

So I do think that there's a lot, I mean, there's a lot of value in this for a lot of reasons. is that it might be able to be accessed by people in lots of different stories, lots of different countries who might have had trouble accessing it otherwise. But also, if it's not paywalled, I think there's real value. I think there's this real question. And, you know, I think that journalism needs a business model that works. But at the same time, when everything that's reliable and high quality is behind a paywall

and everything that is, you know, not is free, yes. You have a real have and have not situation. when it comes to information. So I think it's... Well, and what's nice about this is, there's nobody who is a subscriber to the New York Times who is upset

that one sliver of the New York Times at this moment of time is available freely. It's not like it damages our subscriptions to the New York Times that they're now doing this free. No, of course not. Yeah. No. You know, in fact, but... It should be, right? Like, the Wall Street Journal has been making this

information about Ukraine free and outside the paywall and tweeting it as such, and I don't know if the Times has until now. Yeah, I mean, that's the other option. They could have just said anything tagged on the website. But what I really think this is about is censorship resistance. I think it's very easy to block New York Times.com.

And by putting it to multiple channels, I would guess they're going to do this on some other platforms as well. And this is also where I think some of the social media platforms could do something good. Like Facebook could conceivably say, hey, New York Times, we will pay you a penny. as a licensing fee or, you know, whatever, a dollar per thousand, you know, a fraction of a penny, whatever they come up with for everybody in Europe who reads a Ukraine-related story on Facebook.

So we'll give you a million dollars to license these stories for the next six months or a year on the platform. And we'll have a special section, Facebook.com slash NYT Ukraine. And that would be a nice thing if Facebook ever shot the lock off their wallet and decided to pay content creators. Although there is some rumor that Facebook has some secret covert licensing deal with the New York Times where they ship like 10, 20 million dollars. I've seen people talk about this relationship. I think the New York Times has even talked about it, where they're getting some licensing or some money from Facebook, but I guess they don't like to talk about it all

that much because they don't want it to overshadow coverage. And then there was also like, reportedly some $5 million ad buy for those ads that like Facebook thinks the new internet needs to be, I don't know if you watch the Sunday morning news programs. Did you get like during all of those hearings? Yeah. Facebook had a series of like, wow, the internet has changed so much in the last decade. It's hard to figure out what information is. We should come up with a new rule set. And Facebook really supports a new way to think about. You know, it's like trying to influence people watching meet the press or face the nation or, you know, state of the union kind of audience and I thought that was

kind of interesting but it was also they bought all these podcasts off and I remember Kara Swisher talking about she's like I'm not reading that ad so she like declined because of the optics yeah it's one thing to read a Casper ad or an Ate'slebe ad it's another thing to be like I cover

Facebook and how it's killing democracy and let me read an ad I mean they are they are aggressive about advertising I haven't seen them on the Sunday news shows but they are very aggressive about advertising within news properties like they advertise on Axios, and I do hear them on a lot of podcasts. Were they on Marketplace, too, or no?

I don't think so. Yeah, so that's the thing is people are like, there's a perfect moment. But honestly, I don't know. Well, exactly. So people assume the hosts like, oh, it's influencing the host. Like, in a lot of cases, the host don't even know. Like, sometimes we would get a note about somebody being an underwriter at Marketplace and and be like, wait, what?

Really? I mean, in that case, I would say I maybe had more idea at other outlets, but certainly not. Public radio, no. Well, and you're savaging them, right? Yeah. Like, oh, that, wait, didn't we just absolutely demolish them? Don't tell me. The only time we would find out is if we did mention, like, one producer was in charge of making

sure that if we mentioned an underwriter, then we would say they're an underwriter. So sometimes you'll hear NPR say that because Facebook is occasionally an underwriter. Of unintended collision. So in the magazine business, we used to have somebody who would look at the stories. and the ads and just make sure that the story on the left

did not in some way reference the story the ad on the right or the page before it so that somebody who was reading about, you know, some criticism of IBM

did not turn the page and get a Watson ad or some pro story about Watson would be, you know, in the editor's letter and then, you know, the front,

the back page would be it. You'd be like, uh, we got a, you know, the appearance of impropriety was always challenging. Yeah.

That that anybody cares anymore. I was going to say that was the good old days. Now it's like, I mean, I remember being at CNET and it was like you could, Samsung was not allowed to run an ad on a review page of a Samsung phone, for example. Now it's like Samsung has a huge like a web page takeover, like, and then a big banner. And then you read that, you know, and it just stopped. And they're in the CNET labs and the like there's giant Samsung logo brought to you by

Samsung. Well, come on. Not exactly. is. Welcome to Cooking with Gordon Ramsey, brought to you by wheat. A wheat council. If you're a startup,

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either. If you do, they take a modest percentage between 10 and 20 percent, depending on your following. So the upside is free money from the IRS. Sounds pretty good to me. And the downside is no risk. So here's your call to action. The deadline to claim is approaching fast. So contact BOST today. The first 50 customer signups will get 10% off their first year of filing. Just mentioned the promo code twist at boast.a.ai slash twist. That's B-O-A-S-T-A-I-S-T-T-T-E. All right, let's do this Clearview AI, sorry, because that's always fascinating. Yeah, exactly. Because when it comes to Clearview, I have questions.

Clearview AI is giving Ukraine's defense ministry free access to its facial recognition search engine. And evidently, Clearview is saying you could potentially use this to vet people of interest at security checkpoints, to identify the dead, to reunite refugees with separated families, to identify Russian operatives and help the government take down false social media posts on war. Yeah, fascinating. We actually had the founder, No, thank you. Sorry. No, we had the founder, Wontan Tat on the podcast, episode 1100, back in August of 2020. And he demoed the product for us. There was a lot of controversy around the startup because they took publicly available pictures, made their own databases,

and then we're giving it to law enforcement. Law enforcement would buy it so that they could, if they took a picture of a perp, somebody committed a crime, they would. wouldn't want to give their driver's license or something, or they had somebody on a camera robbing a house or a business, they could maybe find them through social media. And of course, it turns out like high correlation between criminals and, you know, usage of social media. Obviously, when they were raising money, there was this other rumor that they had given complementary accounts to a bunch of right-wing kind of folks. And those folks, you would use it to take pictures of women, and then reverse image look up, a woman at a bar,

to find their social media and other creepy nonsense. They raise money from Peter Thiel. And so it's part of the whole right-wing privacy conundrum kind of group. But let's think this through. Sort of beyond that. I mean, yeah, Clearview AI. I mean, it's been fined at least once. I'm looking this up.

It was recently fined in Italy, $20 million over privacy. concerns. It's sort of like the, or I'm sorry, 20 million pounds. It's like the company that has kickstarted in a lot of cities, you know, attempts to ban facial recognition technology because it can be used so poorly in some cases. And I would just be. It can be abused. Yeah, I mean, I'm very wary of- Because it's actually super effective, right? Like it actually, the technology now works brilliantly. Well, no, it can be abused because it like can't tell the difference between, you know, one black person and another black person. Oh, okay. Like, it can be abused. trying to parse what you're saying.

And I think it may have even been implicated. That's what I was trying to find. I think it might have been implicated in a very specific false recognition case. But I got to look that up. I mean, I'm going to be. I think, look, introducing a tool like this, which is, has been under all kinds of fire and brought a ton of controversy into a war zone.

To me, feels like not a good idea. Yeah. So the question is, yeah, I mean, in all these cases, what is it being used? for. Right. If it was being used to take a picture of a dead soldier tragically to inform the family, you know, possibly that we may have identified your missing child or there's a missing young person who got separated from their parents and they're not dead, but they're on the border of Poland and you want to find their parents. So the abuse is always the issue with these. And that was one of the things I drilled down with the founder on. And I found his answer.

were kind of hit or a miss because I was like, is there a tracking system? It's like absolutely the tracking audit system. I'm like, great. So you have like the records of everybody who used it. So if somebody was using it to stock their ex or stalk somebody or do some nefarious thing, you would know.

He's like, well, no, that's the job of the local police department. They have the audit logs. I'm like, so the local police who would abuse it also have the audit logs? Like, shouldn't you have a backup auto logs? Say, well, that's their decision. like, and that's sort of like, you know, and they're like, well, they could put, you know,

their mayor in charge of the audit log or their, you know, ethics department, you know, in San Francisco in charge of the audit logs, the DA, whoever. And when the police use it or a detective uses it, it would be logged. But they didn't have their own clarity on that. I felt it could have been, like, they could have been more proactively scanning for abuse.

But, you know, I'm sure they've gotten a lot of feedback on it. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't think it. was implicated in that very specific false positive case that I was thinking about, although New Jersey banned it over after some false positives, it's just like, I don't know, it just is sort of this larger question of like, is that what is that what is necessary right now? Yeah. You know, the way I look at these tools is with massive controls and a warrant.

So I think the problem with this tool is if you give the frontline people, whether it's police or soldiers access to do it, the chances of abuse are almost certain. Chances of false positive, you know, that happens with witnesses, right? Like a witness can give you a false positive. You know, they look at those books of mugshots classically as in every police drama episode. So therefore, if this was something where a judge could say, oh, you want to take this pictures of the person who was murdered on the bart, you have two suspects, run it through Clearview, you get your list of potential perps,

then you have some delicate way of making sure that you're not knocking down the door and getting in a firefight with people where you're just, you know, deftly figuring out could they possibly have been in the area during that time. That would be my easy solution for this is to make it a warrant.

Like, I think facial recognition to use that should just be something people have to file a warrant for. Judge, it looks at it, just like a wiretap, reasonable not. What do you think of my solution? Yeah, I agree. I just think. And then as a result, because there's going to be time involved no matter what,

then I don't know if I see there being a significant difference between that system, so to speak, and using AI. You know, like, they're going to photograph soldiers. They're going to have a database. Like, I don't know that this is additive. And if anything, it feels like it could increase the chance of, like, people are pointing out in the chat, misidentifying somebody at a border checkpoint and getting them shot.

Yeah. I mean, that's the, don't, you know, like, if you don't know, like, if you don't know. that it's perfect, don't introduce it in a battlefield situation. I just sort of feel like this does not feel like it has the potential to help as much as it could hurt. That is, I think, well said. With this new technology, you're going to have to know, is this like 995-9s or 98%?

And there's a one in 50 chance of misidentifying somebody with this technology. Right. If it was during an investigation of a robbery, well, there's probably a little downside. but if it's in a battlefield or a cop is pulling somebody over at a traffic stop and it misidentifies somebody as like a felon who's, you know, got a history of like gun trafficking, like, okay, now you've got six cop cars surrounding somebody who's misidentified and the chances of a tragedy occurring is like... Here is the story too. Thank you, Serge Dogg, for pulling up the story in the New York Times about this New Jersey man. This did cause them to block it where Clearview misidentified this guy and police arrested him, a black man. Of course, because this is where so many of these identification issues tend to come up as people of color.

The police identified him using Clearview Software and accused him, arrested him, accusing him of shoplifting candy and trying to hit a police officer with a car. Totally not him, like was not him. And he was the third person known to be falsely arrested based on bad facial recognition data. Yeah, it does seem like these technologies are using data sets. They inferred that clear view was. They inferred. They were there not 100% sure. they know that the New Jersey Police Department was using Clearview AI, and then he was falsely identified by that software.

Possible or probable. I should be very specific about, yes, exactly, the legal implications here. Yes. Anyway, all I'm saying is, I don't think that's good enough to use on the battlefield. That doesn't seem additive to me. That seems like attempting to insert yourself into a situation where the benefits are dubious and the harms are large. Yeah, and this technology will also be able to clear people in some instances, and in some instances, it's like the DNA stuff. Like, anytime this new technology comes out when the DNA stuff came out, it wasn't accurate enough, and then it wound up exonerating a bunch of people 10 years later.

So there is definitely some cleared-eyed application issues here. You've got to go into this with very good intent, and you're going to have to be reserving judgment and using it maybe as a way to steer you to, possibilities of suspects or clearing people's names, but it's not fully ready for prime time. What is your general thought? I've never, we never had this conversation, but your general thought on cameras in cities? The UK packed with cameras. China, obviously,

packed with cameras, so you have authoritarian and democracies, both deploying this for safety. And then you have, I think, San Francisco and Oakland have filed to preemptively ban, like, city-wide camera systems, or maybe the storing of data. But you have a feeling on it? I'm curious.

I mean, surveillance is super problematic. Like, it's a society problem. Like, I remember when Google Glass early on had to get rid of facial recognition. Like, I was one of the people in Google Glass first came out and I was like, oh, my God, that would be so awesome if I had a contact lens or glasses where I could just look at somebody and it would recognize their face and it would give me their like current stats. You know, like, what's their last tweet like Superhuman does? What are their last couple of tweets and what's their calendar?

and what's their sort of publicly available social information like that would be so useful to go up and down the street and get this real-time stream of data about people. And then that was my own naivete in a way about how good that technology could be and whether people have a right to privacy. Like, if people have a right to privacy, you can't put cameras all over and you can't put them in glasses and you can't, you know, try to identify someone's face and maybe get it wrong and get them like canceled on the street because of, you know, a misadjury. attributed tweet.

Like, it just is ultimately always going to be a problem. And yet we've opted into so much surveillance that I'm not sure it's a problem we can even stop at this point. We've just got some notes about Singapore. Yeah, Singapore is like bananas. They plan to double the number of police cameras to more than $200,000 over the next decade. They currently have 90,000 cameras and 270 square miles, which is 330 police cameras per

square mile, according to Reuters. That's bonkers. You know, there is, I have a very... I guess the real question is like, would you rather have police watching you or would you rather have ring? Would you rather have like Google and or, you know,

in a company surveilling you or governments? I think the cat's out of the bag. People have the right to put cameras in and around their homes. That seems reasonable. Therefore, there will be cameras in most places. And then police will just get that. Police will have access to it through just asking for it.

I mean, citizens can give, as there is their right, to give to the police, give to the police somebody who runs through their backyard. A friend of mine had somebody run through their backyard were robbing their neighbor last week. And then I had somebody last night, and both in L.A., both in the same area of L.A., in West Hollywood. And they both live, like, uphills and stuff like that. So one had some, my friend last night had somebody just walk up to his glass door and start knocking on the door.

It was a deranged person. And then the other person had somebody run through the backyard, both caught on cameras. So I don't know if the deterrent thing is working with people who are. Right. I mean, I'm not sure. It doesn't. I think it works for criminals. It doesn't work for people who are high or mentally ill.

They're just like, oh, camera, who cares? I'm like high out of my mind or mentally ill or I'm suffering from both tragically. Well, and the police don't always come. And frankly, there are situations when I don't want the police to come because I don't want someone to get shot because they're mentally ill or on drugs. Like that is a challenge. I mean, that's a real conversation in Oakland about when is it even more. acceptable to call the police because you don't want to get somebody killed because they can't get

the right services. Yeah. If it's a mentally ill person and then you're now in this weird situation where you're feeling empathy for a person who's mentally ill and then you have to protect your family. Right. And they're on your property. Yeah. It is, uh, there's always the answers here. I think it's like, it's one of these questions where like, no, I don't like it. And I do not believe for a second that, you know, does privacy matter if you have nothing to lose? Is that, or nothing to hide is a reasonable approach? Because, first, First of all, anybody, if you could do enough digging, has something to hide and misidentification and misattribution are real. And my favorite word, cameras are freaking everywhere.

Like, we might have already lost this battle. Yeah, I think the battle's lost. The question is, who should have the keys to the kingdom? I like that that is the actual question. Should cities just opt out of doing it? I think there's something even more reasonable here, which is kind of like COVID policy. I always felt like when things become more acute, like the hospitals feel. up, you know, and there's no ICU beds. Like, maybe you have a different policy than when the

hospitals are empty and, you know, like, you could have a different strategy depending on the weather forecast. So if you were in the San Francisco at this moment in time, the tenderloin, whatever places where there's a lot of guns and murder or, you know, New York in the 70s or 80s, you have a lot of cameras. And then, you know, if you live in a place where there's not a lot of crime and you need to have a few, you know, just have a few. It's time for another Our Crowd Deal of the week. Right now you can join Our Crowd's investment in D-I-D.

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There is an open source project. I don't know about this, Molly. that somebody made, flock safety is the name of the company, which I wanted to invest in. Your community can set up a couple of cameras on like the major arteries. It keeps 60, I think 30 days by default

or 60 days of license plates. Crime happens. You look at, here are the license plates that have been in this neighborhood, you know, five times or more. In other words, the people who live there. Or, you know, 20 times or more. Here are the license plates that are not.

Let's start looking through those license plates and see if we can find people who maybe drove through the neighborhood, or we're on the block where the crime occurred. And if people are driving into due crimes, pretty quick way to catch somebody. Yeah. And it's just data.

And they specifically don't take photos of the car. All they know is the license plate. So they've built the technology to scan the license plate, OCR it, you don't actually get a picture. And I was like, well, shouldn't you get the picture of the video of an encrypted, of the, this way you know if somebody stole the car or if they were in the car, that'd be great evidence. It's like, yeah, but then.

People would know who's going to what person's house, who's driving which car, you know, like all the privacy concerns come up. Yeah. You could be thoughtful about this as the CEO of the company. If the CEO of the company says, we're never going to take the windshield picture. We're just going to take the license plate. That's enough data. It's kind of like the metadata or phone calls without recording the phone call, right? I will say, though, that's yes. But don't people steal license plates all the time? Well, yeah, of course. So then if you don't even match the license plate to the car, then you just go arrest some poor person who had their license plate. I wonder if they, I'm trying to remember the conversation. I think there might, it was episode 1249 so somebody can watch it. But I mean, these are all, yeah, these are just all after the fact, Bolton's for crime, which is ultimately a social problem, right?

Like, I just don't think you don't stop crime with surveillance. You just don't. Like, you maybe catch criminals. Well, you may stop them. You may catch them before they do the next one. You may catch them before you do the next one. But they're not, they're, you know, they're being framed as this kind of like this thing that we have to stop crime.

And I fundamentally do not believe that's what they do. You know, for some period of time, cameras were dissuading crime. That was proven that the presence of a camera would lower crime because people were putting even decoy cameras out. So if you, when cameras were very expensive, they would put one real one and then just put the casings for 10 other ones around. But I don't know if that's still the case now. Yeah, I don't think so. It might be that the true hardcore criminals, they don't care if they're on camera, right? And the people who might have, you know, done opportunistic crime, I'm thinking like somebody who might have.

stolen a newspaper or something petty might have done it like opportunistically, but they saw a camera, they didn't. But if you're in a gang and like, that's one of the things about what's happening in San Francisco with the Walgreens and stuff like that. The feds came in and actually busted a giant crime ring like the DOJ came in and it turned out it was like a super coordinated crime ring that was sending people in who were addicts. So it was like people addicted to drugs going in. And when they would come out with their bag of stuff, they would just give them, a dollar per item. And they're like, here's the top 10 list.

If you get any of these, you get $2 per item. They would ship those items to, I think it was Oakland or Alameda. They had a warehouse. They busted the warehouse. And they were driving the stuff down to Los Angeles and San Diego. And they would just go to stores and say, you want any of these items for $4 each. And so somebody would buy, you know, razors or shampoo or condoms or whatever is a high-ticket item. And they would give it to them for cash.

And it was like a, it was literally a gang thing. So this idea that it was, you know, not coordinated was false. It was specifically a coordinated, specific process. Because you were like, why is the person going in there and stealing 20 cans of one thing? Like, they must have a fence somewhere to move this stuff. This is a big story and just a big sort of an additional canary in the coal mine. I think companies are now facing more production issues due to chip back orders caused by the Ukraine-Russia conflict. but also that lockdowns in China, even just over the weekend, got massive.

So China has a bunch more COVID lockdowns. And according to the Wall Street Journal, that is impacting all kinds of raw materials. Russia and Ukraine are causing shortages in neon and palladium specifically. And then evidently the auto industry has been hit the hardest. Specific automakers are being impacted. Ford is going to sell and deliver some. Explorers with limited features, including no rear heating and some missing air conditioning controls.

GM is no longer offering wireless charging HD radios and a fuel management mobile module that made some pickup trucks operate more efficiently. Tesla sold cars without USB ports. I can tell you that the pole star that I just got is missing the sensor where you can put your foot under the trunk. You know, you can like swipe your foot under and have it like auto open. and basically they're like it's kind of a crap shoot at this point whether your car has it or not because it's all about whether this one part came in from China.

They put it in post? Yeah, they'll put it in later. Ah, cool. Yeah, but Bloomberg is reporting this is where the China COVID lockdowns are just like becoming a massive double whammy here. Bloomberg reported that Foxconn, which of course produces iPhones as multiple factories in Shenzhen, has been forced to pause operations in Shenzhen after the Chinese government imposed mandatory lockdowns due to a rising COVID cases.

I wonder if it's Amacron there or what the Chinese know that we don't because we're going, it seems like the rest of the world is just we're going to go through the eye of the storm or is it that they don't have the vaccines there because they had a zero COVID policy and I guess they can shut things down and they have cheap testing I understand $2 or something a person so they can test an entire city very quickly. I called a friend freaking out about this because I was just like I can't go back. But she made the really interesting. We're like you're like you're going to have to take me. I'm not you're going to take me dead. fighting to the end. I'm not going back to jail. I'm not doing it. I'm not going back. But she made the interesting point, and I hope that this is the case,

that yes, because China did have sort of a zero COVID policy for a long time, that there isn't actually broad-based immunity. And we may say that we had a lot of like lockdowns in the US, but in fact, we did, that was very regional. We had very spotty uptake of even basic intervention like masking.

And so, and our vaccines are a lot better. And there's much more access to boosters. And so it does seem to be that China is still vulnerable to these big outbreaks, whether it's Omicron or BA2. I think I even read there's like a delta cron. It's all happening now. Yes.

I don't hope that is the case in the case of China, because if they're still that vulnerable, a lot of people are going to die. What it likely suggests is that BA2 is not going to sweep through the United States, for example, and like cause another. way of the way that Omicron did. I was reading up on this this weekend because we had a little COVID outbreak at our house. So it feels like everybody's going to get it at some point.

Everybody's fine. But it is definitely, you know, it's pretty obvious we have some sort of hurt, dare I say, herd immunity or resiliency. We're broader immunity. Is that the term I'm allowed to use, broader immunity? I mean, you're allowed to say whatever you want. Got it. Okay. Heard immunity, I think, does refer to a specific.

benchmark that we have not hit, but we do have more immunity. Like, just broad, you know, more people have gotten it and or have gotten what are said to be higher quality vaccines. And, you know, we don't have a, we don't have a great booster rate, but the vaccines overall are good. And a lot of people got it in the United States. I mean, this is the problem when you don't have it spread in your population, I guess. You are still a target for it.

And so I guess the Chinese government is going to go with. shut everything down for 10 days and then test everybody, which we could have had that option too. We just never got testing. We had like two companies doing testing. And even now, these Binance tests, what is it? What are they called? I think, excuse me, I think Binance is the, um,

cryptocurrency exchange. Binance is the Binax. Bynax. At home antigen tests. Yes. Thank you. Bynax, uh, kits are, uh, I think they're now $10 per test, 20 bucks for two.

And in other places in the world, it's two to five dollars a test. So we're still only have one or two providers. And these other places have 70 different tests, including ones that I think you just swab your mouth and you're done. Yeah. What a disaster. But hopefully this does not create massive supply chains, not because we need to open our trunks with our feet.

It's cool of a feature that is. I just think on the economy front, it would be really tragic that the reopening doesn't happen and we move into goods and services. not flowing and then companies going out of business and then jobs going away. Yeah. It's very hard to understand what's going on

because there's now 11.6 million job openings, 5 million people looking for jobs. So somewhere or 6 million, these numbers are not perfect, but basically there's 5, 6 million extra jobs in the United States right now. So and record savings. And this will be destroyed.

I mean, look, if there's a pandemic anywhere, right? I guess that's the, that's the, what the word means is that it's everywhere. So if there are outbreaks anywhere, there are effectively outbreaks everywhere, like, unless there's... It could impact us, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. We're all connected.

One of the things I think is a silver lining here is on consumption, you know, this backlog of cars being available and everybody drives their car for another year, I guess that's arguably good for the environment that we're not consuming as much. And that's actually one of the approaches I've taken in my life. Like I decided I wasn't going to order anything on Amazon for 30 days. because I was like, I just have all this stuff I ordered and I have this very like heavy Amazon finger where I just click too hard too often and I'm just taking a 30 day break. I just keep clicking and

you know, now it's been nice to not have any packages coming for me at least because the opening of the packages and I mean, this is the modern era of abundance. I think it's nice to like buy things. I told you the other thing I'm doing is buying things once for the rest of my life. So my Crockett and Jones shoes, my Danner boots, my skillet.

my giant crock pot from La Crosay. I don't know what they call those. Dutch oven. The Dutch oven. Like, I'm looking at all these things at 50, and I'm just saying, last Dutch oven I ever buy, last pair of boots I ever buy,

last ski jacket I buy. I want to get one that last 10 years or 20 years. I just want to buy like the best thing, the most durable, most sustainable, and start looking at life that way, as opposed to this constant disposable culture of everything. Yep, I'm with you.

And people bought a lot of crap during the pandemic, which is partly why. I mean, you know, we keep talking about the supply chain backup and the this and that, and at least one of the major factors here was not just that supply chains were screwed up. It's that Americans bought a crap ton of crap. Everybody bought a bicycle. Everybody was like, I want to buy a new car. Everybody's like, I want to buy, I want to start taking tennis lessons, a guitar, everything.

Yeah. So there you have it. There you have it. All right. We'll see you next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye. Bye. Hey everyone. Producer Nick here.

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