This Week in Startups - Election Security, Skift's Rafat Ali, and Anthropic Unleashes PC AI | E2030

Starting point is 00:00:00 Last time, we had this issue where Trump didn't want to concede and we had January 6th and a bunch of different things occurred. Did the process work to your satisfaction in 2020? And did we have a fair election? In fact, did Biden win? Look, all of us, a lot of people in America still have questions about that election. And the reason is that, look, what should have happened, unfortunately didn't, is most of the lawsuits that were filed contesting the election outcome never got to the substantive hearing stage, that would have been a good thing, because then what would have happened is the claims would have been examined, they would have been cross-examined, the witnesses would have been examined and cross-examined, and a court would have concluded whether or not these claims were credible

Starting point is 00:00:47 or not. What happened in too many of these cases was the judges, you know, they had basically a political hot potato landing in their lap, and so, So most of the cases, if you actually look at them, were dismissed on procedural ground. Claims that the wrong parties had sued, that they had sued too late. They used procedural rules to get rid of most of them. That, I think, was a mistake. I'm not saying that the claims were legitimate. What I'm saying is the court process should have been worked to the end so that the questions would have been resolved.

Starting point is 00:01:22 If that had happened, we wouldn't be talking about this today. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your first job for free.

Starting point is 00:01:53 Terms and conditions apply. And CalShe. The largest regulated predictions market now lets you trade on U.S. elections. Visit calshy.com slash twist to see live election odds, place a trade, and get $20 when you deposit $100. All right, everybody. Welcome to This Week and Startups. I'm your host, Jason Galcannis, with me, my co-host, Alex, Wilhelm. How are you, Alex? I'm tremendous, actually. I love a busy recording week. We're doing three shows together, and this is going be a cracker. Well, I think today will be great. You and I have been talking about election integrity, election security, and, you know, the technology's role in that and just common sense. It's something in the news that interfaces with the technology industry a whole bunch. So today,

Starting point is 00:02:41 we thought we would tackle this head on. I had seen some statistics online about people tracking election fraud, actual cases of people in some way stealing a vote. And so I thought we would just go right after that as part of our series. Last week, we had votes on, I believe. Yep. And we talked a little bit about technology behind this. But I thought we would talk about just how big of a problem is election fraud here in the United States, because we're hearing about it constantly. Obviously, we've had contentious elections in the past, Al Gore, and that election versus Bush. and then obviously Trump's, Hillary's loss, Trump's loss, and now here we are in 2024. And we have seemingly a vice presidential candidate who says I wouldn't certify 2020's results.

Starting point is 00:03:30 And so that's got people a little, I think, rightfully nervous about what's going to happen this election cycle. Yep. So we have. Our first guest today is going to be Hans von Spakowski of the Heritage Foundation. Then we're going to speak with Rafat Ali from Skiff. Quite a lot to talk about their AI travel and some big M&A deals. Then we're going to talk about Anthropics new AI tool and how it can take over your computer if you let it. And Jason, if the sun shines and you and I don't yammer on too long, we will talk about solar at the end of the show.

Starting point is 00:03:57 But I'm not promising that because we tend to yap. And so, you know, let's bring Hans on here. And let's just talk about what the Heritage Foundation is doing in this regard. Hans, how are you? I'm doing just great. Guys, thanks for having me on. All right. I think to level set with the audience, maybe you could tell us what the Heritage Foundation is and then what this project.

Starting point is 00:04:16 is in terms of election fraud that you have been running and how long you've been running it and compiling this database? Well, we're a think tank, actually, probably the largest conservative think tank in the world. And about seven years ago, we decided, well, you know, one thing that doesn't exist is an actual database listing, proven cases of election fraud. You know, there's a lot discussion about it, but there wasn't any one place you could go to try to find actual cases. So we started a database. It's very carefully put together. It's only proven cases. You know, we don't put anything in there where you've got, you know, one side claiming fraud occurred, the other side claiming it didn't happen and it's not resolved. By proven cases, I mean, we only put a

Starting point is 00:05:07 case in there when someone's convicted in a court of law of committing fraud, a judge orders a new election because of fraud, or there is perhaps an official finding by a government agency like happened in North Carolina back in 2018. You may recall the state board of elections there overturned a congressional race. They've been decided by less than a thousand votes because of what it said was systematic widespread absentee ballot fraud. So only proven cases go in. It's up on our website. Anybody can look at it. There's a map of the U.S. You can click on a particular state. It'll bring up a summary and list of all the cases. Plus, the backup documentation, newspaper articles, court documents. Now, right now, people are looking at it. It's going to look kind of holding outdated.

Starting point is 00:05:58 It's going through a facelift. It's getting repainted. We hope that within two weeks, the new web page will be up and hopefully it'll look much better and be much easier to use. Okay. And there's nothing partisan about this database. As you said, no, not at all. No, unless if someone who's convicted of fraud, they're in there. And if you look through the database, what you'll find is it's bipartisan, okay? You'll find Democrats in there convicted. You'll find Republicans convicted. And frankly, some of the cases, that's not one party stealing from the other, it's people within the same party stealing from each other. I mean, some of the cases involve primary elections where one of the candidates set out to win the election by cheating and fortunately got caught and convicted and went to jail.

Starting point is 00:06:50 So what are how many cases are in the database currently and over what period of time? And of course, this is U.S. elections, both local and federal. Yeah. Now, yeah, keep in mind, everything's in there, whether it's a town council race up through congressional federal races. We're approaching 1,600 cases. I've got about a dozen more summaries on my desk that I need to review before we put them up. But keep in mind, this is not a comprehensive list. These cases are not easy to find. You know, many of them are, most of them, are prosecuted by local DAs. But we got over 3,000 counties in this country. And lots of cases we find aren't reported. So it's just a sampling. The other big thing that people need to remember is that, look, I can cite to you many other instances of potential fraud that, frankly, were never referred by election officials to DAs. And even many that were referred to DAs or the DAs just decided, I'm too busy or whatever reasons, and they didn't follow up and didn't prosecute. I had personal experience with that when I was

Starting point is 00:08:03 on an election board in Virginia, and there are many other cases just like that. So, 1600 cases, I think it's over started the first cases in the early 80s, am I correct, Ballpark? Well, yeah, but that's only because I happen to have some of those in my file. We didn't do a comprehensive search for cases from that time period. So if we look over 40 years, there are 1,600 in the database so far. These obviously are the ones that have been, as you said, a pretty high benchmark. They've been prosecuted or an election's been redone. So what should we take from this if there was a multiplier?

Starting point is 00:08:44 Like if we were to say, hey, you found 1,400 over 40 years, 40 a year seems incredibly low. 0.001% of all votes. We have 100, 200 million votes a year here in the year. the United States, depending on the year, obviously when we have a presidential election that booms and then tapers off. So what are we to take from this number, which is obviously minuscule, in terms of if you were to put a factor on it, which you 10 exit or 100 exit? And then when we look at that, what should the American people take from this? That we have secure elections, since it's so small the number and we have so many people focused on this, or is the right

Starting point is 00:09:21 interpretation that, hey, this is one in a hundred for every case that you see prosecuted, you're going to have, I don't know, 10, 100 more that weren't prosecuted in your experience. I think what I would say to people, look, I don't think we have massive fraud in this country, but I do think we have enough of it that we should be concerned about it. You know, the Supreme Court, when it upheld Indiana's voter ID law back in 2008, said that election fraud occurs in the U.S. It's been documented by journalists and historians, and it could really make the difference in a close election.

Starting point is 00:09:57 And while if you look through our database, you'll find many instances of just some blown individual taking advantage of the system. On the other hand, you have cases where it overturned the election. The ninth congressional district in North Carolina, they mentioned in 2018. We just added a case out of Texas, a judicial race in Harris County, a million votes were cast, but the margin of victory was less than 500 votes. A judge overturned the election because he discovered 1,400

Starting point is 00:10:29 illegal votes had been cast in that election, including by about 1,000 people who registered and claimed to live in Harris County, but don't actually live there. And that actually is a good example of what I was talking about. Yeah, the election got overturned, but there's no indication that the 1,400 illegal votes, particularly, for example, the 1,000 people who illegally registered by claiming a residence there, There's no indication that those who have been referred to the local DA for prosecution. If they were, and they were prosecuted and the DA was successful, that would immediately jump our database from 1600 to 2,600. And there's no indication that, in fact, anything is going to be done other than the election being overturned. All right, Squarespace is the place to build beautiful websites. You know that.

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Starting point is 00:12:37 You go to Squarespace.com slash twist and get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's Squarespace.com slash twist. We love them here. Longest running partner on this week in startups, and we really do appreciate that. So, Hans, I'm curious about solutions to this, because, the database was very interesting. I went through a bunch of different entries. I was surprised at how many people didn't understand that felons often can't vote, for example, and that seemed to be a recurring issue that people kept running into. But we're a technology show and we think a lot about

Starting point is 00:13:04 how technology can make things better, can improve things. And so I'm curious, does the Heritage Foundation have a perspective or viewpoint on where we could apply technology to better secure our elections and also ensure electoral integrity? Yeah. And in fact, look, the other big project we have besides this database, which we constantly update, is another database called our Election Integrity Scorecard. And what we did is three years ago, we came up with 50 criteria best practices for the states on how to run their elections. And it covers everything from how to make sure you have an accurate, up-to-date voter role to how you handle your absentee ballots, to do you have requirements in place like an ID to vote? And then we

Starting point is 00:13:54 analyze every single state according to those 50 criteria, and a perfect score was 100. No state in the country scored 100. The highest of time was about an 82. We're now up to about a 90. But the point is that, again, you can go to our election territory scorecard, pull up any state, and it will not only give you our score, but give you our complete analysis of all the things the state is doing that it should be doing and the things that it's not doing.

Starting point is 00:14:27 What are the top three things? Like, is it have a driver's license or a form of ID? I would think a receipt. I mean, I don't know. What are the best practices? It's things like requiring an ID to vote, but part of that is,

Starting point is 00:14:42 do you also provide a free ID to anyone who doesn't already have one. When it comes to voter registration lists, do the states run a monthly comparison between, for example, the statewide voter registration list and their driver's license records? The point of that is that when you register to vote, when you get a driver's license, you have to put in your home address, where you live. So obviously, those two need to match. And if you go into your driver's license bureau and you get a license, and that address is different from where you've registered to vote, that obviously needs to be looked at. Plus, that's a benefit to voters. You know, you may register to vote, then go get your driver's license

Starting point is 00:15:31 after you've moved, and you may not remember to change your address where you're registered to vote. And if there's an automatic, you know, using technology to link those two, then when you update your home address with your driver's license, they can automatically update your voter registration address. And that way, you won't have a problem when you go vote on election day. I think it's, I think it's funny that you mentioned that they should do this monthly. My first thought was, why wouldn't that be real time? I mean, monthly feels incredibly slow. But then again, I guess if that's faster than we're currently doing things, good. But my God, it feels like we need a whole lot more technology to get this thing going faster. Yeah. Oh, look, I agree.

Starting point is 00:16:14 I agree, but you guys know, because you are in the technology area, unfortunately, state governments are often far behind the rest of us, particularly private industry when it comes to their technology. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Instant updates would be good. But remember, it's not just the DMV database. What other databases do states have? Well, state governments also have public assistance agencies, right? people who are poor and are entitled to welfare benefits paid through the state. They also have databases. Those databases should also be linked in to the voter registration database for the same reasons, to be able to do updates, to check the accuracy of information, etc. So, Hans, on the state point, because I'm not shocked to hear the state governments are not at the absolute spear's edge of technology, but is this a funding issue? Is this a just an appellate? the issue? What's holding states from improving the technological underpinnings of our elections?

Starting point is 00:17:18 Well, I think it's a combination of a funding problem and also, look, the salaries in state government for IT specialists are not what you can make in private industry in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. So I think they may have problems sometimes getting the people they need to be able to do this kind of thing. Hans, when I heard that we were going to bring you on the show, Joe, I did not think that the guest from the Heritage Foundation was going to be advocating for increased public servant salaries. But thank you for surprising me this morning. So when we look, I guess, at this election and we look at the past one, this is where,

Starting point is 00:17:59 I guess, politics comes into play. And I understand you're from a partisan organization. So I'll try to keep this as high level and not partisan. I'm an independent, moderate. When we look at the last election, Trump filed a bunch of lawsuits as he's entitled to. I believe Hillary did that. Al Gore did that. There's like a tradition in this country to make sure that voting is secure. We have a system where each state gets to do their own thing, right? It's a distributed system. It's not a centralized system. I guess that has pros and cons. You can't have a national hack because it's 50 disparate systems. You can't possibly be 50 different hacks to do. So that gives you some upside. The downside obviously is that you don't have any standardization and you have to do this one state at a time. That's the nature of our country. But last time, we had this issue where Trump didn't want to concede. And we had January 6th and a bunch of different things occurred. Did the process work to your satisfaction in 2020?

Starting point is 00:19:00 And did we have a fair election? In fact, did Biden win? I guess is the question I'm asking you. Look, all of us, a lot of people in America still have questions about that election. And the reason is that, look, what should have happened, unfortunately didn't, is most of the lawsuits that were filed contesting the election outcome never got to the substantive hearing stage. That would have been a good thing because then what would have happened is the claims would have been examined. They would have been cross-examined. The witnesses would have been examined and cross-examined. and a court would have concluded whether or not these claims were credible or not. What happened in too many of these cases was the judges, you know,

Starting point is 00:19:43 they had basically a political hot potato landing in their lap. And so most of the cases, if you actually look at them, were dismissed on procedural grounds. You know, claims that the wrong parties had sued, that they had sued too late. They used procedural rules to get rid of most of them. That, I think, was a mistake. I'm not saying that the claims were legitimate. What I'm saying is, is the court process should have been worked to the end so that the questions would have been resolved. If that had happened, we wouldn't be talking about this today.

Starting point is 00:20:21 Got it. So we could have done a better job in your mind of adjudicating each of those cases. But just to confirm, you believe Trump didn't win, Biden did win. the Heritage Foundation. And yourself, it's obvious that Biden won. Yeah, I mean, he was certified as the president. Biden was, there's no point in arguing about it today. What we ought to be doing.

Starting point is 00:20:45 Right. But you believe he won, right? Like, because you're an expert on this, you believe Biden won and Trump lost, just so we're clear. Because when you answer the question and you don't say Biden won, Trump lost, it feels like you're leaving room that, and this is where conspiracy theorists will kind of break that wedge open. If you don't, as the Heritage Foundation, say, yes, Trump lost Biden won and it was a clean election. What I'm saying is, look, Biden won. He was declared the winner. The claims that were made were

Starting point is 00:21:14 never resolved the way they should have been. So at this point, they're not going to be resolved. To me, there's no point. Got it. And keep it. You won't say. You won't say that Biden won, fair and square. You'll say, we didn't adjudicate it properly. What do you think? of Sidney Powell, you know, the person who kind of came out on Trump's behalf and attempted to sort of run this election. Look, Sidney Powell herself later came out and gave a press conference in which she said that she didn't really have any backup for what she was saying. But that's, that makes the point, that supports the point I just made, which is, you know, when things like this happened, people should reserve judgment. Let the court process work at self out. That's certainly what happened in Florida, you know, in 2000. And once that was over with, we had the president, uh, declare, who was declared the winner. We had it in 2020. We had it in 2000. And it's over with. And what you just should do with a situation like that is learn from the

Starting point is 00:22:19 mistakes that were made and say, you know, any vulnerabilities we see in the system, let's fix them. Yeah. So that will problem won't, uh, occur again. Founders, I know that you're keeping a close eye on your burn rate. I am too. In today's venture market, every single hire you make has to be perfect, right? You can't make mistakes. You got to keep that runway as long as possible so that you can run more experiments. And you need talented people to run those experiments and figure out how you're going to get product market fit, how are you going to scale your company? And that's why you need to use LinkedIn jobs. As you know, LinkedIn brings you the candidates that you can't find anywhere else. LinkedIn passed the one

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Starting point is 00:23:41 The reason I bring up Sidney Powell is because you're trying to, as part of the Heritage Foundation, I think, do diligent work to make sure these elections are secure. And then Sydney Powell, you know, was obviously pled guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election. duties and she was sentenced to six years of probation. So you have somebody here representing the president who now has been convicted and pled out. And so that makes your job more difficult, I think, to come out here as sort of right-leaning and say, hey, these elections need to be examined more closely, yeah? Well, what makes the job difficult is when people come out with unsubstantiated claims.

Starting point is 00:24:24 Right. And that's why, to go back to what we started talking about, that's why, our database only has proven substantiated cases. How many proven cases were there of federal election fraud in 2020 in the database you put together? Well, we cover both federal and state. Yeah, the federal, I guess, the presidential election, yeah. To tell my head, I don't know how many there were from 2020, but can I give you another over 10, under 10, over 100, under 100?

Starting point is 00:24:56 I don't know. Look, there's almost six. You don't know. We put together the database. There's almost 1,600 cases in there. I don't, off the top of my head. I can't tell you how many numbers there were from each. I was just thinking, the big one that's disputed is the one I was trying to figure out and figure it out, you know, in sorting the database, how to find just those. And I think that's kind of what has everybody really up in arms this time around is, hey, are we going to have a clean election or not? And so it would be good to know in 2020 how much presidential election fraud there was. but obviously we don't have that. So, yeah, Hans, I want to take this to a different, a slightly different angle here. I am a big fan of democracy, so I care a lot about this very personally.

Starting point is 00:25:37 I'm curious, is there a nation out there that you think is doing a particularly good job using technology to ensure a more fair and kind of, you know, safe election environment? Is there anyone we can look to as a, hey, they're doing great stuff? We should learn from them. What are you talking about within the United States or outside of the United States? Outside of the United States. I don't know if it's Finland or some other place, but is there. any place with democracy that is particularly safe and secure to your view that we could learn from?

Starting point is 00:26:01 Well, I do think one thing that I would point out is that in Europe, look, you know, we always have European observers here. I'm about, I'm going to brief some right before the election that the EU sends them over. They're always astonished when I tell them that we don't have a uniform requirement for identification when you vote. And that's a standard requirement in European countries. and frankly, in many other places around the world, that you have to show an ID when you're going to vote. The other thing that I think we ought to look at is that they don't allow absentee balloting in Europe, where they call it postal voting with very few exceptions, because they know how risky and how vulnerable it is to not only fraud,

Starting point is 00:26:48 but errors and delays in delivery by postal service authorities. I don't think we should get rid of absentee ballots. I do think they are needed for people who are too physically disabled, for example, to vote. But there's push in this country for all-male ballots. To get as many people to vote by mail as possible instead of in person, I don't think is a good idea for a lot of reasons that the Europeans can tell you all about. So I do think those are two lessons we ought to love. learn from the EU. Well, I appreciate that, but as an Oregon child, where we have all-male voting,

Starting point is 00:27:30 I'm slightly biased on that one, but Jason, back to you. Well, I was, I was going to say, what is the, what is the penalty for election fraud if an individual or try to vote twice here in the United States in a presidential election on November 5th, if they were to steal a ballot and then, you know, steal somebody's ballot and submit it? What would the potential penalty be? It depends entirely on that that's going to be illegal under both state and federal law, so it's going to depend on whether you're prosecuted by a local DA or a federal prosecutor. It could be a misdemeanor. It could be a felony.

Starting point is 00:28:06 But, you know, if your argument is going to be that, well, if it's against the law, obviously people aren't going to do it. Well, if that were true, our prisons and jails across the country would be empty. Well, motivation does matter. I mean, and the penalty does matter. So that's what I'm trying to get at is, you know, if the value of stealing a vote is obvious, right? Like my candidate has a greater chance of winning or somebody might pay you for your vote. I guess that's a possibility as well. But, you know, the cost of that in the database has been severe.

Starting point is 00:28:40 Some people have gone to jail for many years, yeah? Some go to jail, but others don't. I give an example of this. About two years ago, a former Democratic congressman in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Mike Ozzie Myers. You may remember him. He was a Democratic congressman who got caught in the ab scam scandal more than 20 years ago, went to federal prison. When he got out, he became political consultant. Well, two years ago, he was indicted by the feds for bribery, 12 counts. Why? Why? He was bribing poll managers in Philadelphia to stuff fraudulent ballots into the ballot box at the end of the day after the polls it closed on behalf of his clients.

Starting point is 00:29:27 And he went to jail for this. On the other hand, just a couple of years ago, a U.S. attorney in North Carolina prosecuted about two dozen aliens for illegally registering and voting in election. there. Now, that's normally a felony under federal law. All of them just got slaps on the wrist. They basically got a very small fine, no jail time, and were let go. So frankly, it depends on what state you're in, who's charging you, and how lenient or tough a judge is. Awesome. Hans, I appreciate the work you're doing to chronicle all of this. It does feel to me like We're on the road, hopefully, this next election cycle we can get there. 35 or 36 states require ID. So it seems like that's some progress.

Starting point is 00:30:22 We only have 14 states left. So we're 70% of the way there. And you've been able to compile these 1,600. If we assume there's 10 or 100 times that feels to me, like our elections are very safe. And we have watchdogs like yourself. And I guess the other side have their equivalent. really, granularly trying to find examples here

Starting point is 00:30:47 and we found a very small number of them overall. So I feel good about it and I feel great that you're doing this kind of work to obsess over it because somebody needs to. So thank you for obsessing over it. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the time. I talk about prediction markets all the time on my podcast

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Starting point is 00:32:17 I think this is an example, Alex, here, of, you know, we can have a logical discussion, even with somebody who's partisan. You know, obviously, the Heritage Foundation is as partisan as it gets. On the left, there's, like, extremely partisan organizations. And I actually take them in good faith that they're chronicling the database. When you look at data and you put sunlight on it, it's very hard to debate the data. And I think we saw that here in our discussion. Obviously, he's got a perspective, wouldn't say specifically, you know, that Biden lost or whatever.

Starting point is 00:32:49 You know, and I think that's typically how people will massage this issue like, oh, we don't have to rehash it or it could have been better. But I don't know how you feel about it. But after talking to him, I feel like both sides are so obsessed over this issue. And the cost is great for election fraud. Yeah. And there's so many people looking out for it. And we have 50 different systems. the idea that we could actually swing it one way or the other, the Russians could swing it for Trump

Starting point is 00:33:13 or, you know, a bunch of immigrants could be paid a hundred bucks each to vote for Biden. It feels like the numbers don't math to me of there being systematic election fraud. That would actually switch an election. Now, there's fraud in every system, but I don't think there's enough here to swing any election other than maybe a very minor local one. What's your takeaway from this as you and I learn here? because that's what we're really trying to do is learn and get the data and then examine the data from first principles.

Starting point is 00:33:42 I have a lot of thoughts. So first of all, it's always very enjoyable to watch you, Jason, I is someone who doesn't know you that well. I don't know what that means, but okay. Well,

Starting point is 00:33:52 you don't let things go and you have an ability to ask a follow-up question when someone wasn't excited about the first question, and I appreciate that. It's a little uncomfortable, but yeah. No, no. I mean, I've done it. I've done it to both sides. Oh, no, no, no, no, your equal opportunity here. I just, I always enjoy that. But the thing that really blew my mind, because we were talking about this last week, talking about this week, I'm sure we're going to talk about it more, more startups, more technology.

Starting point is 00:34:19 It seems that even with all of the intricacies, the different systems, the patchwork quilt of our democracy, it kind of works. And I think, frankly, it's very encouraging to me. It's not like we have a system that's on fire in the ditch, broken to all pieces. We can improve it. But generally speaking, seems to go. Okay. And hell yeah, that makes me happy. Yeah. And, you know, we've had close elections many times. Al Gore conceded eventually. Trump has never conceded, but we still, the democracy and the democratic institution we have known as America seems to have, even though a person did not want to concede, allowed the transfer of power, you know, even with January 6. So, you know, you can have these big debates about was January 6th the walk in the park? Was there an effort to overthrow the election? Were there people who, you know, were using immigrants or whatever? At the end of the day, the judicial system seems to have done its job. Trump filed 60 plus lawsuits. He lost them. Sydney Powell was obviously a liar and a conspiracy there. She got, I don't know if she got disbarred, but she was found guilty, obviously, or she pled guilty. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:28 So, you know, it does feel like I, too, feel like we're trending towards reality here. Yeah. I know it's hard for people when they lose, whether it was Al Gore, it was hard for him to concede or Hillary claiming the Russians, you know, cause her to lose because of the email leak. I understand, like, but at the end of the day, it's kind of hard with 150 million voters to do enough votes to swing an election. And then even in these states that are, you know, the swing states, they're under a lot of scrutiny. So I don't think it's, it's all that easy to admit fraud. And if you do, you're going to

Starting point is 00:36:03 go to jail for a long time. I think in the national election. You're throwing in, well, I know we have, we have, uh, uh, Raf and Ali waiting in the wing. So we're going to get to him in just a second here. But one thing prepping for today's show, that I was less happy about is a little bit of like causing the injury and then offering the bandage. So heritage is doing good work. I think the database is useful. I got to go through it. It was lovely to have. I appreciate learning stuff. Sure. But the Heritage Foundation is also going out and doing in-camera footage to Latino voters. This was in The Times. And trying to over-extrapolate from what people are saying to create the idea that there is rampant voter fraud by people who are brown for Democrats.

Starting point is 00:36:44 And I did see that story. Yeah. It makes me very disappointed because we could have very serious conversations about data. But sometimes orgs don't always speak with one voice. And I just think we could all do better here. and we should all move away from fear mongering around election cycle at election time, because this matters a lot. Yeah, matters.

Starting point is 00:37:02 Democracy matters. All right, there we have it, folks. It's a simple list of things. ID, maybe this makes me, maybe I'm MAGA, maybe I'm dark MAGA that I believe that people should show an ID. I don't know. Does that make me not? No.

Starting point is 00:37:15 I think all we have to do is have both sides of this. Voter ID, generally speaking, very good idea. Disenfranchising voters who don't have access to it? Very bad. As Han said, if we have a free ID program, if we rolled that out in every state, I would be 100% in favor of voter ID tomorrow. So let's just solve it with $50 million, Jason. It's not a lot of money, I presume. This is not a big ask.

Starting point is 00:37:36 All right. There's been a lot of talk about Uber's acquisition or the trial balloon of Uber possibly acquiring Expedia. We talked about it here. We talked about it all in. It's been talked about on CNBC every day. And Uber has got a big valuation. and they have a frisky CEO with us to talk about it is my friend Raffin Ali. How are you, sir?

Starting point is 00:37:59 He is the, I don't know, you're the CEO of Skift.com. I don't know if you're the editor-in-chief as well. No, I'm not. We have a very good editor-in-churchase. Got it. You gave that to full disclosure. I'm a minor investor in Raffet's company, and we worked together on Silicon Ler Reporter back in the day. We did.

Starting point is 00:38:15 You got to hear our discussion, I think. You were in the waiting room about election integrity. What did you think? Yeah. Do you really want me to go there? You're allowed to have an opinion Yeah, sure I don't think heritage

Starting point is 00:38:26 will be coming on your show Any chance one again That's what I was getting at I said Jason I think he can handle A tough question or two I think People like tough questions

Starting point is 00:38:35 You know You're obviously very good At what you do So I mean As even though you don't consider yourself A turn list these days I still consider you One and what you do

Starting point is 00:38:45 With obviously all the podcasts As well as this I want to add a point there When Jason Wanted to bring the heritage on My first thought was Oh shit

Starting point is 00:38:52 But I, you know, I work here. I did it. Happy to help facilitate, prepare the notes. I didn't expect Jason to go that hard on that point he wanted to bring up. And I think that does underscore the value of bringing on non-traditional guests, even partisan ones, if you push them. So five points to Jason, I was too skeptical. Well, here's the thing. Partisan people is what I've learned this cycle, because I didn't know how partisan some of my friends would become or are or always have been. You know, it's a range. I actually don't care about politics all that much, as both of you know, But I'm getting dragged into it because All In has become obsessed with it. Sacks is obviously obsessed with it. It's like very important to him. So, you know, I get dragged into these conversations. But even partisan people want to have hard discussions. We've seen that over and over again, you know, when I asked Trump about the border and immigration or about abortion, I asked J.D about certifying the election. They like answering hard questions. This idea that, you know, partisans don't want hard questions. They want it most. I think they want it most. I think Hans enjoyed me asking him about. 2020 and pushing him a little bit. Did Trump win or not? He's going to hold that position,

Starting point is 00:39:57 you know, heritage is. I think they have to maintain a relationship with Trump, obviously. And so they're not going to, they don't want the headline out there. Heritage Foundation guy says Trump didn't win in 2020. So they're always going to try to filibuster that answer, just like a Democrat will filibuster answers, you know, on their side. And you can argue who might do it more. I think one of the things that I'll give to you, Jason, with the all-in podcast, certainly my journey of giving the other side of patient listen. Yeah. Is the thing that I learned honestly really starting to listen to all.

Starting point is 00:40:34 I mean, I was very, this was one. Yeah. The COVID, I was on my Peloton listening. My laptop was on the floor listening to you on the first one. And initially, my first reaction was, do I really want to listen to David Axe? and to be just patience and then seeing his general level headness

Starting point is 00:40:56 beyond just politics I have to listen to this and then so your journey I'm not sure I feel like it's a lot of journey that a lot of us have over the last four years having an independent mind questioning a lot of stuff

Starting point is 00:41:12 yeah I think you have to and you and I come from a media all three of us come from a media background and you know we we see bias in media We see insincerity and people manipulating the media from all sides. And you understand the process of finding the truth. Let's talk about the truth on a business level. You cover Uber incessantly at Skift. Everybody should go to skiff.com.

Starting point is 00:41:36 It's like the New York Times of Travel or the Wall Street Journal of Travel. It's a really great site. If you're in the travel industry, you read it every day. But let's talk a little bit about the Expedia rumor. and there's some other rumors out today about it. And I know you guys did a lot of pros and cons. What are the pros and cons? What are the chances an Expedia deal happens?

Starting point is 00:41:57 Yeah. I listened to what all of you discussed on the old podcast. I thought that was a very good rundown that all of you did and the pros and cons on the deal. I think the biggest pros that the frequency of usage and travel in general is low. Like how many times would people usually travel, two, three, four times year maximum. This is I'm talking leisure travel.

Starting point is 00:42:19 And so the cost of acquisition of a customer in an online travel booking site, which is a layer on top of the brands anyway. So it's one level removed from the actual brands that you may have loyalty to in the travel industry, Marriott or Delta, whatever, airline or hotel of choices. And so for them, they spend tons and tons of money, billions and billions of dollars. It's been rising. We've been covering for the last 12 years of SkipTal. that money went from less than a billion from Expedia and booking each to now $7 to $8 to $10 billion that they're spending on Google.

Starting point is 00:42:52 So the biggest thing from an Expedia perspective is just the cost of acquisition, the frequency of usage of Uber on Uber and Uber eats, and other services that they have and other parts of the world. From an Uber perspective, Barr has been quite clear. You spoke at the conference that Darry spoke last year at our conference that I did you both on stage separately, that. He likes the idea of a super app. Obviously, knows travel very, very well. He's not just a deal maker, but also a really good leader, understands how to create synergies and motivate people to do things profitably. So Expedia, which has struggled a bit in the last couple of years,

Starting point is 00:43:35 particularly on its tech integration in the back end, which has been able to do under the previous CEO, but still languishing, the stocks languishing as well. So from an Uber perspective, if you already have 150 million users being able to upsell a much bigger ticket item, in fact of these low ticket items, I think those are simplest way to put the pros and cons for this. Okay. So, I want to ask a question about that because I use Uber. I use Uber eats more often than I should. Very much a mobile experience for me, booking flights, booking hotels entirely desktop. And so when I think about a combination of Uber and Expedia, to me, it just doesn't resonate with how I use these services.

Starting point is 00:44:12 I'm just curious, am I incredibly out of date and old-fashioned? No, you're not. No, no, no. I mean, a lot of the transaction, particularly in the Western world, still happens on desktop. Even if the research starts on either, it does jump back and forth. In some of the, for instance, Asian countries or Latin America, et cetera, mobile happens to be a much bigger part, but at least in the Western world that we live in, it's a very, mobile isn't as

Starting point is 00:44:39 predominant as you would assume it to be in, for instance, versus our media consumption habits. Yeah, yeah, but like, what I think about a lot of companies that have an app today, like United I'm a united customer, I went from web to mobile, but I feel like if Uber bought Expedia, they'd be going from mobile to web, and I just

Starting point is 00:44:55 can't recall a company making that kind of like backwards progression in platform. So, is that an actual sticking point in this deal, or am I over-neaching down on my own personal concerns? Well, I think the product part, and again, you guys discussed this in the other podcast, product integration

Starting point is 00:45:10 will be the biggest challenge there is. The only thing I'll say in Uber's pro bucket there is there's an over emphasis on assuming that Expedia and everything else in online travel is a huge brand that people have loyalties to.

Starting point is 00:45:26 Most of the customers come through online acquisition channels, Google. But the reality is if Uber Expedia deal happens and Dara says, we're just going with Uber and Uber travel. and all of these legacy brands go away. It won't kill the company.

Starting point is 00:45:41 It will take a while, but the reality is like, there's no loyalty in online travel. There's just no, is no loyalty. People don't go to Hotels.com or Expedia because they, or kayak conversely, because they love that experience necessarily. They're just looking for the best price. They start at Google, like most people do. They do a search for flights from here to here, and sometimes Google flights intercept it.

Starting point is 00:46:04 Sometimes you get an ad. They look at multiple sites. Like, I think your and I behavior, I think this is generally known. We've done research on it, that people look at tens of sites. Yeah. Before they actually book, particularly if it's a once a year, big trip that you're looking at. Right. It's a considered purchase.

Starting point is 00:46:19 If you're doing a big trip and you're spending $5 to $50,000 taking your family on vacation, whether it's a staycation and you're getting a motel aid or you're going to Europe for the summer and you're flying business or first class, you're going to take time to get the most out of your dollar. and the research does pay off, I think. What do you think about the third tab in Uber being, you know, you have rides, you got food. The third one would be travel, which would be hotels and flights, or even just putting hotels, flights, experiences. I mean, it does seem like they've done some experiments there. How are the experiments done for them?

Starting point is 00:46:54 Well, so I asked R. this last year. I mean, it's not big. So it's in UK where there's a company called Hopper that is also there. It's a startup that is in the online booking space. They're tied up with them and offering hotels and then whale, et cetera, there in India, there are a bunch of other things offering as well. And so while they're not giving numbers on conversion for first time users,

Starting point is 00:47:18 Dara did mention that the rebooking rate for people who do convert time is actually quite high. If I'm remembering it, right, something like 60% of people once they book runs, then come back again. Interesting. So they trust it, right? They learn to trust it the way they've learned to trust rides. It's the same thing with Uber Eats.

Starting point is 00:47:38 You're like, is my food going to actually show up and can I risk my family missing dinner? Like, if you order that first time, you have a little bit of anxiety. Is it going to show up? And then once it shows up, you quickly become a two or three times a week person probably. Oh, God. Yeah, that's true. Uber Eats is so expensive, though, Jason, I really got to stop. It's too easy.

Starting point is 00:47:56 I mean, it's too bad. Here's the thing. If you look at your time and I know how. much you get paid because I'm a part of your revenue streams. You know, if you look at people's time, if it saves an hour of prepping a meal or two hours and you save 10 hours a month or 20 hours a month, it does add up. I do think the Uber 1 is, I don't know if anybody here is a member of Uber 1. I am, so I save a bunch on fees. How much is that becoming a phenomenon in travel, this idea of a membership that saves you money? I know I'm very loyal to both Bonvoy and United.

Starting point is 00:48:31 and JetBlue, I actually know my miles and I'm, you know, paying attention to that. I don't need to, but I fly so often for free with United or I get hotel rooms so often for free when I'm traveling because of Bonvoy that I kind of like it. And I, all my cards are United cards. And I would go probably with Uber cards if, you know, the incentive was there. So talk to me about loyalty programs and how Uber is faring with regard to that. Yeah, so loyalty obviously is a big part of the travel industry, airlines and hotels, airlines particularly have very large programs. There's people say that essentially airlines at this point are sort of loyalty programs slash credit cards. And then airline is the loss making part.

Starting point is 00:49:16 That part is true because they're able to pre-sell the miles to some bank or credit card company and then they get advanced. In fact, that's how many of the airlines, Delta, et cetera, got saved during COVID because they were. able to get such big advances from like billions of dollars from these banks. Hotels is also the same thing. I mean, as you said, you are a Bonvoi user. Bonvo is the biggest program in the hotel industry as well. There have been experiments with subscriptions the way Uber one does, but it hasn't been, and those are small-scale subscriptions, some airlines, Alaska Air, and a few others,

Starting point is 00:49:50 launching these, some of the European and Asian ones as well, airline site, launching these subscriptions. Some of the hotels have done experiments on, for instance, subscription to co-working spaces. This is coming out of COVID. But they're small-scale and then Soho House, which I know you know well, is very much

Starting point is 00:50:10 built around working as well as staying. Historically, they haven't turned a profit in 27 or 28 or 30 years of their existence and not a single quarter of... What is this for them?

Starting point is 00:50:25 What is Amadea I saw that this firm was denying rumors. They explained that Uber hasn't reached out to them. There's some $30 billion a year or $30 billion market cap company that I don't even know about. Yeah, Amides is so these are called GDS, is the global distribution system. Sabre. Amadeus travel port three of the companies in that sort of Amadeus is the biggest one, Saber number two, travel port number three in terms of global market share, are the green screens that you may have seen that travel agents.

Starting point is 00:50:56 or if you go to the airport, if you peek around, you will see these are the antiquated systems. This was AI before AI existed. This was variable pricing before variable pricing existed in the rest of the world type tech systems that are the backbone on which airlines run, hotels run, online travel companies run. So they're very, very powerful backends. But in an age where tech has come in and you can directly connect to the hotels

Starting point is 00:51:25 instead of using a third-party system, there's been talk forever and enough progress that competitors are emerging or, you know, AI will definitely have a big role to play in there. There were some, the rumor that I actually just heard right before this podcast was that Uber approach Amides, that seems unlikely, because that's pure sort of B2B tech company.

Starting point is 00:51:54 If it approached it, The only thing that I can think of is not to acquire, but to then build their own Expedia. Expedia. Kayak competitor, Hotels.com competitor, because they would use that feed to present the information inside of their app. So there's multiple ways if Darrah wants to include travel and keep building out the super app. Yeah, I can still, yeah, I can surely build it. And I think they'll keep doing experiments in terms of what's the attach rate, which is, you know, if you're booking one of these two things that they already have,

Starting point is 00:52:26 how many people are opting in? So I think it may be from a partnership perspective as opposed to an acquisition perspective. There was another thing about Grab, which is the big Uber equivalent in Southeast Asia, which I think Dari used to sit on the board of. I forget what exactly the history is. Or Uber used to be an invest,

Starting point is 00:52:44 I don't fully remember the history. I think Uber might have had some equity in it when they maybe they exited that market because it was kind of like the DDDO, et cetera. there were some local players that they gave their business to and took a percentage of. Yeah. Yeah. And it really is a super app in that part of the world.

Starting point is 00:53:01 So there's some rumor that they may look at it. They went public with the SPAC and our friend Brad Guster took it public with the SPAC. I don't, I'm trading at $4 today. It hasn't done very well. Yeah. Well, it's still a market cap of $16 billion, if that's correct. Yeah. Yeah, but according to CrunchBase data, it raised.

Starting point is 00:53:23 about $16 billion. So I don't know if it's done that well. But it's cheap, though. I mean, Uber's worth, Jason, back me up here, $170, $180 billion somewhere in there. I haven't checked it in a while. But yeah, the general sense is that Dara is focused on a few markets to do well. And Jason are probably aware more than I am on sort of the markets that they're looking to continue to double down on versus expanding back into those big markets. Talk to me about VRBO. That, to me, seems like an incredible asset. Obviously, Airbnb is an incredible company. They've got challenges, right, frequency, et cetera. But Uber and Airbnb were always compared as the sharing economy. Right, two iconic companies that came out of that era.

Starting point is 00:54:06 And so VRBO, I used before I used Airbnb, vacation rental, buy, owner. It seems like that's like an underappreciated asset inside of Expedia. And that that would, as a marketplace, where you have inventory on once, an asset light marketplace, you got inventory on one side, and then you have buyers on the other, Uber one buyers, Uber's 150 customers,

Starting point is 00:54:31 with their credit cards in there already. Trusting an Uber, Airbnb competitor sounds incredibly compelling to me. The conventional wisdom that Airbnb as the predominant brand is settled signs, I don't think is correct. I think there's an opening, here.

Starting point is 00:54:51 In terms of, if somebody is so dominant, there's always an opening somewhere. And so one, there's that. And VRBO has been there for a long time, as you said. It was there even before, I'm going to say pre-web, maybe. But Home Away, you may have, some of you may remember Home Away. So Home Away bought VRBO, and then Home Away got bought by Expedia. Pre-COVID, I forget exactly the year. And then so they renamed everything verbal, VRBO as a verbal.

Starting point is 00:55:22 That's kind of how they pronounce it. It did really well during the pandemic. Some would say it even saved Expedia in many ways. You can imagine the reasons Airbnb and Uber in summer of 20, 21, 22 did gangbusters business. Yeah, people didn't want to be in a hotel, risking getting COVID in the hallway, at the front desk, at the gym, and having your own home. Wow, you don't have to worry about that. So it's kind of hard to remember that craziness, but that was what it was. It has come down hard because verbal, as people came back to the cities,

Starting point is 00:55:56 Verbo, which historically was focused on non-city areas, which is the opposite of what Airbnb was, which is cities. And then they added, obviously, the other stuff over the years, has languished in terms of growth, particularly this year. Verbo has struggled. So there's an opportunity potentially. I don't think, well, Barry Diller controls Expedia,

Starting point is 00:56:17 so you can never count out any deal with him, meaning he's probably the best dealmaker in the media tech world in history. And so if you bring a good, and Dara and Barry are very close. It was his mentor, right? It was his mentor. He gave him the shot at Expedia.

Starting point is 00:56:36 And so there is, you know, and Barry is up there in age, right? He's 80 years old. So if he was looking to, retire, that would be a good landing place for Expedia. And then you have this existential threat. There's always an existential threat, as you alluded to, even when somebody is the number one player. So the existential threat, as you've described it, is AI helping you find the perfect hotel or place to stay. I think that's going to happen. I mean, I've said this for many years since maybe 2015, the tyranny of the search box.

Starting point is 00:57:06 as in the travel search box that was there in 1990, pick a year, 98, 99 is essentially the same travel search box that it is today. Which just seems mind-blowing based on the changes that have happened. And so I think a lot of back-end technology in terms of removing the friction, the seamless trip that people have talked about, which is how do you make sure that from airport to hotel to airline? The thing that blows my mind every time is the second you step off the airline, the airline has no idea where you're going,

Starting point is 00:57:45 has no idea what hotel you're staying at, has no idea what you're going to do in in 2024. And how's that possible? Or even vice versa. Hotel does not know the second you leave the hotel. Are you going to the airport? Maybe they do, but then are you which airline you're taking? What's your choices?

Starting point is 00:58:03 So this seamlessness of travel, which somebody like Uber could potentially do, the examples of this in, for instance, China, Mituan and a few others that are trying to create super up around travel are there. Because we brought up AI, Raphat, I want to ask about the ASCIFT service you guys have put together on your company's website. You just relaunched it and it's much expanded, much better, including even SEC data and so forth. I'm just curious, how much consumer use has there been of your AI Q&A service?

Starting point is 00:58:38 Yeah, so keep in mind, this is a B2B service, so not a consumer in the sense that it's not a, it's not a, we're purely focused on the business to business. So we launched this in May last year. We're early with chat, GPT, with GPT, I'm going to say 3.5, I think it was at that point. And so now we're in Forall. We relaunched it a month ago from a chat bot sort of paradigm to, an answer engine paradigm. So it's trained on everything that Skift has done over the last 12 years, all text on our daily news, research, our conferences, transcript, and now we add SEC filings, not all filings,

Starting point is 00:59:15 because then it overwhelms the system. There's a lot of garbage that comes back. So only on 10K and 10Q and even then parts of 10K and 10Q that are relevant to the industry. We cover about 140 public companies across all parts of travel. So it's quite accurate. I would say if you test it yourself, you'll see that it gives. How do you feel like as a media guy with people indexing your information? I'm sure Skift has been indexed into perplexity or Claude or Open AI with or without your permission?

Starting point is 00:59:45 Correct. And have you been able to prove that they've done that? And are they coming to you saying, hey, we want to make this right if we're going to use your data and pay you? Yeah. The one, I take it as a compliment. the fact that like Google Washington Post

Starting point is 01:00:04 there was a Washington Post story last year on they got hold on the sources of data that Google's AI has been trained on and we were like number 500 site on the web I thought that was not bad

Starting point is 01:00:19 like for a tiny small company like ours to be the 500 most useful site that they found in the web seems like a compliment well you hire 100% it's 100% human created with high quality editorial, with people getting paid real salaries.

Starting point is 01:00:34 And so when you think about the information that's available on the web, whether it's Twitter, Reddit, fortune, message boards, like, it's very variable, right? Even the reviews on Amazon or bought and sold to the extent that people even create Chrome toolbars to try to identify the fake stuff on the web, right?

Starting point is 01:00:50 So if you have an unbiased source, that's high quality. Man, that's super valuable, yeah. Yeah, we have blocked GPD from crawling our site now. over the last year because they started that as an option. You can opt out of being trained. Certainly using AskGift, we don't send the data back. This is just the API call.

Starting point is 01:01:09 So they actually, that's an option that you don't use your own chat, but they create on top of GPT to not train the overall chat. I don't spend tons of time worrying about it because there's nothing I can do about as a small company. My thing is how do I use the tools to, this sounds like a cliche, but how to give value to our user. At all times, it's how do I make this better for the people that are reading us, they're paying us money,

Starting point is 01:01:39 how do I get more money out of them if I continue to provide more value out of it? And so Ask Gift is an example where it's not a free. You get like one query a month, two queries a month for free, and then if you're a paid subscriber to Skift's paid services, you get unlimited access. So not that this converts people in droves to Skift, but it's a good retention

Starting point is 01:02:00 for our team, especially our sales team to say and a lot of it today is education like the fact that our sales team is presenting this to people who are enterprise subscribers of SCIFT, they're paying anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 a year to have access to daily news and research

Starting point is 01:02:20 and other things that Skift has and for them to know that, oh, this is available, this are people can use it. So Alex, to answer your original question, Yeah. We do get, we get about a couple of thousand queries a day. I mean, for a B2B product with a very specific use case, that doesn't sound back. So put it into growth terms for us.

Starting point is 01:02:38 What was that six months ago compared to today? Well, so I think we're sort of fair to say it's not being like hockey stick growth there. But it was an initial bump in early days because it was novelty. And it's sort of petered off and stayed around that. number between thousand and two thousand a day type range. One more question about AI costs, because I was going back through your corporate posts. And when you guys talked about the initial launch of it, you were using GPD 3.5. I think because you said at the time that using four was just prohibitively expensive,

Starting point is 01:03:14 how is the cost curve of AI models impacted how you guys build AI-drive products? So again, small usage in terms of, you know, in the overall scheme of things and And Opina has also dropped the cost quite a bit since then. So we're in 4-0 now. It's not significant for us. We're comfortable with the cost we're there. That's awesome. I mean,

Starting point is 01:03:37 I'm curious to see how fast 01 can come down in price, because it seems like people that are building with that set of models are getting consistent discounts. It feels like the early days of AWS in the best possible way, when everything was getting cut and cut and cut and cut and cut. I love it. Yeah, 01 is a lot better. I mean, I'm sure you guys have used it to,

Starting point is 01:03:55 O-1 preview just is so much better reasoning. It's crazy how good it is. I mean, you think about the average analyst that you would hire at a venture firm or, you know, at Skift or we might have at Silicon Honor Reporter back in the day. What would take you two days of research, it will do in two minutes. And then you start your research where you would have been an hour 20 maybe as an analyst in the 90s, right? And obviously you've got to check the data and the facts. a hallucinating and get things wrong. But man, it is so great at giving you quick overviews and making you smarter. I'm just amazed at the jump 0-1 has made. Yeah, and Ravino, I use it a lot in my day-to-day

Starting point is 01:04:38 duties as a CEO, whether it's coming up with ideas for memos that I need to write for the team or, you know, I have to make a list. It's kind of like a lot. And more and more my usage is I talk into it versus typing. And I'm sure you've seen that as well. I, in my car, when I, I'm driving, when I drop my daughter off at school, we will put on the chat GPT. I made my action button on my phone, the voice one. And I have it now doing a series of history questions. So I told it, hey, my daughter is learning history. I want to rush up on it. Start with the easiest possible questions. Who's the first president of the United States? When did the revolution happened? Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? And like, I'm like, wow, I don't remember this stuff.

Starting point is 01:05:21 It was 40 years ago when I was 10 years old. In high school, whatever, you know, trying to learn this stuff. As a publisher, I hear that the green shoots of hope in the publishing business are subscriptions. Obviously, you're doing that corporate and your B2B publication, so great. But I also hear licensing data for models could become a viable business model. And the third, Apple News and the revenue sharing from Apple News seems to have been significant for certain people making seven, eight figures. So that sounds a little bit. bit dangerous because people subscribe and you have to give them your entire corpus. Is that right?

Starting point is 01:06:02 Are you on Apple News and how does it work? So we are, but I think this is the challenge when anybody talks about, you know, Facebook's efforts in media back in the days, Twitter and now Apple News and a bunch of others. We are a sort of niche industry publication. So it's hard for them to come down to be on the top players to then come to somebody like us. So we we don't have tons of visibility into or access into these revenue programs. And beyond a certain point, I just cannot run my company based on that anyway. And so for us, it's always about direct usage with users, whether there's email or, or even honestly, LinkedIn, which is huge for us.

Starting point is 01:06:44 Really, explain. Yeah. I mean, just in terms of everybody in our industry is on LinkedIn. Got it. This is true for a lot of industry. So Skift has, I'm going to say, 500,000, so half million plus followers on LinkedIn. I have about half million followers on LinkedIn. So between us, about a million and then you add all of our teams, et cetera.

Starting point is 01:07:11 So it's quite large substantial. And so many times when I meet people at our own conference, I say, well, we're huge fans. We read you. I said, where do you read us? On LinkedIn. Oh, great. Can you please click through and come to the site? please hit the blue link

Starting point is 01:07:24 come on people but honestly it does and the commentary that we do I do these videos that I do and our team does as well so net net

Starting point is 01:07:33 LinkedIn is where the action is for companies like ours versus Apple news or certainly you know Facebook etc and people starting to get their news on TikTok

Starting point is 01:07:43 I saw you guys doing some shorts some vertical videos yeah I think there yeah I am out of the demo I'm out of the TikTok demo

Starting point is 01:07:51 So I'm probably the wrong person, but I actually did not even go on Instagram. So just Twitter was enough for me as a phone was back in the days. But in B2B, I think it's less, but certainly we have to be where people are. And if TikTok is it, we'll figure out a way some of our employees are doing better videos than we would ourselves do, which I think is great. And that's kind of where we are. And back to office? You have people back in that amazing office? Or you still remote?

Starting point is 01:08:20 No, we're fully remote. We're almost 100 people. We're fully remote. We're 15 different countries now post-COVID. We gave up our office that you came in pre-COVID and gave a talk to our team. But we're a very different company than those days, certainly. So I live in New York. I live in a story of, if you remember, in Queens.

Starting point is 01:08:43 And so at the size we're at, we've made it work, the virtual part. We certainly, the whole company comes together. twice a year. And so that helps a lot. And then different teams are able to get together like at least couple of times a year. So four to five touch points per team seems to be the way to go for us. Yeah. What about mentoring? Can you mentor young analysts remote or is that challenging? I'm curious. It is, but I think the, I mean, the honest answer is surviving as an independent media company profitably from everything else. Yes. And so for us to be able to have a company that has lower cost and is a globally distributed cost base, if you will, has outweighed

Starting point is 01:09:29 the cons of not being in an office. In other words, you can hire people in places where it's less expensive to live, dramatically less expensive than the U.S. or East Coast, particularly where the cost particularly in a city like New York is very high. So I think the balance of, we still are majority, I would say, people in U.S., they're definitely not New York anymore. But we have people, we have about 15 people in UK. We have about nine people in India, Philippines, Panama, etc. Got it.

Starting point is 01:10:03 Yeah. And those workforces are dramatically lower cost and they really want the work. So you probably stay. They're loyal. I mean, you have to give them marks for that. They are definitely more loyal. They'll stay at the company for four or five, six years where an American might be looking at it as a springboard,

Starting point is 01:10:24 especially as somebody who is, let's say comes from some level of privilege in America we all do. Like they probably care more about their career or work-life balance. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything wrong with that. I just think that having a mix of nationalities for a global industry like ours

Starting point is 01:10:43 and having a diversified cost base, I mean, we cover the globe. Skift is truly, truly global. Like if you look at the skip, homepage, you'll have five stories from five different countries and for all, I know, five different continents on it. So it's a very global output that we have to do. Everybody go subscribe to skift.com and you're a Raffet on Twitter, I think, right?

Starting point is 01:11:06 Yes. R-A-F-A-T. Anything else, Alex? Or should we let our- Well, just one, one quick thing. I didn't know you were an investor in Skift before we started this chat. That's fine. That's fine. Well, Ruff, one thing Jason's been talking about a lot is,

Starting point is 01:11:20 distribution dire straits, a lack of DPI from investments. All VCs want to see some exits. So I'm curious, when is Skift going public? When is Skift going public? Fair to say that Jason is not looking to his retirement based on his investment in script. Let me just put it that way. Well, get out of mode and get after it.

Starting point is 01:11:38 Come on now. Here's the thing. You know, sometimes when you make investments, you know, they're slow and steady, compounding 25% growth, 50% percent growth every year, you know, doubling every two to three years in terms of revenue base and you have that downside protection. Then other ones, people are shooting for the moon and they might want to do 10x year over year revenue, but they burn out, right? And some of those rockets wind up just blowing up before they even get off the launch pad.

Starting point is 01:12:03 So you want a mix of those in your portfolio and slow and steady has won the race for Skiff. I mean, it's an amazing brand and product. Brand product profitably. Profitably. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, and there's, I think with this media consolidation that has occurred, you see Penske bought every, like, that's breaking, humbling brand.

Starting point is 01:12:26 Vox bought a bunch of brands, shut down a bunch of brands. I mean, it is a chaotic period of time, but it does seem like skiff the information, certain substacks, just really subscription-based beta business. B2B publications have done wonderfully. And they always have, right? I mean. Yeah, I mean, B2B media has been there forever and grown. the only way it exists is profitably. There's not because there's not like tons of people clamoring to invest in that sector.

Starting point is 01:12:52 No, yeah, you got to make it work. Yeah, and these companies, some of them are large, like the hundreds and millions of dollars, if you look at some of the largest and billion dollar companies as well in these things. Awesome. We'll talk soon and I'll see you when I'm in New York. Everybody go to skift.com, check it out. And if you're in the industry, subscribe, obviously, and check it out. Great publication.

Starting point is 01:13:10 Okay. Nice talking to Ruffet and congratulations on the success. That's Gift. I guess there's one more story we should just hit real quick, yeah. Yeah, real quick, but I have a small detour, Jason. I've been holding this in for 10 minutes. So our chat about Uber and acquisitions got me thinking because we talk about Uber partnering with different companies and so forth.

Starting point is 01:13:29 I mean, Uber is worth like seven United Airlines. You and I both use Uber. You and I both use United Airlines. Come on, Dara, why not get yourself an airline? They're cheap. You can buy two. I mean, the problem with those airlines, I think, is they are just not profitable. I know that Airbnb had looked at doing an airline at one point.

Starting point is 01:13:48 And I think everybody has aspirations and they get frisky about airlines or even hotel chains, Virgin, obviously did airlines and a hotel chain and buses and everything. So yeah, people get a little frisky and think about it. I do wonder like if a commuter airline specifically would work. And maybe what you want to do is skate to where the puck is going. And obviously where the puck is going is VTOLs. So I would be more likely to see, you know, Uber have a big Vitol footprint and be buying a lot of Jobie's VTELs. Because I think those kind of folks just want to give the inventory over to operators.

Starting point is 01:14:29 Yeah. That would be interesting. If United or Delta American Airlines were buying VToles, but Uber said, you know, we'll get in the VTol game as well. Or they'll say, put your inventory into our system and get all the Uber one subscribers to. to use your product. All that's lovely and smart. I'm just saying Dara, it turns out JetBlue's $2.6 billion. So come on.

Starting point is 01:14:48 Now you can buy a dozen of them. They're cheap. I mean, Bonvoy Marriott. I wonder what. Marriott's like $70 billion, I think, Jason. I looked this up for you earlier. Yeah, 75. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:59 So that would be really hard. And the problem is, you know, when you're good at a marketplace and those dynamics, owning and operating things is very hard, right? That's a different skill set. And it's a much lower margin business. it's not a very resilient business. So once you have assets like hotels and something like COVID happens or got a terrorist attack or whatever, you know, those companies can go out of business and they

Starting point is 01:15:21 frequently do get recapped or government, you know, subsidies. It's just not an asset light, scalable business. You saw Airbnb and Uber and Lyft, DoorDash, they were all able to weather COVID quite gracefully, right? Except for ones that maybe, you know, Airbnb, when everything shut down, it wasn't graceful, but they were able to rebound. They just had to get rid of full-time employees at the mothership. They didn't have to have hotel rooms that were empty.

Starting point is 01:15:47 No, no, not at all. Now, I did promise one last quick story. Just before we jumped on, Anthropic has released some new stuff, Jason, that I think is really cool. And I want to show you a very short demo. So just to give everyone a quick level set, there's a new version of Clod 3.5 Sonnet. Claude is the model family from Anthropic. I'm sure we all know this.

Starting point is 01:16:05 But they have a new thing out called the computer use API. It's in beta, and it allows the model to take over your computer and do stuff. Your browser, take over the browser window. I think it could take over more than just that. Let's go ahead and play this demo, Jason, and let me know what you think of this. I think this is super cool. So this is a query that they've given to the service. Essentially, it is a plain text introduction, and then the service is going to pick it up and do stuff with it.

Starting point is 01:16:33 And I think this is great. Wow. Yeah, so they are giving it instructions. Hey, take a bunch of data. from this database and fill out this form. And then the large language model takes over the browser and does that behavior. And so this has been something people have been doing for a long time on the web with scripting, agents, for papers do this.

Starting point is 01:16:55 And so here you can be telling your browser, telling Claude, go find me all the flights using Google Flight, Expedia, and report back to me to pricing and do bits every day. or do it every hour and then tell me the price trend. By the way, that sounds like a crazy search. There are services that do that. They go straight to web for you, check the prices. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:17 And they make a graphery. They've been limited to people who are technical or in other countries where business process outsourcing is popular. Yeah. This is now letting your language model run your browser. What could go wrong? Well, we've had RPA robotic process automation for a long time. We currently have agents via companies like Sierra, Microsoft, Salesforce, but offering this up as an API for developers to use and play with more generally, more openly and also to allow, I'm hoping,

Starting point is 01:17:48 homebrew development with very modern AI models. That's so cool. I can't wait to see people dream up to use with this because I can imagine about 20 different use cases as you already come up with one yourself. So I'm optimistic. I think it's good to show that the AI models are improving and they can do more stuff, Jason. It's not all hype. It's going to release your AI to do anything that can be done in a browser window.

Starting point is 01:18:10 This could get a little bit crazy. You could have it, as an example, go and create 1,000 accounts on social media services and trick the catch-pa and then say, go make me a thousand versions of Alex and Jason on these social networks, then DM people that we're going to book you as a guest on the show, have conversations with those people who DM you back, and then ask them to. send you, you know, a thousand dollars as a booking fee to be on the podcast. And this sounds crazy, but there's somebody out there doing that for this week in startups and other podcasts. What's the guy, something Seneca, who did the habit book. Somebody contacted me like, oh, this person, Simon Sinek or whatever wants to have you on their podcast. And I was like, oh, I think I know him. And then I looked and I was like, wait a second. So I said, oh, just have him email me. He knows me. And they didn't get back to me. Simon Sinnick. And so somebody did this. And the hat was,

Starting point is 01:19:04 they thought they were getting booked on All In, and they were in fact getting, they gave their Instagram credentials over to the hacker who was going to, I guess, get these credentials so that they could stream it to this celebrity's following on Twitter, I'm sorry, on Instagram as well. They went in there and then they redirected their creator funds

Starting point is 01:19:25 to their bank account. And I think they changed their password in time or whatever, but my lord, you can think about the shenanigans this could do. Of course, they will have somebody monitoring this kind of a service. But be prepared, folks. But this dovetails with your least favorite thing, Jason, over-employed employees. Because people use mouse jigglers now to appear active. But now you can just have an API, do it for you and look even more realistic.

Starting point is 01:19:48 I mean, we could literally have it, yeah, be DMing other people or building spreadsheets. And you would think they're doing something at work. I mean, a small company, that's not going to work. But a big company, sure, of course it could work. Yeah, it's all between the cracks. But it's good to see Anthropic making news, pushing the boundaries a little bit. They've been quiet. Talked a lot about Open AI on the show.

Starting point is 01:20:07 Here's the other major American private market model company doing cool stuff. Awesome. And we will see you tomorrow on this week in startups. Bye bye. Okay. I host every six months or so a workshop called Angel University. And this is where I teach people how to become professional angel investors. And the next time I'm teaching the course is on November 6th.

Starting point is 01:20:31 And I teach it with my pal, Mike Savina, he's a partner here at launch, one of my best friends. And it's based on my book, but everything I've learned since then. Obviously, you know, I've invested in over 400 startups. And if you've met me for more than five minutes, you know that Uber, Robin Hood, Com are amongst the ones that I've hit that have gone supernova. In fact, Uber is considered the greatest investment over the last decade or two in Silicon Valley. Robin Hood, you know, doing fantastic as well. And Com, not yet public, but another great company. in this course, I teach you the fundamentals, my personal philosophy, and then I compare and contrast it

Starting point is 01:21:05 to what other people say. And the most important thing is how do you source and decide which companies to invest in? And then how to evaluate those companies? I have a criteria. I have 13 reasons to invest in a company and about 30 reasons to not invest in them. We call those pink or red flags. Pink flag, and it's something you can clean up. Maybe the cap table's a little messy. You know, red flag could be, you know, a patent lawsuit that you don't think they could ever get from under. And when we talk about those criteria for when you're picking a company, we'll also go into adding value as an investor in startup and then portfolio construction scenarios, like how many investments do you need to have a chance at hitting an outlier? If you haven't read the power law,

Starting point is 01:21:46 you don't know what the power law is, the Pareto principle, go ahead and look it up. We talk about securing pro rata, very important, getting investor updates, what information rights are, and just so much more. We had 1,200 individuals join us for this workshop last year. We did four of them, so 300 people at each. Many of these accredited investors have also joined my angel investing syndicate, which is the syndicate.com, and you get to see our deal flow. The workshop is open to all investors, whether you're retail or accredited, and all the proceeds of this go to charity. You can see a full list of the donations we've given at angel.com university slash charity. You can sign up at angel. dot university. So whether you're an accredited investor or non-accredited or you're just interested in learning,

Starting point is 01:22:27 visit angel dot university to learn more and register. Again, the next class is November 6th. I'm going to be moving to twice a year for this because my schedule is very busy. So if you don't get in on November 6th, you're going to have to wait six months, clear your schedule, unless it's something really important for your family. You can take a couple hours and learn about how I make decisions, and our team make decisions on which of these early startups to invest in. It's not like investing in the companies where you can see how many subscribers Netflix has or, you know, how many Uber rides were taken or how many DoorDash deliveries occurred last quarter versus a year ago. No, this is a whole different set of criteria when you're dealing with a company in years

Starting point is 01:23:05 one or two or even in year zero. So I hope you come. It's for a good cause. Again, angel. dot university slash charity to see where all the proceeds go. I'm very proud of the work we've done, Mike and I and the team over the last, I don't know, six or seven years of doing this. We've inspired people to find this new career.

Starting point is 01:23:22 People say it's changed their lives and they love being an angel investor. A lot of times it's young people who sold their company or it's young people who are professionals making a little bit of money. They're making 200 grand or 300 grand working at Google or something. And they just want to learn how to do this. And then all of a sudden it becomes a path to becoming a venture capitalist. Because think about that. If you have no venture capital experience and then you go apply to be a venture capitalist and

Starting point is 01:23:46 then I apply and I've made 15 angel investments and two of them have done. done well and the founders speak highly of me. Who's the venture capital is going to hire? The person who took the initiative to make 15 bets or the person who just wants to be given a chance, right? You're going to pick the person with more real world experience. And then, you know, a lot of people who are retired in post money, they're 50, 60, 70 years old and they're sitting there at home on a mountain of cash. And they want to do something fun. We know it's a lot of fun to hang out with people who want to change the world. They're called entrepreneurs. And they're lunatics in the best sense of the word. They have crazy dreams, crazy ideas.

Starting point is 01:24:20 And when you're an investor, an angel investor, you get to spend time with them. You don't have to drag yourself to an office. You don't have to put in 60 hours a week. You can put in five hours a week. You can put in 50 hours a week or anything in between being an angel investor. You make your own schedule. You meet the most interesting people in the world. Sometimes you hit a big winner.

Starting point is 01:24:37 Sometimes you'll lose. And that makes it just so exciting. And so I think it's like a better pursuit than going to Vegas and playing blackjack or betting on sports. I love the idea of betting on startups because you get all these non-financial rewards. that come with it, which is you get to see where the world's headed. You get to see and you get to hang out with inspiring people and see their plans to change the world. It's just an awesome, fun career and pursuit hobby. However you want to look at it, I hope you come, angel.com.

This Week in Startups - Election Security, Skift's Rafat Ali, and Anthropic Unleashes PC AI | E2030

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