Election Security, Skift's Rafat Ali, and Anthropic Unleashes PC AI | E2030

Summary

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

Date: October 23, 2024
Host: Jason Calacanis
Co-host: Alex Wilhelm
Guests: Hans von Spakovsky (Heritage Foundation), Rafat Ali (Skift)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into current themes shaping the startup and tech landscape, focusing on three core topics:

1. Election Security in the US, including insights from the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database
2. The changing travel industry and tech M&A, with Skift founder Rafat Ali
3. Cutting-edge AI advances, especially Anthropic’s new capabilities to control computers via AI

The show maintains a tone of critical inquiry, aiming to challenge guests on their assertions while seeking actionable insight for founders, operators, and curious listeners.

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Key Segment Summaries & Insights

1. Election Security & Fraud in the US

Setting the Context (00:00–03:36)

• The episode opens with concerns over past contested elections and a preview of the guests to come.
• Jason frames the discussion: technology’s role in election security and how real the threat of fraud actually is.

Hans von Spakovsky on Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database (04:10–11:19)

• Purpose of the Database: Heritage sought to fill a gap with a nonpartisan resource of “proven cases” of election fraud—i.e., only after conviction or official government finding.

  "It's only proven cases... convicted in a court of law, a judge orders a new election because of fraud, or there's an official finding by a government agency." (Hans, 04:24)

• Database Stats:

  • About 1,600 cases, spanning back to the early 1980s, all levels (local to federal).
  • Not comprehensive; most are local, many cases unreported or unprosecuted.

  "We're approaching 1,600 cases... keep in mind, this is not a comprehensive list." (Hans, 07:01)

• Interpreting the Numbers: The number is tiny compared to total votes—but Hans cautions that most fraud is never prosecuted or even referred.

  "I don't think we have massive fraud... but I do think we have enough of it that we should be concerned..." (Hans, 09:35)

Technology & Solutions for Election Integrity (12:48–17:42)

• Heritage also runs an Election Integrity Scorecard: 50 criteria for best practices per state (ID, up-to-date voter rolls, absentee ballot protocols, etc.)

• Top score among states was 82/100 initially, now up to ~90.

• Technology’s lag in state governments is significant, due to funding and competitive pay for IT talent.

  "State governments are often far behind... particularly private industry, when it comes to their technology." (Hans, 16:13)

• Hans supports requiring free voter ID for all and monthly (ideally real-time) syncing of state databases.

• Calls for states to link DMV and public assistance databases to voter rolls.

On 2020 and Adjudication of Election Challenges (17:53–22:30)

• Jason asks directly about “who won” and whether the adjudication process was sufficient.

  "What should have happened, unfortunately didn't, is most of the lawsuits... never got to the substantive hearing stage." (Hans, 19:07)

• Hans repeatedly asserts that the court process should have been more robust, with claims litigated on the merits, but indirectly concedes that Biden won.

  "Biden won. He was declared the winner... there's no point in arguing about it today." (Hans, 20:36)

• Jason presses for clarity, which Hans avoids (“the claims that were made were never resolved the way they should have been”), reflecting broader partisan dance around the issue.

Penalties and Prevalence of Election Fraud (27:32–30:06)

• Penalties for fraud depend on prosecution level—some severe (jail), some as light as a fine.
• Hans recounts cases from recent years, e.g., bribes for ballot box stuffing, and non-citizen voting with only light consequences.

Panel Reflection on Election Security (33:04–37:35)

• Jason and Alex reflect that, despite highly publicized fears and scattered individual cases, the scale of fraud capable of swinging a national election is vanishingly small.

  "The idea that we could actually swing it one way or the other... feels like the numbers don't matter to me of there being systematic election fraud..." (Jason, 33:04)

• Alex calls out Heritage for sometimes fearmongering with "in camera footage" of minority voters, expressing a need for better, less inflammatory public discussion.

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2. The Travel Industry, Uber-Expedia Rumors, and Skift’s Trajectory

Rafat Ali on Uber-Expedia (41:57–47:22)

• Travel booking sites face “infrequent usage” (2–4 times/year on average user), creating high customer acquisition costs.

• Uber’s 150M user base presents an upsell opportunity for travel bookings; Expedia is struggling and stock is languishing.

• Integration challenge: most travel bookings (especially in the West) are done on desktop, rides/orders on mobile, which complicates super app ambitions.

  "There's an overemphasis on assuming that Expedia and everything else in online travel is a huge brand that people have loyalties to. Most of their customers come through online acquisition channels—Google." (Rafat, 45:12)

• No real loyalty—travel shoppers price-comparison search across multiple platforms.

• Uber Travel initiatives in UK and India show higher rebooking rates for those who try multimodal bookings.

Loyalty Programs, Marketplaces, and Asset Light Models (48:58–56:31)

• Travel industry is “addicted” to loyalty programs—miles & points drive significant revenue and user stickiness for airlines and hotels.
• Uber 1 is gaining traction as a subscription model, but similar attempts in travel are still niche.
• VRBO (Expedia’s home rental arm) has untapped potential, especially post-pandemic, but now struggles in city markets.
• Mentor relationship between Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber CEO) and Barry Diller (Expedia chair) may grease the wheels for a deal.

AI, Industry Integration, and Future of Traveltech (57:00–62:40)

• AI could transform travel’s “tyranny of the search box,” enabling better user experiences and backend links between airlines, hotels, and transport.

• Skift’s own AI “Ask Skift” engine (SEC filings, B2B data) gets 1K–2K queries/day; not a hockey stick but steady.

• Licensing and indexing of Skift’s content by major AI companies is an ongoing issue—most powerful publications are seeing their content scraped and trained.

  “You have an unbiased source that’s high quality—man, that’s super valuable.” (Jason, 60:26)

Remote Work, Global Teams, and the Media Business (68:16–70:56)

• Skift has evolved to a 100-person fully remote, global workforce. The cost base is now much lower—and team loyalty is higher, especially outside the US.
• Niche B2B subscriptions (esp. with “high quality human content”) and corporate sales are the growth model for sustainable media businesses.

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3. NEW AI CAPABILITIES: Anthropic & Beyond

Anthropic’s “Computer Use API” Demo (75:47–78:06)

• Anthropic released a feature to allow Claude (its AI model) to take over browser windows (and potentially full computers) to automate tasks.

• This enables agents to: scrape data, fill forms, book items, interact with services, etc., with natural language commands, which broadens the scope and ease of automation far beyond traditional RPA (Robotic Process Automation).

• Jason and Alex discuss both the power and the risks (e.g., automating scams, fake accounts).

  “This is now letting your language model run your browser. What could go wrong?” (Jason, 77:26)

• Potential for misuse is high, but so is the upside if properly harnessed.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

Election Security

• Hans on structural weaknesses:

  “Most of the cases... were dismissed on procedural grounds... 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.” (Hans, 00:16)

• Alex, challenging on process and public service pay:

  “When I heard that we were going to bring you on the show, I did not think that the guest from the Heritage foundation was going to be advocating for increased public servant salaries.” (Alex, 17:42)

• Hans conceding on the 2020 outcome:

  "Biden won. He was declared the winner... there's no point in arguing about it today." (Hans, 20:36)

• Jason, reflecting:

  “Even though a person did not want to concede, the democratic institution... allowed the transfer of power, even with January 6.” (Jason, 34:39)

Industry & Travel

• Rafat on Expedia and Uber:

  "There's just not loyalty in online travel... [customers] look at tens of sites before they actually book." (Rafat, 46:08)

• On AI integrating the travel industry:

  "The tyranny of the search box... is essentially the same in 2024 as it was in 1999. That just seems mind-blowing." (Rafat, 57:00)

• Remote, global work:

  “Having a mix of nationalities for a global industry like ours and having a diversified cost base... has outweighed the cons of not being in an office.” (Rafat, 69:10)

AI

• Alex, on Anthropic’s potential:

  "Offering this up as an API... to allow, I'm hoping, homebrew development with very modern AI models. That's so cool. I can't wait to see people dream up..." (Alex, 77:32)

• Jason, on risks:

  “You could have it... create a thousand accounts... DM people... and then ask them to send you, you know, a thousand dollars as booking fee to be on the podcast... you can think about the shenanigans this could do.” (Jason, 78:06)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Election Security & Heritage Foundation:

  • 04:10–11:19: Building and maintaining the election fraud database
  • 12:48–17:42: Tech solutions and “integrity scorecard”
  • 17:53–22:30: 2020 election process and direct “who won” questions
  • 27:32–30:06: Penalties for fraud and case examples

• Travel Industry Deep Dive:

  • 41:57–47:22: Uber-Expedia pros, cons, and tech hurdles
  • 57:00–62:40: The role of AI and seamless travel
  • 68:16–70:56: Remote work and the business model for media

• AI & Automation News:

  • 75:47–78:06: Anthropic’s “Computer Use API” demo and implications

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Conclusion/Takeaways

• US elections are far more secure than public discourse suggests, with proven fraud cases nearly statistically insignificant at the national level—but the system is still patchwork, with room for procedural and technical improvement.
• The future of travel and marketplaces likely lies with the integration of user data, loyalty, and AI—in which Uber, if it makes a bold acquisition or tech partnership, could dramatically shift the market.
• Anthropic’s API opening up browser and PC control to LLMs is a huge leap functionally—and a potential Pandora’s box if safety controls aren’t prioritized.
• Media businesses that are niche, B2B, and built on direct relationships (subscriptions, quality data, active LinkedIn presence) are thriving amid chaos in consumer tech/media.
• Critical, non-tribal conversations are still possible, and even necessary, with partisan guests—especially when hosts refuse to let the evasive “party-line” go unchallenged.

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Hosts’ Closing Reflections:
Jason and Alex emphasize that both technology and society require constant vigilance, data-driven analysis, and open conversations—even (and especially) with those outside one’s own bubble. The episode closes with a look ahead at more coverage of AI and startup trends.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

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, Hans, in 2020? And did we have a fair election? In fact, you know, did Biden win?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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, 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. 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. If that had happened, we wouldn't be talking about this today.

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[Jason Calacanis]

All right, everybody. Welcome to this week in startups. I'm your host Jason Calcanis. With me, my co host, Alex Wilhelm. How are you, Alex?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm tremendous, actually. I love a busy recording week. We're doing three shows together and this is going to be a cracker.

[Jason Calacanis]

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. Huh? So today 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.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Yep.

[Jason Calacanis]

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. And so that's got people a little, I think, rightfully nervous about what's going to happen this election cycle.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yep. So we have our first guest today is going to be Hans von Spakovsky 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 and A deals. Then we're going to talk about Anthropic's 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, but I'm not promising that because we tend to yap. And so, you know, let's bring Hans.

[Jason Calacanis]

On here and let's just talk about what the Heritage foundation is doing in this regard. Hans, how are you?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

I'm doing just great, guys. Thanks for having me on.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 is in terms of election fraud that you have been running and how long you've been running it and compiling this database.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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 of 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. 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 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 1,000 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 US 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 old and outdated. It's gone 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay. And there's nothing partisan about this database, as you said?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

No, not at all. No, it lists. If somebody is convicted of fraud, they're in there. And if you look through the database, what you'll find is it's bipartisan. Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

So what are. How many cases are in the database currently and over what period of time? And, of course, this is US Elections.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Both local and federal, correct?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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 1600 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 DA's 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 on an election board in Virginia, and there are many other cases just like that.

[Jason Calacanis]

So 1600 cases, I think it's over started. The first case is in the early 80s, am I correct, Walpar?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

So if we look over 40 years, there are 1600 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, like if we were to say, hey, you found 1600 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 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, would 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 interpretation that, hey, this is 1 in 100 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.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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. And while if you look through our database, you'll find many instances of just some lone individual taking advantage of the system, on the other hand, you have cases where it overturned the election. The 9th 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 14, 1,500 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 1400 illegal votes, particularly for example, the thousand people who illegally registered by claiming a residence there, there's no indication that those would 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 2600. And there's no indication that in fact anything's going to be done other than the election being overturned.

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Alex Wilhelm]

So, Hans, I'm curious about solutions to this because the database is 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, that seemed to be a recurring issue that people kept running into. But we're a technology show and we think a lot about 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?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Yeah. 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, 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, from how to make sure you have an accurate up to date voter roll to how you handle your absentee ballots, to do you have requirements in place like an ID to vote? And then we analyze every single state according to those 50 criteria and a perfect score was 100. No state in the country scored 100. The highest at the 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 Integrity 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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. What are the best practices?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Yeah, it's things like requiring an ID to vote. But part of that is, 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 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.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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, feels like we need a whole lot more technology to get this thing going faster.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Yeah. Oh, look, 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. For 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, et cetera.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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 just an apathy issue? What's holding states from improving the technological underpinnings of our elections?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Hans, when I heard that we were going to bring you on the show, 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, for surprising me this morning.

[Jason Calacanis]

So when we look, I guess at this election and we look at the past one, this is where 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, Hans, in 2020? And did we have a fair election? In fact, you know, did Biden win? I guess is the question I'm asking you.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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, 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 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Yeah. I mean, look, he was certified as the president, Biden was. There's no point in arguing about it today. Well, we ought to be doing.

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Well, what I'm saying is, look, Biden won. He was declared the winner. The claims that were made were never resolved the way they should have been. So at this point, they're not going to be resolved. There's no to me, there's no point.

[Jason Calacanis]

Got it.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

And keep going backwards.

[Jason Calacanis]

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, the person who kind of came out on Trump's behalf and attempted to sort of run this election?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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 makes the point that supports the point I just made, which is when things like this happen, people should reserve judgment, let the court process work itself out. That's certainly what happened in Florida in 2000. And once that was over with, we had the president declare who was declared the winner. We had it in 2020, we had it in 2000, and it's over with. And what you should do with a situation like that is learn from the mistakes that were made and say, you know, any vulnerabilities we see in the system, let's fix them.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

So that, so that will problem won't occur again.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 1 billion member mark. Think about that. 1 billion members and 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit the other leading job sites. This is a phenomenal statistic. They don't even go to the other job sites. Why? Because they might not be looking and those are the best hires, but they're hanging out on LinkedIn, doing professional development, checking in on their network, building their network, sharing content, finding leads, all that great stuff. Bottom line, there's amazing hires waiting for your company on LinkedIn and nowhere else. And they have a special deal right now. Post a job for free. What? F R E E what a great price. LinkedIn.com/TWIST that's right. LinkedIn.comTWIST to post your job for free. Terms and conditions course apply. 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 Sidney 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, to come out here as a sort of right leaning and say, hey, these elections are need to be examined more closely. Yeah.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Well, what makes the job difficult is when people come out with unsubstantiated claims.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

That's why, to go back to what we started talking about, that's why our database only has proven substantiated cases.

[Jason Calacanis]

How many proven cases were there of federal election fraud in 2020 in the database you guys put together?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Well, we cover both federal and state.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, the federal, I guess the, the, the, the presidential election.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Yeah, the top of my head, I don't know how many there were from 2020, but can I give you another over 10.

[Jason Calacanis]

Under 10, over 100. Under 100.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

I don't know. Look, there's almost six.

[Jason Calacanis]

You don't know. We put together the, the data.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Almost 1600 cases in there. I don't, off the top of my head, I can't tell you how many numbers there were from each.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was just thinking the big one that's disputed is the one I was trying to figure out and figure it out 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'd be good to know in 2020 how much presidential election fraud there was. But obviously we don't have that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Hans, I want to take this to a different Slightly different angle here. I am a big fan of democracy, so I care a lot about this. Very personally, 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.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Well, you talk about within the United States or outside of the United States?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Outside 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 viewers that we could learn from?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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. They call it postal voting with very few exceptions because they know how risky and how vulnerable it is to not only fraud, 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're needed for people who are too physically disabled, for example, to vote. But this push in this country for all mail 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 learn from the eu.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, I appreciate that, but as an Oregon child where we have all male voting, I'm slightly biased on that one, but. Jason, back to you.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 5, if they were to steal a ballot and then, you know, steal somebody's ballot and submit it, what would the potential penalty be?

[Hans von Spakovsky]

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. 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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. The cost of that in the database has been severe. Some people have gone to jail for many years.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Yeah, some go to jail, but others don't. I'll give you an example of this. About two years ago, a former Democratic congressman in Pennsylvania, Mike Ozzie Myers, you may remember him. He. 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 had closed on behalf of his clients. And he went to jail for this. On the other hand, just a couple of years ago, a US Attorney in North Carolina prosecuted about two dozen aliens for illegally registering and voting in elections 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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. We only have 14 states left, so we're 70% of the way there. And you've been able to compile these 1600. 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. 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.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Well, thank you very much.

[Jason Calacanis]

I appreciate the time. I talk about prediction markets all the time on my podcast and prediction markets are brilliant because they allow people to buy and sell contracts on future events with prices set by market opinion. So if you're interested in this, we've got some amazing news. Kalshi, the world's largest prediction market just made it legal to trade on the upcoming U.S. elections. That's right. For the first time in 100 years, U.S. citizens can now legally place trades on election outcomes. Political polls can certainly be inaccurate. We've learned that. But the markets tell you where the Sharps are putting their money. Sharps are the smart people and election outcomes matter. They impact your taxes, the economy, and of course, the world of investing. Traditionally, only large corporations and the wealthy could hedge their bets against election uncertainties. But now Kalshi allows anyone to protect themselves if their preferred candidate loses. So go check out the real time election odds and if you feel confident about who's going to win, why not play some trade? I'm going to do it. So here's your call to action. I want you to check out Kalshi, that's kalshee.com/twist K A L S H I kashi.com Twist and get in on the action. You will get an additional $20 with your first deposit of 100. That's kalsheet.com twist I think this is an example, Alex, here, of, you know, we can have a logical discussion even with somebody who's partizan. 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 got a perspective, wouldn't say specifically, you know, that Biden lost or whatever, 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.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 or, you know, a bunch of immigrants could be paid 100 bucks each to vote for Biden. It feels like the numbers don't matter 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 like learn and get the data and then examine the data from first.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Principles, I have a lot of thoughts. So first of all, it's always very enjoyable to watch you. Jason eyes someone who doesn't know you that well.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't know what that means, but.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, well, you, you, you, 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. And so it's a little uncomfortable, but.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, no, no, you, I mean, I've done it, I've done it to both sides, you know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, no, no, no, no. You're equal opportunity. 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. 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 that's very encouraging to me. It's not like we have a system that's on fire in the ditch, broke into all pieces. We can improve it, but generally speaking seems to go okay. And hell yeah, that makes me happy.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And you know, we've had close elections many times. Al Gore conceded eventually. I don't, Trump has never conceded. But we, we still the democracy and, and the democr, the, 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 6th. So, you know, you, you can have these big debates about. Was January 6th a 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. Sidney Powell was obviously a liar and a conspiracy theorist. She got, I don't know if she got disbarred, but she was found guilty, obviously or she pled guilty. Yeah. 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, caused 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, the swing states, they're under a lot of scrutiny. So I don't think it's. It's all that easy to commit fraud. And if you do, you're going to go to jail for a long time. I think in the national election you're throwing in.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I know we have, we have Rafat Ali waiting in the waiting sub. 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I did see that story.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, 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, election time, because this matters a lot to me.

[Jason Calacanis]

Matters. Democracy matters. All right, there we have it, folks. It's a simple list of things. Idaho. 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.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No. 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 roll 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not a big ask. 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 is got a big valuation and they have a frisky CEO with us to talk about it is my friend Rafat Ali. How are you, sir? 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.

[Rafat Ali]

No, I'm not. We have a very good editor.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, got it. You gave that to Full Disclosure. I'm a, I'm a minor investor in Rafit's company and we worked together on Silicon Alley Reporter back in the day. You got to hear our discussion. I think you were in the waiting room about election integrity. What did you think?

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah. Do you really want me to go there?

[Jason Calacanis]

You're allowed to have an opinion? Yeah, sure.

[Rafat Ali]

I don't think Heritage will be coming.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

On your show anytime soon.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's what I was getting at. I said, Jason, I think he can.

[Jason Calacanis]

Handle a tough question or two. I think people like tough questions. You know, I think you're obviously very.

[Rafat Ali]

Good at what you do. So I mean, as.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Even though you don't consider yourself a journalist these days, I still consider you one.

[Rafat Ali]

And what you do with obviously the all in podcast as well as this.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I want to add, I want to add a point there. When Jason wanted to bring the Heritage on, my first thought was, oh, shit. 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, here's the thing. Partisan people. This 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, 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. Sachs 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, and in when I asked Trump about the border and immigration or about abortion, I asked JD 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. 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.

[Rafat Ali]

I think one of the things that.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

I'll give credit to you, Jason, with the all in podcast, my journey of giving the other side a patient listen.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Rafat Ali]

Is a thing that I learned honestly.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Really starting to listen to all the podcasts. I mean, I was very difficult one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Rafat Ali]

Covid. I was on my peloton listening to my laptop was on the floor listening.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

To you on the first one. And initially my first reaction was do.

[Rafat Ali]

I really want to listen to David.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Axe and to me just patience and then seeing his gender level headedness beyond just politics. Well, I have to listen to this. And then. So your journey and not journey. I feel like it's a lot of journey that a lot of us have.

[Rafat Ali]

Gone through over the last four years, having an independent mind, questioning a lot of stuff.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And you have to. And you and I come from a media, but all three of us come from a media background. And you know, we, we see bias in media. We see, you know, 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 like the new York Times of Travel or the Wall Street Journal of Travel. Like, it's a really great site if you're, you know, 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?

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah. I listened to what all of you.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Discussed on the own podcast I thought that was a very good rundown that, that all of you did. And the pros and cons on, on the deal.

[Rafat Ali]

I think the, the biggest pro is.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

That the frequency of usage and in travel in general is low. Like how many times would people usually travel? 2, 3, 4 times a year maximum. This is, I'm talking leisure travel. 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, it's one level removed from the actual brands that you may have loyalty to in the travel industry. Marriott or Delta, whatever your 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 skip tile. 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. 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 in other parts of the world. From an Uber perspective, Dar has been quite clear. You spoke at the conference that Dar spoke last year at our conference that I interviewed both on stage separately, that he likes the idea of a super app, obviously knows travel very, very well, is 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.

[Rafat Ali]

In the last couple of years, particularly.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

On this tech integration in the back end, which has been able to do under the previous CEO and, 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.

[Rafat Ali]

Ticket items, I think, you know, those.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Are simplest way to put the pros and cons for this.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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. I'm just curious, am I incredibly out of date and old fashioned?

[Rafat Ali]

No, you're not. No, no, no. I mean a lot of the transaction.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Particularly in the western world, still happens on desktop. If even if the research starts on.

[Rafat Ali]

Either, it does jump back and forth in some of the for instance Asian.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Countries or Latin America, et cetera, mobile happens to be a much bigger part.

[Rafat Ali]

But at least in the western world that we live in it's a very.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Mobile isn't as predominant as you would assume it to be in for instance versus our media consumption habits.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, yeah. But like when 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 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 niching down on my own personal concerns?

[Rafat Ali]

Well, I think the product part and.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Again you guys discussed this in the, in the other podcast product integration will be the, the biggest challenge there is.

[Rafat Ali]

The only thing I'll say in Ubers.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Throw 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. Most of their 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 share the company. It will take a while.

[Rafat Ali]

But the reality is like there's no.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Loyalty in online travel. There's just not loyalty.

[Jason Calacanis]

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. Sometimes you get an ad, they look.

[Rafat Ali]

At multiple sites like I think you are not behavior.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

I think this is generally known, we've done research on it that people look at tens of sites.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Rafat Ali]

Before they actually book. Particularly if it's a once a year.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Big trip that you're looking at.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right. It's a considered purchase. If you're doing a big trip and you're spending five 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 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, it does seem like they've done some experiments there. How are the experiments done for them?

[Rafat Ali]

Well, so I asked our this last year and they, I mean it's not big.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

So it's in UK where there's a company called Hopper that is also there to startup that is in the online booking space. So they've tied up with them and offering hotels and then whale, etc. 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, Dara did mention that the rebooking rate for.

[Rafat Ali]

People who do convert time is actually quite high.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

If I'm remembering it right, something like 60% of people once their book runs then come back again.

[Jason Calacanis]

Interesting. So they trust it, right? They learn to trust it the way they've learned to trust rides and food. It's the same thing with UberEats. You're like, is my food gonna 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.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh God, Yeah, that's true. UberEats is so expensive though. Jason, I really gotta stop. It's too easy too. It's too fast.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 one 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 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, 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.

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah, so. So loyalty obviously is a big part of the travel industry. Airlines and hotels, airlines particularly are, have very large programs. There's a. People say that essentially airlines at this point are sort of loyal to programs. Slash credit cards and then airline is the loss making part. That part is true because they're, they're able to pre sell the miles to some bank or credit card company and then they get advance. 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, you, you're, you are a Bonvoy user. Bonvoy is the biggest program in the, in the hotel industry as well. There have been experiments with subscriptions the way Uber 1 does but it hasn't been and those are small scale subscriptions. Some airlines, Alaska Air and a few others launching these, some, 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 built around working as well as staying. Historically they haven't turned a profit in 27 or 28 or 30 years of, of their existence. Not a, not a single quarter of.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What does this do for them?

[Jason Calacanis]

What is Amadeus? I saw that this firm was denying rumors or 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.

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah, Amadeus is a, is so these are called GDS is the global distribution system. Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport. Three of the companies in that sort of Amadeus is the biggest one. Sabre number two travel port number three in terms of global are the green screens that you may have seen that travel agents or if you go to the airport if you are, 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 instead of using a third party system there's Been talk forever and enough progress that competitors are emerging or AI will definitely have a big role to play in there. The rumor that I actually just heard right before this podcast was was that Uber approach Ametus. That seems unlikely because that's pure sort of B2B tech company. If it approached it. The only thing that I can think of is not to acquire but to then build their own.

[Jason Calacanis]

Ah, expedia. Expedia competitor. Hotels.com competitor. Because they would use that feed. Correct. To present the information inside of their app. So there's multiple ways if Dara wants to include travel and keep building out the super.

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah, you 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, 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 Darius to sit on the board of. I maybe I forget what exactly the history is. Or Uber used to be an invest. I don't fully remember the history.

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Rafat Ali]

And it really is a super app in that part of the world. So. So there's some rumor that they may look at it. They went public with the spac and our friend Brad Gerstner took it public with the, with the SPAC.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't, I, I trading at $4 today.

[Rafat Ali]

It hasn't done very well.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I was about to say it's.

[Jason Calacanis]

Currently worth but still a market cap of 16 billion, if that's correct. Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But according to Crunchbase data, it raised 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Haven't checked it in a while, but yeah.

[Rafat Ali]

The general sense is that Dara is focused on a few markets to do well. You, 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Rafat Ali]

Two iconic companies that came out of that era.

[Jason Calacanis]

Of that era. And so vrbo I used before I used Airbnb vacation rental by 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 with their credit cards in there already trusting an Uber Airbnb competitor. Sounds incredibly compelling to me.

[Rafat Ali]

The conventional wisdom that Airbnb as the.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Predominant brand is settled science, I don't think is correct.

[Rafat Ali]

I think there's an opening here 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 gonna say pre web maybe. But HomeAway you may have remember. Some of you may remember HomeAway used. So HomeAway bought vrbo and then HomeAway got bought by Expedia pre Covid. I forget exactly the year. And then so they renamed everything Verbo. Vrbo as in verbo. 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 202122 did gangbusters business.

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

You don't have to worry about that. So it's kind of hard to remember that craziness. But that, that that was what it was.

[Rafat Ali]

It has come down hard because. Because vrbo as people came back to the cities. Vrbo 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. Verpo has. Has struggled. So there's an opportunity potentially I don't think. Well, Barry Diller controls Expedia. So you can never count out any deal with him, meaning he's the 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was a mentor right it was his mentor. Yeah, he gave him the shot at Expedia. And so there is, you know, if Barry, 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?

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah, I think that's gonna, I mean I've said this for many years, since maybe 2015. The tyranny of the search box, as in the travel search box box that was there in 1990. Pick, pick a year. 99 is, is essentially the same travel search box that it is today, which just seems mind blowing based on crazy changes that have happened. And so I think a lot of backend 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, has no idea what hotel you're staying at, has no idea what you're going to do right. In 2024 and how's that possible? And so, 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? So this seamlessness of travel which somebody like Uber could potentially do, the examples of this in for instance China, Meituan and a few others that are trying to create super app around travel are.

[Alex Wilhelm]

There because we brought up AI Rafat. I want to ask about the Ask Skift 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?

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah. So keep in mind this is a B2B service. So not a consumer in the sense that it's not a. We were 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 4. 0. We relaunched it a month ago from a chatbot sort of paradigm to an answer engine paradigm. So it's trained on all, 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, 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 OpenAI with or without your permission. And have you been able to prove that they've done that? And are they coming to you saying, hey, you know, we want to make this right if we're going to use your data and pay you?

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah. The one I take it as a compliment the fact that like Google Washington, 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. Like for a tiny small company like ours to be the 500 most useful site that they found on the web seems like a compliment.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, you hire a hundred percent you, it's 100% human, created with high quality editorial, with people getting paid real salaries. And so when you think about the information that's available on the web, Whether it's Twitter, Reddit, 4chan message boards, like it's very variable. Right. Even the reviews on Amazon are bought and sold to the extent that people even create Chrome toolbars to try to identify the fake stuff on the web. Right. So if you have an unbiased source that's high quality, man, that's, that's super valuable.

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah, yeah. We, we have blocked GPT 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 Ask Gift. We don't send the data back. This is just the API call. So they actually that's an option that you don't use your own chatbot. They create on top of GPT to.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Not train the overall ChatGPT thing.

[Rafat Ali]

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, like at all times it's how do I make this better for the, for the people that are reading us, they're paying us money. 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 to, for, 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, who are enterprise subscribers of Skift. They're paying, you know, anywhere from 25 to a hundred thousand dollars a year to have access to daily news and research 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 get about a couple of thousand queries a day.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I mean, for a B2B product with a very specific use case, that doesn't sound bad. So put it into growth terms for us. What was that six months ago compared to today?

[Rafat Ali]

Well, so I think we're sort of fair to say it's not been like hockey stick growth there. But it was, there was initial bump in early days because it was novelty and it sort of petered off and stayed around that number between thousand and two thousand a day type range.

[Alex Wilhelm]

One more question about AI costs because I was going back through your corporate post and when you guys talked about the initial launch of it, you were using GPT 3.5, I think, because you said at the time that using four was just prohibitively expensive. How has the cost curve of AI models impacted how you guys build AI drive products?

[Rafat Ali]

So again, small usage in terms in the overall scheme of things. And OpenAI has also dropped the cost quite a bit since then. So we're in 4.0 now. It doesn't. It's not significant for us. We're comfortable with the cost where they are.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's awesome. I mean, I'm curious to see how fast o1 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. I love it.

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah, O1 is a lot better. I mean I'm sure you guys have used it too. O1 preview just is so much better reasoning.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 Eye Reporter back in the day. The 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 in hour 20 maybe as an analyst in the 90s. Right. And obviously you got to check the data and the facts. It's going to hallucinate and get things wrong. But man, it is so great at giving you quick overviews and making you smarter. I am just amazed at the jump 01 has made.

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah. And you know, I use it a lot in my day to day duties as a CEO. Whether it's coming up with ideas for memos that I need to write for the team or, or you know, I have to make a list, it's gonna like a lot. And more and more my usage is I talk and do it versus typing and I'm sure you've seen that as well.

[Jason Calacanis]

I in my car when 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 brush up on it. Start with the easiest possible questions. Who's the first president? United States? When did the revolution happen? Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? And like I'm like, wow, I don't remember this stuff. It was 40 years ago when I was 10 years old in high school or 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 you're a B2B publication, so great. But I also hear licensing data for models could become a viable business model. And a third Apple News. And the revenue sharing from Apple News seems to have been significant for certain people making seven, eight figures. So yeah, that sounds a little bit dangerous because people subscribe and you have to give them your entire corpus. Is that right? Are you on Apple News and how does it work?

[Rafat Ali]

So we, 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, 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 it's email or, or even honestly LinkedIn, which is huge for us. As a really explain. Yeah, I mean just in terms of. Everybody in our industry is on LinkedIn and this is, this is true for a lot of industries. So Skift has I'm gonna 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. So it's quite large, substantial. And so many times when I meet people at our, at our own conferences say, well, we're huge fans of skate. We read you. I said where do you read us on LinkedIn? I said, oh great, can you please click through and come to the site?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Please hit the blue link. Come on people.

[Rafat Ali]

But, 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, LinkedIn is where the action is for companies like ours versus Apple News or certainly, you know, Facebook, et cetera.

[Jason Calacanis]

And people started to get their news on TikTok. I saw you guys doing some shorts, some vertical videos.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

What do you think there?

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah, I am out of the demo, I'm out of the TikTok demo. So probably the wrong person. But, but I actually did not even go on Instagram. So just Twitter was enough for me as a, as a journalist back in the days. But in B2B I think it's less but, but certainly we have to be where people are. And if TikTok is it, we'll figure out ways. Some of our, 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

And back to office. You have people back in that amazing office or are you still remote?

[Rafat Ali]

We're fully remote. We are 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 Astoria, if you remember, in Queens. 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 a couple of times a year. So four to five touch points per team seems to be the way to go for us.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. What about mentoring? Can you mentor young analysts? Remote or is that challenging? I'm curious.

[Rafat Ali]

It is, but I think the honest answer is surviving as an independent media company profitably trumped everything else.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Rafat Ali]

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 the cons of not being in an office.

[Jason Calacanis]

And in other words, you can hire people in places where it's less expensive to live, dramatically less expensive than the.

[Rafat Ali]

Us, than US 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 the us, they're definitely not New York anymore, but we have people. We have about 15 people in UK, we have about nine people in, in India, Philippines, Panama, etc.

[Jason Calacanis]

Got it. Yeah. And those workforces are dramatically lower cost and they really want the work. So you probably loyal.

[Rafat Ali]

I mean, you have. You have to give them marks for that. Like, they, they are definitely more loyal.

[Jason Calacanis]

They'll stay at the company for four or five, six years where an American might be looking at it as a springboard, especially somebody who is, you know, 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.

[Rafat Ali]

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 and having a diversified cost base, I mean, we cover the globe. Skift is truly, truly global. Like, if you look at the Skift homepage, you'll have five stories from five different countries and for all I know, five different continents on it.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Amazing.

[Rafat Ali]

So it's a very global output that we have.

[Jason Calacanis]

Everybody go subscribe to skift.com and you're a rafit on Twitter, I think, right?

[Rafat Ali]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

R A F A T. Anything else, Alex, or should we let.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Just one. One quick thing. I didn't know you were an investor in Skift before we started this chat. And so. Yeah, that's fine. Well, Rafi, one thing Jason's Been talking about a lot is 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?

[Rafat Ali]

When is going public? Fair to say that Jason is not looking to his retirement based on his investment in Skift. Let me just put it that way.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, get outer mode and get after it. Come on.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now, here's the thing. You know, sometimes when you make investments, you know, they're slow and steady, compounding 25% growth, 50 growth every year, you know, doubling every two to three years in terms of revenue base. And you have that downside protection and 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. So you want a mix of those in your portfolio. And Slow and steady has won the race for Skiff and Amazing. Brand and product.

[Rafat Ali]

Brand. Product. Profitably.

[Jason Calacanis]

So profitably amazing. Yeah. I mean, and there's, I think with this media consolidation that has occurred. You see, Penske bought every like background humbling brand. 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. B2Business B2B publications have done wonderfully and they always have, right? I mean, Yeah.

[Rafat Ali]

I mean, B2B media has been there forever and grown.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

The only way it exists is profitable. There's not. Because there's not like tons of people clamoring to invest in that sector.

[Jason Calacanis]

No. Yeah, you got to make it work.

[Rafat Ali]

Yeah.

[Interjecting Voice / Possibly Producer or Co-host]

And these companies, some of them are large, like the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you look at some of the largest and billion dollar companies as well in this space.

[Jason Calacanis]

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. Okay, nice talking to you, Rafa. And congratulations on the success that Skift. I guess there's one more story we should just hit real quick.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, yeah, real quick. But I, I have, 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. 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 and I think everybody has aspirations and they get like frisky about airlines or even hotel chains. Virginia 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 Vetols. So I would be more likely to see, you know, Uber have a big VTOL footprint and be buying a lot of Joby's vetoes because I think those kind of folks just want to give the inventory over to operators. Yeah, that would be interesting if United or Delta, American Airlines were buying vetols. But Uber said, you know, we'll do, 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 use your product.

[Alex Wilhelm]

All that's lovely and smart. I'm just saying, Dara, turns out Jeff loser only worth 2.6 billion. So come on now you can buy a dozen of them. They're cheap.

[Jason Calacanis]

Cheap. I mean, Bonvoy, Marriott, I Wonder what.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Marriott's like 70 billion, I think. Jason, I looked this up for you earlier. Yeah, 75.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. 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 God forbid, a terrorist attack or whatever, you know, those companies can go out of business and they frequently do get recapped or government, you know, subsidies. It's just not an asset, light, scalable business. You saw Airbnb and Uber were 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. To have hotel rooms that were empty.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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. I want to show you a very short demo. So just to give everyone a quick level set, there's a new version of clone 3.5. Sonnet Claude is the model family from Anthropic. I'm sure we all know this, but they have a new thing out called the Computer Use API. It's in beta and it allows the model to take. Take over your computer and do stuff your browser.

[Jason Calacanis]

Take over the browser window.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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, because 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. And I think this is great.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow. Yeah. So they're 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, scrapers do this. And so, you know, here you can see telling your browser, go find me all the flights using Google Flights, Expedia, and report back to me the pricing and do this 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 the web for you check the prices. Yeah. And they make a graphic. They've. They've been limited to people who are technical or in other countries where business process outsourcing is popular.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is now letting your language model run your browser. What could go wrong?

[Alex Wilhelm]

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, 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 hyper.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is going to release your AI to do anything that can be done in a browser window. This could get a Little bit crazy. You could have it as an example. Go and create a thousand accounts on social media services and trick the catchpa 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 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 Sinek 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. And so somebody did this. And the hack was 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 to their bank account and I think they changed their password in time or whatever. But. 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 yeah, be prepared, folks, this.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Fall 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 OpenAI on the show. Here's the other major American private market model company doing cool stuff.

[Jason Calacanis]

Awesome. And we will see you tomorrow on this Week in Startups. Bye.

[Hans von Spakovsky]

Bye.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 and I teach it with my pal Mike Savino. 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, Robinhood. Com are amongst the ones that I've hit that have gone super nova. In fact, Uber is considered the, the, the greatest investment over the last decade or two in Silicon Valley. Robinhood, you know, doing fantastic as well, and calm, 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 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 flags, 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 out 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, 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 1200 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 University. Charity, you can sign up at Angel University. So whether you're an accredited investor or non accredited or you're just interested in learning, visit Angel 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. And it's not like investing in public 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 one or two or even in year zero. So I hope you come. It's for a good cause again, angel 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, years of doing this. We've inspired people to find this new career. 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 then I apply and I've made 15 angel investments and two of them have done well. And the founders speak highly of me. Who's the venture capitalist 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 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. 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. And when you're an investor, an angel investor, you get to spend time with them, but 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 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, sometimes you lose. And that makes it just so exciting. And so I think it's 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 University.