Sora app review, Perplexity’s Comet is FREE, and which AI tools reign supreme? | E2188

24:51Who are you? What are you doing? Why should I care? Very basic question. So I applaud this person for putting themselves out there. Just as a closer, they didn't actually end up buying coffee for anybody, Jason, because no one took them up on that. So they ended up getting all that input, advice, and networking for free. So big win for them. Amazing. I mean, the other thing you could do is you could say, I'm looking for a developer and a co-founder. Like I have so many people who are like, I can't find a co-founder. I'm like, well, what are you doing to find one? And they're like, nothing. I'm like, oh, okay.

25:20So just the Easter bunny is going to just show up on your doorstep with a basket of chocolate eggs and a founder. I was like, it's not going to happen. Like, what are we talking about here? So people like people who are in action, if you're in action, if you're in motion, if you're doing things that's attractive to people. All right, next up on the docket, Jason, there is an amazing leaderboard called the Lean AI Native Companies Leaderboard that I was going through this morning. And it brought up a couple of questions that I wanted to run by you about founders and their expectations. So here's the data set that we're looking at.

25:54Some of the data points here are a little bit out of date. For example, Cursor now has more employees. But if you're on the audio version, this is a chart that tracks companies, how much money they're bringing in revenue and then the number of employees and it ranks them based on how much revenue they're driving per employee. Jason, on the show, we've talked about static team size, use of AI automation and companies doing more with less over the last couple of quarters. A lot of companies here are doing over a million dollars in revenue per employee, which is very impressive for companies of their size.

26:22But it got me thinking about what is normal now and what is kind of the thing that founders should be shooting for? Because if I look at this, Jason, and I see that, you know, company access five employees and 20 million revenue. Is that a good benchmark to shoot for? Or are these companies that are built just differently than most startups are? And so these examples, these leading companies in terms of efficiency are not actually a good role model for most founders. Yeah. So some of these companies at the top of the stack here, like Telegram and MidJourney, MidJourney was built by a bunch of rich people and it was early and they have a ton of revenue and it looks like their annual revenue is 500 million.

27:04So they're making 12 million per employee. Obviously that's not sustainable or real. It might be for them for some period of time, but another, you know, firm might have 400 people and make 125 K per person, right? They, or they 10 exit and they would have, yeah, if they had 400, they would have 1.25. So now you've got 400 engineers working on something and the engineers are getting paid 500K and they're each generating 1.25 million, it's like, this could be too profitable, right? You're not ambitious enough. Maybe MidJourney should have done vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right?

27:43And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work. These can be really interesting ways to raise money. So, hey, we're a seed stage company like Lovable and we're making 75 million. We only have 40 employees and we're making almost 2 million employees. Yeah, it's nice to go raise a bunch of money, but I don't think most investors would want to see you be that profitable, to answer your question. And at scale, you could do this with Facebook or Meta Corporation. You could do it with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

28:24And that would tell you, hey, well, what if they cut 20 % of their workforce? What would it look like? And then it becomes like an interesting metric, which is what we saw three years ago when all these companies got fit and Meta started cutting people, Microsoft started cutting people. They started to realize, man, we probably have overdone it. we don't have enough revenue per employee. So there's a balance here. I don't think there's one number that makes sense. If you were a marketplace, for example, marketplaces take a while to get the flywheel going. Whereas an AI software company like Lovable, if it becomes very well known and it goes viral on social media, you know, you got 20 people building it, 40 people building it, you have unlimited number of people who can use it.

29:09Now, if you're building a marketplace, you might need a lot of people to build up the supply side of restaurants. And then you got to go to another city and put more restaurants on if you're DoorDash or Uber Eats. And it's never ending. But when it hits scale and you're making, you know, a 10 or a 20 % VIG, like an Airbnb or DoorDash's, they can be wonderful businesses. So Amazon would be another incredible example. They were making no money for a long time. They just broke even, broke even, broke even. So the revenue per employee was very high. There was no profits per employee. And then at a certain point, they flipped the switch, right?

29:45When you hit scale. So it's interesting to look at. It's definitely a different era. What's nice when you're profitable is you don't need to go to the well for more money from venture capitalists. So I think we will see founders maintaining higher ownership, maybe as high as twice as much ownership by the

30:11founders are constantly asking me, hey, where can I find my first customers? I need a customer. I'm talking about business to business advertising and marketing your product to other businesses. And to do that, the greatest place in the world, hands down, is LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn's advertising tools aren't just going to throw your message around to anybody clicking on random ads. No, these are not randos. You can pick decision makers based on the data that you know inside of LinkedIn works, the job title, the industry? How about the size of the company? Or maybe you're working on startups and you just want people in New York City and Miami because that's where your first two sales offices are.

30:48There's over a billion people on LinkedIn, and that includes 130 million decision makers and 10 million C-level executives. These are the big fish, right? These are the whales. Business-to-business markers report 2.5 times higher returns on their ad spend on LinkedIn versus the other social platforms. Makes sense, right? So to start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads and customers, we're going to give you a hundred dollar credit towards your next campaign. That's how confident LinkedIn is that you're going to get value. They'll just give you the a hundred dollars to prove it to you.

31:19LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups, LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups, no spaces, no dashes to claim that hundy. LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups terms and conditions do apply. So for folks out there who aren't as familiar with that number, Jason, maybe what's a good estimate for what a founder would expect to own of their company at scale before and then today? How much has that changed? Well, if you look at Larry and Sergey, I think they own, they both own roughly 10 % of Google at the end of the day. So 20%, that was considered very high. If you look at Aaron from Box, that was known as like, oh, he only owned 4 % of his publicly traded company.

31:56Maybe he raised too much money. Of course, the company is doing great. Most of the time when the companies go public. I'm not sure what Elon owns of Tesla, but I think it's 15%. Maybe with his new grant, he goes up to 25%. But in his SpaceX, he owns much more. Because, hey, as you go on as a founder, you're able to either fund it yourself or raise at higher valuations, get more done with less. Ultimately, at the end of the day, when you go public, owning 10 % to 20 % amongst the founders is pretty typical. I think that number could go to 20, 30, 40 % in the future. The HubSpot guys, they owned a lot too.

32:35Dharmesh and Brian, I think they owned a decent amount. So you just have to be thoughtful about it. And the early rounds can be quite punitive. I had somebody recently who was like, I'm raising 3 million in my seed round. And I'm like, okay, the product's not launched, right? No product launch. And I'm like, okay, so you're raising three at 10 and you're diluting 30%. I said, how about if you think you can get that$10 million, why don't you raise$1 million at$10 million, hit some milestones, make that money last 18 months, and then raise again and get$2 million at$20 million. And so now you've got a 10 % dilution, a 10 % dilution.

33:09That's a little more efficient than just 30 % out of the gate. Can you do more with less? And in this case, It was a founder who was older with families. And then I looked at their team, five team members, all of them like senior executives who were 40 or 50 years old, who probably all want to make 300 ,000. And they're taking a haircut down at 150 ,000 or something. And, you know, it's too many people, too many chiefs, not enough Indians and too much money. Right. So that's the problem with, I think, a lot of companies is they dilute too much in the beginning. So this is the nature of it. You need to have as small a team as possible and be as frugal as possible in the beginning.

33:53So, you know, it's a data point I think everybody should really care about. What's that, Jason? Their BMI, their weight. And I was worried about that for a long time. If you're a fan of this show, you remember when I was a little bit bigger. I was, you know, I peaked at 213. Now I'm down in the 170s. Lost 40 pounds. I lost so much weight. that when I hike around my ranch, Alex, it's not challenging anymore. So you know what I do? I put on a 40 pound weight vest to add the 40 pounds of fat I lost. And you know how I lost it? GLPs. GLPs. No shame in the GLP game is what I've told everybody. Now I didn't talk about it the first couple of years I did it because I wanted to make sure that, hey, people could get these GLPs.

34:37When I started using in the early days, there was a shortage and people who had diabetes, um, you know, uh, couldn't get it because so many people were using this magical drug. Um, that's my opinion. Um, and a lot of the science is kind of backing me up. Um, and now everybody knows somebody who's had a good experience on GLPs and I've had a fantastic one. I sleep better, the sciatica in my leg, my breathing, my focus at work. I'm back to my fighting weight from my, my running weight. And you can get affordable GLP ones without insurance or with insurance at my new partnership with Rowe.co. You saw Rowe.co has Charles Barkley, Rowe.co has Serena Williams, and now they got J-Cow.

35:21I'm here to tell you, I want you to go look into GLP ones. I'm telling you right now, being shvelt is better than being a fat bastard. That's me fat shaming my old self. I wish more people did. But I wanted to live longer for my daughters. I don't want to get emotional or anything like that, but I was like, this is not sustainable. I'm going to lose this weight. I had a hard time losing weight. The GLP has made it easy. Maybe that works for you. Maybe it doesn't. You'll find out at ro.co for FDA approved weight loss options from a provider that I trust and you can trust. Roe.co. All right. Next up on the docket, OpenAI completes its tender at$500 billion.

36:02Jason, a couple of things here. First of all, It is now the most valuable private company in the world. Just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago. And the tender offer was worth about$6.6 billion in total. This is a secondary offering, folks. So it's employees selling their shares. But what was interesting, Jason, is that there was a total of$10.3 billion in authorized sales, but only$6.6 billion traded hands. Why? Not a demand issue, a supply issue. Employees in the company didn't put up as many shares as they could have in this tender offer, which people are taking to indicate that they're big believers in the company.

36:38But this got me kind of thinking, how are tender offers sized? And how often have you seen one have a supply issue from the employee side? Talk to me about what founders should know. Yeah. So there are multiple dynamics here. Often they don't want people clearing their entire position and not being motivated because it's a distraction at work when you look to your left and you look to your right and everybody's got jet cards on there or like their ski houses and they're looking for a ski house. Now everybody's distracted. So what they'll do typically is say, if you've been here for four years, you can sell half your stock.

37:16If you've been here for three years, you can sell 20%. If you've been here two years, you can sell 10%. And if you've been here under two years, you can't. So they'll come up with some sort of formula like that. Obviously there's a lot of demand here. I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI.

37:55It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for this, these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I literally, if I was an employee with 10 million shares, I would sell all 10 million. Why? If you, you're now, you are, have so much risk owning this stock that there could be a drawdown, there's competition and reasonably like what's the largest comparable company here? Microsoft, Apple. Maybe it's Microsoft because they're a software company. Maybe it's Google. And so those companies are worth$2 trillion,$3 trillion. I would sell every share you have, or I would sell 80%, get diversification for your family, take that 80 % if you believe in the category.

38:41And I would literally put it into the other players you're competing against, if you really believe in that space. More likely than not, if you already get the 10 million, and spend$3 million on your house and then put the rest into index funds. Okay, let's keep going. Let's keep going. Jason, Sora, we talked about it earlier on the show. I have some big news. It has reached the absolute top of the iOS app store here in the United States, besting even ChatGPT, besting even Google Gemini, which means that OpenAI has yet another hit on its hand. If you don't know what Sora is, it's a new social app from OpenAI using the Sora 2 model that allows you to create social-ish videos of yourself using AI.

39:23And it has a cameo feature, Jason, that lets you put yourself into the action. I'm a little surprised for an invite-only product that it reached the number one slot, but good for them. I wanted to stop by and talk about it because I do feel like this is a genuine step up from where we've been. Not only just in terms of the fidelity, like you can make a guy in Sora that looks a lot like yourself. You can realistically recreate IP and famous characters, but it's not just that it can fill in the gaps for you So if you give it a funny premise Sora is very good at taking figuring out what the joke is or what the bit is and actually Filling in the details in a way that adds value to the premise you came up with So let's take a look at the first one here All I typed in here was the first astronaut on the moon gets on the lunar surface and realizes he's not wearing a space suit That's all I said, but now play the video, Alex, if you would.

40:20That's one small step for man. Houston, be advised, I'm in shorts. I did not put the suit on. Copy? Kind of chilly out here. So I did not tell it any of that. He's only in shorts. And it even made that guy look and sound like Neil Armstrong all on its own. It figured out the first astronaut of the movie. It recreated that famous footage. So it's doing a lot of this without prompting. And that's where I feel like is the huge difference. We've seen text to video, text to image stuff before, and it's quirky and it's fun, but you had to put everything. The prompt had to be so sharp to get what you wanted.

40:58And Sora, it's just really good at sort of figuring it out. Now, it's probably doing something in the interim lawn where it says, okay, what does the user want? What would be funny? What's a good line of dialogue? Create a script for this. Like it probably is doing some background. I don't know what the term for this is, but re-prompting. Yeah. And it is, it's, it's sort of functioning like an agent and it is tied into your chat GPT account. So if you use yourself and you say Lon Harris is on a talk show, it'll have the talk show interviewer ask me like, so what movies have you seen lately? Or tell us what it's like working with Jason.

41:35Like it knows me from my chat GPT and it implies that to my Soroclips, which is. And it landed a joke here when it said it's cold out here. That's what I mean. It's a bit chilly out here. It is that next step of cleverness up from where the old ones were, where it can figure out it, it not only. And you've been very cynical about this category. Let's be honest. Sure. You felt it wasn't good at jokes. It wasn't good at that. So this is an honest assessment from you that it's crossing this chasm into. Absolutely. Contributing creatively. Yes. It is doing more in terms of figuring out it's, it's getting better at storytelling.

42:10It's figuring out narrative and it's not just characters standing around saying like, hello, how are you? I am good. How are you? I'm good. You know, like the original AI, it was very basic. And this is it's gotten to that next level of cleverness, wit, thoughtfulness about the scenario. But look at this one. Watch this one.

42:32All right. Hold it right there. That's enough. You're flat. You're behind the beat. And it sounds like you're reading a breakup text, not singing a song. There's no fire in that voice. that's not creepy that that is close enough to elvis that we all get it it's elvis it may not look exactly like him but it's not creepy it's not in that uncanny valley they've made it to the other side of the valley which a lot of people myself included didn't necessarily think they were going to the last thing i'll say in terms of in the plus category uh and i think as a user this is a plus as a publisher media copyright holder i would not think it's a plus but it's very easy to work around there are guardrails to prevent you if you just wrote like shrek at a rave it might be like we can't do that because shrek is a licensed character but you can like in this case i didn't say a character name i said a jedi knight talks his way out of a parking ticket and you could see the results right here it did it no problem did not give this is not the violation you're looking for yeah it figured i didn't tell it to do that joke it did that joke on its own.

43:35I don't. What you really want is to let me get back to my mission and move along. Right. You should get back to your mission. I'll move along. Thank you, officer. The force be with you. Oh, wow. It did exactly my joke. It did exactly my joke. I didn't say Star Wars. I didn't say uses the force. I just said a Jedi Knight talks his way out of a parking ticket. It filled in the rest. And Alex, the reporting is they're telling copyright holders they have to opt out of having their IP soon. That's what the Wall Street Journal reported last week, that they said, yeah, Sam Altman says, it's an opt-out, that they informed everybody, this is coming, let us know if you want to opt-out or not, and if you didn't opt-out, it's in, and you can play.

44:17Yeah, they're going to get a lot of lawsuits. Yeah. They're going to get a lot of lawsuits for that. You can also see - It's going to be staggering. Once one user figures out a character is in there, you can see it take off. Like a person figured out SpongeBob, SpongeBob, you can make SpongeBob characters appear, and now SpongeBob is everywhere. And then a person figured out you can make Pikachu appear, and now there's hundreds of Pikachu. So every time, or Peter Griffin from Family Guy, like every time there's a new one of those, you see thousands of them as everybody gets excited that they can remix them.

44:46So speaking of remixes, the one downside at this point, and I know it's very early on, but it is built for social. It's like a TikTok-style app where you're supposed to scroll and you like and you share. But it's as of yet, because it's invite only, it is not very social. There's no good way to find people you know in there. You can use your address, but they haven't added that stuff, but they rushed it out. They rushed it out for good reason. And you can tell, I think for now, it's a lot more fun to make these clips than it is to watch them. So I've seen amazing, really funny stuff that has two or three likes that's just dying on the vine because there aren't enough people watching.

45:25Everybody wants to make things. Nobody wants to watch other people's. I think this is the future of it. If you are selling chat GPT subscriptions, there's two ways to go about this. And I showed it, I think on the show, and I did it during my Nostrocanis keynote. If you want to pull up that slide, Lon, if you open up Canva, you can find it and show it. I showed in my presentation at KPMG, I do this like every summer with their partners and their top customers. I do a keynote and I do my predictions for the future. and I said, here's how it would work with the New York Times and ChatGPT or Grok and Disney, whoever.

46:01You authenticate with your Disney Plus at ChatGPT or vice versa, and then it unlocks these features. So if you're at the ChatGPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says, connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney Plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up. You click on the Mandalorian and it gives you prompts already there. It says, upload your picture. And what would you like to do? And you have all that sitting there waiting for you. Canva, by the way, great. So if you see here from the beginning, it's you're on Disney.

46:34It says, make me a Jedi, upload your photo, choose your saber. And then it shows me, it's a bad one because we did this six months ago, but this would be what you would do in Disney Plus. And then I think in the previous slide, I did it with the New York Times and Wirecutter. If you go back a slide or forward a slide, you'll see. Yeah. So here's my idea. You're on the New York Times. You authenticate with ChatGPT. And now you have a ChatGPT box. You say, give me the earliest mentions of Putin. This is Saks doing some searches here. And here you go. You can go get all these Putin stories and then summarize them and just use the ChatGPT functionality inside of the New York Times interface.

47:14So it can go both ways, Alex. You see what I'm saying? This is why I need to be a studio head. I will be running the Disney Corporation. And this will be one of the first things I do. And can you imagine how much money this will make and how sticky it would make your app if you had a hundred photos in there of your kids doing Jedi stuff or Marvel stuff, whatever it is, like now you unsubscribe and you lose that? No. And your kids are going to want to keep doing it. So this is the future of entertainment. You're going to be able to make a short movie with yourself. you're going to be able to put in the dialogue and then you're going to be able to publish it so if when i run disney corporation i'm going to give the ability for kids and their parents to write a grogu bedtime adventure and publish it to the disney plus site for other users to see and then it would be a leaderboard of the best grogu stories and you know disney would vet them and you have to be a paid user so if you do something inappropriate they could take it down or whatever, but it would be non, what do they call it?

48:14Non-canon? Non-canonical. Non-canonical. It'd be non-canonical stories. But can you imagine how amazing that would be if a bunch of kids did a bunch of Grogu stories or they did a bunch of Groot stories, you know, the little characters that kids like in these things? Yeah. I mean, that's clearly coming. Right now you can do anything for 10 seconds. I feel like the next iteration is 30 seconds, a minute. Like once we get more processing power, figure out how to do this with less compute. That's what's coming next is longer clips and you'll get to make more stories. All right. Let's let's talk about this Apple ice block story.

48:48This seems really interesting. Lon, I'm sure you have some feelings. I have a few thoughts. Yeah. All right. So after the White House demanded that Apple take down the ice block application, which tracked the location of ice agents in and around the country, Apple complied with AG Bondi's request. Lon, surprisingly little controversy in the technology world about this move. Well, I do feel like the argument that you can immediately imagine tech people and companies making is, well, it doesn't have to be an app. You could put it up on a website that you own, that you host. And so like an app is going into these walled gardens and we sort of established the precedent that Apple gets to decide if you get to be in there.

49:30And so I don't know, you know, their ice block is claiming it's a free speech issue. And I don't know, is my app has to be in your app store count as a First Amendment issue or not? I feel like that's a little bit of an in-between bubble case. Obviously, if this was just on the Internet, I don't think the U.S. government should be able to be like, take that down. And I do think that in light of how much we were talking about the Biden administration intervening and like telling Twitter, you can't have that on Twitter and telling Facebook about misinformation, like, well, now we're sort of doing that again.

50:03just in a different way. It's different kinds of information that the White House doesn't want to get out. So there is a hypocritical thing there to it, I think. I hope this comes up on All In. I'm very curious to see what the thoughts are going to be over there. I kind of doubt. No, I mean, I'll bring it up if you guys want me to, but there is some precedent to this. Speed traps and alerting people to speed traps is, I think, if my memory serves me correctly, Exactly. And this is where producer Claude could really help us out. Even flashing your lights to warrant oncoming drivers, I believe that is illegal in some states.

50:43So there are some laws around interfering with police activity. So as somebody who comes from a family of law enforcement, I would be concerned if you got a thousand people to suddenly show up during an ICE arrest or any arrest, an FBI arrest, whatever it is. That could be very dangerous, I think. And I would have definite concerns about this because what happens if you create a flash mob and then violence breaks out and, I don't know, protesters get killed, a cop gets killed? Now you're in really dangerous territory here. I do have a clawed answer. Courts have generally ruled that warning other drivers is protected free speech under the First Amendment.

51:29But there are gray areas. Some states and municipalities have attempted to restrict headlight flashing. Those laws are often overturned. But they do say physically interfering with police operations like blocking their view. That can be illegal. And also, of course, laws vary based on jurisdiction. Absolutely. But FIRE, the free speech organization, really points out that this is protected speech, in their view, that's being not forced down through a legal process, but instead through the jaw boning that was so unpopular from the Biden administration. I just think that it's a disappointing moment in which people that were very fired up about this in one case have now decided to put it down on the other.

52:07Oh, you mean censorship? Yeah. Well, I mean, this is not censorship per se. it's the government leaning on your shoulder versus demanding you do something. Okay. So we're talking about the FBI jawboning of the Twitter executives to take down COVID stuff or Spotify. I remember the jawboning term. They weren't arresting anybody. They weren't deleting it themselves. They were just telling like, Hey, you guys really take this seriously. And that seems to be what this exists in ways. I was always wondering how Google made the decision to allow Waze to put speed traps in it. And those are super accurate.

52:45I thought for sure when Google bought Waze, they would remove that feature because it is the number one reason people use Waze. Everybody says it's because it's routing. Like Google Maps does a good enough job rerouting you. Apple Maps reroute you. Everybody can reroute you now and give you multiple routes. I think that's the second feature because how often do you, in a ride, have you been rerouted live. Only when something bad happens. Yes. If you had like an accident, that would be, so that happens one in 50 rides, one in a hundred. If that. But when you're driving and you're using Waze, I would get a speed trap every 30 minutes, every hour.

53:26If I go to Tahoe, it would be five from San Francisco to Tahoe. I mean, I, and I'm not like a major speeder, but just in case I'm, you know, five, six, seven, eight miles over it. I still want to be respectful and not blow past people. Waze, according to Claude, thank you, producer Claude, Waze has faced threats of legal action in the past over this, but no actual lawsuits have ever been filed. There was a December 24 instance where two NYPD officers were killed and the LA police chief sent Google a letter saying Waze could endanger police officers in the community. In 2018, the LA City Council asked the city to sue Waze for creating dangerous conditions on roads due to traffic congestion.

54:09And in 2019, the NYPD sent a different letter to Google threatening legal action over the DWI checkpoint reporting feature, but no lawsuits have ever actually gone down. These are just threats. Yes. So Apple did take down in 2011 DUI checkpoint apps. At the time, according to the International Business Times, Google declined to comply. But this story is so old, they actually mentioned Research in Motion or RIM, the company behind BlackBerry as part of its reporting. So this is pretty far in the past. I do want to say thank you to Anthropic for providing these amazing Claude answers. If you're ready to level up your AI collaborations, you got to go to Claude.ai slash twist.

54:50You can't do everything we're doing with Claude without a paid plan. But Twist listeners get 50 % off their first three months with Claude Pro. Claude.ai slash Twist to get started, folks. Yeah. You know, this ice block thing, just to wrap it up, anything that could cause to put people in danger, and in this case, it puts both sides in danger, I would be very cautious if I was the folks. Now, I understand it has people share information when they've seen ICE agents within a five-mile radius of their location and share details of the clothing agents are wearing. If it's a five-mile radius, it feels like they're addressing that head-on, but it does feel like this is a jump ball situation.

55:41I would always fall on the side of safety in this situation. Well, yeah, I mean, safety for the people being rounded up. Sure. But I get what you're saying, that if you look at it from the reverse perspective, it's less warning people that they're about to be impacted by ICE. And it's also alerting people to where ICE is and how to find them and recognize them. So that I do think there is a concern there. OK, let's keep going. Next up on the docket, I found a really interesting startup, Jason, just before we went live. It's called the Anti-Fraud Company. It's pitching itself as a sort of private doge.

56:21And if you recall, there was a student at Brown named Alex Xi, and he was complaining about how much money Brown University spends on things. I paid a lot of attention to that because I live very close to Brown University. And he's one of the co-founders along with two other folks who are also anti-monopolists and pharma experts. Their idea is to go out and find waste and fraud in the government and then collect money via whistleblower programs. I don't know if that's a really brilliant business model. Love the idea. And they just raised$5.1 million from Abstract Ventures, Browder Capital, and Dune Ventures.

56:56But can I show you the launch video? Because I think it really tells us where we are in the market today. Yeah, let's do it. All right. So here from the fine folks over at the Anti-Fraud Company is how to launch a startup in 2025. We just found$250 million in fraudulent government spending over the past month. But that's nothing compared to nearly$500 billion that happen every year. And that's why we raised$5.1 million to start the Anti-Fraud Company, a private sector doge that saves your tax dollars from greedy corporations. Even universities and pharmaceutical companies, entities we trust with their children's health and their education, are participants in what we call organized craving.

57:41And these aren't just one-off mistakes here or there. It's the system. And while they profit, you suffer the consequences. Higher prices, more debt, and less for the people who need it most. Ugh. What is this about? This is weird. At the FCC, I worked to stop Big Pharma from defrauding Medicare and Medicaid. And before that, I filed class-action lawsuits against Big Pharma for delaying generic competition and raising consumer prices. And I spent years of my life researching and writing a book about how Ivy League institutions fix prices, raising costs for students and their debt burdens, and this launched multiple congressional investigations and billion-dollar class action lawsuits.

58:22I emailed thousands of administrators at Brown University to ask them what they did in the past week and built an AI system to audit the university's budget. They tried to kick me out, but I ended up testifying before Congress about the Ivy League's antitrust violations. anyways i think that shows what we're talking about here but jason it just takes me such an interesting moment in time in which slickly produced hype videos seem to take more well that was not slickly produced that was oh i thought it was pretty amateurish i don't think that was like austin's from um um howie where he spent like serious money on it i think that was like kind of a running gun one i it wasn't a great concept lon didn't like it i could see he was like Like, it's not really that great.

59:06It needed to be half as long and twice as good. It was too long and not as good. It lacks a through line. It feels like part of the joke is that it's thrown off. You know, they're using pieces of paper. He's just picking stuff up. But you don't, it doesn't, there's no set up punch. Like, it doesn't build in that way. Yeah, there's no payoff. But what I want people to know is the way whistleblower laws work in the United States is I believe you get half of whatever's recovered. It's something ginormous from the SEC. And there have been multiple nine-figure whistleblower payments, and you don't need to be public.

59:49The whistleblowers get protected. $279 million is the first highest ranked one. Thank you, producer Claude. $266 million is the second. $200 million, the next one, and that's from the CFTC. So there are, the IRS also does this. You can make serious bank. I think this is actually going to become a brilliant business because it's clear what they'll do. They will help you pursue these claims and take a percentage of it is what I think they're going to do. Another way to do this would be to just hire two lawyers and vet incoming. And I don't, or if you encourage people to be whistleblowers, that's not allowed, I believe.

1:00:33So you have to be very careful. If you can inform people of how whistleblowers work, but I don't think you can encourage people to steal documents. It's a very like nuanced thing here. So if you were a gawker, um, or, you know, you're the New York Times or Washington Post. And at the bottom of the story, sometimes you'll see if you work at Tesla, if you work at Google and have any information and want to talk to her, they would say I have any information and you want to talk to our journalists, here's our number. But they don't say, if you have documents related to this, please send them to this place.

1:01:10But some people do have a document dump link where they say, if you would like to give us, if you'd like to contact us here, you can upload documents or whatever. So this is a very unique American concept, whistleblower awards. They're awesome because it's rewarding tipping people off to crimes. And you really want that in society. I don't know if there was one for FTX or Theranos, but there, I believe Madoff, there was a whistleblower award. I don't know if that got paid out or not, but this is a major focus of the SEC is to get whistleblower awards. All right, everybody, another amazing episode of This Week in Startups.

1:01:53Twist will be back on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of next week. And we're cooking with oil. Go to thisweekinstartups.com slash docket, and you'll see a bunch of links. Give us a review on Apple podcasting. Write a comment. Follow us on socials. We're doing a little experiment on Instagram where all the news that's in the docket, we release it there so you can get your news fixed for tech news in real time on our Instagram account, instagram.com slash TWI startups. I'm instagram.com slash Jason. I repost a lot of the stuff plus, you know, scenes from the ranch. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

1:02:43Thank you.