This Week in Startups - The Pentagon Wants Equity in AI Startups | E2336

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean — Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. Odoo: The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started for today at Odoo.com/twist Upwork helps businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. Post your job for free at upwork.com   Today's show: The Pentagon is reportedly in talks to lend AI cloud startup Fluidstack $5. billion, and Jason thinks the real story isn't the loan itself. It's the US government owning equity in private AI companies, and competing directly with venture capital. Plus returning friend of the pod Tibo Louis-Lucas shows us how he runs seven companies with fewer than 10 people by stacking AI agents. Can a few $200/month AI subscriptions really do the work of an entire marketing team? Tibo seems to think so. Plus it's Off-Duty Friday, so Jason and Lon are reviewing some current streaming favorites, and commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11 with some personal stories. Check out the full summary and transcript of today's episode from Plaud: https://web.plaud.ai/s/pub_213fdb2e-a65e-4901-b5fc-57a4f1e357a1::ZvclWNOK-PPr-9atxIDVG2tpGYUJxiklGAzVbHd9aJRBMSd6ef8l4hG7j_mUAyNTYTXS_Ha1XlEm8fYC Guests: Tibo Louis-Lucas on X: https://x.com/tibo_maker Squad: https://squad.so/ Relevant Links: Fluidstack: https://www.fluidstack.io Google-Fluidstack warrants deal details: https://cointelegraph.com/news/google-acquires-5-4-stake-in-bitcoin-mining-company-cipher-mining-in-ai-deal Center for Public Integrity: Solyndra timeline: https://publicintegrity.org/politics/missed-warning-signs-a-solyndra-timeline/ The Hill: Energy Dept. loses $139M in Fisker auto loan default: https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/191258-energy-dept-loses-139-million-in-auto-loan-gone-bad/ Apple iPhone Duo: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/09/apple-unveils-iphone-duo/ Apple Mac Studio: https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/ Sonos: https://www.sonos.com/ Amazon Fire TV: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=8521791011 UniFi: https://www.ui.com/ Lanterns trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UIBOsuUwc4 Dark Matter Season 2 trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhB6_1UbR7s "Robin" biography by Dave Itzkoff: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627794247 What Dreams May Come trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmZ-FuBThuQ Huffington Post on the Robin Williams-Disney feud: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/robin-williams-disney-feud-aladdin-picasso_uk_6a7cc304e4b079a0b2ec2233 Keith Roma: the 344th firefighter lost, remembered: https://www.firerescue1.com/9-11/articles/the-firefighter-everyone-forgot-about-on-911-142cs6WyLmn2FDib/ Timestamps: 0:00 Remembering 9/11, 25 Years Later 9:10 Are we about to nationalize the AI industry? 9:53 DigitalOcean - Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. 20:30 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist 21:45 Apple's foldable iPhone Duo 29:43 Upwork - Upwork helps businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. Post your job for free at https://upwork.com 38:04 Tibo Louis-Lucas returns to TWiST 41:47 The affiliate update email that runs on autopilot 46:40 Why you should "stack" multiple AI subscriptions 52:57 Squad's ideal customer is a solo founder 54:11 Jason digs Hal Jordan on "Lanterns" 1:00:19 Lon reviews Apple's "Dark Matter" 1:03:39 Remembering Robin Williams Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp   Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons   Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/   Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland   Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis   Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

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All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It is Friday, September 11th, 2026. I can't believe it's 25 years from September 11th when I was living in New York and was wondering where my brother was, who was a firefighter at the time for half the day. Really intense memories I have from those days. Yeah, I can't even imagine. Been thinking about it. Don't have too much to say other than my heart goes out to the families. And for those people who don't have a memory of this, get a bit educated on it.

and exactly how intense it was for this country, and then how aligned the country was. Being a New Yorker, one of the most amazing moments I experienced in my life was the unity that I felt walking the streets of Manhattan, and I was in Manhattan for it. I watched it happen with my own eyes, and I stayed in Manhattan. The island of Manhattan was locked down. You weren't allowed to leave, and you weren't allowed to get on the island. I didn't leave. I wasn't allowed to leave after that.

So I was there the whole time on 26th Street at my loft on 26th and 11th. Memory I remember was coming out of my building after the second tower got hit. And in my building on 26th Street, there was a secret garage which housed the FBI and a bunch of other agencies in my loft building. It was an FBI agent with a machine gun. So imagine a guy in a suit like Sicario, like wearing a perfect suit, but having a massive automatic rifle right and I came out I said what's the latest he goes we're under attack they bombed the Pentagon and I have never seen an individual law enforcement

officer look so rattled and I was like oh my god I went to the west side highway and I looked down and it was and you took out your had a cell phone at the time in 2001 they weren't super common no service no everybody was trying to call find their loved ones it was the most disturbing thing I've ever seen in my life when those towers fell. Yeah. It was visceral. We were, we were not prepared. Like, Americans didn't think that anything like that could happen on American soil. It was, it was shocking on a level. I don't know if people who weren't around can really appreciate it. But to the camaraderie, uh, for those next 30 days, you'd be walking around Manhattan and, uh, everybody would just say, how are you doing? How you holding up? And Manhattan is one cacophony of never-ending

symphony of people yelling at each other and blasting their horns. I saw somebody like three to four days after 9-11 honk somebody and the person got out of their car and like kind of did one of these. The other person got out of the car and did one of these. I'm throwing my hands up like, what are you doing? The other person put their hands up. They walked up to each other. They hugged each other. Wow. I said, I'm sorry. I just thought you didn't see the line. It was like the act of just honking somebody, which is what New York drivers live for, you know, you're doing that 20 times every mile as you're honking somebody because they get, like I'm trying to get somewhere. New Yorkers were embracing each other and just holding each other. It was unbelievable my experience

from that. And I basically, my entire life is bookmarked pre-9-11, post-9-11. I think about my life as like two chapters, because that was the end of the innocence. I think. for a lot of us. And... Well, yeah, in the 90s, there was this idea, and then we'll move on. We got a show to you. But in the 90s, I think there was this idea

that we were at the end of history. You know, we'd sort of figured out, we'd figured everything out. We got pan, the Cold War was over. We kind of figured out racism and prejudice. And there was this idea like, everything was just going to be sort of easier from now on.

And then 9-11 happened, and it was just like, oh, no, we were wrong. We don't have anything figured out. We don't know what we're doing. I think empire is like the way to think of it. We had this incredible. empire that had reached a level of like, you know, post-Clinton, like, oh, my God, we have this perfect society.

Yeah. We figured everything out. Right. We balanced the budget. We, they're jobs. We got through the dot-com. Russia's got a president now. They're fine.

Everything's going to be for, you know, we capitalism beat communism. The world was stable. Like, that's really, that's, it seems crazy now, but that's really what people thought in, like, 1996. Well, and it was, you know, the 90s were just such a magical decade, hip hop, the internet, magazine publishing. I just experienced this incredible 20s. My 20s were peak America.

And we didn't have social media. We didn't have this just incredible animosity between Americans and haves and have knots. Everybody was just, we're all positive. Hey, you're building a company. You got rich? Great. Oh, hey, I got a job. You know, I'm raising a family.

It just felt like the American dream had been realized. And I hope we have, can think of that spirit a little bit more and have consensus with each other that were all in it together. I would like to see some more espri de corpse, as they say, in the biz. But I'm thinking about my brother and all the firefighters that lost. My brother, Josh, was on the pile down there for the first two months afterwards. And then he, there were so many firefighters that died over 340. of them, you know, and subsequently many from their lungs and what they breathed in.

Those firefighters were so many funerals to be done that they had to space them out and it was a year later and my brother was still going to funerals. So in order to have, you know, the amount of people show up for the funeral, which firefighters, you know, hundreds show up when a brother goes down, It was just really hard. So they just scheduled them over a year.

It just never ended. And my poor brother had to be re-traumatized every weekend as part of the color guard and showing up there in the perfect uniforms and saluting and, you know, dealing with so many of his friends dying that day. Really horrific. And so shout out to my brother. All right. Let's get started.

But before we start, we always like to applaud, plot. We do. And I'll hit my button here. on my lapel, get to record the notes. And we now share our applaud notes. We do. We take every episode. We make a synapsis and we share that link, yeah?

In the show notes? It's very cool. I'm recording our show right now via this plod pin that you see on me. It's getting, it's hooked into the Zoom. This was a question to a lot of people ask, well, isn't it only picking up your voice? How is it also getting Jason? It goes right into the Zoom. It's recording it live.

It's going to create both a summary and a transcript. So if you want to just go read the full, complete, corrected AI, corrected transcript, you could do that. But it also produces a very helpful summary if you just want to hear, you know, notes on what happened during the show. And Jason, this is very cool. It's got all kinds of templates. So you could turn it into a memo if you wanted to send it out to other people. You could turn it into a more robust or less robust summary, depending on what was most important to you. You could do all kinds of stuff with POD.

We're putting it in the description. So just look in the description below if you're watching the. on YouTube and find the link, and it'll take you right to the Plaud synopsis of this show. And you could go to plod.a.ai slash twist. And if you use the code Twist, we'll also get you 10% off a Plod pin of your very own, so you can use this incredible system yourself. It's an incredible product. Can't live without it, especially when I'm traveling.

That's when I use it a lot. I'm working out traveling, but incredible that Plod now works with your Zoom meetings. And here's an example. I think it's important to show this example here. So what we're seeing here is the summary of an AI frontier debate, but you can see how it puts it in these nice boxes and gives you all kinds of different ways to view the same data. Whether you want a transcript, a summary, all of that is available. Really amazing. And you get the transcript right there.

So if you listen to an episode and you really, like we used to write show notes and we always dreamed about having this level of comprehensiveness, now Pua just does it. automatically for us. Unbelievable. Listening in while we record and then it does this on its own. I don't have to do anything. It's amazing. It's web.plod.

ai, by the way, if you want to go use that. All right, cool. We've got to talk about this Pentagon deal. The Pentagon is in talks to lend fluid stack. $5 billion for AI infrastructure, Jason. It would be the largest loan, the Department's Office of Strategic Capital has ever made.

Fluid stack being advised on that loan application by Aribor Bank, the brand new national bank from Andrew, founder Palmer Lucky, specifically to serve tech and defense clients. The money not earmarked for building a new AI data center. It's meant to shore up the U.S. supply chain and manufacturing capacities behind the components that go into making data center lands just days after fluids declosed a $1.5 billion round, led by... Wait a second.

You're saying the Pentagon. Yes, the U.S. military. wants to invest in a startup? They want, yes, they're going to put about $5 billion. into fluid stack. They want to own equity in the startup as opposed to just buying its product. Truth is, most of the big, popular AI models

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If you want to understand what building on a true AI Native platform looks like, go to DO.co slash twist. Start building on the Digital Ocean AI Native Cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. That's DO.c.O.com slash TWIST. We're seeing sort of two threads, I think, that are both coming together. AI paranoia, doomerism reaching a peak, including a lot of calls for the government to intercede and take over supervising AI. development, and now the U.S. military actually wants to own a chunk of America's AI infrastructure.

To me, this feels like, and I'm curious, your thoughts, are we creeping toward nationalization of AI? Is that where all this is going? Yeah, this is just a bad idea to pick the winners. The free market should be able to do this. We should not be using our taxes to, like, pick a winner in a market like this. If we want to have... a sovereign wealth fund that invests in companies, we need to have a national discussion about that with the Senate, with the Congress involved since they have the power of the purse. Procurement for specific products, of course, like AWS versus this versus that, okay, but why would we be owning shares in this company?

That's not the mandate. That's venture capital. That's capitalism. So now you have the government. If I'm understanding the story correctly, we're going to have to have a government. have our government competing against venture capital, so they're competing against Andresa and Horowitz for this equity in this company or competing with Sequoia to win this deal versus them. And then what does that say about how it's priced and what the valuation is? And then why would we go more into

debt as a country to own equities like this? If you really wanted to use American exceptionalism to try to make a profit on these things, well, then I guess you could earmark 10, billion dollars a year, give it to existing venture firms, ask them to give you a discounted carry for patriotic reasons, like go to Indrisen Harwitz, go to Sequoia and say, hey, we have $10 billion. We'll give you $500 million a year of the American taxpayers' money. We would like you to give us, you know, 1% fees instead of 3% and 10% carry instead of 30%. Like it's the patriotic thing to do for the American people. But even then it's convoluted. We want to smaller government, we don't want to own these companies, we want a free market. So now, if,

you know, pick whatever company you want, if we started owning as a country shares in Open AI or GROC or SpaceX or whatever the company is, well, then does that mean we're obligated to pay that person and give them the contracts? And if we don't give them a contracts, well, why did we give the contract to Open AI versus Anthropic if we own 5% of 1? It just adds. It just adds, It's conflicts all the way down. This does not seem like a great idea to me. We should have contracts we can back out of. We should have performance in the contracts.

And we should do competitive bidding, the end, right? Yeah. I mean, I feel like this has been a big Trump administration thing. They wanted like a little piece of the action. Like Intel, we saw that previously. But we're paying for it here, right? We're not getting it for free. Yes, it's a low.

Like the Pentagon is giving $5 billion to fluid stack, is my understanding of it. a loan to build out their data centers. That's the... Well, it's a loan to to finance the infrastructure that allows for more data centers is what the story says. I mean, framed as a loan, we did do... Yeah, Lange, fluid stack $5 billion. I mean, that's how they're saying it.

And it's their banks involved. So if it's, in fact, a loan, there is some precedent for this. We did a series of... of energy loans, famously to Cylindra, if you remember that, failed company, I believe. Fisca also failed. I think they both defaulted on their loans. You can check with an LLM right now. And then Tesla, and Tesla paid their loan back, and they paid it back with the interest ahead of schedule. And that was an Obama era trying to, in the age of global warming and

wanting to have more energy sovereignty, they wanted to see some national champions. And national champion they did build in Tesla, $1.5 trillion company, that would have argued for them to have warrants. So if we are going to give a loan, like we did to Tesla, if we had warrants to buy 10% of Tesla that we could execute those warrants anytime in the next, say, 10 years, so we had penny warrants to buy 5% of it. That would have been a $75 billion, $50 billion, $25 billion return on top of the interest for the loan. maybe, but we got a lot of debt already. So it just seems overly complicated.

And why can't Fluidstack just get a loan? That's what I don't understand. There's so much money in the world right now. Why can't they just get a loan? Why do they need the loan from the Defense Department? If I'm understanding the story correctly. The U.S. taxpayer. Yeah, I don't know.

Fluidstack does have similar structures. Google, for example, a potential 14% equity stake in exchange for guaranteeing fluid stack lease obligations on some of their other data center campuses. So maybe there is a warrant situation here. Wait a second. So Google gave a loan and got 14% warrants? Yeah. Google holds warrants for a potential 14% equity stake in exchange for guaranteeing fluid stack lease obligations on key data center campuses. This is from an ARS technica article the other day. So the U.S. government doesn't get 14%, but Google does. I don't know.

So that, wait, we're speculating. The article does not let us know what, like, I'm just saying it is possible. But this proves my point. Yeah. If, if this is true in it, maybe it's true because this isn't in the story that they are getting warrants. So if they were getting warrants, that would be something the American, that they would include in the story, I think, because that would be in the benefit of America.

So this proves my point. The government's not good at negotiating and being a sharp elbowed venture capital. or a sharp corporate development office like Google is. Google knows they can extract warrants in exchange for the loans. By the way, that's what Silicon Valley Bank would do, right? They would give you a loan. You'd pay it back over some period of time. And their pot sweetener, just a little bit of, you know,

sprinkles on the Sunday. Cherry on top would be, I guess, the ability to buy some warrants. So if it really works out, you know, because I gave you the $5 billion, I get like the equivalent of, I mean, if this company became worth $100 billion, it'd be $14 billion, because it was $10 billion, $1.4 billion. So there's like another $1.4 billion here.

Like if it's a $10 billion, get a little taste on top of it. But the government doesn't have those individuals working at it to negotiate that stuff. Just like private companies don't have generals to, you know, do wars. Fight wars. Or we don't have Delta Force, you know,

or the seals. So each group has their speciality. maybe not, but if we were going to do this, I really think one of the problems we have right now is the dysfunctional Congress, Senate, House of Representatives, however you phrase it. What's the way to phrase both? Congress.

Congress. Congress is them together. I always get that. The House in the Senate together is Congress. Yes. So Congress, power of the purse, backstop against crazy spending, $5,000 checks, stimmy checks. Biden forgiving loans, all that stuff should not be possible.

It should go through the power of the purse as the founding fathers intended. And I got to tell you, man, less government, less involvement, less blocking M&A. Like we don't need more of this socialistic, you know. Yeah, that's now becoming no difference. But Republicans used to believe this. By the way, Democrats used to believe this. Less government. I mean, it was kind of built into the system.

So I kind of feel like, you know, this is not like Dems versus Republicans. Both parties are now just too involved in making things too much bigger. When you put your thumb on the scale, like, what is FluidStack's competitors now going to do? They have to go to the government to get a sweetheart deal maybe? I don't know. And it just seems like it's unnecessary. So why are we doing convoluted things like this? Right.

It's unnecessary. And then that makes you wonder. People are then going to wonder. Did somebody buy this deal? So now you have to ask, you know, when a loan happens like this, how did the loan originate? With those energy loans, people applied for them and, you know, they won them. Now you have to say, okay, did any of these people donate to the ballroom, the crypto, this thing, America, you know, a Trump pack? Like, who's greasing the wheels to get a $5 billion loan?

And even if they didn't, the appearance of impropriety now happens when, you know, you know, you know, five billion dollars drops from the sky. Yeah. So it's just, it's a bad look for the company, but it seems convoluted for the government. Why are we doing this? The government's got enough they got to deal with. There's plenty going on.

The government doesn't need to be. I think AI is bad idea on my mind. But hey, listen, who knows, this is just a breaking news story. We're commenting on it. Yeah, let's move on. When you're an early stage founder and you're just starting out, you're probably going to rely on a few different tools to run your business. And then you're going to try to duct tape them together.

Yeah. And that might be a fine placeholder until you finish your MVP. But this will get expensive and messy fast. When you're scaling, that's when you need O-D-O-D-O-O-O-D-O-O-O-D-O-O-D, the all-in-one management software that already has 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies. O-Doo is bringing everything you need into one platform. That means your CRM, sales, your accounting, manufacturing, inventory, and of course point of sale, if you have retail,

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get started today at O'Doo. dot com slash twist and your first app is free that's od oo.com slash twist. Apple has launched the $1,99.99, iPhone duo. It is foldable. Of course, John Turner took over from Tim Cook as the new CEO of Apple on September 1st. And in Cooper Tino, he ran his first keynote the other day. He unveiled the iPhone duo. It's Apple's first foldable.

Opens to a 7.6 inch screen starts at around 2 grand, running up to $3,200 if you want two terabytes of storage. The more consequential decision was what he didn't announce. There is no standard iPhone 18. Hold on a second. Go back to that screen there. There's two different sizes. Is that what I'm saying?

Is that folded and then unfolded? Oh, it's opened and turned vertical. That is folded and unfolded. Folded, yeah, on the left there. Also, no standard iPhone 18 this fall. Cheaper models are reportedly being pushed to spring 2027. So what do you think of iPhone Duo? Are you going to rush out and get a double-sided foldable iPhone?

The foldable for me, this did not result of me using the phone that much because I had the pixel fold pro 9 or whatever. It's my backup phone when I'm traveling. I need to have a backup on a different service. Something happens to my iPhone or if I'm traveling places where they might tap my iPhone. I wipe a phone and have a burner phone, yada, yada. And so I have the iPhone air. I like it to a certain extent, but the camera sucks.

And the battery life is terrible, but I always have backup batteries. So it's not as big of an issue for me. But I don't want to compromise on my camera anymore because I have kids. So I'm going to get off the iPhone air. I initially was like, I'm never going to do a foldable again. However, I heard Dave Moran talking about it on his podcast and other folks talking about how, the screen feels next level. And this is another instance where Apple took an existing product category that was very popular for a very long time. I think foldables have been around over five

or six years now. Yeah. And they reinvented it. So I need to get my hands on it. The problem I have with the foldable I have is it's just too thick. It's like two smartphones laid on top of each other. And then the instances where I actually open up and use it, I don't have too many of them. If I'm I'm watching like short videos, it's, you know, just fine. So I, and then the software doesn't seem to leverage it, but Apple has a way of inspiring people to make these kind of software. So I have to see how Amazon, you know, TikTok, Twitter, you know, DoorDash, Uber, like when I open it up, does the Uber app, when I'm shopping for Uber Eats, is it like delightful where I have my,

on the right hand side, I have like the menu that I'm going through. On the left hand side, I have the shared order with my family. We do like shared orders. Sure. And I can see that filling in. Like if I could see both screens at the same time, maybe interesting. So just off the top of my head, if I'm seeing, if I'm on a Zoom call and on one side I have the chat and one side I have the video.

Yeah. And I don't have to switch between them. Like those things. So, you know, those could be interesting to me. If they can convince the software people to rewrite their software to have both. things are going on. Perhaps when I'm doing chat GPT or Claude or GROC, if I had the output in one window and I have the GROC thread in the other, you know how GROC will inline the images and videos you're creating documents. Maybe the documents on the right and the chats on the left.

Maybe that's compelling, you know? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I agree with you. It's like, a phone is the right size for what I want to carry around with me all day. I could certainly think of times where I'd open up. Like, if you're on the plane, you want to watch a movie, you open up the the phone, but I don't know if there's enough of that to make me want to carry like a double. If it feels sleek, if it's folded and somehow there's engineering magic and it just feels like a regular phone in my pocket, but then I can open it up, I would consider that. But otherwise it feels like it's just going to be more phone than I need. So here on the right, we have, I don't know what app this is.

It's like, yeah, it's some sort of like, oh, I thought I knew, but now I don't. on the right. Maybe it's like a to-do list or something or it's a, what does it say underneath it? It's Siri, scroll down a little bit, Siri. The all-new dedicated Syriop brings together rich conversations across a user's Apple product. So I guess this is their chat GPT. Yes. Interesting. So on the left are my, those boxes on the left, Athena statue, light reflection, et cetera, permits and Greece. Like these are the questions you've asked in the past. Permits in Greece, you know, like this is somebody traveling. Literally what I was just saying, yes. Those are the chats on the. The history on the left in bubbles.

On the right is the active chat you're on, the Athena statue. That's kind of interesting. Let's go to the right one. See what the next example is. So here we have Weaving Workshop. Scroll down a little bit. Is that Siri again? I guess that's like their chat GPT competitor describing what I said earlier.

Go to the next one. Let's see the next screen. Okay, so this is notes, I think. This is write and edit with Siri virtually. just by describing, yeah. This doesn't really use the two screen particularly well. That's a bad example. Meh.

Here's examples of your calendar and clock on the left and then your message is coming in the right. That's kind of lame. See the next one. This is folding it backwards, breaking its back to have a nightstand clock. Yeah. That's a gimmicky, not interested. Okay.

That's a zero of 10. 10. All right, here it is again, like flipping it so you don't need an iPhone stand. And then here's playing music on it, nothing different. So I give that like a two of 10. Maybe that's interesting on a plane if you're watching a movie, but then you don't get the full use of the screen. I find this whole thing lame. But if you can go back down to this one, I think, maybe had something. Is there a video? Well, this is, yeah, you can be basically browsing two windows at once and then you can flip them around like you just, you know, if you want the left and the right and merge them and, you know, just keeping...

Yeah, but I don't see an application here yet. I see no application. Okay, wait, right, here's Slack. Here's Slack, yeah. Okay, so, okay, now this gets interesting. Let's see the next Slack screen. Oh, let's go back then to the previous Slack screen. So this is interesting because on the left,

you have your channels and messages, direct messages on the right, you have the actual thread. That's kind of interesting. Let's go to the left, because I think there are some images to the left here. Okay, so this is... a Zoom call or a FaceTime call on the bottom. And on the top is a web browser. I think maybe somebody's sharing their screen. Somebody's sharing their screen. So that's actually what I just described. That's interesting. Next slide. Let's go backwards to the left. Okay, that's just a big hero image.

What is this one? This looks like editing a video. That's the transcript on the right and the video. and you can see the timeline at the bottom on the left. That's where the users are going to make or break this, is does having the two screens provide so much value that you open it as opposed to just using the top level screen before you open it, the front-facing screen. The front-facing screen kind of gets everything done when you open it up.

Does it have a two-windowed experience and the app is actually worth doing? That's actually the interesting thing. It's absurd. to $3,000 for this device. Yeah, that's great. Ridiculous. I mean, I feel like 99% of these utilities are the things people are using it for,

that's what we have tablets for. Like, there's already phone, tablet computer. I don't know if we need another category in the middle there to me. Hiring freelancers can be a great way for your startup to keep your head count low while accessing the specific expertise that your team needs. But let's be honest. It takes so much time to source and vet these, new hires, even if they're super talented. And then you've got to track their work, pay their

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That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent, ready to help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. I mean, I travel with all three. Phone tablet and computers. Phone tablet laptop. That's the suite of devices. I don't need a fourth niche in there.

It depends on like I got to see what it feels like because I had the same position about an iPad. I was like, I don't think this is different enough from my laptop. And then once you started using it, you're like, it is kind of different. I prefer to watch when I'm in bed like, you know, we're streaming a movie or something or playing like a casual game like you're seeing here. It is a better experience. You use an iPad than a computer or your phone.

Yes. So I'm not price sensitive, but I also don't want to get ripped off. $3,000 is like complete rip off. Maybe FaceTime looks interesting. I don't know. I think with all Apple, with new Apple products, and this is like, this is a new product category, to be honest, I need to put it in my hands. And typically the second version is the one to get. So like it took four iterations of the wall.

watch to have it be worthy. AirPods were pretty good out of the gate, but really the second, third, fourth version really started to cook with noise cancellation eventually. I don't know. I want to see John Turnus do something completely revolutionary like a car, something in health care that's revolutionary. I know it sounds silly, but I would like to see them make a suite of health products that go beyond the watch, like a scale, blood pressure cuff.

I know other people make these kind of things, but I think they should make an Apple watch that's kind of like the whoop, and that is less like a watch and more just like dedicated. I would like to see them go all in on health, all in on transportation. Like they should have made the car.

I think they should have made a car. I also like to see them do a television because that could be, and then a Sonos competitor. Like they have like, they still have one single speaker. They should have gone for the home water information really hard. I use Unified products now. I use DropCam and I used to use ring

doorbells and I use Sonos still. I would rather have like an Apple suite of high res speakers that were easier to use. Sure. I would rather have an Apple TV instead of a Samsung or a Sony or whatever I have. Yeah, I have just more elegant and simple. Fire TV and it's pretty crap. I'm sure Apple would improve on the Fire TV model? Yeah. The question is would you pay instead of, would you pay $1,000 for an Apple flat panel TV instead of $500 for the, you know, junkie? Yeah, if it was a significant upgrade, I think I might actually. I think it's Apple TV sounds like. That's what John Turnus has to do is find another category.

And I don't think VR AR is it. I think that's kind of lame. I do like the idea of taking videos and pictures of your kids with the glasses eventually in AR. But I feels like AR is still years away. like another two or three years. And they got to figure out a way to make it not look dorky. I still think they're trapped in that when you're wearing the glasses camera. You look silly.

And then AI, like just going all in on AI desktops. And if they can get, if Siri becomes an open source LLM and everything on my phone that's powered by AI is using a local model, that could be very interesting to me. So, you know, if I want to query my photos or if I, I want to have an agent. The agent is running on local hardware, only goes up to the cloud, encrypted. And with all this data leaking happening at Open AI, allegedly and Anthropic and all those concerns about sovereign AI,

I would love to have my ICloud include a $20 subscription to their open source, encrypted. They're not looking and doing any reinforcement learning with my data. That would be a big win. And then having that work on the incredible hardware I'm going to have on my desktop on this $12,000 Mac Studio. Exactly. It should all tie together.

And I went from spending $1,500 on MacBook Air, so spending $3,000 on MacBook Pro specifically to get to 48 gigs of RAM. So I think that's going to be the big trend. I think that's where they can make a lot of money. You know, the other story that didn't come up was this story of Sam Altman telling the Open AI employees that startup is slowing, cutting. edge AI development. Yeah, we can talk about that.

I don't believe it's true. I'll just say that. Oh. So wait, you don't think Sam Altman said this in the meeting, or you don't think he means it? I think he might have been floating it. Okay. All right. I'm, again, back to a conspiracy corner.

Yeah. Conspiracy Cal. My alter ego, conspiracy cow. Conspiracy Cal says he's floating the idea and then people are running with it. And then maybe it was leaked on purpose of, hey, you know, to get more attention and or to appeal to developers who have high P-dooms, you know, hey, yeah, you know, if this is really dangerous, I would be okay slowing it down. I think that's, I don't know if did an exact quote come out of the story?

Because I didn't see an exact quote. I saw like a paraphrase in my timeline. And this obviously wasn't recorded. This is some, was this an email or was it something he said? It says in a company-wide meeting this week, Altman told. So we don't have a quote. I don't have a direct quote. Here's Bloomberg.

In a company-wide meeting this week, Altman told employees that Open AI could potentially pace its AI development, perhaps in conjunction with several other AI labs, but that some may not agree to do so, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. So this is somebody who was at this meeting said Sam Altman floated this idea during a meeting. That's what we're reporting. being there this is the media running with this and then presenting it as if he's like we're slowing down he's basically having an intellectual discussion here a theoretical open to all possibilities if everybody slows down of course we'd slow down if everybody wants to go fast we'll go fast like

this is not him saying we're slowing anything down by any means he's certainly not going to give up his lead and it's not like he's going to stand on business right now and be like, you know what? We know we're going too fast. We're going to slow down. You all can do whatever you want. Yeah. And again, not to put my tinfoil hat on too tightly,

but if you really believed, if you've Sam Altman and Dario, if they honestly believed this thing I'm inventing in a few months could take over the world and kill all humans, they wouldn't just be floating this in a meeting. They would be getting very serious about what do we do to unwind this thing we've created.

Frankenstein wasn't like, well, maybe I shouldn't have created a monster. I'll consider maybe not making another monster. He tried to burn the guy down and ran away, you know? Like, they're not acting like people who are scared of their invention. Really intelligent people can run away with it. Let's get to our guest at Long Last. He is the founder of Teemaker. He's a returning guest on the, oh, that's the studio behind apps like Outrank, Revid, and SuperX,

returning guest to the show. We're bringing him back for more. Tebow, Louis Lucas. Thanks for joining us. Fantastic. Welcome to the show. Wonderful to have you back. Wonderful to have you back.

So today, Tebow is here. He's not just hanging out as a guest, although we love to have him. It's him. He's going to show us his system of AI agency built that watches his products, code base, spots new features, and then automatically generates content about it. No editors, no cameras required. It just looks at the code and delivers content straight to your email and Slack. Can't wait to get a look at this.

Okay. So this seems very tactical and also very practical. Quite practical, Jason, yes. Yeah, pretty excited to share that, especially because I think I'm going against your buddy, Jessen, this dear Mr. Musk. And so it's both incredibly scary for me, but I think it's going to be my most serious and ambitious projects. We'll see where we go. So it's a Grockbot killer?

That's what you're saying? Exactly. Oh, wow. So a bit about me. I'm basically managing seven projects right now. your team Jason have been asking how I am managing seven projects with an extremely limited team. I think we are barely more than a person per product. So, yeah, less than 10 people in the team.

And so one answer has been this launch where we are trying to basically go against Greg Bot. It's called squad and that's an agentic platform, I guess like everybody. And today, I'm going to try to share a few workflows on squads that you can just apply with grogbots, with cloud code, or anything that's where you run your agents. The one thing that I absolutely love with my workflows, I guess, is this one. I actually ask my agent to explain it for you so you can fully see it. I'm a developer, but I also have developers working with me. And so it's incredibly hard for me, since I'm very active on socials, to know what to talk about on socials.

Like, we went from three years ago to one or two commits per day on our products to today. I think we have 50 commits, 50 new things coming every day on each product. And so, of course, you cannot talk about all of them. And so what we did here is that we have our agents monitoring every week. everything that happened on each of our products for the last seven days the agent is going to pick the most relevant and high value feature especially the customer-facing features and it's going to use one of my other products and I love when two of my products are working together it's going to use Revid which is an

AI video making products and it will create a video that explain the crazy thing about this new feature that I will be able to then use everywhere. All right. So just to explain here and you're going to actually run this now, you have your agents finding new features, building new features, and then making the marketing for them. That would take about an hour to run. So I did that before this call. That's pretty much the video that it created. What I love here is, I think it's very close to this other workflow, is that it's doing 99% of the work. And then everything that I see, I can edit. everything that I see, I can just tweak it myself and then ship it to my audience.

It's very similar to this one, like the FIA's weekly email. Basically, it works a bit the same. Tons of things are happening, and you have tons of people that you want to update every week. It can be your users, your IPA, your team, or anyone else. So you have affiliates, people reselling your software, and here you have it, doing an update email to all of them. And this agent is doing what with the data and what is the outcome you're hoping to have? This agent is going to work pretty much the same. It's going to look at everything that I push on my repository, every new updates that I did on my products. And it's going to

package this email that would be ready to go with just one click for me. So I can check. I can just blindly trust the AI. I did that with GitHub, but I guess you can do that with Gira, with Slack, with like anything where you have you normally do this work. If you were like a startup with just all humans and had no agents, who would take the updates to the product, the affiliates, craft the email and send it? And what type of time would that take you? I used to have a dedicated person in India doing that for between a thousand to two thousand euros per month. So you had, what were they, a product manager, a copywriter? What was there? skill set? That would be a copywriter with some like some business understanding. It's, it's hard to

find that like right now on X, if you scroll X, you have plenty of those of those people that are very talented. I've done that job. So that's amazing. So $24,000 in savings and you get to do it continuously. And do you read it before it goes out? Right now, I'm not, not anymore. Honestly, I did that. Stop reading it and it's going out to your affiliates. Yeah. I did that. Blan, you had a question. boost eight weeks and then that stopped. Okay. So eight weeks, human in the loop, but now you feel confident in a pretty good. Yeah.

My question was like, what's the, what's the refinement? What's the fine-tuning process like? You're having it do the work. You're looking at the early examples and you're saying, I don't like this, do the video this way. I don't like this. Write the email this way. Like, what's the process there and how long does it take until the agent is just

ready to knock it out itself? I think it's exactly how you would do it with a human, basically. Like people have, people does. have this assumption that it would work very differently with an AI agent. But it's the same. Basically, like you hand over the work, you try to be as descriptive as possible, and then the AI is going to do mistakes, and you can just tell it. Basically, like you would just take a screenshot of the newsletter,

and you would just hand it on the chat here and say, I really didn't like this part. Please make sure that this is not happening again. And it's very confusing for people that, UI is working like this more and more right now. If you work with agents, you can just tell it what to do exactly like a human. That's the hard part. And once you understand this, it gets very easy.

I think it's like a rule of three, Jason, in my experience. Like by the third time the Grockbot is doing the thing, I really don't need to give it notes. It's like the first time, the second time, I got to be like, okay, well, I don't like this. And you pick the wrong clip. And this doesn't link up or that doesn't look good. By the third or fourth time, it's ready to go on its own. That feels like magic. If you can do three times and done, pretty good.

Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. You ask about how I would do this without the agent. But I think the most interesting use case is where you would not do it without the agents. And so there are just plenty of things. There is this little hack. Atheat is interesting because it always leaves a mark. like affiates they generally use this little tag in the web address that they use like they would add some tracking like specific tracking codes and so it's very easy for you to find on the web you can have your agents try to find affiate codes on the web address of your competitors and trying to do outreach to those affiates to just turn them into

your own IP. That's something that it's incredibly time consuming. I would not do that on my own. I would not hire a team to that. But I started doing that with agent because now I just can, you know. Amazing. All right. Continue. Anything else you want to show? There is something that I think you cannot do with Grogbots, but I think you can with, because all these together, like if you run all these, it's going to burn so much token. is like there's no way you can run this on a 200 per month subscription with codex or cloud code. So one thing that I wanted to show you and I think everyone should do that is that it's probably the case in the other product, but please start stacking your AI subscriptions.

So in squads, you can just add multiple codex subscription. I even have a croc one, a cloud code one. And so they would fall back between each other when one of them is going down. Oh, so this is the $200 a month premium subscription, which has a lot of tokens in it and probably gives you, if you were to estimate a $200 super subscription on these services, gives you $1,000 or $2,000 worth of usage tokens? What's your guess? I think it's much more than this.

There is this guy, Theo, on YouTube that did exactly this. Like, it compared how much it would cost with a real API cost. It was something like $15K per month. It's insane. Wow. So, Claude is giving you $15,000. thousand dollars worth of tokens, according to this person's claim, for $200, which means to Milan, these companies are basically doing price dumping. Similar to what Uber did or DoorDash did,

like, we'll make this so cheap that you'll get addicted to it. Eventually, I guess their hope is that these tokens come down and cost enough, that that 200 eventually becomes worthwhile, or people who are on the $200 plans eventually, say, I'm getting so much value from this. I'm willing to pay $2,000. I'm willing to pay $800. I'm willing to pay $5,000 a month. But you're stacking them and your system,

and your system is called squad, that's your product to do all this, then stacks them. Is that against the terms of service? Or it's just clever? It's a very good question. It was at one point, but since Open AI allowed it,

Anthropic had to revert their decision and it's now a lot again. And so it's completely compliant and you cannot get banned on this. But when I share on X that I'm stacking three 200 per month subscriptions, people go crazy. Like how are you burning that much token? But I think that's because you are not using agent at their full potential. You need to run those workflows. And what people don't understand is that you just dump your own.

the tools that you are using, all the marketing channel that you are using, and the agent themselves would come up with very, very interesting use cases that you can just run by yourself on any agent platform. So step one for a founder is to get everything authenticated, your Google ad account, your Facebook meta ad account, your affiliate account if you're using some third party, and then it eventually figures out how to make sense of all that now? Yeah, definitely. I think you mentioned Google Ads,

but I, so I was not super happy about the person working on Google for us. Like it was managing Google Ad4 for us. I was paying this guy $5K per month. I was able to fire the guy and to create this workflow where the agent would review the ads performance every week for me And it would give the exact, because I'm a very super nube with Google ads. And so it would give the exact step by step, click on this, click on this, click on this, click on this, on how to update the ads to do things properly. And so we now have better performance than ever.

It's worked super well. I'm super happy. What's interesting about what you're doing, Lon, what he's doing is he's now taking what he would pay consultants. And it would take him six months to get in a groove with them and just saying, well, I'll just upfront that with five hours of, you know, AI agent testing. But when I get to that sixth hour, to your point of like maybe three swings at bat, it will then run forever recursively getting better or the LLMs get better just on their own.

And when they release Fable or whatever, Ashtra, the next one, the next one, it'll just have those capabilities and get better. and you are, if you're running a startup and you're not building agent technology like this, and you don't have a dashboard, imagine if your competitor does. Right. You're hiring somebody, you're spending $60,000 in order to solve this problem. And what are you spending? Like, in tokens on this one job, $100 a month, $10 a week, who knows?

Something de minimis by comparison. Yeah, definitely. definitely the case. And yeah, there is amazing. There is no way. This works because it's not prompting

it's systems. You take time putting those systems in place and then they run forever. It's definitely not the case. You cannot just get stuck into prompting code. If you do that, you get

mandatory in front of your computer every single day to make things go forward. If you put the system in place and they move forward on their own, it's a game changer. Incredible. Well done. Just super inspiring. Anything else you want to show before we wrap up? Yeah, I guess you see a lot of errors. What I absolutely love about this platform is how you can see everything, everything that happens. So you can just see all the activities here. And when something is wrong, it might be something about an outdated token or outdated API key, you can just quickly fix it and that we work exactly

how you would manage employees giving you anything that might have gone wrong exactly like here. And who is the product is squad. These agents are for you running your SaaS product in case people lost the script here. But squad's your new product. You have seven other SaaS products. But squad is the product like Grockbot or I guess Claude agents or Open AIs product, Kodak. No, not Kodax. They have another work. Now it's chat GPT work now, yeah.

It's chat GPT work, I guess, would be the equivalent here, or having an open claw, Hermes, et cetera. So who are you putting your squad, who is your ideal customer profile for squad, I guess? It's basically the web founders who has a small audience on socials. The guy on X that is running multiple side project the same time, he's already kind of successful, like he has 1K to 20K per month in earnings on their products. And because he's a web founders, he can integrate many, many services

and it has a huge value in just making the connection between each of them. Okay, awesome. And where can people find out more? So about squad, squad.sco, very easy. And about me, I'm Tibo maker. on X and just my DMs are open and I'm talking about startups and growth every single day. Awesome. Well done and we'll drop you off and thanks, Debo. I look forward to having you on again to do more tactical and practical talks. Getting lots of good founders together to

put some hacks together for everybody. I'm still in love with lanterns. There are four episodes in. This guy, Kyle. Kyle Chandler is playing how Jordan. Aaron Pierre is John Stewart. Kyle Chandler is the best casting in a superhero film since Christopher Reeve and Robert Downey Jr. Yeah, he's great.

I used to love Green Lantern. This guy playing an old Hal Jordan has got the swagger, confidence, and doesn't give an F. Like, he's incredible, incredibly confident, even when the ring's not on his finger. Yeah.

When the rings run out of juice, he's still incredibly confident. And this weathered version of him after 35 years from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, you know, this is taking place, I think, in 2016 to 2026 era. Correct. I mean, he just plays the most perfect, doesn't, non-pulsed, is that the word, non-plulsed? Non-plussed. Non-plussed, confident, you know, It's not like the billionaire swagger of Robert Downey Jr. Where he's cracking.

He's just kind of like a weathered, I've seen it all, et cetera. And then this guy, Pierre, he plays like a cocky, manipulative, fearless, possible lantern replacement really well as well. And then there's another guy who play Cineshro. Yeah, I don't actually know that actor who's play. Let me look up his name. He's like a new face to me, and he is killing. Pull up the Sinestro from this.

He's going through every possible character. He is killing it. That actor. The Sinestro guy has a edge to... Ulrich Thompson is his name. Okay, so they debut Sinestro here, if you just click on the first image. There is. In like a prison cell, and he's left the lantern core to become part of the...

There's other rings and other ring colors. He's in, I think, the yellow one. He becomes the... Somehow he's... The most famous yellow lanterns, which is like the they use fear instead of will yes and he was previously how jordan's i guess mentor slash yeah so he plays in prison a and i think they must have been uh inspired by silence of the lamb where he is in prison doing like a back and forth with um hal jordan a green lantern who's former

mentor there's the image of them like in prison there and it's kind of like the silence of the lambs where klorice starling and um hanibal lector are having a dialogue and they kind of need each other and they're pumping people each other for information and then eventually it's obvious you're gonna get out of that cell and all hell's gonna break loose slow burn i love the mood and aesthetic of the show aesthetics matter, right? And tone matters. And this has none of the woke BS that they were trying to force feed down our throats with, you know, the Star Wars stuff.

It's just these guys are detectives. They're badasses. It's just straight detective slash superhero. Yeah. Badassery. They've got a really cool, interesting dynamic. And I think so much of the show is about this relationship between Hal Jordan and John Stewart.

it. And they did a really good job of, you know, like, it's sort of the guardians. I also think Laura Linney, who's playing one of the guardians who takes human form and comes to Earth. She's amazing in this. And yeah, she's amazing in everything. Laura Linney is fantastic. But like the guardians are sort of playing them against one another. Like they're bringing John in and they're telling him, you're the next Greenlander, just get the ring off of how Jordan, say the lines and it's yours. And it's created this weird, weird tension. It's like it's doing the buddy cop thing. they're cracking this case together, but there's this weird tension that the guardians are creating

with them. And it gives both of the actors just so much to play with. There's so much to chew on here. Garrett Dillahunt, who's playing Will Makin, who is this powerful local rancher in the town they're investigating, and he's got some sort of shadowy connection to the alien conspiracy. That actor is also killing it. A really weird, interesting character. He gets, like, totally naked in front of all the heroes in the previous episode.

Yeah, that was a weird kind of thing. It's very strange. justified or something? What was he in? I believe Garrett Dillahan is from, he was unjustified. Let me look that up. He plays like a really good cowboy type actor. Yeah. Dead to me. Yeah. Makes gives me hope for the DC universe. Although this came after the guy from Guardians of the Galaxy took over and he still approved it. This isn't James Gunn's project, but he allowed it to go through apparently. This was, this was already in the works pre-jad. I mean, Damon Lindelof is really the mind behind this show.

He's got some co-creators, but he also did Watchmen, another fantastic HBO series based on a DC-com. I think there's something about what James Gunn is doing, where he's allowing the Batman series with Robert Patterson, this one, and then doing his own, that it's kind of working maybe to have a little diversity and not one core, you know, timeline. That's so true of just,

DC Comics as a company. Like Marvel, they're sort of a Marvel style. Everything is kind of in that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby sort of mindset, and it works really well as a shared universe. DC's always been kind of all over the place. Some of the titles are really violent and nasty. Some of them are like Superman where it's kind of old-fashioned and a little corny. And I think that's what's working really well about DC now is just let it all coexist. I think I'm okay with it. I'm okay with her being like two different Batman shows or whatever. Yeah, yeah. The Harley Quinn animated show. That was also a lot of fun, by the way. What else you got an off duty?

You got an off duty for us? I did mine. I'm still. Sure. Well, I'll tell you about another great show that I highly recommend. It's on Apple TV Plus. It's just back for season two, but you can go back and watch season one. It's called Dark Matter.

The concept is that Joel Edgerton is a physicist, and with his, with, he's got a very, very rich sort of Elon Musk-esque friend who runs a tech company. He's got a chemist friend, and together they develop a box that can, it basically puts a human being inside the box into a quantum state so that they can move between universes. Like there's a multiverse, and if you go into the box and you take the right drug at the right moment, you just see this huge hallway full of doors and any door opens into another parallel universe to your own. So the whole story begins, he is kidnapped by a double of his from another universe. created this box because that guy wants to take over his life. Like that guy blew it with his college girlfriend and now he's lonely and miserable. And he finds another universe is Joel Edgerton who's married to that girl who's Jennifer

Connolly now. And so he kidnaps that Joel Edgerton deposits him back in his universe and takes over the guy's life in his universe. And now the original Joel Edgerton has to like get in the box and find his way back to his own unit. So Freaky Friday. It's like a version of Fekeke Friday except it's version. of yourself, clone. And right, and it becomes this sort of between universes war between all the

different Joel Edgerton's, but then it gets even more complicated. Other people start going into the box themselves. And so they're creating multiples of themselves that are going between universes. And the story ultimately is set in several different parallel universes. It's very trippy. It's based on a sci-fi novel by this guy, Blake Crouch, who's also making the show. And I mean, if you are a hard sci-fi fan, it is great. And it really plays around with that multiverse premise in a way that like the Marvel stuff, they're just kind of doing it in a more cartoony way. This is really thinking deeply about like what would happen if a person from one reality went into another and they like if you started traveling between these realities.

Like what would that do to you? What would that do to the universe? How would that affect people? Like it's really interesting stuff. There was a movie multiplicity, right? Well, multiplicity is Michael Keaton creates multiple versions of himself. It clones himself. And so that is sort of similar. That is sort of what happens like he ends up having to live in the world with a bunch of Joel Edgerton clones, but it's more playing around with the multiverse quantum state aspect of it. It's multiplicity where he creates... I've never actually seen multiplicity.

I just know of it. It's fun. I mean, Michael Keaton, it's really stretching Michael Keaton's comic chops because he's simultaneously playing like four or five diversions. And the bit in multiplicity is the more copies you make of a person, they get dumber over time, like if you Xerox a Xerox, a Xerox. So eventually they're making, you know, like... But they're on the screen at the same time, which I think means this was a technological innovation that looked for a plot line, which is we know how to like put two people on the screen at the same time.

Let's make a movie out. We'd rather see Robin Williams in this one. Maybe Robin Williams would have crushed it. It was Ivan Reitman and he did it like, I think it was immediately post-groundhog day. I want to say this was like his next movie. So there was a lot of anticipation. And then it is kind of a visual effect showcase where it's like, look, we have five Michael Keatons and they're all interacting in one. frame, which was a big deal in the 90s.

You know, I just thought of this. I, you know, always was a huge fan of Robin Williams. Sure. And I saw his son had just tweeted a memoriam or just remembering his father on his birthday. And I had just finished his biography. There's a biography of him. And I'm not sure who wrote it. Absolutely fantastic autobiography.

You pull it up on the screen to listen to. And it really, yeah, I guess it was a New York Times bestseller, really just goes into his life. I didn't know that he had gone to the famous art school in New York. And Julia, I guess. Yeah. And just his entire life of just and then Morg and Mindy and that didn't work out and his struggles there. but I grew up on Mark and Mindy and had seen Garp. Sure.

And then I had this memory of meeting him when I saw his sons, I believe it's Zach, who follows me. And I follow him. And I wrote a nice reply to him. And he actually replied back to me. You can pull it up online. But I responded to him and was just like, hey, just finished his biography. He said, oh, yeah, it's a good book. And I said, you know, I remember meeting your father in the early 2000s at each.

there was some sort of video game that he did a presentation of. And then I looked for it and I found the video of the Robin Williams. This autobiography is great. So there was this game's sphere. And it was by a very famous guy. Spore. Spore. I remember sport.

Spore. Yeah, Spore was Sid Meyer, right? The civilization guy. Sid. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And so I was at E3. So Spore, the idea was you created life.

Like you created a new life form. And then it was this virtual world. And you'd sort of send your creation out into the world and see how it flourished. It was like an evolution, natural selection themed game. So here is Robin Williams. All right. He's designing his own creature. And he just, freestyles.

this and he's hilarious. Yeah, I, I interviewed him once. You interviewed Robin Williams. Yeah, the movie, What Dreams May Come. I was working as the film editor for the Daily Brew in at UCLA at that point. And so he agreed, he wanted to do a panel just with college journalists. So it was me and it was a girl from USC and like one other, like an LMU reporter, around a table.

And he just went for like 45 minutes nonstop. Everything's a joke. Everything's a voice. He's doing bits. He's playing it to this guy. It was relentless. Like, you could barely get a question in because he was just doing like, now he's doing the Gandhi voice and now he's doing the Mrs. Doubtfire and now he's doing this.

And he's playing with everybody's microphones. And, I mean, it was just, it must have been so exhausting to be him because he was on all the time like that. And that movie was based on a novel that he read, I think. And it was, yeah, and he, it's actually a really interesting movie about the afterlife. and he in and what the biography of Robin Williams and I'm addicted to biographies. There it is. There's my old blog talking about Robloose. There it is.

He fell in love with that book. It was a passion project for him like Patch and these other things he did. He was had this tension. Do I want to be commercially successful and or do I want to be doing these projects? And he actually had a bit of an ego. about the guy who played Ace Ventura coming onto the scene. Jim Carrey being the wild bombastic guy

who obviously cribbed a little bit of Robin Williams-Stick on the margins, I'm sure. And he's like, oh, my God, this guy's so big. He's doing the mask. He's doing this, all this stuff. He's the zany, bombastic, you know, changing characters, you know, physical comedian. But Robin wanted to also do things that matter to him

and he wanted to do things that were a little bit more expansive. And he had a run of just really bad box office, you know, things that. Duds in there and the Jack that Francis Ford Copeland movie sort of infamous. And yeah. Just tons of like Bicentennial Man's Mansion, which I watched my daughter and I quite liked. I could see where he was going with it. It's probably not executed perfectly. But he wanted to do these kind of soulful things.

And then he started to hit some goodwill hunting, obviously. And he hit one other. Awakenings, he got panned by some people and other people loved it. It was like very polarizing and that one hurt his feelings too. So he was constantly and then he did one where he played like a serial killer, but obviously Ms. Doubtfire broke out. So Ms. Dalfire got him back in the game and then Goodwell Hunting. But if you look at his arc of his career, lots of crazy choices.

And the other one that was really interesting, it goes into the biography, is his embracing of the Aladdin character, the genie. But then he was also distraught because they kind of used his character without permission. And he got in a big battle with Disney over and had a lot of bad feelings that they started using him. And like he said, I just don't want to do products. Don't want to do products. They had impersonators who could sort of do a Robin Williams voice and they would put the genie in everything. If you remember after Aladdin, it was such a huge smash hit, direct to video sequels, video games,

commercials and he wouldn't come back and do the voice so they would just have guys who could do the like, or her, you know, like do the Robin Williams voice and that, that bothered. Yeah. And supposedly to get back in his good graces, I read this in another biography, the guy who is the head of, the person who was the head of Disney gave him a Picasso. Wow. Is that true? Yes.

they gave him a Picasso or something to kind of bridge the gap and get him back. It's Michael Eisner. Yeah, but Michael. And then they're ready to saying, Robin received a Picasso painting as an apology and that he felt insulted by receiving the Picasso. He felt insulted by Michael Isner, gifting him of the Picasso. We made hundreds of millions of profit off those toys instead of paying you fairly. Here's a Picasso.

You should be happy. We're even doing that. That's apparently the Robin Lewis book. Yeah. I thought maybe a nice gesture. sending a Picasso? I'll take a Picasso. I guess he's saying I'd rather have the check for the merch than the gift.

But yeah. Oh, maybe it was Katzenberg. Now I'm saying maybe it was Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the head of Disney. Studios. Reisner was the head of the Walt Disney Company. I got to ask, I know Jeffrey. I got to ask Katzenberg about that story. Anyway, you should definitely, I highly recommend this biography to everybody.

And what dreams they come? A great movie. Polarizing. It's very, but it was very ahead of its time with the visual effects. Like, they used computer animation to put him in this sort of like paint world where he's interacting with a painting inside it. It looks for 99, you're like, this is amazing. He was a big into visual effects and just groundbreaking technology, as you saw from him doing the video games to doing this. He was, he named his daughter Zelda.

Right, from the legend after the video game. Yeah, Legend of Zelda. So he was just another one of these losses, you know. I just sometimes I just think like Steve Jobs dying too young, Robin Williams dying too young. I would just love to have those guys around. Maybe it's selfish. But man, they were just, those two guys meant a lot to me.

The ones that really hit me were like Phil Hartman and Chris Farley, when both of them died. I think I was in college for both of those. And that was really sad. Yeah, those are rough too. Yeah, balushi before that and all of those. All right, listen, another amazing twist is in the can. We'll see you next time.

Bye bye, bye, folks.