The Pentagon Wants Equity in AI Startups | E2336

Apple has launched the $1,999 iPhone Duo. Cheaper models are reportedly being pushed to spring 2027.

Apple took an existing product category that was very popular for a very long time and they reinvented it. 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. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Upwork. Upwork helps the businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work.

Post your job for free at upwork.com. Odoo, the all-in-one business platform.

Your first app is free. Get started today at odoo.com/twist.

DigitalOcean.

Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to doo.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It is Friday, September 11th, 2026. 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.

Wow.

There 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. And I came out and 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— I 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 not prepared. Like, Americans didn't think that anything like that could happen on American soil. It was shocking on a level I don't know if people who weren't around can really appreciate.

But to the camaraderie, for those next 30 days, you'd be walking around Manhattan and everybody would just say, how are you doing? How are you holding up? And Manhattan is one cacophony of never-ending symphony of horns people yelling at each other and blasting their horns. I saw somebody, like 3 to 4 days after 9/11, honk somebody, and the person got outta their car and like kind of did one of these. The other person got outta their 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.

Said, I'm sorry. I just thought you didn't see the light. 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. Um, and I basically— my entire life is bookmarked pre-9/11, post-9/11. I think about my life as like 2 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 do. 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 past— the Cold War was over. We kind of figured out racism and prejudice. And there was this idea like this, 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. There are jobs. We got through the dot-com crash. Russia's got its friends right now. Everything was going to be fine.

They're fine. Everything's going to be fine. You know, we— capitalism beat communism. The world was stable. Like, that's really— That's really— it seems crazy now, but that's really what people thought in like 1996.

Yeah, 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, um, just incredible animosity between Americans and haves and have-nots. Everybody was just— we're all positive. Hey, you're Building a company, you got rich, great. Oh, hey, I got a job and, 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 we're all in it together. We're all in it together. I would like to see some more esprit de corps, as they say in the biz. But thinking about my brother and all the firefighters I lost, my brother Josh was on the pile down there for the first 2 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.

Yeah.

Those firefighters, there 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 retraumatized 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. And all right, let's get started. But before we start, we always like to applaud Plod.

We do.

And I'll hit my button here on my lapel. I've got mine right here. Get to record the notes. And we now share our Plod notes.

We do.

We take every episode, we make a synopsis, and we share that link. Yeah, in the show notes.

It's very cool. I have— we— 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 a lot of people asked. 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 gonna create both a summary and a transcript. So if you wanna 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 wanna 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—

A letter.

more robust or less robust summary depending on what was most important to you. You could do all kinds of stuff with Plaud. We're putting it in the description. So just look in the description below if you're watching this on YouTube and find the link and it'll take you right to the Plaud synopsis of this show. And you could go to plaud.ai/twist. And if you use the code TWIST, we'll also get you 10% off a Plaud 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 Plaid now works with your Zoom meetings.

Great.

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. Um, 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 Plaud 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.plaud.ai, by the way, if you want to go use that.

All right, cool.

We got to talk about this Pentagon deal. Uh, the Pentagon is in talks to lend FluidStack $5 billion for AI infrastructure, Jason. It would be the largest loan the department's Office of Strategic Capital has ever made. FluidStack being advised on that loan application by Erebor Bank, the brand new national bank from Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, 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 US supply chain and manufacturing capacities behind the components that go into making data center. Lands just days after FluidStack closed a $1.5 billion Wait a second.

The—

you're saying the Pentagon?

The Pentagon, yes. The US military.

Wants to invest in a startup?

They want— yes, they're gonna— they wanna put, uh, about $5 billion into, uh—

That makes no sense.

FluidStack.

They wanna own equity in the startup as opposed to just buying its product. Truth is, most of the big popular AI models can handle your workloads just fine, and your performance and your cost, that comes down to your infrastructure more than your model selection. And the best way to keep system running fast while staying affordable is with DigitalOcean's inference engine. DigitalOcean built their entire cloud platform from the ground up specifically with AI in mind. That means you get a serious performance upgrade without stitching together services from a dozen different vendors or getting hit with a surprise bill at the end of the month, which keeps happening to me. DigitalOcean system is already powering some of the biggest and most popular AI applications Character AI runs over a billion queries every single day on DigitalOcean, and they cut their cost per token in half while doing so. So here's your call to action. If you want to understand what building on a true AI-native platform looks like, go to do.co/twist. Start building on the DigitalOcean AI-native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. That's do.co/twist.

We're seeing sort of 2 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 US 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, 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 wanna 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 our government competing against venture capitalists. So they're competing against Andreessen 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 a year, give it to existing venture firms, ask them to give you a discounted carry for patriotic reasons. Like, go to Andreessen Horowitz, 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, and that— it's the patriotic thing to do for the American people. But even then, it's convoluted. We want 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 OpenAI or Grok 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 the contracts, well, why did we give the contract to OpenAI versus Anthropic if we own 5% of one? It just adds conflicts.

Right.

All the way down. This does not seem like a great idea to me. Uh, 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.

And but we're paying for it here, right? We're not getting it for free.

Yes, it's a loan. Like the Pentagon is giving $5 billion to FluidStack, is my understanding of this.

As a loan to build out their data centers.

That's— Well, it's a loan to finance the infrastructure that allows for more data centers. Is, is, is what the story says.

I mean, framed as a loan. Yeah, we did do—

Stack $5 billion. I mean, that's how, that's how they're saying it. And it's— they're banks involved.

So if it's in fact a loan, there is some precedent for this. Um, we did, um, a series of energy loans, famously to Solyndra, if you remember that failed company. I believe Fisker 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. So maybe, but we got a lot of debt already. So it just seems overly complicated. And why can't FluidStack just get a loan?

I—

that's what I don't understand. Like, there's so many— 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 US taxpayer. Uh, yeah, I, I don't— I know FluidStack does have similar structures. Uh, Google, for example, owns a potential 14% equity stake in exchange for guaranteeing FluidStack lease obligations on some of their other data center campuses. So Maybe there is a warrant situation here.

Whoa, wait a second. So Google—

Yes.

Gave a loan and got 14% warrants?

Yeah. Google holds warrants for a potential 14% equity stake in exchange for guaranteeing FluidStack lease obligations on key data center campuses. This is from an Ars Technica article the other day.

So the US 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 warrant— 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. Um, 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 capitalist 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 sundae, cherry on top, would be, I get the ability to buy some warrants. So if this 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. If it becomes worth $10 billion, $1.4 billion. So there's like another $1.4 billion here. Yeah, okay.

Like if it's a $10 billion company.

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. Like, so each group has their specialty. Uh, 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. So Congress—

I always get them together. The House and 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 gotta tell you, man, less government, less involvement, less blocking M&A. Like, we, we don't need more of this socialistic, you know— Yeah, that's what'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, 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 gonna do? They have to go to the government to get a sweetheart deal maybe, or I don't know. And it just seems like unnecessary. 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 gonna 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, uh, 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, uh, you know, a Trump PAC? Like, who, who's greasing the wheels to get a $5 billion loan?

Exactly.

And even if they didn't, the appearance of impropriety now happens when You know, $5 billion drops from the sky.

Yeah.

So it just— it's a bad look for the company. Bad look for— it seems convoluted for the government. Why are we doing this? The government's got enough they gotta deal with.

There's plenty going on. The government doesn't need to be funding AI.

Bad idea in my mind. But hey, listen, I— 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 gonna rely on a few different tools to run your business, and then you're gonna try to duct tape them together. Yeah, and that might be a fine placeholder until you you finish your MVP, but this will get expensive and messy fast. When you're scaling, that's when you need Odoo, O-D-O-O, Odoo, the all-in-one management software that already has 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies. Odoo 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. All of that is right where You need them. And these tools are in constant communication with each other, so you don't have to log out of one system into another and then reconcile the information by using different apps and spreadsheets.

Ugh.

When you make a sale, you want that invoice created instantly, and then you want your inventory to get an update. If you're still cobbling together your back office across 5 different apps, get started today at odoo.com/twist, and your first app is free. That's odoo.com/twist.

Apple has launched the $1,999 iPhone Duo. Uh, it is foldable. Uh, of course, John Ternus took over from Tim Cook as the new CEO of Apple on September 1st, and in Cupertino, 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 $2,000, running up to $3,200 if you want 2 terabytes of storage.

Wow.

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 2 different sizes. Is that what I'm seeing?

Is that, is that folded and then unfolded?

Oh, it's opened and turned vertical.

Yes, that is folded and unfolded. Folded.

Yeah.

On the left there. Also, no, 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 in 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 And have a burner phone, yada yada. Um, and so I have the iPhone Air. I like it to a certain extent, but the camera sucks. Um, 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 Morin 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, product category that was very popular for a very long time. I think foldables have been around over 5 or 6 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 2 smartphones laid on top of each other.

Exactly.

And then the instances where I actually open it up and use it, I don't have too many of them. If I'm watching like short videos, it's, you know, just fine. Um, 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, um, 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, uh, 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 'em. 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 going on. Perhaps when I'm doing ChatGPT or Claude or Grok, if I had the output in one window and I have the Grok thread in the other, you know how Grok—

Sure.

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, I— 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 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, um, I don't know what app this is.

It's like, yeah, it's some sort of, it's some sort of like— Oh, I thought I knew, but now I don't.

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 Siri app brings together rich conversations across a user's Apple products. So I guess this is their ChatGPT.

Yes.

Interesting. So on the left left are my— those boxes on the left, Athena statue, light reflection, etc., permits in Greece. I think these are previous chats.

Like, these are 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— those are the history on the left in bubbles. On the right is the active chat you're on, the Athena statue. Um, that's kind of interesting. Let's go to the right one, see what the next example is. So here we have Weaving Workshop. Uh, scroll down a little bit. Is that Siri again? I guess that's like their ChatGPT competitor describing what I said earlier. Go to the next one. Let's see the next screen. Okay, so this is Notes, I think.

Um, this is write and edit with Siri virtually anywhere just by describing.

Uh, yeah, this doesn't really use the 2-screen particularly well. That's a bad example.

Meh.

Here's examples of your calendar and clock on the left, and then your messages coming in on the right. That's kind of lame. Let's see the next one. This is folding it backwards, breaking its back to have a nightstand clock.

Yeah.

That's gimmicky. Not interested. Okay, that's a 0 of 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 2 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—

Well, this is, yeah, you can be basically browsing 2 windows at once and then you can flip them around like he 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, wait, here's Slack. Here's Slack. Okay, so, okay, now this gets interesting. Um, let's see the next Slack screen. Uh, 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. Uh, okay, so this is a Zoom call or a FaceTime call on the bottom.

Mm-hmm.

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. Um, 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 this. That's where the, um, users are going to— it's going to make or break. This is— does having the 2 screens provides so much value that you open it as opposed to just using the open screen, 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. You know, does it have a 2-windowed experience and the app is actually worth doing? That's actually the interesting thing. It's absurd. It's $2,000 to $3,000 for this device.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Ridiculous. Um, and—

I mean, I, I feel like 99% of these utilities or 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 headcount 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 invoices. It's a full-time job. Thankfully, I've got the answer for you. It's called Upwork. I've used it countless times to help my businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals to do really specialized work. Obviously software development, but AI implementation, marketing, design, anything you can think of. You can cut down on all the hassles by handling the contracts and the payments inside their platforms. You don't need to become a full-time HR department. They've got over 170,000 freelance is holding that coveted 5-star rating, and that's why you can hire with complete confidence from Upwork. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.com. Upwork.com. I mean, I travel with all 3— phone, tablet, and computer.

Right.

Phone, tablet, laptop. That's the suite of devices. I don't need an—

I don't need a 4th It depends on, like, I gotta 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, if we were streaming a movie or something or playing like a casual game like you're seeing here, it is a better experience to 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 a complete ripoff.

That's bad for a phone.

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 4 iterations of the 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 Ternus, um, do something completely revolutionary like a car, um, something in healthcare 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, you know, that is like 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 would also like to see them do a television, um, because that could be, uh, and then a Sonos competitor. Like they, they have like, they still have one single speaker. They should have gone for the home automation really hard. I use UniFi 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 a—

Just more elegant and simple.

Fire TV. 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, junky version?

Yeah, if it was a significant upgrade, I think I'm— I think I might actually. I think that Apple TV sounds—

That's what John Ternus has to do is find another category, and I don't think VR/AR is it. I think that's kind of lame. Um, I do like the idea of taking videos and pictures of your kids with the glasses eventually in AR. So, but it feels like AR is still years away. Yeah, another 2 or 3 years.

And they gotta 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 want to have an agent, the agent is running on local hardware, only goes up to the cloud encrypted. And yeah, with all this data leaking happening at OpenAI 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 when this $12,000 Mac Studio comes out.

Mac Studio, exactly. That should all tie together.

Well, and I went from spending $1,500 on MacBook Airs to spending $3,000 on MacBook Pros 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, uh, that didn't come up was this story of Sam Altman telling the OpenAI employees that startup is slowing cutting-edge AI development.

Yeah, we could talk about that.

Um, I don't believe it's true. I'll just say that.

Oh, so wait, you, 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 conspiracy corner.

Yeah.

Conspiracy Cal, my alter ego, Conspiracy Cal. 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, um, to get more attention and/or to appeal to developers who have high PDoMs, 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— is it— 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 OpenAI 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, that's what—

Yeah.

See, this is 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 said 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? Like Frankenstein wasn't like, well, maybe I shouldn't have created a monster. I'll consider maybe not making another monster. He like tried to burn the guy down and ran away. You know? 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 Teamaker. He's a returning guest on the— oh, that's the studio behind apps like Outrank, Revit, and SuperX. Returning guest to the show. We're bringing him back for more. Thibault Louis-Lucas, thanks for joining us. Fantastic.

Welcome to the show.

Wonderful to have you back. So today Thibault is here. He's not just hanging out as a guest, although we love to have him and see him. He's going to show us his system of AI agents he built that watches his product's codebase, 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 belly, Jason. This dear Mr. Musk, and so it's it's both incredibly scary for me, but I think it's going to be my most serious and ambitious projects. We'll see. All right, let's see how we go.

Grokbot 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 GrokBot. It's called Squad, and that's an agentic platform, I guess, like everybody. And today I'm gonna try to share a few workflows. On Squad that you can just apply with Groq bots, with Claude code, or anything where you run your agents. The one thing that I absolutely love with my workflows, I guess, is this one. I actually asked 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 It's incredibly hard for me since I'm very active on socials to know what to talk about on socials. We went from 3 years ago to 1 or 2 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 7 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 2 of my products are working together. It's going to use Revid, which is an AI video-making product, and it will create a video that explains 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 Affiliates Weekly Email. Basically, it works a little 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 affiliates, 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 update 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 Jira, with Slack, with like anything where you have a routine.

So who would 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 €1,000 to €2,000 per month.

So you had, what were they, a product manager, a copywriter? What was their skill set?

That would be a copywriter with some like some business understanding. It's hard to find, but like right now on X, if you scroll X, you have plenty of those people that are very talented.

I've done that job.

So that's amazing.

So 25 $4,000 in savings and you get to do it continuously. And do you read it before it goes out?

Right now, not anymore. Honestly, I did that—

So you're not reading it and it's going out to your affiliates?

Okay.

Bold.

I did that—

Lon, you had a question.

First 8 weeks and then I stopped.

Okay. So 8 weeks, human in the loop, but now you feel confident enough. Pretty good.

Yeah. My question was like, 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 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 gonna do mistakes. And you can just tell it basically, like you would just take screenshots 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, that's the hard part. And once you understand this, it, it gets very easy.

I think it's like a rule of 3, Jason, in my experience. Like by the 3rd time the Grok bot is doing the thing, I, I really don't need to give it notes. It's like the 1st time, the 2nd time I gotta be like, okay, well I don't like this and you picked the wrong clip and this doesn't link up or that doesn't look good. By the 3rd or 4th time, it's ready to go on its own.

That feels like magic if you can do 3 times and done.

Yeah.

Pretty good.

Oh, it's amazing. Yeah.

You, you ask about, um, how I would do this Without the agent, but I think 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. Affiliates is interesting because it always leaves a mark. Like affiliates, they generally use this little tag in their 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 affiliate codes on the web address of your competitors and trying to do outreach to those affiliates to just turn them into your own affiliates. That's something that it's incredibly time-consuming. I would not do that on my own. Like I would not hire a team to do 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 Groq Bots, but I think you can with— because all these together, like if you run all these, it's gonna burn so much token. It's like there's no way you can run these on a $200 per month subscription with Codex or Claude 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 other products, but please start stacking your AI subscriptions. So in Squads, you can just add multiple Codex subscriptions. I even have a Groq one, a Claude 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 worth of tokens according to this person's claim. um, for $200, which means to me, Lon, these companies are basically doing price dumping similar to what Uber did, uh, or DoorDash did. Like, we'll make this so cheap that you'll— you 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 OpenAI allowed it, it, Anthropic had to revert their decision and it's now allowed again. And so it's completely compliant and you cannot get banned on this. But when I share on X that I'm stacking 3 $200 per month subscriptions, people go crazy. Like, how are you burning that much tokens? But I think that's because you are not using agents at their full potential. You need to run those workflows. And what people don't understand is that you Just dump your all 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 on any agent platform.

You don't have to 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 Ads 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 like, I'm a very super noob with Google Ads. And so it would give the exact step-by-step, 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 works 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 6 months to get in a groove with them, and just saying, well, I'll just upfront that with 5 hours of, you know, AI agent testing.

Mm-hmm.

But when I get to that 6th hour, to your point of like maybe 3 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, Ashra, 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, 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, yeah, in tokens on this one job, $100 a month, $10 a week, who knows, something de minimis by comparison.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely the case. And yeah, there's amazing, there is no way when this, this works because it's, it's not prompting, it's systems. Like you, you take time putting those systems in place and then they run forever. It's definitely not the case. You cannot just get get stuck into prompting Claude 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 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 will 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 7 other SaaS products, but Squad is the product like GrokBot, or I guess Claude Agents, or OpenAI's product, um, Codex— no, not Codex. They have another—

ChatGPT Work now. Yeah.

It's ChatGPT Work, I guess, would be the equivalent here, or having an OpenCLAW, Hermes, etc. So who, who are you putting your Squad, uh, who's 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 projects at the same time, he's already kind of successful. Like he has $1K to $20K per month in earnings on other products. And because he's a web founder, he can integrate many, many services and it has 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.so, very easy. And about me, I'm Thibault 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, Thibault.

Look forward to having you on again to Getting lots of, lots of good founders together to, to put some, some hacks together for everybody. So I'm still in love with, um, Lanterns. They're 4 episodes in. This guy, uh, Kyle—

Kyle Chandler is playing Hal Jordan. Aaron Pierre is, uh, 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 ring's 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— nonplussed. Is that the word? Nonplussed?

Nonplussed.

Nonplussed, 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, Yeah. He plays like a cocky, manipulative, fearless, um, possible Lantern replacement really well as well. And then there's another guy who plays Sinestro.

Yeah, I don't, I don't actually know that actor who's playing. Let me look up his name. He's like a new face to me and he is killing it.

Pull up the Sinestro from this. I don't— yeah, we're going through every possible character.

He is killing it.

The Sinestro guy has an edge to him.

Ulrich Thompson is his name.

Okay. So they debut Sinestro here. If you just click on the first image. There he is. In a prison cell. And he's left the Lantern Corps to become part of the— there's other rings and other ring colors. He's in, I think, the yellow one.

Yes.

He becomes—

Somehow he's—

The most famous Yellow Lantern, Sinestro, which is like they use fear instead of will.

Yes. And he was previously Hal Jordan's, I guess, mentor slash—

Mentor, right.

Yeah. So he plays in prison a— and I think they must have been inspired by Silence of the Lambs, where he is in prison doing like a back and forth with 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 Clarice—

Starling.

Starling and Hannibal Lecter 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, he's going to get out of that cell, and all hell's going to 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 Jon Stewart, and they— it's a— they did a really good job 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.

She's a legend. But 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 Green Lantern. Just get the ring off of Hal Jordan, say the lines, and it's yours. And it's created this weird tension. It's like it's doing the buddy, cop thing where 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 Macon, 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.

Was he from Justice League? or something? What was he in?

I believe Garrett Dillahunt is from— he, he was in Justified. Let me look that up.

He plays like a really good cowboy-type actor.

Yeah, Dead City.

Great show.

Yeah.

Makes— gives me hope for the DC Universe. Um, although this came after the guy from Guardians of the Galaxy took over.

James Gunn.

He still approved it. This isn't James Gunn's, um, project, but he allowed it to go through apparently.

This was, this was already in the works pre— I mean, Damon Lindelof is really the mind behind this show. He's got some co-creators. But, uh, and he also did Watchmen, another fantastic HBO series based on a DC—

I think there's something about what, um, James Gunn is doing where he's allowing the Batman series with Robert Pattinson, this one, and then doing his own, that it's kind of working, maybe, uh, to have a little diversity and not one core, you know, uh, timeline.

That's so true of just DC Comics as a company. Like Marvel, there's 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 there being like 2 different Batman shows or whatever, you know?

Yeah, the Harley Quinn animated show is also a lot of fun, by the way.

What else you got on off duty? You got an off duty for us? I did mine. Maybe yours. I'm still—

Sure. Well, I'll tell you about another great show that I highly recommend. It's on Apple TV+. It's just back for season 2, but you can go back and watch season 1. It's called Dark Matter. The concept is that Joel Edgerton is a physicist, and 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 tra— 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.

Wow.

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 what the whole story begins he is kidnapped by a double of his from another universe that 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's Joel Edgerton, who's married to that girl, who's Jennifer Connelly now.

Wow.

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 let go get in the box and find his way back to his universe.

So Freaky Friday. It's like a version of Freaky Friday, except it's versions of yourself cloned.

And right, and it becomes this sort of between-universes war between all the different Joel Edgertons. 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 you get— it's a story ultimately 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— 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.

There was a movie, Multiplicity, right?

Well, Multiplicity is Michael Keaton creates multiple versions of himself. He clones himself. And so that is sort of—

Yeah, similar.

That is sort of what happens. Like, he ends up having to live in this world with a bunch of Joel Edgerton clones, but it's more playing around with the multiverse quantum state aspect of it. There'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 'cause he's simultaneously playing all these characters. like 4 or 5 different versions. 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 plotline, which is we know how to like put 2 people on the screen at the same time. Let's make a movie out of it. We'd rather see Robin Williams in this one. Yeah, maybe Robin Williams.

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, it is kind of a visual effects showcase where it's like, look, we have 5 Michael Keatons and they're all interacting in one frame, which was a big deal in the '90s.

You know, I, I just thought of this. I, you know, always was a huge fan of Robin Williams, 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 can pull it up on the screen to listen to. And it really, yeah, I guess it was a New York Times bestseller.

Hmm.

Really just goes into his life. I didn't know that he had gone to the famous art school in New York. Juilliard, I guess.

Juilliard, yeah.

Yeah. And just his entire life of just— and then Mork and Mindy, and that didn't work out, and his struggles there. But I grew up on Mork 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 this 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 E3. There was some sort of video game that he did a presentation of.

Hmm.

And then I looked for it and I found the video of the— Robin Williams. This autobiography is great. So there was this game Sphere, um, and it was by a very famous, uh, guy, um, oh, Spore. S-P-O-R-E.

I remember Spore. Yeah, Spore was Sid Meier, right? The Civilization guy.

Sid Meier. Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I was at E3.

So Spore, the idea was you created life, like you created a new life 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 interviewed him once.

You interviewed Robin Williams?

Yeah, the movie What Dreams May Come. I was working as the film editor for the Daily Bruin 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 one other, an LMU reporter around a table. And he just went for 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. You could barely get a question in because he was just doing—

Nice.

Now he's doing the Gandhi voice and now he's doing Mrs. Doubtfire and now he's doing this and he's playing with everybody's microphones. And I mean, it 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. It's definitely based on a novel. Yeah.

And he—

it's actually a really interesting movie about the afterlife. And he, in what the biography of Robin Williams— and I am addicted to biographies. There it is.

There's my old blog talking about Robin Williams.

There it is. He, um, fell in love with that book. It was a passion project for him, like Patch and these other things he did.

Yeah.

He was— had this tension. Do I want to be commercially successful, and/or do I want to be, um, doing these projects? And he, he actually had a bit of an ego about, um, the guy who played Ace Ventura coming onto the scene.

Jim Carrey.

Jim Carrey being the wild, bombastic guy who obviously cribbed a little bit of Robin Williams' shtick 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, changing characters, physical comedian. But Robin wanted to also do things that mattered 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—

Yeah, a couple of duds in there. And then Jack, that Francis Ford Coppola movie, sort of infamous.

And yeah, just tons of like—

there were some—

Bicentennial Man's mentioned, which I watched with my daughter and I quite liked. Um, 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, um, he started to hit some. Good Will Hunting, obviously.

Sure.

Um, Awakening. Hit one other one.

Awakenings, he got panned by some people, and other people loved it. It was very polarizing, and that one hurt his feelings too. So he was constantly— and then he did one where he played a serial killer, but obviously— He stopped doing that. Ms. Doubtfire broke out. So Ms. Doubtfire got him back in the game, and then Good Will 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 the Aladdin character, um, 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 it, had a lot of bad feelings that they started using him in. Like, he said, I just don't want to do products, don't want to do product sales.

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, you know, like do the Robin Williams voice. And that, that bothered him.

Yeah. And supposedly, to get back in his good graces, I read this in another biography, the guy who was the head of— the person who was the head of Disney gave him a Picasso.

Wow.

Yes, uh, uh, they gave him a Picasso or something to kind of bridge the gap. Yep, and get him back.

It's Michael Eisner. Uh, yeah, but Michael Eisner— and then they're ready to say, uh, Robin received a Picasso painting as an apology, and that he felt insulted by receiving the Picasso. He felt insulted by Michael Eisner gifting him 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 Williams quote.

Yeah, I thought maybe a nice gesture sending a Picasso.

I mean, I'll take a Picasso. I guess he's saying I'd rather have the check for the merch than the than the gift. But yeah. Oh, maybe it was Katzenberg. Now now I'm saying maybe it was Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the head of Disney Studios. Eisner was the head of the Walt Disney Company.

I gotta ask. I know Jeffrey. I gotta I gotta ask Katzenberg about that story.

For sure.

Anyway. Anyway, you should definitely— I highly recommend this biography to everybody.

And What Dreams May 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 big into visual effects and Um, 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 a— it's 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—

Yeah.

Man, they were 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 were rough too.

Yeah.

Belushi 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.