The Pentagon Wants Equity in AI Startups | E2336

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 6:41 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  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 O D O O dot com slash twist. Digital Ocean. Want to see what building on a true AI native platform looks like? Head to do.co slash twist to start building on Digital Ocean's AI native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.

• 0:54Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't even imagine.

• 1:16Jason Calacanis?

  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

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:27Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:55Jason Calacanis?

  It was visceral.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  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, can really appreciate.

• 3:07Jason Calacanis?

  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 people yelling at each other and blasting their horns.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:25Jason Calacanis?

  I saw somebody like three to four days after nine 11, honked 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?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:39Jason Calacanis?

  The other person put their hands up. They walked up to each other, they hugged each other.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  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, 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 nine 11, post nine 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

• 4:21Speaker 00

  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, the Cold War was over. We kind of figured out racism and prejudice. There was this idea like this, everything was just going to be sort of easier from now on. And then nine 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.

• 4:43Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:58Jason Calacanis?

  We figured everything out.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:59Jason Calacanis?

  We balanced the budget. We, their jobs, we got through the dot com crash.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and it was, you know, the 90s were just such a magical decade. Hip hop, the internet.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 5:24Jason Calacanis?

  Magazine publishing. I just experienced this incredible twenties. My twenties were peak.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:30Jason Calacanis?

  America. And we didn't have social media. We didn't have this 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, I, 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. 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 two months afterwards.

• 6:13Jason Calacanis?

  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, 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, the amount of people show up for the funeral, which firefighters, you know, hundreds show up when, when, when a brother goes down, it was just really hard. So they just scheduled them over a year. It just never ended. And my brother, my poor brother had to be re-traumatized every weekend as part of the

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  We do.

• 7:14Jason Calacanis?

  And I'll hit my button here on my lapel.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  I've got mine right here.

• 7:19Jason Calacanis?

  We now share our Plod notes.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  We do.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

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

• 7:26Speaker 00

  It's very cool. I have, we, I'm, I'm recording our show right now via this Plod pin that you see on me. It's getting, it's, it's hooked into the Zoom. This was a question 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 Plod.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  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 Plod synopsis of the show. And you could go to plaud.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.

• 8:31Jason Calacanis?

  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 Plod just does it automatically for us. Unbelievable.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:24Jason Calacanis?

  Very cool.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  We got to talk about this Pentagon deal. 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 Andro 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 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 round led by

• 10:03Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second. You're saying the Pentagon?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  The Pentagon, yes, the US military.

• 10:09Jason Calacanis?

  Wants to invest in a startup?

• 10:10Speaker 00

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

• 10:16Jason Calacanis?

  That makes no sense.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Fluid Stack.

• 10:18Jason Calacanis?

  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 your system running fast while staying affordable is with Digital Ocean's inference engine. Digital Ocean 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 the surprise bill at the end of the month, which keeps happening to me. Digital Ocean's system is already powering some of the biggest and most popular AI applications.

• 11:01Jason Calacanis?

  Character AI runs over a billion queries every single day on Digital Ocean. 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 Digital Ocean AI native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. That's do.co/twist.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  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 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?

• 11:55Jason Calacanis?

  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,

• 12:41Jason Calacanis?

  we're gonna 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.

• 13:25Jason Calacanis?

  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 wanna 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?

• 14:10Jason Calacanis?

  It just adds 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?

• 14:23Speaker 00

  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

• 14:32Jason Calacanis?

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

• 14:34Speaker 00

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

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  As a loan to build out their data centers.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Well, as a loan to, to, to finance the infrastructure that allows for more data centers is, is, is what the story says.

• 14:52Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, framed as a loan, we did do

• 14:56Speaker 00

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

• 15:01Jason Calacanis?

  If it's in fact a loan, there is some precedent for this.

• 15:09Jason Calacanis?

  We did 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 in 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 gonna give a loan, like we did to Tesla, if we had warrants to buy 10% of Tesla,

• 15:53Jason Calacanis?

  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 Fluid Stack just get a loan? That's what I don't understand. There are 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.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  The US taxpayer. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. Fluid Stack does have similar structures. Google, for example, holds 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.

• 16:51Jason Calacanis?

  Whoa, wait a second. So Google

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:53Jason Calacanis?

  gave a loan and got 14% warrants?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:09Jason Calacanis?

  So the US government doesn't get 14%, but Google does.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know.

• 17:13Jason Calacanis?

  So that

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Wait, we're speculating. The, the article does not let us know what warrant, like, I'm just saying it is possible.

• 17:19Jason Calacanis?

  But this proves my point.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:21Jason Calacanis?

  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 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 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 guess, the ability to buy some warrants.

• 18:04Jason Calacanis?

  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 because we're $10 billion, $1.4 billion. So there's like another $1.4 billion here, like if it was a $10 billion company, 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. Like, so each group has their speciality. Maybe not, but if we were gonna do this,

• 18:46Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Congress.

• 18:58Jason Calacanis?

  Congress.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  So Congress Together. The House and Senate together is Congress.

• 19:02Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 19:24Jason Calacanis?

  Less blocking M and A like we, we don't need more of this socialistic, you know.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:31Jason Calacanis?

  It'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 Fluid Stack's competitors now going to 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. So why are we doing convoluted things like this?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:05Jason Calacanis?

  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 PAC, like who, 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, $5 billion drops from the sky. So it just, it's a bad look for the company, bad look for, it's, it seems convoluted for the government. Why are we doing this? The government's got enough they got to deal with.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  There's plenty going on. The government doesn't need to be, I think AI.

• 20:53Jason Calacanis?

  Bad, bad idea on my mind, but hey, listen, I, who knows? This is just a breaking news story. We're commenting on it.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's move on.

• 20:59Jason Calacanis?

  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 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

• 21:43Jason Calacanis?

  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. Oh, 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 five different apps, get started today at Odoo.com/twist and your first app is free. That's O D O O dot com slash twist.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Apple has launched the $1,999 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 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 two 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.

• 22:46Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on a second. Go back to that screen there. There's two different sizes? Is that what I'm seeing?

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Is that, is that folded and then unfolded?

• 22:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's opened and turned vertical.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Yes, that is, that is folded and unfolded, folded, uh, yeah, on the left there. Uh, also no, oh, no standard iPhone 18 this fall. Cheaper models are reportedly being pushed to spring 2027. Uh, so what do you think of iPhone Duo? Are you going to rush out and get a double sided, uh, foldable iPhone?

• 23:16Jason Calacanis?

  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 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

• 23:57Jason Calacanis?

  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 five or six years now.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:20Jason Calacanis?

  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 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 kinds 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

• 25:00Jason Calacanis?

  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 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.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:27Jason Calacanis?

  And I don't have to switch between them, like those things. So, you know, those could be interesting to me. If the, 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?

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 25:46Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I mean, I, yeah, I, 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.

• 26:22Jason Calacanis?

  So here on the right, we have, um, I don't know what app this is.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  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 on the.

• 26:33Jason Calacanis?

  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 brand. So I guess this is their ChatGPT.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:46Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. So on the left are my, those boxes on the left, Athena statue, light reflection, et cetera.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Previous chats, like these are the questions you've asked in the past, permits in Greece, you know, like this, somebody traveling.

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  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. 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.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  This is write and edit with Siri virtually anywhere just by describing, uh, yeah.

• 27:36Jason Calacanis?

  This doesn't really use the two screen particularly well. That's a bad example. Meh. Here's, uh, examples I, uh, of your calendar and clock on the left and then your messages coming in on the right. That's kind of lame. See the next one. This is folding it. Backwards, breaking its back to have a nightstand clock?

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:59Jason Calacanis?

  That's a gimmicky, not interested. Okay, that's a zero 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 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 go back down to this one, I think maybe had something. Is there?

• 28:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but I don't see an application here yet. I see no application. Okay, wait, all right, here's Slack.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Your Slack, yeah.

• 28:40Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  I think maybe somebody sharing their screen?

• 29:10Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  That's the transcript on the right and the video, and you can see the timeline at the bottom on the left.

• 29:29Jason Calacanis?

  That's, that's where the users are gonna, is gonna make or break this is, does having the two screens provide so much value that you open it as opposed to just using the open, 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 two 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.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 29:59Jason Calacanis?

  Ridiculous.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:12Jason Calacanis?

  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

• 30:55Jason Calacanis?

  the payments inside their platforms. You don't need to become a full-time HR department. They've got over 170,000 freelancers holding that coveted five-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 U.P.W.O.R.K. dot com. Upwork.com. I mean, I travel with all three, phone, tablet, and computer.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Right. Phone, tablet, laptop. That's the suite of devices. I don't need, I don't need a fourth niche in there. I don't.

• 31:33Jason Calacanis?

  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, we, we're 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.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:56Jason Calacanis?

  So I'm not price sensitive, but I also don't want to get ripped off. $3,000 is like complete ripoff.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  For a phone.

• 32:05Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe FaceTime looks interesting. I don't know. I, I, 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 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 healthcare that's revolutionary. I know it sounds silly, but I would like to see them make a suite of health products that

• 32:48Jason Calacanis?

  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, because that could be, 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 unified products now. I use Dropcam, and I used to use Ring doorbells,

• 33:29Jason Calacanis?

  and I use Sonos still. I would rather have like an Apple suite of high-res speakers that were easier to use.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 33:39Jason Calacanis?

  I would rather have an Apple TV instead of a Samsung or a Sony or whatever I have.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have an Amazon Fire TV, and it's pretty crap. I'm sure Apple would improve on the Fire TV model, yeah.

• 33:50Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 34:00Speaker 00

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

• 34:05Jason Calacanis?

  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, so, but it feels like AR is still years away, like another two or three years.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:31Jason Calacanis?

  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

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:58Jason Calacanis?

  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 on this $12,000 Mac Studio.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Studio, exactly. It should all tie together.

• 35:27Jason Calacanis?

  And I, I went from spending $1,500 on MacBook Air, to 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 OpenAI, OpenAI employees that startup is slowing cutting-edge AI development.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, we could talk about that.

• 35:50Jason Calacanis?

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

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Oh, so wait, you, you don't think Sam Altman said this in the meeting, or you don't think he means it?

• 35:58Jason Calacanis?

  I think he might have been floating it.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Okay, all right.

• 36:02Jason Calacanis?

  I'm, again, back to conspiracy corner, conspiracy cow, my alter ego, conspiracy cow. Conspiracy cow 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?

• 36:44Speaker 00

  It says, "In a company-wide meeting this week, Altman told..."

• 36:48Jason Calacanis?

  So we don't have a quote.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  I don't have a direct quote. Here's, 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 we're reporting.

• 37:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, see, this is being, 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, 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 gonna slow down. You all can do whatever you want.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. And again, not to put my tinfoil hat on too tightly, but if you really believed, if you have 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? Like they're not acting like people who are scared of their invention.

• 38:26Jason Calacanis?

  Really intelligent people can run away with it.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Let's get to our guest at long last. He is the founder of Temaker. 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. Tebow Louis Lucas, thanks for joining us.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Wonderful to have you back.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  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 as 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.

• 39:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So this seems very tactical and also very practical.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Quite practical, Jason. Yes.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty excited to share that, especially because I think I'm going against your buddy, Jason. This dear Mr. Musk. And so it's, it's both incredibly scary for me, but I think it's gonna be my most serious and ambitious projects. We'll see where it's gonna go.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  It's a Grok bot killer? That's what you're saying?

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Exactly. So a bit about me, I'm basically managing seven project 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 going against Grok bot. 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

• 40:17Speaker 03

  that you can just apply with Grok bots, with Cloud Code or anything that where you run your agents. The one thing that I absolutely love with my workflows, I guess, is, 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 incredibly hard for me, since I'm very active on socials, to know what to talk about on socials. Like we, we went from three years ago to one or two commits per day on our products to today, I think we have 50 commits,

• 40:57Speaker 03

  50, 50 new things coming every day on each product. And so of course you cannot talk about all of them. And so what, 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's gonna pick the most relevant and high value feature, especially the customer facing features. And it's gonna use one of my other products. And, and I love when two of my products are working together. It's gonna use Revit, which is an AI video making product. And it will create a video that explain the crazy thing about this new feature that I will be able to then use everywhere.

• 41:41Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So just to explain here, and you're gonna actually run this now, you have your agents finding new features, building new features, and then making the marketing for them.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  That would take about an hour to run. So I did that before this call. That's, 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, 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, to my agents. It's very similar to this one, like the ICA's weekly email. Basically, it's, it works a bit the same, like tons of things are happening and you have, you have tons of people that you want to update every week. It can be your users, your ICA's, your team, or anyone else.

• 42:35Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 42:49Speaker 03

  This agent is gonna work pretty much the same. It's gonna look at everything that I push on my repository, every new updates that I did on my products. And it's gonna 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, with GitHub, but I guess you can do that with Jira, with Slack, with like anything where you have your team working.

• 43:13Jason Calacanis?

  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, what type of time would that take you?

• 43:26Speaker 03

  I used to have a dedicated person in India doing that for between a thousand to 2,000 euros per month.

• 43:35Jason Calacanis?

  So you had, and what were they? A product manager, a copywriter? What, what was their skillset?

• 43:41Speaker 03

  That would be a copywriter with some, like some business understanding. It's, it's, 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.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  I've done that job.

• 43:53Jason Calacanis?

  So that's amazing. So $24,000 in savings.

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  And you get to do it continuously. And do you read it before it goes out?

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Right now, I'm not anymore. Honestly, I, I did that.

• 44:04Jason Calacanis?

  Stop reading it and it's going out to your affiliates. Okay.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  I did that.

• 44:08Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, you had a question.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  First eight weeks and then it stopped.

• 44:11Jason Calacanis?

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

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. My question was like, what's the, what's the refinement? What's the fine tuning process like? You're, you're, 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, like what's the process there? And how long does it take until the agent is just ready to knock it out itself?

• 44:33Speaker 03

  It's, I think it's exactly how you would do it with a human, basically. Like people have, people that have this assumption that it would work very differently with an AI agents, but it's the same basically. Like you, you hand over the work. You try to be as descriptive as possible. And then the AI is gonna do mistakes and you, you can just tell it's basically like you will, you would just take screenshots of, 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, it's very confusing for people that UI is working like this more and more right now. Like if you work with agents,

• 45:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I think it's like a rule of three, Jason, in my experience, like by the third time the Grok bot is doing the thing, I, I really don't need to give it notes. It's like the first time, the second 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 third or fourth time, it's ready to go on its own.

• 45:41Jason Calacanis?

  That feels like magic. If you can do three times and done, pretty good.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Oh, it's amazing. Yeah.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  You, you ask about how are we do this without the agent? But I think, I think the most interesting case is where you would not do it without the agents. And so there are just plenty of things. There, there is this little hack. ICA is, is interesting because it always leaves a mark. Like ICA's, 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 ICA code

• 46:26Speaker 03

  on the web address of your competitors and trying to do outreach to those ICA's to just turn them into your own ICA's. That's something that I, 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?

• 46:48Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. All right. Continue. Anything else you wanna show?

• 46:50Speaker 03

  There is something that I think you cannot do with Grok bots, but I think you can with, with, because all this together, like if you run all of these, it's gonna, it's gonna burn so much token. It's 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, it's probably the case in other products, but please start stacking your AI subscriptions. So in, in Squad, 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.

• 47:31Jason Calacanis?

  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 a thousand or $2,000 worth of usage tokens. What's your guess?

• 47:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 47:58Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. So Claude is giving you $15,000 worth of tokens, according to this person's claim, for $200, which means to me, Lon, 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, 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.

• 48:43Jason Calacanis?

  And your system is called Squad. That's your product to do all this, then stacks them.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:48Jason Calacanis?

  Is that against the terms of service? Or it's just clever?

• 48:53Speaker 03

  It's a very good question. It was at one point, but since OpenAI allowed 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 three, 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 agent ads 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,

• 49:36Speaker 03

  and the agent themselves would come up with very, very interesting use cases that you can just run by yourself on any agent platform.

• 49:43Jason Calacanis?

  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?

• 50:01Speaker 03

  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 Ad 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, a super newb 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's going super well. I'm super happy.

• 50:45Jason Calacanis?

  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, 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,

• 51:27Jason Calacanis?

  you don't have a dashboard, imagine if your competitor does.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:32Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. Definitely the case. And yeah.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  There is no way, this works because it's, it's not prompting, it's systems. Like, you take time putting the systems in place and then they run forever. It's definitely not the case. You cannot just get stuck into prompting code 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.

• 52:27Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. Incredible. Well done. Just super inspiring. Anything else you want to show? Before we wrap up?

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess, 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's, 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.

• 53:03Jason Calacanis?

  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 Grok Bot, where I guess Claude Agents or OpenAI's product. Codex, no, not Codex. They have another work.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  ChatGPT work now, yeah.

• 53:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's ChatGPT work, I guess, would be the equivalent here, or having an OpenClaw or Mez, et cetera. So who are you putting your Squad? Who's your ideal customer profile for Squad, I guess?

• 53:38Speaker 03

  It's basically the web founders who has a small audience on socials. The guy, 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 the products. And because he's a web founder, he can integrate many, many services and it has a huge value in just making the connection between each of them.

• 54:10Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, awesome. And where can people find out more?

• 54:14Speaker 03

  So about Squad, squad.eso, very easy. And about me, I'm Tibo Maker on X and my DMs are open and I'm talking about startups and growth every single day.

• 54:27Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Well done. And we'll drop you off and

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Thanks, Tibo.

• 54:31Jason Calacanis?

  We look forward to having you on again to do more tactical and practical talks.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Getting lots of, lots of good founders together to put some hacks together for everybody, so.

• 54:41Jason Calacanis?

  I'm still in love with Lanterns. They're four episodes in. This guy, Kyle.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Kyle Chandler is playing Hal Jordan. Aaron Pierre is Jon Stewart.

• 54:53Jason Calacanis?

  Kyle Chandler is the best casting in a superhero film since Christopher Reeve and Robert Downey Jr.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's, he's great.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  I used to love Green Lantern. This guy playing an old Hal Jordan is 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.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:21Jason Calacanis?

  When the rings run out of juice, he's still incredibly confident. And he, 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.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 55:35Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he's just plays the most perfect, doesn't, non-pulsed, is that the word? Non-pulsed? Non-pulsed, 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.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

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

• 56:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:20Jason Calacanis?

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

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Killing it. That actor.

• 56:25Jason Calacanis?

  The Sinestro guy has an edge to.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Ulrich Thompson is his name.

• 56:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so they debut Sinestro here, if you just click on the first image.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  There he is.

• 56:37Jason Calacanis?

  In like 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 the, I think, the yellow one.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  He becomes the most famous yellow lantern, Sinestro, which is like the, they use fear instead of will.

• 56:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and he was previously Hal Jordan's, I guess, mentor slash, yeah. So he plays in prison a, and I think they must have been inspired by Silence of the Lamb, 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 and 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, you're going to get out of that cell

• 57:33Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:00Jason Calacanis?

  Badassery.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  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, 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, the-

• 58:20Jason Calacanis?

  She's amazing in everything. Laura Linney is fantastic.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  She's a legend, 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 Green Lantern. Just get the ring off of Hal 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 where they're, 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 Dillahun, 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, the previous-

• 59:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that was a weird kind of thing.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  It's very strange.

• 59:08Jason Calacanis?

  Was he from Justified or something? What was he in?

• 59:10Speaker 00

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

• 59:14Jason Calacanis?

  He plays like a really good cowboy type actor.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:18Jason Calacanis?

  Great show.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:20Jason Calacanis?

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

• 59:27Speaker 00

  James Gunn.

• 59:28Jason Calacanis?

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

• 59:35Speaker 00

  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, and he also did Watchmen, another fantastic HBO series based on a DC comic.

• 59:45Jason Calacanis?

  I think there's something about what, um, 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, uh, to have a little diversity and not one-

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  -core, you know, uh, timeline.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:29Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think I'm okay with it. I'm okay with there being like two different Batman shows or whatever, you know?

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

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

• 1:00:38Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, what else you got on Off Duty? You got an Off Duty for us? I, I did mine. You do yours, I'm still.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Sure. Uh, I, well, I'll tell you about another great show that I highly recommend. Uh, 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. Uh, the, the concept is that Joel Edgerton is a physicist and with his, with, with, he's got a, 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, 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

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  into another, uh, parallel universe to your own. So what, the, 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 universes Joel Edgerton, who's married to that girl, who's Jennifer Connelly now. Uh, 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 home universe.

• 1:02:02Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  And, and right, and it, 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, 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, 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?

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  What would that do to the universe? How would that affect people? Like, it's really interesting stuff.

• 1:02:55Jason Calacanis?

  There was a movie, Multiplicity, right?

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

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

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, similar.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  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, the multiverse quantum state aspect of it. Um, it's Multiplicity where he creates like-

• 1:03:16Jason Calacanis?

  I've never actually seen Multiplicity. I just know of it.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  It's, I mean, Michael Keaton, it's really stretching Michael Keaton's comic chops, because he's simultaneously playing like four or five diversions. 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, uh, so eventually they're making, you know, like-

• 1:03:36Jason Calacanis?

  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 two 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. Maybe Robin Williams would have crushed it.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  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 five Michael Keetons and they're all interacting in one frame, which was a big deal in the 90s.

• 1:04:08Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I, um, 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, um, I had just finished his, um, biography. There's a biography of him, um, and I'm not sure who wrote it. Absolutely fantastic autobiography, you pull it up on the screen, um, to listen to. Uh, and it really, um, yeah, I guess it was a New York Times bestseller. Um, really just goes into his life. I didn't know that he had gone to, um, uh, the famous, uh, art school in New York.

• 1:04:52Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and Juilliard, I guess.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And, um, just his entire life of just, um, and then Mork and Mindy, and that didn't work out, and he struggles there. But I grew up on Mork and Mindy and had seen Garp.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:05:09Jason Calacanis?

  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, um, I wrote a nice, uh, reply to him, and he actually replied back to me. Um, you can pull it up online. Uh, 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, um, in the early 2000s at E3. 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.

• 1:05:50Jason Calacanis?

  So there was this game, Sphere, um, and it was by a very famous, uh, guy, um, or Spore.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

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

• 1:06:04Jason Calacanis?

  Sid Meier, yes.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:06Jason Calacanis?

  And so I was at E3.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  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, an evolution, natural selection themed game.

• 1:06:24Jason Calacanis?

  So here-

• 1:06:27Jason Calacanis?

  Is Robin Williams.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  All right, he's designing his own creature.

• 1:06:32Jason Calacanis?

  And he just freestyles this and he's hilarious.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I interviewed him once.

• 1:06:39Jason Calacanis?

  You interviewed Robin Williams?

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  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, 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. He 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 Mrs. Doubtfire, and now he's doing this. And he's playing with everybody's microphones. And I mean, it was just, it must've been so exhausting to be him, because he was on all the time like that.

• 1:07:20Jason Calacanis?

  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, and what the biography of Robin Williams, and I am addicted to biographies, there it is.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  There's my old blog talking about Robin Williams.

• 1:07:41Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Jim Carrey.

• 1:08:09Jason Calacanis?

  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, you know, changing characters, you know, physical comedian. But Robin wanted to also do things that mattered to him. And he wanted to do, do things that were a little bit more expansive. And he had a run of just really bad box office, you know, things that...

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  A few duds in there. And the Jack, that Francis Ford Coppola movie, sort of infamous, and yeah.

• 1:08:45Jason Calacanis?

  Just tons of like...

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  Bicentennial Man, there were some...

• 1:08:47Jason Calacanis?

  Bicentennial Man's mentioned, which I watched with 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, Good Will Hunting, obviously.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:09:01Jason Calacanis?

  And he hit one other one. 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 Miss Doubtfire broke out. So Miss 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 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. But they started using him in like, he said, I just don't

• 1:09:45Jason Calacanis?

  want to do products, don't want to do product sales, just...

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:10:06Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Wow. Is that true?

• 1:10:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. They gave him a Picasso or something to kind of bridge the gap and get him back.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  It's Michael Eisner. Yeah, but...

• 1:10:36Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Eisner.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  And then they're ready to say, 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 book.

• 1:10:55Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess he's saying...

• 1:11:01Jason Calacanis?

  I'll take a Picasso.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:11:16Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:11:20Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  And What Dreams May Come, a great movie.

• 1:11:26Jason Calacanis?

  I, it was polarizing.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  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. And it looks, for 99, you're like, this is amazing.

• 1:11:39Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Right, from the Legend of Zelda.

• 1:11:56Jason Calacanis?

  After the video game, Legend of Zelda. So he was just a, 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.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  The ones, the ones that really hit me were like Phil Hartman and Chris Farley, when both of them, I think I was in college for both of those. And that was really sad.

• 1:12:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, those are, 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.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Bye, folks.