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Huge update in artificial intelligence world. Someone has created a product that speeds up Lex Friedman when he asks questions on his podcast. You saw this? No way. Lexspeedman.com Mario Dion says, I wanted to watch the Lex Friedman episode with dhh, but Lex talks way too slow for me. So I built Lex Speedman. It speeds up Lex to 2x speed and keeps the guest at 1x, cutting up to 20% of the episode. Wait, so he. So Lex will talk for 40% of his episodes? That's not possible. I feel like Lex is like. He asks one question. He really lets the person talk. That's kind of the benefit of that. He does. He talks for a while. Kind of. I wonder. We should pull some stats on, like. On, like who. Who talks more? Because sometimes we have good back and forth and we're both. We're all talking with the guest. Sometimes it's just us. Short question. They go on a rant for a couple minutes, you know. Yeah. Sometimes we get some very angry, very angry comments around cutting each other off. Would you please let the guests talk? Oh, they say that. Interesting. I remember early on they were saying, you guys got to stop cutting each other off. And we. Do we ever. Was I cutting you off or were you cutting me off? I feel like this is just the way we talk. And like it never. My real fans went to the rescue. Yeah. We never really got to the bottom of it. I think it was me cutting you off sometimes, but especially with the ads. I love cutting you off with an ad. That's the best. That's the best. But also no dead air. You know, I love cutting you off with a flashback. Don't do it. Don't do it. Flashbang. We're going to the stars. Astra GPT6 is out. Go check it out. There's a crazy video by Matt Schumacher.

Enterprise, much less in this controversial topic. Well, Phish Audio ran a billboard campaign we love out of Home. This one sort of confused people. Heshi Brody says $100 for anyone that can explain what this company does without looking it up. This is on the New York City subway today, and we'll read it to you. And you can take a guess. Fish Audio says we put voice AI on a silent sign. You see the problem is this one of those jokes, though. I think it's a joke. I think this is an ElevenLabs competitor. We know. But is this a real ad from a real company or is this a prankster making fun of tech ads? Because there was that prankster who put up a bunch of billboards. Like fake billboards, remember? Like, I think it's two plus two equals. It really makes you think. It really makes you think. It made me go to the website. Okay. They make text to speech, speech to text, audio separation, voice changers, translation. And they partner with global innovators. John. They're working with. Hey Gen. Okay. Retail company, a bunch of games companies. It looks like Clout Kitchen. You ever heard of Clout Kitchen, John? No. You ever been in the kitchen cooking clout? Okay, so isn't it like they put voice AI on a silent sign? You can't. Like, if you have a billboard, you can't listen to it, but their product is audio. Oh, so if you can't listen to the billboard, if you get. That's the problem. Yeah, Right. I guess I would expect your explanation is a problem. I would expect the application. More importantly, we have our first guest. Take a picture and it reads it to you. That's what I would expect. Anyway, we do have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in.

Maybe it's right there. It's official. Hot Bot summer is over. Super Grok is saying goodbye to companions. I remember we were debating, you know, there's obviously a lot of people that had ethical concerns about AI romantic companions. But we were more discussing just like, is there actually a business here? Once you break the seal of like, okay, we're doing it, he did it. We. Would it actually be successful? Because Replica has seemed to get to scale. There's been other products that have played in this world and seemingly reached adoption and scale. But it's very. This is the same thing as the SORA discourse, where everyone was caught up in. SORA is either going to be the most powerful thing ever and we're not gonna be able to stop watching it, or it's gonna be good and so fun and it's gonna be amazing and dominant. But no one was counting just like, oh, go away in six months. And it's the same thing here. I don't know. I. Internet. I think I was saying it was gonna go away. Yeah. Just because I thought it was gonna be a tool. Yeah. And I think, I think we benchmark the market for this. Like, if you, if you look at other romantic stuff. Yeah. So. So when when first said, okay, I'm going all in on. On adult entertainment, I did think it was a potential path for. For Grok to get into the single digit billions. I probably overestimated the market there, but it felt like one of the plays that he had to get back in the game at the time. But again, this was last year and back then, if you could get into the single digit billions, you were doing pretty well. And then the game obviously, you know, really shifted down. Yeah. It makes sense to wind it down. Focus on enterprise software. That was what was in the SpaceX S1 was the. What was it, $13 trillion market he was going after something like that. It was in the. It was a shocking, shocking number. Maybe 20 trillion or something. Absolutely huge, huge numbers. And it makes sense. There's a lot of value in the enterprise, much less in this controversial topic. Well, Fish D.

Let's go through what else is in the timeline. What is John Palmer saying these days? Says, I actually think Snapchat for work might be a good idea in today's big companies. Work platforms work. Communication platforms have always followed what teenagers were doing 10 years ago. I did use IRC when I was a teenager. Tyler has to look it up. He doesn't know what Internet Relay Chat is. Wow. I. For what it's worth, I didn't use IRC either. No. Did you use aol? You didn't use aim? AOL Instant Messenger. Wow. What was your first communication platform on the Internet? Email. Email. I remember, I remember being inundated with emails. I remember there was like a summer. There was a summer. He's laughing at me. I had a hotmail. Wow. Well, I just, I remember spending a summer as, like not even a teenager yet, just being super stressed about my inbox because, like every kid had just started using email and so they were just sending these super long emails and I would be thinking, I'd just be like playing outside in the grass and thinking, man, I got to check my email. Do you think there's anything actually to this? It sounds like he's being serious. In the age of AI slop, the most efficient form of communication is just short videos of yourself speaking. What do you think? I would love to use Snapchat for work. So if we said, hey, as a team, we're going to communicate through short selfie videos. Yeah. With the filters. You got to have the dog filter or whatever. The hot dog filter, whatever those were. He says he's serious. A two minute demo video. Yeah, I guess in terms of actually just taking a video of your screen, showing people what you're working on. You know, there's a lot of different things you can do. There's a town.

Cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. It's Model Mayhem, folks. It's Model Mayhem. We got tons and tons of new AI Model releases. It's a great week to be into AI. I think all the lab leaders, they got together, they said, you know what? People just love AI. Let's give them more, even more. Let's all team up to launch new AI for them the same week so that everyone has something just to be happy about. That's right. We got Anthropic Fable 5.1. We got Musespark 1.3. We got Gemini 3.8. Flash, OpenAI's tease. And Astra is a GPT6. There's a 6 where the S goes in one of the videos. People will figure it out. But the Model Mayhem is continuing. Everyone got back from their long summers, their vacations. They said, we got a long story. Time to ship. We got to update this stuff. And grok, Claude, and OpenAI were all down this morning. So much, people thought Astra might have escaped. Kind of a deflock moment for AI, maybe. What do you think's going on? Possibly. Do we actually understand why all of the different models went down at the same time? Because it's easy. If it's like AWS went down and it took down a bunch of stuff. It was east. Why is Gemini. I think it was us, East 1. Why is Gemini down then? No, no, Gemini wasn't down. Oh, Gemini was never down. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. So Amazon, clearly very critical to the. To the global Internet. Good luck to the folks over at Amazon that are fighting the good fight. Keep a couple of big announcements. One which we got Chamath's birthday. It is big five. Should we sing.

Future that base 10 is betting on. Yeah. So what is the framework or what is the next model, the thesis behind model development that you want to execute on in this role? Yeah. So I think to be honest, and the closed lives will tell you differently, but everyone is scaling the same recipe right now. There is no difference between OpenAI's RL stack and the Chinese open source RL stack and the American open source RL stack. We've got the same recipe. People believe it scales. We first scaled pre training and model size. We're now scaling RL and people are going to keep doing that till the cows come home. And the bet is that you hit higher and higher levels of intelligence and you'll be able to do more and more economically useful things. I think to us we care a lot, for instance about continual learning. So we announced Base labs today which is going to be doing less myopic longer term research around what models can actually do. And, and continual learning looks very different for us as it does to the big labs. Like the big labs are already in this kind of continual learning loop of they train a model GPTN or Claudn and they released into the world, they collect feedback on what it can do, what it can't do, then they build fuck ton of RL environments to patch the holes in it and they go back and from a high level view, bird's eye point of view, that is continual learning. Right. The continual learning that you or I might imagine is very different. It's where you have an open source model that you specifically using either as a firm or a team within a firm or even an individual. And that model is organically adapting to the information that it's learning. It doesn't have to write everything down in memory markdown files because it learns about your business and so on. And then we think there's major paradigms to be unlocked within that regime and it's not necessarily going to get the focus from the big labs because that doesn't necessarily benefit them. They want to serve one big model at scale and the pitch they've, they've sold to their investors is that you know, you do that at a large enough scale and you don't need this, this kind of continual learning. Yeah. How do you, how do you process their claim? Because.

You do that at a large enough scale and you don't need this kind of continual learning. Yeah. How do you process their claim? Because a lot of the big labs, there's this dance between, oh well, there's a fine tuned model, it was really good at this one benchmark, then the next version of the big model that does everything is better than the fine tuned. And it feels like this horse race where I can totally see the cost argument and I can see even like the, yeah, for three months this fine tuned model was better. But if we're talking just like raw capability, how do you interrogate that claim that the big God model will always be better as long as you give it time? Yeah. This is where I think people are thinking about intelligence capabilities in the wrong way. People think about intelligence relativistically. They say, okay, the open source gap is like six months behind closed source. And GLM 5.3 is at the point that Opus 4.8 was whatever. I think the best way to think about what models can do for you and for the world is like, absolutely. So for any given task that you want to do with an LLM, there is some intelligence threshold that below that you can't do the task and above that you have very diminishing marginal returns to more intelligence on the task. And so when you think about it that way, the game of LLMs over the last five years has been, okay, we have these things we want to do with them. Closed source hits it first, which to be honest, we think is a good thing for many reasons which we can get into. But you know, open source eventually, like six months later or nine months later or whatever it is, can then do that task. And then for many reasons, like whether it's to control your own intelligence, whether it's to improve that task specifically once you have the base level of intelligence required to do it, you probably do want to swap to open source. And so it's not really about, you know, the God model being better. Like if I'm know, filing a tax return, there is just a limit to like how much intelligence I need to do that particular thing. And so I think the world is going to look like, you know, the frontier. Closed source labs are going to continue to push the frontier. Like we, you do want to use the, the most intelligent model. You have very like inelastic demand for intelligence when you're doing like, you know, frontier science or frontier maths. But for a lot of the economically valuable things it looks a lot like, okay, you know, I'm a cursor or I'm one of these big companies who are now realizing like, I can't just be a rapper anymore. I've been through the lifecycle of building a great product that people love, and they tell me what they love and hate about it, and I should be using that information to make my model better at the things that I care about and not at anything else. And so that pattern was executed fairly well with Composer. It's obviously early days in the ecosystem is immature enough for anyone apart from the curses of the world and a few other big companies to go about training, but I think eventually we'll get there where it's much more organic. Can you talk about the goals of this project? I understand.

Yeah. This VC said they're going to invest, they tell it to another vc, they call each other. I didn't say that. And it becomes. Who said. Are you broadly bullish on new AI hardware? Because I think one of the reasons that people have been generally bearish is you've had, you know, you had the rabbit, you've had friend, you've had a bunch of these shots and attempts. Humane. Humane. So there's been a. There's been a handful that haven't got the level of traction that you have had. But given your experience so far, do you think there's a lot more devices to build that are AI native in the real world? I think so. And I think like, you know, Rabbit and Humane died so, you know, Pocket could live. And we learned a lot from all these other devices that essentially died. And they primarily died because they were trying to replace the whole smartphone game. Doing too much, for sure. Too much stuff. Yeah, exactly. And they were actually just going against going towards real world works the way that the workflows work for real people. They don't want all the other things like ordering UberEats from AI. All they want is that AI to fit in their existing workflows. And what we did was we looked at a lot of people, had a lot of meetings and we didn't go into things like personal note taking, for example. All these others are like dead. Basically. Whoever went and did anything other than note taking. And note taking was essentially a product market fit. It was almost like Fitness for Apple Watch kind of product market fit. And everything else was basically like people didn't want them. Yeah, yeah. When I saw rabbit R1, I never got a.

The whole product basically for why. So the thing that stands out to me is like, you launch the initial app, you're not seeing the kind of growth that you wanted to see. And so then you're thinking, okay, we should. The solution is to launch a hardware device. Let's turn up to try to accelerate difficulty level to normally you'd think like, okay, the product's not working. Add a hardware thing that functionally does a lot of the same stuff. It's probably not necessarily going to. I don't know. My intuition would be that it wouldn't solve the problem. But I keep coming like, what is. Why. Why does it make sense for this to be a separate device from the phone? Because I'm sure, you know, if you met with investors, a lot of investors would be like, well, I have a device that's a hardware device. It has battery, it has a microphone, it has a screen, it has all these things. So why are your 200,000 plus customers saying like, no, I want this separate device? Because like, like clearly the customers are right. Yeah, absolutely. It's 300,000 now. Right. So when we actually went and asked these people like, hey, why are you using this 10 times more than the app that we had? We actually had one of the user who was actually using a different phone he just bought for recording conversations and he had a battery attached to the phone on top. Sure. So that's kind of what Pocket ended up being product by just watching how people use these recording apps on the phone. There are a lot of limiting factors for recording on the phone. A, you cannot record your own Zoom meetings in Google Meet if you're already on the phone, you cannot start. That's right, not recording. So there are a lot of people who have issue with that. And there are people who get incoming phone calls all the time. So if you're recording something and you get an incoming phone call, it interrupts the recording. And if you take the phone, your recording is stopping. Essentially. Apart from all of these technical reasons, the real reason is actually that the people who take 10, 15 meetings a day, these doctors, consultants who are like, you know, patient goes out and their patient comes in, the client goes out and the client comes in and there's 10 to 15 back to back meetings. They feel awkward in the first eight seconds to take their phone and start a recording by unlocking their iPhone, setting up the recording and hoping so that the operating system doesn't kill background running apps for a long time. So people just felt that, you know, this is much more reliable thing a quick access thing that that can immediately start recording and I don't need to feel awkward on placing it on a desk so people don't take take their attention. Why is this guy looking at his phone? We just met. Yeah, so that's kind of what we came around that convenience beats intentions. So if your users have intention to record and you don't make it convenient enough, they will not record. But if you actually make it convenient enough to record and they want to record even a little bit, they'll 100% record. Interesting. Should more people be taking notes with and and recording their conversations? Oh yeah. I.

What was received. And then you have a one year ban for, for Ballmer. And then, but, but what was your reaction to the, to the, to the verdict from the NBA? Yeah, this was the biggest punishment for an owner in the history of, I think, American professional sports. And the NBA took five first round picks, which is the most you could imagine. They took $30 million, which is a rounding error, of course, for Ballmer. They made him pay the $50 million legal fee to walk to Lipton, the NBA's outside counsel, which is also a rounding error, but still pretty annoying, I would imagine. But the real thing that I thought was meaningful was that they banned Steve Ballmer from his own building for a year. He loves basketball. He sits courtside. He measured literally the toilets at the Intuit Dome when he was designing the whole building. He was a micromanager who knew every piece of the building. And they banned him from being inside his own building, which he funded for $2 billion privately, to his credit. And they also banned his president of business for a year. And they banned his gm, his president of basketball for six months. And so Kawhi got effectively a slap on the wrist. And that is wild on the merits. The reason they did it briefly is because when Ballmer now is rattling his saber because he is the former CEO of Microsoft, who when presented with antitrust findings by the literal federal government, also fought. Right. This is unsurprising if you know the trajectory of his life. What he has threatened is litigation. And what he has not been able to pursue is arbitration, which is interesting because arbitration briefly in the world of Sports Court, which is another TV show we should pilot together in Sports Court. In Sports Court, you have an arbitrator, a system arbitrator, but that is an arrangement between the player, Kawhi Leonard, and his union, as well as the league. And when Kawhi Leonard got a slap on the wrist, only $700,000, no suspension, no voiding of the contract, no nothing. He agreed to a settlement that was quite favorable. And the question was, why? Well, Kawhi Leonard's settlement meant that the arbitration option was legally removed. So now they boxed in Ballmer, which is again, no small thing. My reaction was, it's no small thing to be at war with a guy with $145 billion, depending on Microsoft stock, and to say you got one move and it's to enter yet more discovery when you know there's. He doesn't want to be discovered, it sounds like, yeah, it sounds like a nightmare situation for Ballmer at this point to.

Personal review of the product. So when your original story, when your original story broke, you got a bunch of pushback, even from a bunch of people that, that are pretty tapped in and knowledgeable. And some of that pushback was just that there's no way that Ballmer would be this dumb, right? So this like, like this story couldn't possibly be true because who would ever do, who would ever like, risk it all in this way? Is that somewhat accurate? I think that's even the most generous defense. I think there are a lot of people who are just being told by the Clippers and Ballmer's crisis PR handlers, this weird podcaster is clout chasing. None of this makes sense. Steve would never do this. He's Steve Ballmer. The less, I think, surprising version, though, which you just articulated, is a common one, which is he can't be this dumb. And I dare say that one of the things you learn when you investigate financial impropriety in our great country is that that is something that you should never assume. There are many phenomenally successful people who, because they are desperate to get the thing, they can't just buy, do things that they think will never get found out. And the problem in this case, across these four companies and across these employees and across my reporting, is that he trusted people that he should not have trusted, and also he maybe shouldn't have tried to do it in the first place. Isn't there one weird trick that would have made this all work, which is just Ballmer goes to Boingo Wireless and says, yeah, we got this deal.

He's actually in your guys wheelhouse. So happy to be on with you. Yeah. And I remember, I remember I watched some of your content around a year ago when you were originally breaking this story. And then I'm surprised that the story like at least went away out of the public eye for some time. I'm sure you were still following it. But take us maybe from back a little bit to first kind of uncovering this and then we'll get all the way to the present. Yeah. So this was an investigation that started with a tip and the tip was there's a weird company out in L. A called Aspiration. It was a tree planting startup, AKA a carbon credits company. ESG thing, as you guys may recall, during the pandemic was a real thing. We're going to be good guys, right? Everyone's going to be a good guy now. And endorse. I love trees. I love planting trees too. I love what they do to carbon and oxygen reportedly. So Aspiration has all these endorsers that are public. There's Robert Downey Jr. There's Leonardo DiCaprio, there's Frank, there's Cindy Crawford. People who grew up in the 90s. Toronto figures into the story in lots of ways it turns out. But the point is that there are all these A list stars. Orlando Bloom, I didn't even mention all these A list stars that this good guy company is paying to tell everybody about what they are. Yeah. And what I get a tip on is, hey, you should look into this company. It's kind of weird. They just signed a deal, $300 million to be the Jersey patch sponsor of Los Angeles Clippers. And you know, they have another endorser that you'd be interested in. And when I look into this, it's not immediately obvious like what they're talking about, but when this company goes bankrupt because. And this is going to be in your wheelhouse again. They were going to go public. Be a spac. Yeah, what a time, right? What a time. SPAC esg. We're all going to get rich being good guys and no one really needs to ask many questions. Just trust us, it's going to be fine. And what turns out is this company is co founded by two people, two big dem donors. Classic good guys went to Harvard. I mean, I resemble the remark. I want to say that like this has been also awkward for me. Steve Ballmer, Harvard, all these guys, all of this. Right. Pedigree, all of it. The thing that's interesting is that when you dig in to how this company fell apart and they go into bankruptcy. You, of course, get to examine some public filings. And one of their big creditors was a company called KL2 Aspire LLC. And if you're a basketball fan who is aware of the Clippers, you may realize that KL. Yeah. Sounds like Kawhi Leonard 2. Sounds like his jersey number. Kale to Aspire sounds like a vehicle you've invented to accept money transfer. Yeah, yeah. And he was owed $7 million outstanding. And the weird part was that this dude had no public record of being associated with Aspiration personally at all. And so when you dig in and you begin to ask questions of people who used to work at a company that has now gone into bankruptcy, in which the co founder, Joe Sandberg, is now, by the way, serving 14 years in federal prison for fraud, you get people who are interested in explaining how crazy their life has been and what they say and what they provide. In the tonnage of all the reporting I did for months, seven months before we came out with part one of the series, one year ago today, was documentation that attested to the fact that Kawhi Leonard was paid, according to this agreement, a total of $48 million. 20 in stock, 28 in cash, to do nothing for a deal that never got announced. And the question was why? And so you follow the threads and you get to. Oh, wait, there's a massive salary capture convention scheme in which the richest owner in American sports, Steve Ballmer, is trying to use all of his wealth in ways he's not allowed to to get money to a guy that he, he needed to take away from the Lakers and the Toronto Raptors in order to make his dream of owning a professional basketball team exactly the dream that he imagined. So how, how strict are these rules? Because I can imagine. That's a funny. Yeah, we. So we covered. We covered.