Aaron D'Souza launches Objection AI to use AI juries to fact-check legacy media — and previews Enhanced Games' $1.2B SPAC

Good to see you. Great to see you guys.

We'll talk to you soon.

Up next, we have Aaron Duza. He is the founder of Objection.AI and the enhanced games. He's in the waiting room and we'll bring him in to the TV Ultradom.

Keith,

what's going on?

Aaron, how are you doing?

Uh, I'm great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Of course. Thanks for being here. Uh, do you want to give us a little bit of your background? you've done a lot in your time. I I'm super interested in enhanced games and then we can go into objection.ai at some point, but uh how how are you introducing yourself these days as a multihyenet?

Uh yeah. Uh so I'm a lawyer by training. Uh when I was 24 years old, Peter Teal hired me to lead his litigation against Gawker Media

involving the wrestler Hulk Hogan. Uh we won the largest invasion of privacy judgment in history. Uh, it's the subject of the bestselling book Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday, forthcoming movie starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

And, uh,

there's a movie. There's a

movie.

There's a movie. Yeah. And, uh, since then, I've gone on to found nearly 12 companies.

Uh, you know, most famous for the enhanced games, the quoteunquote steroids Olympics. Uh, but launched today, uh, my new one, Objection AI.

Okay. Uh, do you know who's going to play you in the movie yet?

I don't know. It's, uh, you know, Hollywood is not like Silicon Valley. It takes them a very long time to make a movie and it seems to go through a lot of different iterations.

Yeah, it should be interesting. Uh well, let's uh I I would love an update on the enhanced games. Uh the the first event is happening in late May. Is that correct?

That's correct. In Las Vegas.

Las Vegas. And and uh talk to me about the scale, the the the the potential value, the goal with that project. Uh it certainly got a lot of uh a lot of attention. Everyone has a take on it. Uh

yeah, the timing feels pretty good considering it feels like more people than ever are enhancing themselves.

Oh yeah, with GLP1s and stuff on which you know are some of them are banned, some are not in in traditional sporting events, but

yeah. But what yeah, what led you to the uh the enhanced games and and give us the update there. Uh yeah, I I'm I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and I've always been interested in bioeththics and I read a paper by professor Julian Searescu who's a professor at the University of Oxford

and he actually argued back in the9s for an enhanced Olympic games

and I learned that there were nearly half the athletes uh in the Olympics admit to using banned performance-enhancing drugs yet less than 1% get caught. So there's this like real disconnect

and at the same time things like peptides, TRT uh are becoming increasingly normal. Uh you know, even people like Secretary Kennedy, you know, our our health minister in the United States is quite an advocate for human enhancements. And so I thought to myself, you know, why should we be uh uh shackled by the ideas of the past and shouldn't we be able to unleash uh the full level of human potential uh using the best of science and technology? And that's where the idea of the enhanced games came from.

Yeah. Uh how many athletes have actually stepped forward and said that they want to participate? Like how how how big is the movement at this point? Obviously the first games is happening. Do you want to put it on this similar like every two years cadence? Is there demand for more of a UFC like schedule? How do you think this all works out?

Uh it's it's the aim is for an annual schedule. Okay. Uh we're very pleased that the company uh is going to go public through a spa combination on the New York Stock Exchange uh in the coming weeks. Obviously, I stepped down from being CEO a few months ago to focus on my new venture, so I can't speak to the uh exacts of the the spa. Um but a $ 1.2 billion valuation we're very happy about. Um and ultimately uh it's not the number of athletes participating, it's the quality of athletes. So we have Olympic gold medalists, we have world record holders. And in fact, uh we've already set our first world record in the 50 freestyle.

No way.

Which was set by Christian Gomev of Greece, uh in an exhibition event last year. He swam faster than any man in history had up to the point in time. Uh and he had only been enhanced for a couple of weeks. And so

to to show you how how much of a difference that could make, Christian was 31 years old at the time, which arguably is about 10 years past his prime for a swimmer.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Uh well take us through objection AI. What's the uh the thesis? How do you uh like what what led you to start another company at this moment in time?

Uh I believe that the fundamental problem that we face in our society is truth.

Uh there is no sense of uh an objective arbiter of truth in our society and this is something that has caused um you know great societal decay. If we don't have a shared sense of truth we can't have a functioning civilization. And you know uh two decades ago we would have said the New York Times is the arbiter of truth.

And today you know the social platforms don't seem to care about it very much. AI uh you know juggernauts don't seem to care about it very much. And so I said to myself what is the best way to find truth? Uh and truth is not a vibe. Truth is a process. And that process is very well documented in courts. Courts are viewed by Americans as being very trustworthy entities versus the legacy news media in particular has seen a collapse in credibility. Uh 50 years ago, according to the Gallup poll, 70% of Americans trusted the media. Today, that's down to only 30%. And so, the goal of objection AI is to create a uh system where anyone can challenge a claim made in the legacy news media. Uh independent investigators will then investigate it. former CIA and FBI agents and then all that data is presented to an AI jury to analyze um to figure out if uh the original claims made by the journalists were true or not.

Interesting. Uh yeah, some something that's uh it feels like community notes have been uh a a good innovation for like truth online, but the big flaw is that by the time

a post gets like a

like solid community note, oftentimes like a million people seen it already. They didn't know that that it that there that there was

Yeah. So I mean the the logical followup is uh is speed a problem here? Because I imagine that yeah I imagine that if you have to run a whole jury process and have discovery and argue argument like the original claim could be baked into the society's like mind share before you have

that's the fundamental problem about news media today is that um false information spreads six times faster than true information. Uh and so the incentives for generating clickbait content uh is very pronounced and we've known this for a very long period of time. And so by compressing the legal process which often takes 10 or 20 years and costs $10 million as we learned in the Hulk Hogan lawsuit down to something driven through software and artificial intelligence down to a couple of days. Um we can adjudicate factual disputes much much quicker and much cheaper. Uh the whole process on objection can cost as little as $2,000 uh and can be done in as little as 24 hours.

So is the business model to sell directly to people that uh want to uh contest claims that are made on on the internet?

Yeah, exactly. So if uh the New York Times writes something inaccurate about uh you guys and your wonderful podcast, uh you can file an objection.

Okay.

Uh then human investigators will investigate the story line by line, source by source. They'll call everyone quoted in the article.

Um, and then they'll present that information to an AI jury. Uh, and the original author, of course, has the opportunity to respond.

Uh, and say, "Hey, my reporting was good. It was high quality." But, you know, we live in the era of data.

Uh, and I think it would be wonderful if every story published by the New York Times, including included the long form recordings of each interview, right? I've done thousands of media interviews,

journalists always record them,

but they never publish them in full. uh and so being misqued or uh you know anonymous source uh these are the tools that in particular print journalists use that have seen a massive degradation in trust.

Yeah. Have you been following the Satoshi Nakamoto story recently? That feels like a textbook example of something that's been disputed but it's very hard to disprove if you're being accused of being Satoshi. How have you processed that particular story?

Yeah. And so um courts are a very good methodology of finding truth. I think there are only two solid methodologies of finding truth. One is courts and the other is the scientific method.

Sure.

And so if you take a scientific method approach

um uh anonymous sources should never be allowed.

Right. So you can't say to a scientific publication a source told me this. You have to be able to replicate the experiment over and over.

Yeah.

Right. Um or courts is the alternative method of truth finding is where you have two adversarial parties

often arguing antithetical points of view and what is truth. It's a really important question. It's almost the core question of philosophy. Well, in the court setting it is it is who has made the better argument, who has presented more evidence and um and how coherently has that argument been made. And now with the magic of artificial intelligence, we can do all of that uh very quickly and very cheaply.

Yeah. H uh how do you think about tuning different models to actually give you uh unbiased results? It feels like uh every different model has slightly different flavors and and things that it likes and dislikes and might see things different ways. Like these feel like subject it feels like a subjective technology. How do you get it to be impartial? Yeah. So that's a that's a great question and that's exactly how we face these issues with human juries and human judges.

Sure.

Right. So um human judges are extremely infallible. Uh according to a paper from professor Pner who's one of the leading scholars of law and economics at the University of Chicago. Uh AI applies the law 100% accurately. Human judges only do it 52% of the time because human judges can be swayed by um whether they've had lunch or not, whether they're having a bad day, you know, whether um they have a savvy lawyer in front of them.

And then in the same way, we use a jury based system.

Yeah.

Uh five different models prompted to act as if they were different personas of people based on um you know, a statistical sample of how everyday Americans behave themselves and demographic samples. uh and the models have to find um you know a uh a majority opinion uh to to to pass a verdict.

Uh are you thinking about integrations with social platforms? Jordy mentioned um the community notes system. Uh how do you think about distributing uh findings once you actually have reached a conclusion?

Yeah. So um this is the principal flaw of courts. So courts isue issue a judgment. Yeah. Yeah,

but they have no distribution mechanism.

Uh and uh we have something called a fire blanket. So we have an algorithmic um uh posting system on X

so that every single claim that is under investigation, we immediately fire off a tweet that says this claim is under investigation, please see the full case file. Mhm.

And then when the similar claim is um uh retweeted at some later point in time after adjudication is complete, we then say um that claim is false or that claim is true. Please see the full analysis that was done. So it intercepts uh the spread of disin disinformation as it is happening.

Very cool. Jordy, anything else?

Uh excited to follow along.

Yeah. Uh well, thank you so much for taking the time to come with Chat wanted to confirm though, you are not being held hostage right now, right?

I am not being held hostage right now. I'm in an undisclosed location. Okay.

Uh because uh as someone who is often subject to um negative media reporting. I like to not show where I live.