The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 37,600 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 974 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Bryan Johnson: Humans are no longer qualified to manage their own affairs
“I'm fundamentally proposing that the human race is no longer qualified to manage our affairs.”
Lonsdale: Israel Will Keep Fighting and Completely Wipe Out Hamas
“The way it stands now is, is we're going to keep fighting. We're going to wipe out Hamas and hopefully we can work with others to have a government there. That's not, you know, does not allow terrorism.”
Lonsdale: Anti-Israel Hatred in Gaza Stems From School Indoctrination
“I think basically what creates a generation of civilians that hate Israel is you have the schools in that area have been run by people who teach people that Jews are pigs and Jews are wrong and our religion hates Jews.”
Gontovnikas built CEO deepfake technology for personalized outbound sales emails
“You can even, and we've created this, you can even create deep fakes of CEOs telling you something on a video, on an email, even though it's not really the CEO.”
Plantenga: Predatory seed term sheets in small European markets handicap startups
“Like if you look what kind of like seed stage term sheets get to the table of like people I know building companies and I get like in these small markets in Europe, but it's like financial rape and it does a lot of damage. It's, it does a lot of damage because…”
Samani: Bitcoin has no productive value and produces no economic utility
“Bitcoin is a strictly financial construct. Bitcoin has no economic value. It has, it is no, it's not productive. Excuse me. Bitcoin is no productive value because it doesn't do anything. It's an asset. There are some interesting properties of that asset, but i…”
Tomaino: Taylor Swift exemplifies soulless greed for money and attention
“To me, she's kind of the definition of someone that has this, like, soulless greed for attention and money, and is not authentic at all.”
Samani: XRP, Cardano, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash are garbage lacking substance
“I mean, look, there's a lot of assets in the top 10 that most people who are sophisticated retail market participants view as, you know, garbage, XRP, Cardano, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc. I cannot explain to you how those assets are trading nine, 10 figures a…”
Rabois: No $100 billion European tech company has been created since 1990
“There hasn't been a hundred billion dollar European company created since 1990.”
Rabois: LinkedIn developed a mediocre culture because early engineers wanted 35-hour weeks
“Yeah, we didn't have an Olympic work ethic. We had a bunch of French engineers that wanted to work 35 hours a week. At the time, In 2003 to five, when the company was really founded, most people thought the internet was dead, so we didn't, Reid Hoffman, who fo…”
Petersen: Chinese believe in China, while half of Americans hate America
“Chinese people believe in China. Half of Americans hate America.”
Petersen: Remote US workers will lose jobs to offshore talent arbitrage
“By the way, I think remote work can really work, but it's not going to benefit the people who think like, it's not going to be people making 250,000 dollars a year hanging out in Jackson Hole. It's going to be geniuses in the developing world Making, you know,…”
Tomaino: Silicon Valley is driven by soulless greed, citing Sequoia Capital
“My sentiment in a lot of Silicon Valley is that it's very, there, there's a lot of soulless greed, and just this desire to create these kind of you know, massive funds create massive attention, and I think, again, Sequoia is the best example of this, and 1789,…”
Eisenberg Claims Woke Anti-Semitic Left Has Taken Over American Universities
“The kind of progressive, woke, anti-Semitic left has taken over a lot of American universities. And they don't like Jews, and that's just the truth.”
Eisenberg: College Is A Waste Of Money And Brainwashes Kids
“Not sending kids to college. It's a waste of time and money. I think it's worse than that. You send kids to these places, they are brainwashed with immorality.”
Eisenberg: Attackers Of Human Values Must Be Eradicated For Progress
“It's a human aspiration, except there are some barbarians that don't believe in this. And they need to be eradicated. And that's our job right now. And our job of our children is to go eradicate them so that we can have more weddings, more children, more grand…”
Lemkin: B2B SaaS CEOs should be embarrassed to conduct layoffs
“If you're a great SAS CEO, you should never have a RIF. It's called recurring revenue. You should have the ability to, I get it in B to C or D to C or X and Y and Z to C. I don't think good SAS CEO should, I think it's an utter failing to ever have a RIF unles…”
Huber: Wealth redistribution would revert to 80/20 inequality within five years
“You could take all the money in the United States right now. You take all the money and you could divide it equally among everybody. Take all the money and divide it equally. And in five, 10, 15 years, you could argue about the timeframe. In five years, at lea…”
Huber: Poorest Americans today live better than wealthiest Americans 50 years ago
“Today the poorest people in America have a better life than the wealthiest people in America 50 years ago. They have better access to healthcare. They have better living situations. They have more amenities. They have better food. It trickles down massively, a…”
Huber: Prevailing victim culture gives accountable families a competitive advantage
“I think this woke mindset and virus is a tremendous advantage for me and my family. The people who buy into it, Our victims, the people who buy into it are blaming other people, the people who buy into it are focusing on things that are totally outside of thei…”
Lessin: Founders who ask VCs for help are weak
“Because I, if you're coming to me for help, my view is you're almost by definition, or you're saying, I need help or whatever I want help. I think you're a weak founder.”
Lemkin: Startups should not hire tech workers who lack pre-boom experience
“I almost think We shouldn't hire any of these people in startups today. You have to have had some adversity or have worked before the boom or have, or you just need to flush through this and have a fresh perspective.”
Khosla: Nuclear fusion will demonstrate net positive energy by 2025 or 2026
“I believe demonstrating positive energy by 25, maybe 26, will be also 10 X faster.”
Claure: I Invested $150M Into FTX at SoftBank Due to FOMO
“So I invested hundred and fifty million dollars on FTX, which I mean, apologies to SoftBank, because I should have never made that investment, but it's probably one decision that has changed my life forever. I'm never going to invest in something that I don't …”
Batchu: Hiring from portfolio companies is not a conflict for angels
“I, I'm pretty ruthless about that. I think that there's absolutely no conflict. I think it's extremely anti-competitive from a labor market perspective for you to think that I won't hire the best people from your company. And so you, it's your job to retain yo…”
Douwe Kiela: Incumbent AI firms promote existential risk to entrench regulatory advantage
“So the people who are pushing this narrative are really the people who are benefiting from this being the narrative. So these are the incumbent AI companies who are, who want to have either the market regulated. Right. Because then they benefit because they ca…”
Stebbings: The younger generation of workers is lazy and expects high compensation
“I think this generation is fucking lazy. They do not work, sorry, I'm on a rant now. They do not want to work hard, they do not want to come into the office, they get paid top dollar, and actually, they want great package, they want all of this, and they don't…”
AI Existential Risk Warnings Are Driven by Publicity Seekers
“I fully agree with Jan and not just because he was my boss at Meta, but I think if you really understand how machine learning works and you're not looking for free publicity, I don't see why you would say something like that, that, that getting more intelligen…”
Proposed EU AI Regulation Would Make All Existing LLMs Illegal
“One of the percent of the LMs that were trained these last three years would be illegal in Europe.”
Summers: Fed cannot lower inflation to target without an economic downturn
“My own view, and I've said this many times, is that what Samuel Johnson said about second marriage is true about soft landings. They represent the triumph of hope over experience, and I don't think we're likely to be able to bring inflation down to its target …”
Parker Conrad: David Sacks made wrong decisions across the board at Zenefits
“David was not really interested in making Zenefits successful. You know, almost every decision he made at the company was wrong. The decisions he made from a product perspective, from a strategy perspective, the people he. Fired the people he promoted, like al…”
Mostak: Only 5 or 6 Foundation Model Companies Will Exist in 3-5 Years
“I think that there's only going to be five or six foundation model companies in the world in three years, five years.”
Mostaque: AI Will Eliminate All Outsourced Programming Jobs in India
“India, all of the outsourcing jobs in programming will go, because GPT-IV can go level three Google programmer exam and pass it.”
Mostaque: AI Will Build Software Automatically, Eliminating Human Coders
“Why would you need a human for that if the AI gets better and better at coding? Just tell it what you want. I want to create an app for 20 minute VC that has these features. Of course it will go and build it automatically. Where is the human coder in that?”
Mostaque: Only five or six foundation model companies will survive
“I think that there's only going to be five or six foundation model companies in the world in three years, five years. ... I think it's going to be us, NVIDIA Google, Microsoft OpenAI, and Meta and Apple probably are the ones that train these models.”
LeCun: Human-level AI will not be achieved using autoregressive LLMs
“Well, so first of all, there is no question that eventually AI systems will understand the world in similar ways that, that humans do perhaps better ways but there will not be autoregressive large language models as a type that we're now talking about.”
LeCun: Autoregressive LLMs will be obsolete within a few years
“So my prediction is that within a few years, nobody in their right mind would use auto-reversive LLMs. They'll go away in favor of something more sophisticated and controllable. They can plan its answer as opposed to just produce one word after the other react…”
LeCun disagrees with Geoffrey Hinton on AI-driven human extinction risk
“So I understand why, why he might have wanted to leave, but I don't agree with him at all with the whole sort of, you know, probability of human extinction or whatever.”
Paik: Taxing carried interest as ordinary income would redistribute tech talent
“You probably should tax carried interest like income tax. That would write, that would like break that structurally different incentive mechanism, and then it would defuse talent elsewhere.”
Guo: Tiger Global's index-style early-stage strategy will perform poorly
“Short on a multi-stage fund. I think early in growth investing is more different than it appears. And so I think there are firms that like, you know, tried the early stage investing route with like a blanket based approach. And like, I don't know if that's goi…”
Stebbings: Remote Work Is One of the Most Poisonous Things
“I don't buy remote by the way. I think remote is one of the most poisonous things.”
Tobi Lütke: Viewing wealth inequality as inherently bad is a bad faith take
“It's also like a bad faith take that wealth inequality is a bad thing by itself”
Tobi Lütke: The belief that micromanagement is bad destroyed massive business value
“I think there's probably no singular idea that has destroyed more business value on planet Earth than the idea that Micromanagement is a bad thing.”
Tobi Lütke: Study World of Warcraft guilds over corporations for organizational mastery
“I think you can learn more by studying World of Warcraft raiding guilds than you can learn from studying companies about coordination and what great looks like.”
Ackman: Biden wealth tax will bankrupt every startup in America
“You know, the Biden wealth tax, which is like, 25% of the appreciation of things that you own privately, it's going to bankrupt every startup. No one will ever start a business in America anymore, right?”
BPI asked Ophelia Brown where her older male partner was
“The French, what's the French equivalent of EIF? BPI. BPI. They asked me where my older male partner was.”
Didi and the Chinese Government Had Full Access to Uber's Data
“It became very clear that everyone had all our data. Didi knew everything we were doing whereas, like, Lyft and Uber always knew what each other were doing, because we were watching each other, we're friends, things like that, but, like, we never had each othe…”