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 22 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Albert Wenger: Markets Cannot Guide Attention to Non-Priced Problems
“Some of the most important things that we should be allocating attention to don't have prices associated with them, and cannot have prices associated with them, and so as a result, we cannot be relying on the market mechanism to guide our attention. We have to…”
Wenger: The mantra "strong opinions weakly held" is a corrosive attitude
“Because it puts the burden on others to talk you out of it instead of, like, trying to get smarter yourself.”
Wenger: Universal Basic Income is essential to unlock future economic innovation
“The basic income, which is the idea of everybody getting enough money to be able to cover basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter I believe is what's necessary to make people free economic actors in the labor market, and I think that's essential for innova…”
Wenger: UBI raises manual labor costs and forces automation of dirty jobs
“And one of the criticisms that people raise is, well, who will do these sort of dirty jobs? And I think the answer to that is it means that the price that has to get paid for somebody to say clean bathrooms will go up. And that's a good thing because when the …”
Albert Wenger: Attention, Not Physical Capital, Is Humanity's Primary Constraint
“The constraining factor on humanity isn't how much physical capital there is. We can do amazing things. I mean, look at Germany. Germany just built a whole bunch of LNG terminals in, like, a few months, right? These are projects that people were like, oh, this…”
Wenger: Social media server architecture creates an unacceptable power imbalance
“As long as I am basically reduced to, like, my thumbs and the sort of wetware between my ears while somebody else on the other end is operating millions of servers, that's just the wrong balance of power.”
Wenger: Cash flow positivity is the only safe place for high-valuation startups
“If you have raised at a high valuation, you, and you have a lot of money in the bank, you have to get a cash flow positive. It's the only safe place. Literally the only safe place is cash flow positive.”
Wenger: VC generational transitions fail when senior partners hog the economics
“By not hogging the economics.”
Wenger: Anti-scraping laws reduce market competition by legally blocking custom APIs
“One is we could, by law, require companies to have proper APIs and the other would simply be to empower end users more to construct their own APIs, and at the moment, however, most of the laws run the other way, which is if you're trying to hack together your …”
Wenger: Climate Groups Using Civil Disobedience Are More Likely to Succeed
“We have a new wave of climate movements that are much more determined than the old ones were that are much more working in kind of a civil disobedience mode. And that's much more historically speaking, much more likely to lead to success.”
Wenger: Multiple focused funds force more discipline than one large fund
“Because it forces discipline. Like if you raise one big fund, you can be less disciplined than if you have three vehicles where you have a very specific thesis for each vehicle. And each time you can ask yourself, does this fit with the thesis? Or am I just, y…”
Wenger: Crypto acts as an effective inflation hedge in devaluing fiat nations
“Yeah, I mean, look, if you live in a dollar denominated country, it probably wasn't a very good hedge, but There are many other countries where there's an amazing hedge, right? So, like, I mean, there are other countries that, whose currencies have, you know, …”
Wenger: Central bank quantitative easing primarily enriches wealthy financial insiders
“It's because central banks aren't these entirely benevolent, above-it-all policymakers. Cantillon wrote about this in, like, the 1700, that when you print money, basically the people who are closer to the money benefit more. Closer to the money meaning people …”
Wenger: Achieving massive success on your very first endeavor warps you
“I think the people where the very first thing that they ever did became a monster success I think that's really warps you.”
Wenger: Speculative tech bubbles benefit society by rapidly funding foundational infrastructure
“These sort of frothiness in the installation phase is good from a social perspective, because it means that A lot of capital is allocated very rapidly to a sector, and then subsequently you can build interesting things on top of that.”
Wenger: Cultural and intellectual inertia is the biggest barrier to UBI
“I think the biggest challenge to getting to basic income is purely a intellectual and cultural challenge that has to do with Having constructed a system for over a hundred years or so, or several generations that, you know, has a specific perception of how the…”
Wenger: Passionate pursuits will remain infinite, but paid labor will not
“No, absolutely. We will never run out of things to do. We'll never run out of things that we will pursue passionately, but that's very different from being able to get paid for it.”
Wenger: Smartphone owners subsidize extended compute power for centralized tech platforms
“On mobile, it's a lot less clear, because on mobile, you're downloading these apps that are controlled by the companies, and you're downloading them onto a phone, where nominally you control the But because you don't control the apps, you're really, by buying …”
Wenger: Effective operators require singular focus and managing people
“To be a good operator, you have to really stay on one thing with a kind of a singular focus for a prolonged period of time, and you also have to deal a lot with people, and I'm not really a people person at the end of the day.”
Wenger: Developing nations will leapfrog legacy energy grids like mobile banking
“I think that developing nations can leapfrog. They don't have much of an existing infrastructure that needs, like, If you look in big parts of Africa, they don't have a grit. They can lean right into decentralized energy production. Just like, you know, why do…”
Wenger: Every startup investment needs a clear, one-sentence thesis
“Best investment advice is to have one clear thesis about an investment. Like, why, like, what is the one sentence thing, why this investment makes sense?”
Wenger: A board member's top duty is helping founders recognize personal weaknesses
“I think the best board member is somebody who can help the team be the best team that it can be. That has many aspects to it, but one of the crucial aspects to that is helping founders and the management team, but especially founders and CEOs, understand what …”