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 6,975 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 83 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
Mark Cuban says a 15% tariff would wipe out small business margins
“You increase, you know, from a two and a half percent average tariff to a 15% tariff, that's their profit margin, and it's gone.”
McCune: Effective Altruists spent a decade funding think tanks to steer AI
“You know, from my point of view and look, you know, they deserve a lot of credit. I think the effect of altruist community for 10 years backed by large sums of money were very, very effective at influencing think tanks and nonprofit organizations in D.C. And t…”
McCune: Current AI tech lobbying is dwarfed by decade of safety spending
“But I mean, when people are writing these articles about the fact that the AI industry is, you know, pumping all this money into the system, Certainly, like, I'm not suggesting that there's not money in the system. We're obviously active on the political and p…”
Boyle: Substack was the only platform protecting free speech
“There was one platform that stood up and said, hey, we are protecting free speech. And that was Substack.”
Best: Liberal media figures bore the brunt of 2020 cancellations
“The people that it really, I think in 20, 20, the thing that surprised me, the people that felt the brunt of that were not conservatives. We're not Republicans necessarily. It was the people in the liberal media. In, you know, in, in, in my telling, I would sa…”
Horowitz: Crypto is more transparent than Visa or dollars
“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”
Horowitz: Media praised Facebook under Obama, called it dangerous under Trump
“The funny thing was like, if you go back to 2008, All the stories on how Obama got elected were Facebook. Like, he mastered Facebook. He got elected on Facebook. Facebook's the greatest thing. It's making the world more democratic. Arab Spring. Wow, this is so…”
Casado: VC firms ignoring AI have become irrelevant and absent from deals
“Some firms that were very, very relevant, we just never see anymore. I mean, like the founders don't talk about them. They're not there. They're not in the deals.”
Smith: US factory construction boomed under Biden after decades of stagnation
“But when you look at factory construction, real, real factory construction, you saw this enormous, you saw it basically flat at a flat level for decades and decades at a fairly low level. Then you saw this enormous boom during the Biden years and all the facto…”
Patel: Claude Code and Cursor have surpassed GitHub Copilot in ARR
“If you look at the revenue ARR chart, it's like, Cloud code in, like, three months has surpassed them, and, like, cursor, you know, easily surpassed them, and then, like, even, like, companies like Replin or, like, and Windsurf slash Cognition are, like, gonna…”
Casado: China has the best AI models and the US is behind
“And then you forward by a year, and they've got the best models by far, and we're way behind.”
Srinivasan: US regulatory assault blocked tech IPOs and M&A for four years
“For four years, it was just a desert. A bunch of companies silently died. The state blocked IPOs. They're blocking M&As. It was just an all-out anti-tech assault.”
Srinivasan: Google paid over $100 million into Windsurf's account for dividends
“Google put a hundred million plus in the bank account of WindSurf where the intent was to dividend it out.”
Andreessen: U.S. de-industrialization resulted from deliberate policies outlawing manufacturing
“We chose to de-industrialize through a set of explicit policy choices, you know, not, not least of which is You know, we made a lot of industrial activity illegal over time.”
Noah Smith: Smartphone technology is driving global fertility far below replacement
“Phones have destroyed the human race. Like, the fertility crash that's happening all around the world. Nobody has replacement level fertility. Fertility is going far below replacement everywhere because of technology.”
Balaji Srinivasan: The Atlantic published an article advocating for invading Brazil
“Like, a great example is The Atlantic published this crazy piece calling for invading Brazil because they saw a photo of the Brazilian fires, ok?”
Balaji Srinivasan: NYT won Pulitzer Prizes for false Russiagate coverage
“The New York Times collected all these polizers for this, for basically false information, right?”
Balaji Srinivasan: AI can automatically surface every historical contradiction in NYT archives
“AI can do that. AI can do that. AI can find every internal contradiction to NYT ever, ok? And so you could just have them, NYT versus NYT, like, you know, they're enslaving people, and then they're pretending they're, you know, like, there's just so many thing…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Uber VCs leaked information because Travis Kalanick resisted IPO
“At Uber, like the VCs there wanted money and Travis didn't want to sell or IPO. So that's why they did it in part.”
Horowitz: Facebook internal probe found virtually no evidence of Russian hacking
“You know, what they found in terms of the quote-unquote Russian hacking was just about effectively nothing. Like, there was nothing. And so, but the dominant media narrative Was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians, and I think like probably half the …”
Ulevitch: Taiwan is seven days from a blackout under a Chinese blockade
“This is an island country. That is, you know, seven days away from a total energy block, blackout if they get an oil and gas blockade from China so that they can't bring in ships to deliver oil and fuel.”
Roy Lee: Cluely generates more revenue than the latest YC batch
“We wrote our first lines of code 10 weeks ago. We're, like, earlier than the latest YC batch of companies, yet we're, like, generating probably more revenue than every single one of them, and, like, the product is, like, it's literally two and a half months si…”
De la Garza: ChatGPT is 100% accurate at detecting suspicious emails
“To drop a suspicious email into a, into ChatGPT and ask if it's suspicious, and it's like a hundred percent accurate, right? Like if you want to like find sensitive information, you ask the LLM, is this sensitive information? And it's like a hundred percent ac…”
Marc Andreessen: Russian Facebook ad spend during 2016 election was only $80,000
“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”
Andreessen: Cambridge Analytica's psychometric ad targeting never actually worked
“It turned out that the method that was supposedly used by the Russians slash, you know, the Trump campaign to do the mind control, you know, basically like that, that method, I mean, we now know basically it never worked. Like it, the whole psych, psych, psych…”
Andreessen: US government launched a war to kill crypto
“Crypto, you know, became incredibly politicized, and the government, US government basically launched a full-on war against it, tried to kill it.”
Rick Rubin claims AI vibe coding eliminates the need to learn programming
“You don't need to learn to code anymore. So that's the beauty of it. It democratizes it and makes it for everybody.”
Rick Rubin claims a top neurosurgeon said half of medical textbooks are wrong
“I spoke to the top brain surgeon in the world, neurosurgeon, and I asked him, of the textbook that's currently being taught, In medical school today, how much of the information is accurate and how much of it is wrong? He said, at least 50% of it is wrong.”
Ben Horowitz says media ignored a massive shift in Trump's Middle East policy
“Yeah, it was actually a big thing in Trump's Middle East speech where it was such a, Remarkable speech in the sense that he advocated for the Middle East living or evolving from their own culture as opposed to being changed into our culture, which is a massive…”
Topol: Personalized vaccines are curing pancreatic and kidney cancers
“So vaccines now are capable Of cures of pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, with these personalized vaccines using the proteins of the person's tumor.”
Topol: Mass screening detects only 14% of cancers despite massive costs
“We only pick up 14% of cancers from that mass screening, which costs over hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”
Vance: One Chinese firm outproduced post-WWII US shipbuilding in 2024
“In fact, one of Beijing's state-owned firms built more commercial ships just last year than all of America has produced since the end of World War II.”
Vance: Importing cheap labor directly causes economic productivity to stagnate
“And I'd say that if you look in nearly every country from Canada to the UK that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you've seen productivity stagnate. And I don't think that's not a total happenstance. I think that the connection is very direct.”
Vance: Migrant border crossings dropped 94 percent last month
“Last month, migrant crossings were down 94% to their lowest number all time, and that happened just in two months of serious Border enforcement.”
Sankar: The United States empirically lost deterrence a decade ago
“I think empirically, we lost deterrence, and we lost deterrence about a decade ago.”
Ayrey: Non-technical founders are advocating on LinkedIn to eliminate code reviews
“I've seen posts on LinkedIn from startup founders that maybe don't have a background in coding and they're basically advocating for removing the code review check because they say, well, look, I just generated this whole program and I submitted it to my team a…”
Ian Webster: Anthropic Claude censorship matches DeepSeek on Chinese political topics
“Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, the level of censorship here is like Anthropic Claude is actually on par with DeepSeq.”
Sivulka: China has not shown it can push frontier AI
“China has not shown that they can actually continue to play ball, ah, pushing the frontier of AI.”
Jones: The FBI would have bugged MLK's psychiatric sessions for J. Edgar Hoover
“Whether it's in 30 days, or 60 days, or 90 days, but within 30 to 60 days, every conversation that Martin is having with his psychiatrist is being transcribed. And within 60 days, the transcription of his sessions will be on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover. I'm ab…”
Schimpf: Wargames show key U.S. munition stockpiles run out in eight days
“You know, one of the areas where we see it is showing up with weapons, so when you look at these wargaming sort of scenarios, and you know, all these wargames are sort of questionable in their own ways but pretty consistently the stockpile of key U.S. Munition…”
Schimpf: Pentagon oversight bureaucrats outnumber accountable leaders 10 to 1
“It's just there are 10 times as many people who say no as there are to people who are accountable for doing it.”
Sheriff McMahill: Legalizing marijuana has failed to eradicate the black market
“The legalization of marijuana has done nothing to eradicate the black market of marijuana.”
Andreessen: CHIPS Act money is stalled due to added political requirements
“The money has not been dispersed because the deal keeps getting renegotiated to add new political requirements.”
Horowitz: Major tech and pharma CEOs couldn't get Biden administration meetings
“It's like every major, you talk to any major tech CEO of the biggest companies in the world of the, you know the biggest pharma companies in the world, none of them could get meetings with this administration.”
Andreessen: AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky advocates bombing data centers
“The AI version of that is, you know, Eliezer Yadkowsky's version of that is we must bomb data centers. Like, if there's a data center that we think might take off, like, if the training run starts to go too well, like, we need to send in the Air Force and be b…”
Andreessen: Only 6% of Americans Share Ideology Built Into Social Media
“Even in the US, if you do the sort of, there's you know, sort of analysts that do the mapping of ideologies and political views in the US, it's only like six percent of the US population that agrees with the point of view that ended up getting built into socia…”
Andreessen: AI Labs Have Begun Purging Activist Safety Personnel
“Inside some of these companies, there's at least the beginning of a, you know, the beginning of a purge, retrenchment, rethink on, on, on these topics.”
Horowitz: Government pressure on tech platforms came via informal threats, not legislation
“So it hasn't, Congress did not pass a law. The, there was no executive order. There was no policy. There was no nothing. There was just phone calls and letters and threats you know, from you know, from various kind of people in the government, you know, rangin…”