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 2,795 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
Andreessen: Screenwriters will use AI to render full movies within years
“What's going to happen is they're going to use AI to be better writers and to write a lot more material. And by the way, if you're a Hollywood screenwriter, like all of a sudden, you're going to be able to use AI at some point in the next few years to actually…”
Ismail: Top exponential Fortune 100 companies outperformed bottom 10 by 40x
“Over a seven-year period, the top 10 did better than the bottom 10 by three x on revenue growth 6.4 times on profitability, 10.9 times on return on assets, but shareholder returns, compound annual growth rate, top 10 outperformed the bottom 10 by 40 x.”
Diamandis: XPRIZE competition aims to reverse human biological age by 20 years
“My biggest area right now is reinventing, disrupting healthcare a health span XPRIZE reverse your biological age or your functional age by 20 years, right?”
Bovell: AI will depress wages in modeling and programming
“We're going to see this across the board with AI. It's going to put downward pressure on a lot of different wages from modeling to programming, but that's where it becomes a little bit challenging.”
Masad: Replit uses three distinct AI models while Copilot uses one
“Copilot uses a single model, rapidly uses like three different models of different sizes. So the smallest models as the model, you know, over your shoulder, continuously giving you suggestions, then a medium sized model to do the transformations and things lik…”
Gas app's exclusive Today Show segment generated only 1,000 downloads
“Prior to the acquisition, Nikita, the founder went on the today show and had this big exclusive segment, which in the past would have been like, Huge for an application or a company. And he said he thinks it generated a thousand downloads.”
Luckey: Nearly two-thirds of major US weapons contracts have one bidder
“Nearly two-thirds of major weapons system contracts in the United States have just one bidder.”
VandeHei: Axios bans opinion pages and reporter political posts
“We don't have an opinion page. We ask our reporters to stay off of Twitter and social media platforms expressing their personal opinions.”
Gallagher: One-third of US military energetics rely on Chinese supply chains
“DOD is still largely using the same energetic material developed in the 19 forties. And a third of that material is produced overseas with supply chains reliant on China, of course.”
Gallagher: China's hypersonic missile program relied on U.S. semiconductor technology
“It turns out that the Chinese hypersonic program has benefited from American semiconductor technology”
Hefets: Housing downturn will not be as extreme as 2008 crisis
“So I don't think that we're going to see something as extreme as the, that last housing crisis.”
Andreessen: Patients presenting GPT query results will force doctors to adopt AI
“And by the way, patients using GPT, if it hasn't started, it's going to start imminently. So, so, so, so the patients are going to show up with the results of GPT queries, and the doctors are going to have to respond to that, and so they're going to end up bei…”
US had to reverse-engineer B-2 bomber parts due to lost documentation
“About a year ago, the government had to issue an RFQ for some of the parts on the B to not just to replace the parts, but because no one, you know, the guy that designed it or engineered it retired and they didn't have it documented anywhere. Like there's lite…”
Fielding: Privateer plans to offer space tracking tools for free
“We aim to democratize the space situational awareness market. By bringing these tools to humankind for free, by enabling and empowering the community so that we have a single source of truth and knowledge, and we're not aiming to own it.”
Gluchowski: ZK-rollups will maintain a 50x cost reduction ratio over Ethereum mainnet
“So right now the rollups we have for ZK rollups we have for payments are about 50 times cheaper than native payments on layer one. And I expect that this ratio to remain roughly the same for also for smart contracts.”
Chou: Rally will operate as a network, not an IPO-bound company
“I'm not trying to be a company. We're trying to really create a network where other businesses can build a business and not worry about rally being a traditional company that's trying to you know, earn revenues and do an IPO at some point and eventually potent…”
Abernethy: HIPAA-de-identified health data remains likely re-identifiable through modern analytics
“Even information that is de-identified from a HIPAA perspective actually still is probably re-identifiable even in our context.”
Abernethy: The FDA has approved pharmaceuticals based on Phase 1 data
“We've seen drugs approved based on phase one data.”
Dixon: Cable TV bundle economics will collapse in the near future
“And the economics too, like the, you know, like the cable bundle is going to break at some point, I think soon, right? But at some point, like the economics will, like fundamentally, like it will no longer work to have the cable bundle. I think that's, Relativ…”
Dixon: VCs will not fund third-party tools for closed platforms
“You will not see any VC. We have not funded. No one will fund an anti-spam solution for Twitter or Facebook.”
Pathak: Synapse will not seek to acquire its own banking charter
“We're most likely not going to go and get a charter.”
Dixon: NFTs and digital goods will regain mainstream popularity
“I think another interesting area is it's fall, it's kind of out of fashion at the moment, but I think we'll come back is NFTs or you know, digital goods.”
Yahya: Decentralized storage will not drastically cut costs for most uses
“So the reason that we need decentralized storage networks is not because they're going to reduce the price of storage by orders of magnitude. At least for most kinds of files and for most use cases, I don't believe that that'll be the case.”
Church: Off-target edits appear low in first two CRISPR babies
“So the amount of off-target and mosaicism so far for these two babies seems to be low, but time will tell.”
Church: Embryo selection avoids Mendelian diseases without CRISPR editing
“Ignoring the fact that if you're in an IVF, PGD clinic anyway. To do your CRISPR editing of your Mendelian disease, you could just do selection for most of these things.”
Church: Dor Yeshorim has eliminated Tay-Sachs via genetic matchmaking
“And this actually works. So, Dorya Shurim has eliminated significant meningitis disease like Tay-Sachs by practicing a version of this that probably isn't perfectly generalizable, but there are versions of this that could keep a great deal of privacy.”
Church: Genetic recoding can render any organism resistant to all viruses
“Biocontainment using recoding is a way that we can make any organism resistant to all viruses and horizontal transfer. Most of these things now work.”
Church: Lab achieved 10,000 gene edits in a single cell
“So we set the record of 62 edits in the pigs, and we now have edits, so we have 10,000 edits in a single cell.”
Hirasaki: Immuno-Oncology Acquisitions Occurred Before Human Clinical Data
“Now, there are some areas of clear exception. So, so very competitive hot areas like oncology, immuno-oncology over the last few years. You've seen this shift in acquisitions earlier on. In, in phase one, and actually even earlier just because it was so compet…”
Care facilities use therapeutic social robots as alternatives to medication
“They've been able to use these robots as Alternatives to medication for calming distressed patients.”
Autonomous weapons create an accountability gap in existing war crime laws
“One of the interesting conversations that's happening right now is around autonomous weapon systems and accountability for harm in settings of war, where we have war crimes, but they require intentionality, and if a robot is committing a war crime, then there'…”
De La Garza: Arrested malware authors often work for antivirus companies
“There has been more than one malware author that was arrested and actually it turned out that they were working for an antivirus or anti-malware company. It's really common to find people kind of on both sides of that fence.”
Jin: Top business schools like Harvard and Stanford face declining MBA applications
“The number of applications is shrinking across the board, and the institutions that historically were thought of as immune to this, so Harvard Stanford, GSB, Wharton, the top, top business schools, They're now experiencing this, too, where they're seeing year …”
Tyson: Kaiser Permanente owns 39 hospitals managed as expense centers
“So you take, for example, in my system, ah, we own 39 hospitals, they're not even revenue centers, they're expense centers.”
Tyson: Kaiser will perform hospital admissions at home within 5-10 years
“We believe strongly that within the next five to 10 years there's a certain percentage of our admissions into the hospital we're going to be doing in the homes.”
Whitman: Quibi will be a mobile-first, mobile-only short-form video platform
“What we are trying to do is create a platform where we offer short form, and I'm going to describe that in a minute, short form video of Hollywood production quality built for mobile. And mobile first, mobile only, honestly.”
Wilson: Cloud market will split to Amazon 60%, Google 30%, Microsoft 10%
“But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market, Google has 30% of the market, and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's gonna be a three player game in that business, and that's good.”
Evans: Battery costs of $200/kWh explain why Tesla loses money
“Or is it because batteries are still 200 dollars per kilowatt hour? And that's not cost competitive with gasoline, which incidentally is also a big reason why Tesla is still losing money.”
Haun: Moving offshore will not protect crypto startups serving US consumers
“Well, I don't think they should wait, but I think they should have common sense and good judgment, and one of the red flags I see sometimes is, you know, and they'll publicly state, oh, we're moving offshore so that we don't have to comply with these laws that…”
Reich: Unidentified Denisovan fossils are already sitting in East Asian museums
“Well, I think it's almost certainly the case that there has been a fossil record found, and it's staring us in the face in museums all around East Asia. So I think if you go to Southern China, or you go to Southeast Asia, or you go to parts of Russia, you will…”
Reich: Modern human populations are almost entirely products of mass migration
“But what we now know is that that's almost never true, and that the people who live in any one place today are almost always The result of layers and layers of mass migration and population mixture convulsively replacing and changing each population over time,…”
Reich: European ancestry in African Americans is four-to-one male-derived
“African Americans today have about 80% ancestry from West Africans and about 20% ancestry from Europeans with a lot of variation. But the European ancestry in African Americans comes four to one from the male side. So very little of it comes from European wome…”
Reich: India's genetics show sex-biased admixture 3,000 to 4,000 years ago
“If you look in people in India today are the result of a massive convulsive mixture between two groups that occurred around three or 4000 years ago, and we now know that from lots of lines of evidence, including ancient and modern DNA analysis. Now that proces…”
Andreessen: Tech has yielded zero productivity growth in healthcare and education
“There are these giant sectors of the economy in which not only is there no productivity growth, like overall in both healthcare and education, there is no measured growth. There is no measured results in the application of technology in those fields, and in fa…”
Rampell: Affirm gets paid by merchants to acquire customers, unlike traditional lenders
“Contrast that with the other company that I co-founded a firm where we get paid to acquire customers in contrast to every other lending company where they have to pay a lot of money to acquire customers.”
Caplan: 1971 Griggs ruling restricts degree-based hiring as much as IQ tests
“If you look at the original case, it actually said that not only is IQ testing legally suspect, but educational credential hiring legally suspect.”
Caplan: National education spending boosts GDP far less than personal earnings
“The main result is that the measured effect of national education on national income is much smaller than the effect of personal education on personal income, which fits very nicely with the signaling story and does not fit really with any other story out ther…”
Humble: High-performing tech teams do not trade speed for stability
“High-performing companies don't make those trade-offs. They're not going fast and breaking things. They're going fast and making more stable, more high-quality And this is one of the key results in the book, in our research, is this fact that high performers d…”