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 1,799 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 61 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
Friedberg: AI models will eventually gain legal privilege and professional certification
“And it sounds crazy today, but I guarantee if you put it on Polymarket, there will be a date when this happens.”
Friedberg: Progressive political wave will continue sweeping American cities
“For me, it feels like actually a little bit of a beginning of a wave that's going to continue to sweep over this country starting in cities, and I think that we're at the very early stages.”
Friedberg: Kamala Harris will soon look like a conservative candidate
“I think we'll look back and I jokingly say that Kamala Harris is going to look like a conservative candidate pretty soon.”
Friedberg: Eliminating federal student loans would force banks to underwrite quality degrees
“What will happen is the capital markets will flood to fill that hole. Banks and lenders will show up and they will say, you know what? We'll underwrite the loans, but they'll underwrite it by saying good colleges get the, get, get loans and bad colleges don't.…”
Friedberg: Near-term Chinese chip manufacturing breakthroughs will surprise the US
“And just like we were knocked over by DeepSeq, I think we will be knocked over by some semiconductor manufacturing processes coming out of China in the near term.”
Friedberg: Chinese semiconductor advances will threaten Nvidia in the near term
“So I do think that there's going to be an emergent competitive threat coming out of China to NVIDIA. And just like we were knocked over by DeepSeq, I think we will be knocked over by some semiconductor manufacturing processes coming out of China in the near te…”
Friedberg: Microsoft faces core application revenue decline within next five years
“I do think that there's a real probability of revenue decline in the next five years. So if you look at the enterprise install base, I think that cloud gets competed away. So I do think like on the application software layer, they're going to have a really har…”
Friedberg: AI will ultimately create far more jobs than it destroys
“So generally speaking, I think that the premise that AI destroys jobs is wrong because it doesn't take into account the significantly higher return on invested capital, which means more capital is going to be deployed, which means actually far more jobs are go…”
Friedberg: House GOP reconciliation bill is an absolute disgrace
“It is absolute disgrace. If you're an American, you should feel shame that your elected officials are proposing that this is the bill that gets passed, that we vaporize this much money, that we put ourselves this much further in debt, that we do not treat the …”
Friedberg: Universities should pay income taxes on their multi-billion dollar endowments
“I don't know why an institution that has fifty three billion of capital and is making probably four or five billion a year shouldn't pay taxes on that income.”
Friedberg: China's 3nm semiconductor technology will reach full production in 2026
“China, one thing that's not talked about, which I'll add in, seems to have developed three nanometer semiconductor manufacturing technology, which is going to go into production in Q three of 20, 25, and will end up being in full production in 20, 26.”
Friedberg: China's industrial growth will drive a great era of prosperity
“And that's what drives the growth and the improvement in productivity and this extraordinary abundance in energy, in mining, and now in manufacturing. And it's, I think, gonna lead to a great era of prosperity for China. It's pretty clear with or without the c…”
Friedberg: Support for socialism will rise in 2025 if government cuts succeed
“And that's where my theory on, like, I think socialism's gonna be on the rise this year. If they're successful, I think you'll see a big boom.”
David Friedberg: Price controls harm LA wildfire recovery by suppressing contractor supply
“The second order effect is you're actually hurting the market and you're hurting the rebuild effort because you're reducing the incentive for folks to come in and fill the void in the market that is necessary for us to accelerate the development of 15,000 home…”
Friedberg predicts a dramatic rise in US socialist movements in 2025
“I think that the party line is that socialism was defeated in this election cycle, and that there was a resounding kind of vote from the American populace against socialism, and I actually think my contrarian belief is that we'll see a rise, a dramatic rise in…”
Friedberg: Bitcoin will ultimately become a threat to the U.S. dollar
“I do think Bitcoin fundamentally is meant to be, supposed to be, ultimately will become a real threat to the US dollar”
Friedberg: Relaxing accredited investor rules will increase private market fraud
“I think it's more likely than not that people are going to go market bullshit securities in private markets and rip poor people off even worse.”
Friedberg: RFK Jr. has made statements that are factually wrong
“I will say that there are a number of things that RFK have said that, that Cause me a lot of trouble that I'm very troubled by, because I think that he has said things that are factually wrong.”
Friedberg: Coastal Commission cited Musk's tweets to block SpaceX launches
“I will comment on the California Coastal Commission ruling that was based on Elon's political tweets, which is why they stopped additional launches out of Vandenberg.”
Friedberg: Functional managers no longer need data analysts due to AI
“Everyone that owns a function no longer needs an analyst. The analyst is the model that's sitting on the computer in front of you right now, and you tell it what you want, and not days later, but minutes later, you get your answer.”
Friedberg: Mobile handsets will no longer exist in ten years
“I don't think that mobile handsets are going to be around in 10 years. I don't think we're going to have this, like, phone in our pocket that we're like, Pressing buttons on and touching and telling it where on the browser to go to the browser interface is goi…”
Friedberg: Redistributive policies become mainstream when government spending hits 50% of GDP
“And the tipping point is when half or more of the population begins to be employed by the government, at which point that concept is lost. Because now it is the government that is the employer, not one's own individual liberties and ability to go out and be en…”
Friedberg: Food inflation stems from government spending, not corporate price gouging
“The real cause of price inflation in food is not the supposed price gouging by corporate players in the ag and food industry, all of whom are deeply competitive with one another, but rather is the result of the inflation associated with government spending and…”
Friedberg: Price caps will reduce competition and lower productivity investment
“Trying to step in and cap prices will reduce competition, and as a result, will reduce investment in improving productivity”
Friedberg: Executives are passed over for leadership roles for being Jewish
“All I know is that there have been other conversations I've been privy to behind closed doors where senior people have been passed over because they are Jewish and because of the concerns of someone Jewish being viewed to be in a leadership position in an orga…”
Friedberg: A major board denied a Jewish candidate chairmanship over geopolitical climate
“There was a, an individual on the board who was supposed to be elected chairman. They went in for the vote. And in that board meeting, this individual who happens to be Jewish, there was a conversation that ensued about, you can't be the chairman at this time,…”
Friedberg: AI custom software will become standard, blowing up SaaS model
“I think that the tooling and the capabilities to enable the enterprise to write their own custom workplace productivity tools and their own custom workplace software, whether that's customer facing or internal facing, Really becomes kind of the standard maybe …”
Friedberg: Trump effectively secured the 2024 election after the assassination attempt
“I think the first thing I thought after I saw the video and saw that he was okay and that his ear was bleeding was that's it. It's over. Trump's won.”
Friedberg: Socialist policies across developed nations will cause Argentina-style economic crises
“First of all, I think it's rationalized as being, hey, there's economic excess for a few while the majority are left behind. It's activated by big bureaucracy, by anti-free market principles, and by tax policies and spending policies that will ultimately cripp…”
Friedberg states high probability COVID-19 originated from a lab leak
“I think that from my point of view, there's a very high probability that there was some leak. That meant that the work that was going on to try and get in front of the next pandemic and understand what we could do to prepare ourselves and what vaccines can be …”
Friedberg: Enterprise cloud market has no lock-in for AWS, Azure, or GCP
“The cloud is a wide open competitive market right now. Like there is no AWS lock-in in this market. There's no Azure lock-in. There's no GCP lock-in”
Friedberg: AI copyright infringement should depend on output, not training process
“I'd rather focus on is there copyright infringement in the output? Does the output mimic An original copyrighted source. And if it does, then that's where the infringement should lie. Not on the, how did you do it?”
Friedberg: Admitting Ukraine to NATO will cause a global world war
“I think the statements are correct, that Ukraine joining NATO escalates conflict, and we will find ourselves in a de facto global conflict, world war.”
Friedberg: Over 100M Americans directly work for or get paid by federal government
“So when you add this all up, there's over a hundred, hundred and twenty million people in the U.S. That are directly working for or getting paid by the federal government in the U.S.”
Friedberg: YouTube is the world's most valuable asset for AI
“So I think it's the most valuable asset in the world today, based on this thesis, that AI value is going to accrue to the data owner.”
Friedberg: Ukraine will be 2024's biggest political loser
“Well, Saxl like this one, but I think Ukraine might be the biggest loser this year as attention shifts to the brewing conflict in the Middle East.”
Friedberg: Turkey faces risk of being challenged in NATO in 2024
“I think there's a risk that Turkey gets challenged to leave NATO. That a lot of what's going on right now where Turkey is siding with Hamas, this has obviously been talked about and rumored about for a long time. There's no real mechanism, by the way, for kick…”
Friedberg argues high-margin SaaS was a temporary era before AI software generation
“The SaaS business model Is really a temporary phenomenon that existed between ubiquity of the internet and the development of AI and low cost, low code tools for developing software.”
Friedberg: 2021 VC vintage could torpedo 50% of Silicon Valley firms
“And what I've heard from institutional piece this year is that, you know, not only will that vintage underperform, but it could torpedo as many as 50% of firms that are managing capital today in Silicon Valley, and it could switch the capital allocation Model …”
Friedberg: Open-source local LLMs are critical to bypass AI regulation
“My best new tech of this year, I think is really important as we race to keep the promise of AI alive in the face of increasing government regulation, which is open source locally run LLMs. So you can take a, an LLM and you can run it on your machine. You don'…”
Friedberg: Regulating US AI will cause the US to fall behind China and India
“If we don't allow our market to develop in the United States, India, and China, and Singapore, and other markets will get well ahead of us in terms of their model development and their capabilities as a nation and their capabilities as an industry.”
Friedberg: Respected public figures privately told him "all Muslims need to go"
“And I've heard friends of mine in the last week Who have said awful things like all Muslims need to go. Well-known, well-respected public people have said this to me in private.”
Friedberg: TED hosted zero talks explaining why people voted for Trump post-2016
“And what disturbed me the most was that in the three years after he was elected, every TED conference had plenty of subjects, plenty of talks, and plenty of conversations about why society is falling apart, why Donald Trump is a key root cause of that, why so …”
Friedberg: 100% chance existing fusion portfolio yields low-cost power in 20 years
“I think there's a hundred percent chance that the portfolio of 70 fusion companies that exist today that are pursuing this technology will succeed. And that we will get low cost power in the next 20 years at scale, right?”
Friedberg: Federal government will launch structured lending program for CRE sector
“My prediction is the federal government is going to help to monetize that debt, and they're going to help to support that commercial real estate sector through some sort of structured lending program.”
David Friedberg predicts GPT-4 training costs will drop 100x within 18 months
“If they spent four hundred million dollars in the last couple of years, you could probably assume that doing the same trading exercise could be done for five to ten million dollars, 18 months from now, to generate the same model.”