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 2,594 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 67 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
Sacks: Ukraine war would not have happened with three specific US concessions
“If we had just done those three things, there would have been no war.”
Sacks: Putin seized Crimea in direct retaliation for a U.S.-backed coup
“If you're wondering why Putin seized Crimea, it was in direct retaliation for the coup that we backed in Ukraine in 2014. This is the origin of the conflict.”
Sacks: Hersh report alleging U.S. Nord Stream sabotage is plausible
“I lean towards thinking it's more plausible than not.”
Sacks: Closing NATO's door likely could have avoided the Russia-Ukraine war
“Because there's a good chance we could have avoided This disastrous war if we had just been willing to close NATO's door.”
Sacks: Twitter's undisclosed moderation is an FTX-level free speech fraud
“This is an FTX level fraud, except that what was stolen here was not customer funds, it was their free speech rights.”
Sacks: Russia will likely use a tactical nuke if Ukraine retakes Crimea
“With the result that I think is quite likely that the Russians will be willing to use a tactical nuke to prevent their total defeat.”
Sacks: US State Department failed to avoid war by refusing NATO guarantees
“The question is, did the US State Department do everything they could to avoid this war? And my point is, absolutely not. They should have taken this Ukraine issue off the table in writing before the invasion.”
Sacks: The New York Times acts as the woke mob's enforcement wing
“They are the enforcement wing of the woke mob.”
Sacks: Big Tech committed massive 2020 election interference censoring Hunter Biden
“The scale interference in the election was committed by big tech. I mean, they censored the Hunter Biden story two weeks before the election.”
Sacks: Biden FTC would allow Big Tech to buy Twitter over Musk
“I think this administration does not want to see Twitter become a free speech company again. And so the political winds will blow towards letting, I think, Twitter be acquired by a big tech company, even if it means big tech gets bigger. Wait a second. So I th…”
Sacks predicts elites and media will stop Musk from acquiring Twitter
“Elon is gonna be thwarted by these folks. He's not gonna get control of this company. They're, the vested interest in stopping him by the board, by the new CEO, and by the corporate media and the political elites is too great. They will find a way to stop him.”
Sacks: US State Department could have easily avoided Ukraine war
“This war was easily avoidable. I mean, the State Department could have avoided this war very easily.”
Sacks: A deal could have been negotiated to prevent the war in Ukraine
“I strongly believe we could have cut a deal on Ukraine a year ago to diffuse this whole situation before it turned into a war.”
Sacks: 2014 removal of Yanukovych was a US-backed coup
“They had this basically pro-Russian democratically elected Prime Minister, President Yukinovich who was deposed in a coup in 2014, a coup that was supported by our State Department and probably the CIA, ok?”
Sacks: Chesa Boudin has done nothing except release perpetrators of anti-Asian violence
“Chase Boudin has done nothing except release the perpetrators.”
Sachs: Fauci participated in suppressing COVID-19 origin investigation
“Fauci, with respect to COVID, we talked about it before, 100% participated in a suppression of the investigation into the origins of COVID. There was an active attempt to suppress that.”
Sacks claims a Democratic super PAC astroturfed the viral Rogan video
“If you kind of look at you know, who's behind this clip, it's pretty clear that it was a democratic super PAC, put this together, and sort of astroturfed it as a viral video.”
Sacks: EcoHealth's Peter Daszak helped unleash COVID-19 and is 2021's worst human
“So this, you know, this guy not only helped unleash a plague upon the world. He then lied about it to cover his ass and protect his millions. That makes him the worst in my view.”
Sacks: Twitter censorship principles exist solely to suppress opposing political views
“These censorship principles only exist so the employees of the company can censor one side of the debate that they don't agree with.”
Sacks: The public school system is the primary cause of structural racism
“Look, I mean, if you're going to define structural racism as conditions that, that trap people of color in poverty across generations, which seems like a pretty fair definition, then you have to say the number one cause of structural racism is the school syste…”
Sacks: Facebook whistleblower leaks were an orchestrated political hit
“Because I think like all this, these leaks from the so-called whistleblower, I think this is a completely orchestrated political hit, and they should just fight back and push back on it.”
Sacks: Gavin Newsom is one of the most corrupt governors ever
“He is one of the most corrupt governors we've ever had.”
Sacks calls wearing masks after vaccination the blue equivalent of MAGA hats
“Wearing a mask after you're vaccinated is now, it's like the blue equivalent of the red MAGA hat, where it's completely performative to say, hey, I'm on team blue. You know, even though, like, scientifically, it's meaningless.”
Sacks says Capitol riot death toll would be identical for Black protestors
“Honestly, I think it would have been the same.”
Sacks: Trump has disqualified himself from running for national office again
“I think he's disqualified himself from being a candidate, you know, at a national level again.”
Sacks: AI doomer campaigns aim to establish federal AI regulator
“Well, they're creating a very negative perception of AI to further their case for AI regulation. And the end goal here is to create a federal department of AI. They want an AI regulator.”
Sacks: Anthropic faces severe product liability from internal doom warnings
“On the one hand, you're asking public market investors to underwrite your company to a value in the trillions. On the other hand, your own safety lead, not Jacob Cox and the boss who then sort of co-signed his tweet, is saying that your core product is unsolve…”
Sacks predicts a federal AI agency will effectively ban open source
“I mean, no, look, this is a doomer psyop and the ultimate target is open source. That's what it all comes down to, because that is what An FDA AI will ultimately ban. They won't call it a ban. They'll just say, look, we have to apply the same standards to open…”
Sacks: OpenAI is pursuing regulatory capture to secure a duopoly moat
“OpenAI, frankly, seems to be running an anthropic slipstream right now from a red capture standpoint. I don't think they're as doomer as anthropic, but they can see the benefit if the federal government effectively creates a moat that, you know, there's huge e…”
Sacks: Anthropic embraces AI doomer warnings to advance regulatory capture strategy
“Fundamentally, They agree with him, and their employees are saying they agree with him, and he's amplifying their message, and frankly, whether they plan this or not, they are happy that he's doing this. Why? Because they like the political outcome that he is …”
Sacks: Colin Kaepernick ad marked the beginning of Nike's downfall
“I think that if you were to pinpoint the beginning of the downfall, that was it.”
Sacks: US Venezuela oil agreement is purely a business deal, not nation building
“Well, I definitely don't think this is nation building. You know, we're not trying to stand up an army here like we did in Afghanistan. We're not trying to teach them about toxic masculinity. We're not trying to stand up a government or anything like that. We'…”
Sacks: Backing Machado in Venezuela would risk deploying US troops
“I'm glad that President Trump didn't put Machado in charge, because how's she going to stay in power? Like, what Guns are gonna basically protect her. You know, it takes men with guns to basically stay in power in these countries. I'm not saying that it can't …”
Sacks: No founder has amplified AI fears more than Dario Amodei
“No company, and you'd have to say, therefore, no founder CEO has done more to promote these fears and pump these fears and amplify these fears than Dario has.”
Sacks: US will get smoked by China if AI faces pre-release regulation
“And yes, we will get smoked by China because they will not subject all their companies to these constraints.”
Sacks predicts an open-source AI ban disguised as uniform safety standards
“An open source ban is coming. They're not going to call it that. You know what they're going to say? They're going to say that we simply have to apply the same standards to open models that we apply to close.”
Sacks: AI Boom Shows No Evidence of Job Loss, Only Job Creation
“There is no evidence of that. We're now years into the AI boom, and there's no evidence of that. We only see that job creation.”
Sacks: Anthropic Lobbied to Restrict Nvidia's International Chip Sales
“Anthropic has really been behind a lot of the political activity to restrict Nvidia's sales internationally.”
Sacks: New AI data center scaling will rely entirely on natural gas
“The green stuff can't scale in the short term. It's all gas powered for the new data centers. That's the only way to kind of get the amount of scale that you need in the next year or two.”
Sacks: Frontier AI intelligence is now an Anthropic-OpenAI duopoly
“Now we're really down to just anthropic and open AI. So the market for frontier intelligence has become a duopoly.”
Sacks: Anthropic surpassed $80B ARR and will beat year-end targets early
“The latest we heard is Anthropic is now over eighty billion of ARR. Started the year at 10. It had forecast a hundred billion as exit ARR for the year, and most people said that that would be impossible to achieve. Now it looks like they're gonna do it with a …”
Sacks: Senator Cantwell opposed AI safety bill at Dario Amodei's behest
“Cantwell, who's the ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, opposed it, supposedly at Dario's behest, because he will accept nothing less than an FDA for AI.”
Sacks: Anthropic iterated prompts over 200 times in AI blackmail study
“Remember when Anthropic did the whole blackmail study, you know, where supposedly an agent displayed independent goal-seeking behavior and then blackmail an employee. It turned out that actually they iterated on the prompt over 200 times to get to that result.”
Sacks: Anthropic shows breathtaking hypocrisy by blocking training on its model output
“It's breathtaking hypocrisy for Anthropic to maintain that it is entitled to train on all the world's output for free, even if the creator objects, but- The one type of output that you're not allowed to train on is their output, even if you pay for it. That is…”
Sacks: AI safety rhetoric is leading toward a push to ban open-source models
“I think where it's all leading to is an effort to ban open source models.”