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 2,425 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
Friedberg: Zero documented cases globally of fully vaccinated individuals transmitting COVID
“Besides the statistics on this you know, there is no documented proof that someone was fully vaccinated and transmitted COVID to someone else out of four hundred million total vaccinations globally.”
David Sacks claims accounting for transfer payments drops US poverty to 2%
“The publicly reported stats are that 13.5% of the US population lives in poverty. Once you actually take into account all these programs and transfer payments it's more like two percent.”
Sacks: Over 30 prosecutors left Chesa Boudin's office during his tenure
“In addition to these seven veterans he purged, over 30 prosecutors, which is about a quarter of the whole office, have left under his reign because they don't like working for him.”
Friedberg: California EDD paid $30 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims
“There's a hundred and fourteen billion dollars in unemployment claims paid since COVID. This is an insane statistic, but it looks like roughly 27% or thirty billion dollars of fraudulent claims were paid by the EDD.”
Sacks: Adam Schiff introduced a bill creating a domestic Patriot Act
“Now we have in Congress a bill put forward by Adam Schiff that basically would create a domestic Patriot Act to create giant new surveillance powers for the state to go after people they deem to be traitors and seditionists and domestic terrorists.”
Chamath: SDNY, state, and federal prosecutors will aggressively pursue Trump
“Even if we don't find a way to basically put Trump in jail for this, I can 100% guarantee you, I will bet a million bucks That now the Southern District of New York gloves off. Every single state that can go after this guy, gloves off. And to the extent that J…”
Sacks: Major tech platforms censor posts contradicting the WHO
“Google, YouTube, and even sites like LinkedIn or Nextdoor are now censoring People's statements if they contradict the WHO, apparently without irony, because nobody has contradicted the WHO more than the WHO itself.”
Calacanis: Nikola stock will go to zero
“I predict it will be worth 60 cents. I kid you not, this company will go to zero, is my prediction.”
Sacks: TikTok paying Oracle political protection money; deal will fail
“It's bite dance paying political protection money to Larry Ellison to be their bodyguard in this political process. But, and I, but that's why I don't think it's going to fly.”
David Sacks claims official COVID fatality rate is overstated by 10x
“The official fatality rate has been over, which is about six percent. You know, it's a very high fatality rate. It's pretty scary, but we now know that that's overstated by probably at least 10 X.”
Friedberg: High asymptomatic rate means actual COVID-19 fatality rate is much lower
“If you take that high level, you take that low level, call it somewhere between 25 and 86%, maybe even as high as 86% of patients are asymptomatic, which means that the actual fatality rate is much, much lower even in a large cohort that gets infected here.”
Sacks: OpenAI agents reached the internet due to a misconfigured third-party sandbox
“And that's what happened here is that open AI was running these agents. They were in a sandbox. The sandbox was misconfigured by a third party vendor. That's why it was able to get onto the internet, ok?”
Sacks: AI agent accessed Hugging Face via 14 exposed public API keys
“No, the way it did it is that the agent found 14 exposed working hugging face API keys sitting in public code repositories.”
Sacks: Bernie Sanders is demanding a total pause on AI development
“Bernie Sanders is now picking up on this, and he's demanding a total pause on AI development.”
Weinstein: American and Russian scientists are relocating to China
“American scientists, Russian scientists, all sorts of scientists are going to China for some prestige, some money, and some freedom.”
Kratsios: China has achieved no EUV lithography breakthrough since 2019
“They have been trying to essentially figure out how to do EV lithography since, since we put the export controls in 2019, no breakthrough has happened.”
Kratsios: NSF Stopped Funding Programs for Gifted STEM Students
“We used to have programs at National Science Foundation that would actually support and encourage gifted and talented students in American high schools and middle schools. Those were stopped. For some reason, encouraging high-performing young students to pursu…”
Chamath: Governors Abbott and Shapiro issued executive orders limiting datacenter growth
“Governor Abbott of Texas put down this executive order around Texas data centers and limiting its growth. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania just did the same thing.”
Friedberg: 53% of young conservatives support government-run grocery stores
“53% of self-identified conservatives under 40 support government-run grocery stores.”
Friedberg: 10% tax on $50M+ individuals funds only 3 months of spending
“The total net worth of all people that are worth over fifty million dollars is only 23 trillion. You could take 10% of their net worth and it would only cover three months of fiscal spending, today's fiscal spending.”
Sacks: Forbes 400 total wealth is less than 10% of DSA platform cost
“The Forbes 400, all the wealth of the Forbes 400 is only 6.6 trillion. So it's less than 10% of the low end of DSA spending.”
Langley: Zero federal regulation exists for police drone deployments outside air safety
“There's very little state regulation. There's zero federal regulation outside of air safety, which is important, but nothing yet.”
Baker: Software coder job openings are higher today than a year ago
“There are, you know, there are more job openings for software coders today than there were a year ago. There's more demand for coders, and that is the kind of in the epicenter of the blast zone.”
Baker: CoreWeave is profitably renting 2020 Nvidia Ampere GPUs through 2029
“Corweave said that they are renting Amperes at economically profitable rates today for 2029. So an Ampere that came out in 2020 is going to have a nine-year life, and I think that's what Nvidia sees”
Gerstner: Frontier AI labs pay 3x to 5x market price for compute
“Right now the shortage is so acute, and the willingness to pay from the Frontier Labs is so high because they all recognize they're on the verge of some massive breakthroughs. That they're willing to pay three, four, five X market pricing in order to get at sc…”
Mavrucas: Only 1% of the defense budget goes to autonomous systems
“When you look at the overall defense department of war's budget, One percent goes to autonomous systems.”
Calacanis: Moonshot's Kimi K3 matches GPT 5.6 at half the cost
“China's moonshot AI released Kimi K three. Open source model, obviously. Performance on par. On par. Not six months behind, not 12 months behind, but now on par with models like Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.6. Which in and of itself is extraordinary, but about 50% cheap…”
Sacks: White House has made no decision to ban open-source AI
“Well, look, I mean, I have it on good authority that there is no decision by the white house to ban open source models.”
Calacanis: Anthropic downloaded 7 million pirated books to train Claude
“Anthropic downloaded seven million books from pirated websites to train Claude”
Chamath: Permitting reform in Austin increased housing supply and lowered rents
“The data from Austin says once you relax the permitting constraint, you'll get more units built. And for every unit that comes online, it literally drives down the rent.”
Calacanis: Reports indicate 50,000 vacant 'ghost apartments' in New York City
“And so you have 50,000 ghost apartments, according to reports, in New York City.”
Calacanis: Apple filed 41-page lawsuit against OpenAI for trade secret theft
“On July 10th, Apple filed a 41 page lawsuit against OpenAI over alleged, alleged stolen trade secrets.”
Calacanis: OpenAI hired over 400 Apple employees in recent years
“During all of this, OpenAI has poached over 400 Apple employees over the last year or two.”
Sacks: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a seven-figure donation to Public First
“There's one called Public First where Dario just gave his first seven-figure contribution and then a bunch of other employees at Anthropic gave it.”
Sacks: Study shows top AI-spending firms grew headcount 10% post-adoption
“And it was an actual study of over 21,000 firms in the U.S., and they looked at their Payroll data combined with their spending on AI, and what they saw is that firms that spent the most on AI actually grew the fastest, and they tended to grow their headcount …”
Jason Calacanis: Heritage Foundation data shows voter fraud cannot flip elections
“They have a lot of people trying to figure out where fraud exists, investigating it, and it's de minimis. It's a couple of thousands of cases they can find. So even if you extrapolated them, 10 X or 20 X, pick your multiple, it would never swing a major electi…”
Nate Silver: Immigrant and entrepreneurial groups are shifting away from Democrats
“You have seen shifts in those groups and the most entrepreneurial groups away from Democrats.”
Sacks: Polling shows 80% of Democrats disapprove of Israel
“If you look at polling, 80% of Democrats now say they disapprove of Israel.”
Calacanis: OpenAI's Greg Brockman and wife donated $25M to Trump
“If you look at OpenAI and Grok, those are the people who are largely pro-Trump including Greg Brockman and his wife, who gave twenty-five million to Trump.”
Sacks: Anthropic retains all Mythos prompts and outputs for 30 days
“They are now retaining for 30 days, every prompt and every output you send to one of these mythos class models. There are no exceptions, even enterprise customers who had signed zero data retention agreements.”
Sacks: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei advocated for FDA-style AI regulation
“Dario wrote a new blog post. Saying that transparency was no longer good enough, that we needed to have a new regulatory agency like an FAA or maybe an FDA to approve all models.”
Dreyfus: Standard electrification will trigger US power shortfalls without AI
“Now, if we simply just want to achieve our objectives to re-industrialize, re-shore, electrify, when I say electrify, that just means replacing your old gas boilers in these buildings with heat pumps, which every commercial building is doing. It means, you kno…”
Dreyfus: China controls the technological know-how for rare earth processing
“The Chinese have all the technological know-how to convert what you take out of the ground and convert it into something that we can use.”
A $7B fund returning 3x exceeds total annual venture exit values
“Now, if you have a seven billion dollar fund, and we do the same math through, you know, you've got to return two hundred and ten billion. Seven billion to 70 times three X is two hundred and ten billion, which, ah, exceeds the total venture-backed M&A and IPO…”
Arora: Vulnerability-finding AI will be public within three months
“I think we're three months away, if not already there, from this being available in the wild.”
Laffont: SpaceX will go public in the next few weeks
“That doesn't include three companies that we know will be coming public pretty shortly, SpaceX obviously in the next few weeks, and we know Anthropic just today, the headlines hit that they've submitted confidentially for their S-one.”