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 21 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: Sam Bankman-Fried would be greatest investor ever if not liquidated
“SBF pretty much would have been the greatest investor of all time if he didn't get liquidated. Same dynamic. I mean, obviously there was fraud in terms of how he was allocating capital, but his actual portfolio over the long run was absolutely correct.”
Friedberg: Capping Bezos at $1B would have destroyed Amazon's future societal benefit
“If Jeff Bezos stopped building Amazon, when he made a billion dollars because he was forced to by the government. At that point, all the future benefit of Amazon would have been lost.”
Friedberg: Career public servants heroically preserved democracy during Trump's presidency
“But if not for that deep state, we may have found ourselves in a lot of very ugly situations over the last four years that there really were layers and layers of career public servants that did incredible and incredibly heroic things to preserve democracy, to …”
Eliminating flat or down rounds would double VC fund IRRs, says Friedberg
“45% of their capital went into flat or down rounds, and they had a negative net return on that allocation of capital across 13 funds, and if they had put that, if they had never invested in flat or down rounds, Then they would have doubled their IRR overall as…”
Friedberg: Returning US spending to 2019 levels yields budget surplus and 2% bond yields
“And we would be, by the way, if we did that, we would have a budget surplus and the bonds would be trading down to two percent yields again.”
Friedberg: Rejecting Musk's pay would have reduced Tesla stock price further
“And the reality is that by him getting the pay package, the certainty of him sticking around at the company caused the stock to go up by 10%. So they actually had the calculus wrong that if they had gotten their way, the stock would have declined by more than …”
Friedberg: US GDP growth would be negative without government stimulus
“It would be negative GDP growth if not for the government's program stimulating the economy.”
Friedberg: Delaying second vaccine dose would have doubled US vaccination throughput
“And so there's now very good data that shows that that would have been a better move because we would have had Double the throughput in terms of how many people we could have gotten shot in arms, if we had done that.”
David Friedberg estimates reshoring China manufacturing would increase consumer costs 5x
“And that just wouldn't fucking be possible. Like we don't have enough people to work. We don't have the ability to do that. The cost of everything would go up by five X.”
Friedberg: US would have a budget surplus at 2019 spending levels
“You know, if we went back to 2019, we would actually have a budget surplus right now as a country. Our economy has grown so much Since 2019, that if we had the same spending levels as we had in 2019, our federal government would be making a profit paying down …”
Friedberg: Depreciating Google's chips over 3 years reduces net profit 10-12%
“In Google's case, their total net profit would come down by roughly 10 to 12%.”
Friedberg: Solar subsidies starved U.S. investment in Gen-IV nuclear systems
“And therefore, the R&D investment dollars that were supposed to go into nuclear that would have allowed us to accelerate to Gen-IV systems, which, by the way, China has now done, went away.”
David Friedberg: Social Security would be $15T if invested in S&P 500
“If in 1971, which was the year that we went off the gold standard in the United States, if we invested the Social Security Trust Fund in the S&P, the balance of the Social Security Trust Fund today would be 15 trillion dollars.”
Friedberg: Drug costs would drop if consumers paid directly without government insurance
“If we only had private insurance, or if consumers had to pay for their drugs and their therapies themselves, the cost of drugs would go way down.”
Friedberg: RFK Jr. as VP would have caused major disagreements with Trump
“I think RFK would have been a challenging partner for Trump, and it would have led to a lot of disagreements, and I think that RFK has some policy perspectives that I don't agree with.”
Friedberg: Someone else would have exploited crypto if SBF hadn't
“If it wasn't this guy, it was someone else. It was going to be someone else.”
Friedberg: Daily Fed rate adjustments would have prevented current economic crisis
“Because if we had made smaller adjustments, Every day for a period of time, as these economic data indicated that we should be making them more quickly, we would not be in this problem.”
Friedberg: 'Euphoria' would never be made on Netflix
“Euphoria is incredible. It would never be on Netflix.”
Friedberg: US could have produced hundreds of millions of 50-cent tests
“We have the facilities in the US to do it. And we could have made, you know, a 100,000,000,050 cent tests and made them just free and available to schools, to workplaces, to, Everything.”
Friedberg: Human tech progress impossible without capital accumulation from free-market capitalism
“And so I think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these businesses Is that we can do research and development, and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist sys…”
Friedberg: Musk couldn't have funded Tesla and SpaceX without selling PayPal
“Elon sold PayPal and he was able to use that money to reinvest in Tesla and SpaceX. I think Elon's putting all the money back into two companies that are solving two major issues for humanity. He wouldn't have been able to do that if he hadn't sold in the firs…”