The Argument Index
Debate potential by speaker, the highest-scored statement each year, and the companies with the most bearish calls on record. All of it clickable, all of it playable.
People
Average debate potential by speaker
All 5 guests with 5 or more scored statements, ranked. 1 more have fewer than 5, too few for a fair average. Sort or filter below.
| # | Person | Avg debate potential | Statements scored |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Leonard Brody Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Caravan | 2.56 | 18 |
| 2 | Bernadette Kevins | 2.5 | 16 |
| 3 | Jay Goldberg Investment Partner, Snowcloud Capital | 2.29 | 28 |
| 4 | Lillian Li Investment Manager, Baillie Gifford | 2.22 | 9 |
| 5 | Jeremy White Senior Innovation Editor, WIRED | 2 | 8 |
Companies
The most bearish calls
Debate potential is an AI score of how much a statement invites disagreement. Bearish counts tally what was said about a company on the show; they describe the conversation, not the company. Every count opens to the exact tape. full disclaimer →
All 177 companies, funds and products with at least one bearish claim on the record.
| Company | Bearish statements | Of which 4–5 |
|---|---|---|
| Meta company | 37 ↓ | 6 |
| Google company | 34 ↓ | 4 |
| Apple company | 29 ↓ | 4 |
| Twitter company | 25 ↓ | 8 |
| ChatGPT product | 15 ↓ | 1 |
| Instagram product | 14 ↓ | — |
| YouTube company | 11 ↓ | 1 |
| OpenAI company | 11 ↓ | 1 |
| Amazon company | 11 ↓ | 2 |
| TikTok product | 10 ↓ | — |
| Microsoft company | 10 ↓ | 2 |
| Netflix company | 8 ↓ | 2 |
| Salesforce company | 5 ↓ | — |
| Claude product | 5 ↓ | — |
| App Store product | 5 ↓ | — |
| Anthropic company | 5 ↓ | — |
| TSMC company | 4 ↓ | — |
| Tesla company | 4 ↓ | 3 |
| Slack company | 4 ↓ | 1 |
| Shopify company | 4 ↓ | — |
| iPhone product | 4 ↓ | 2 |
| Intel company | 4 ↓ | — |
| FTX company | 4 ↓ | 1 |
| Bing product | 4 ↓ | — |
| Apple Vision Pro product | 4 ↓ | 1 |
| Zoom company | 3 ↓ | — |
| Windows product | 3 ↓ | 1 |
| WhatsApp product | 3 ↓ | 1 |
| WeChat product | 3 ↓ | — |
| Vision Pro product | 3 ↓ | — |
| Substack company | 3 ↓ | — |
| NationBuilder company | 3 ↓ | — |
| Ethereum product | 3 ↓ | 1 |
| Condé Nast company | 3 ↓ | — |
| Adobe company | 3 ↓ | — |
| Andreessen Horowitz fund | 3 ↓ | — |
| Yelp company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Yandex company | 2 ↓ | — |
| WeWork company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Vogue company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Threads product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Statista company | 2 ↓ | 1 |
| Sora product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Shein company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Second Life product | 2 ↓ | — |
| SAP company | 2 ↓ | — |
| RSS product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Quest Diagnostics product | 2 ↓ | 1 |
| Procter & Gamble company | 2 ↓ | — |
| PDF product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Notion company | 2 ↓ | 1 |
| NBCUniversal company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Midjourney company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Microsoft Teams product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Meta AI product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Magic Leap company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Mac product | 2 ↓ | — |
| HBO company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Gemini product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Figma company | 2 ↓ | — |
| ESPN company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Epic Games company | 2 ↓ | 1 |
| Disney company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Discord company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Copilot product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Clubhouse company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Azure product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Apple TV product | 2 ↓ | — |
| Amazon Web Services company | 2 ↓ | — |
| Yahoo company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Y Combinator fund | 1 ↓ | — |
| Workday company | 1 ↓ | — |
| WordPress product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Within company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Wired company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Watson product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Warner company | 1 ↓ | — |
| USB C product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Uber company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Tumblr company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Tinder company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Time Out company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Third Party Twitter Apps product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Stripe company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Stratechery company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Stable Diffusion product | 1 ↓ | — |
| SQL product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Snapchat product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Snap Inc. company | 1 ↓ | — |
| SMIC company | 1 ↓ | — |
| SK Ad Network product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Simon & Schuster company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Siemens company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Sequoia Capital fund | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Sephora company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Saint Gobain company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Saab company | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Reliance Jio company | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Reliance Digital company | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Rabbit R1 product | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Rabbit company | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Quibi company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Qualcomm Snapdragon product | 1 ↓ | — |
| PwC company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Pinduoduo company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Pew Research Center company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Perplexity company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Penguin Random House company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Oracle company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Okta company | 1 ↓ | — |
| NVIDIA company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Nintendo Wii product | 1 ↓ | — |
| The New York Times company | 1 ↓ | — |
| MySpace company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Mozilla company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Motorola company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Microsoft Office product | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Meituan company | 1 ↓ | — |
| McKinsey And Company company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Marvel Entertainment company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Macintosh product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Linux product | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| LinkedIn company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Lightning Port product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Kindle product | 1 ↓ | — |
| JD company | 1 ↓ | — |
| ITunes product | 1 ↓ | — |
| IRobot company | 1 ↓ | — |
| IPod product | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| IPad product | 1 ↓ | — |
| IOS product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Internet Explorer product | 1 ↓ | — |
| The Information company | 1 ↓ | — |
| IDFA product | 1 ↓ | — |
| HoloLens product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Hai company | 1 ↓ | — |
| GPTs product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Google Glass product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Google Gemini product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Google Docs product | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Google Display product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Google Cloud product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Giphy company | 1 ↓ | — |
| General Electric company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Frontier company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Fox Corporation company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Fortnite product | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Flow company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Firefox product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Facebook Messenger product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Excel product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Drive To Survive product | 1 ↓ | — |
| CryptoPunks product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Condé Nast Traveler product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Chase company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Caterpillar company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Casper company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Cambridge Analytica company | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| ByteDance company | 1 ↓ | — |
| BuzzFeed News company | 1 ↓ | — |
| BuzzFeed company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Bored Ape product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Bloomberg company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Bitcoin product | 1 ↓ | 1 |
| Bing Chat product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Binance company | 1 ↓ | — |
| ASML company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Arm company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Apple Mail product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Apple M Series product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Apple Intelligence product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Apple Fitness+ product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Apple A Series product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Android product | 1 ↓ | — |
| Alibaba company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Airtable company | 1 ↓ | — |
| Active Directory product | 1 ↓ | — |
Highest debate potential, by year
2026
Evans: Creators most upset about AI art lack originality
“The really unkind thing one could say is that the people who are most upset about AI art are the people who are making stuff that has no particular authenticity originality. I mean, if you, if you've made, if you wrote 10 vampire romance books last year and yo…”
Evans: Dismissing AI as useless is like calling the internet useless in 1999
“I still see people who say, no, it's just like a stochastic parrot. It doesn't do causation. It doesn't work very well. It's got hallucinations. It's all useless. These people are morons. Like, they are just idiots. But they're idiots in the sense of somebody …”
2025
Evans: Skeptics dismissing AI as useless or like NFTs are ignoring reality
“The real idiots are the people who are just saying, oh, none of this works, and it's all nonsense, and it's just a stochastic parrot, and it's useless, and I don't know what it's for and this is all, like, nonsense, and this is a rerun of NFTs. Because these p…”
2024
2023
Evans: Near-zero AI error rates render semantic understanding questions practically irrelevant
“And as the error rate goes down, you get this philosophical conversation, which is what gets you to AI risk, where people are saying, look, you throw another hundred X more compute and 200 X more data at it, and the error rate goes to 90 X percent, 99.98%.
At…”
2022
Evans: Open source and Linux failed completely as consumer products
“So Linux failed completely. As a consumer product, open source failed completely at creating consumer products.”
Evans: Decentralized social networks with multiple clients are an illusion
“And so this idea, which is also a web three idea, which is that you could sort of have a decentralized social network and have lots of different clients all plugging onto the same database is kind of an illusion because what's going into the database is what t…”
2021
2020
Evans: 1990s antitrust intervention against Microsoft had no effect
“And actually none of the antitrust intervention had any effect, but that's again a separate conversation”
Benedict Evans: Search and social networks are natural monopolies like water utilities
“There are clearly structural reasons why it's very hard to create a new search engine or to create a new social network. There are very strong network effects, which I, the last, one of the last pieces I wrote, I described as basically a natural monopoly. And …”