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 208 guests with 5 or more scored statements, ranked. 12 more have fewer than 5, too few for a fair average, and the host is scored on his own page. Sort or filter below.
| # | Person | Avg debate potential | Statements scored |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jonathan Haidt Professor of Ethical Leadership, NYU Stern | 3.48 | 21 |
| 2 | Blake Lemoine Former Senior Software Engineer, Google | 3.31 | 45 |
| 3 | Jürgen Schmidhuber Director, AI Initiative, KAUST | 3.29 | 14 |
| 4 | Geoffrey Hinton Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto | 3.29 | 31 |
| 5 | Liz Hoffman Business and Finance Editor, Semafor | 3.2 | 10 |
| 6 | Kara Swisher Podcast Host, Vox Media | 3.2 | 30 |
| 7 | Emily M. Bender Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington | 3.18 | 11 |
| 8 | Rob Copeland Finance Reporter, The New York Times | 3.18 | 17 |
| 9 | Gil Luria Head of Technology Research, D.A. Davidson | 3.17 | 23 |
| 10 | Jinja Birkenbuehl Founder & CEO, Birk Creative | 3.17 | 6 |
| 11 | Ed Zitron CEO & Founder, EZPR | 3.16 | 31 |
| 12 | Sir Nick Clegg Former President of Global Affairs, Meta | 3.14 | 14 |
| 13 | Lawrence "Larry" Lessig Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School | 3.14 | 7 |
| 14 | Senator Mark Warner U.S. Senator, United States Senate | 3.11 | 18 |
| 15 | Gary Marcus Founder & Executive Chairman, Robust AI | 3.11 | 45 |
| 16 | Saagar Enjeti Co-host and Co-founder, Breaking Points | 3.11 | 28 |
| 17 | Andy Yen CEO and Founder, Proton | 3.1 | 10 |
| 18 | Yann LeCun Executive Chairman, AMI Labs | 3.01 | 83 |
| 19 | Paul Kedrosky Partner, SK Ventures | 3 | 25 |
| 20 | Evan Hubinger Alignment Stress-Testing Lead, Anthropic | 3 | 10 |
| 21 | Dario Amodei Co-Founder and CEO, Anthropic | 3 | 30 |
| 22 | Wael Ghonim Author & Internet Activist | 3 | 16 |
| 23 | Alex Stamos Chief Product Officer, Corridor | 2.96 | 52 |
| 24 | Dan Hendrycks Executive Director, Center for AI Safety | 2.93 | 27 |
| 25 | Palmer Luckey Founder, Anduril Industries | 2.93 | 43 |
| 26 | Max Chafkin Features Editor, Bloomberg Businessweek | 2.93 | 27 |
| 27 | Nick Bostrom Director of Research, Macrostrategy Research Initiative | 2.92 | 40 |
| 28 | Peter Diamandis Executive Chairman, XPRIZE Foundation | 2.91 | 23 |
| 29 | Noah Smith Economics Writer & Publisher, Noahpinion | 2.9 | 21 |
| 30 | Max Cherney Tech Correspondent, Reuters | 2.89 | 9 |
| 31 | William Saunders Alignment Science Researcher, Anthropic | 2.89 | 9 |
| 32 | David Plouffe Partner, Orchestra | 2.88 | 16 |
| 33 | Dr. Alan Baratz CEO, D-Wave Quantum | 2.88 | 26 |
| 34 | Jim Cramer Host, CNBC's Mad Money | 2.88 | 17 |
| 35 | Reed Albergotti Technology Editor, Semafor | 2.86 | 51 |
| 36 | Anissa Gardizy Reporter, The Wall Street Journal | 2.86 | 7 |
| 37 | Carissa Véliz Philosopher, University of Oxford | 2.86 | 22 |
| 38 | Alex Hanna Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute | 2.86 | 7 |
| 39 | Cory Weinberg Senior Reporter, The Information | 2.86 | 7 |
| 40 | Anthony Scaramucci Founder & Managing Partner, SkyBridge Capital | 2.85 | 13 |
| 41 | Aravind Srinivas Co-founder & CEO, Perplexity AI | 2.83 | 18 |
| 42 | Marshall Kosloff Co-Host, The Realignment | 2.83 | 6 |
| 43 | Andrew Ross Sorkin Co-Anchor, CNBC | 2.82 | 39 |
| 44 | Steven Adler Co-founder, Guidelight AI | 2.82 | 11 |
| 45 | Casey Newton Founder & Editor, Platformer | 2.81 | 16 |
| 46 | Marc Benioff Chair, CEO & Co-Founder, Salesforce | 2.81 | 16 |
| 47 | Lauren Goode Senior Writer, WIRED | 2.8 | 5 |
| 48 | Dan Ives Partner & Senior Managing Director, Yorkville Ives | 2.8 | 20 |
| 49 | Michael Pollan Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley | 2.79 | 19 |
| 50 | Molly White Author, Citation Needed | 2.79 | 19 |
| 51 | Dwarkesh Patel Host, Dwarkesh Podcast | 2.78 | 68 |
| 52 | Erik Brynjolfsson Director, Stanford Digital Economy Lab | 2.78 | 9 |
| 53 | David Cahn Partner, Sequoia Capital | 2.77 | 22 |
| 54 | Mark Cuban Co-founder, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company | 2.77 | 22 |
| 55 | Chris Hayes Host, MSNBC | 2.76 | 25 |
| 56 | Kyle Vogt Founder & CEO, The Bot Company | 2.76 | 17 |
| 57 | Parker Harris Co-Founder, Salesforce & CTO, Slack | 2.75 | 8 |
| 58 | Gavin Wood Founder and Chief Architect, Parity Technologies | 2.75 | 12 |
| 59 | Muhammad Alam Executive Board Member, SAP | 2.73 | 11 |
| 60 | Stephen Morris San Francisco Bureau Chief, Financial Times | 2.72 | 32 |
| 61 | Tom Lee Head of Research, Fundstrat Global Advisors | 2.71 | 24 |
| 62 | Ryan Broderick Author and Editor-in-Chief, Garbage Day | 2.71 | 17 |
| 63 | Ranjan Roy Co-author, Margins | 2.7 | 375 |
| 64 | Matthew Prince Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare | 2.7 | 53 |
| 65 | Michael Horowitz Director, Perry World House & Professor, University of Pennsylvania | 2.69 | 13 |
| 66 | Adam Parker CEO, Trivariate Research | 2.69 | 13 |
| 67 | Suhail Doshi Founder & CEO, Playground | 2.69 | 26 |
| 68 | Kristi Coulter Author | 2.69 | 16 |
| 69 | Zeb Evans Founder & CEO, ClickUp | 2.67 | 15 |
| 70 | Ben Plummer Co-founder & CEO, Dragonfly | 2.67 | 9 |
| 71 | Arthur Mensch Co-Founder & CEO, Mistral AI | 2.66 | 29 |
| 72 | Andrew Callaghan Host and Creator, Channel 5 | 2.65 | 17 |
| 73 | Snehal Antani CEO & Co-founder, Horizon3.ai | 2.64 | 11 |
| 74 | Sam Altman CEO, OpenAI | 2.64 | 50 |
| 75 | Tony Stubblebine CEO, Medium | 2.64 | 22 |
| 76 | Deepa Sitaraman Tech Correspondent, Reuters | 2.64 | 11 |
| 77 | Dmitry Shevelenko Chief Business Officer, Perplexity | 2.63 | 19 |
| 78 | Alexandr Wang Chief AI Officer, Meta Platforms | 2.63 | 27 |
| 79 | Aidan Gomez Co-founder & CEO, Cohere | 2.63 | 27 |
| 80 | Parmy Olson Technology Columnist, Bloomberg | 2.62 | 13 |
| 81 | Campbell Brown Co-Founder and CEO, Forum AI | 2.61 | 18 |
| 82 | Bret Taylor CEO & Co-Founder, Sierra | 2.61 | 31 |
| 83 | Demis Hassabis CEO & Co-Founder, Isomorphic Labs | 2.61 | 64 |
| 84 | Amjad Masad Co-founder & CEO, Replit | 2.61 | 31 |
| 85 | Clint Sharp Co-Founder & CEO, Cribl | 2.6 | 15 |
| 86 | Bill McDermott Chairman and CEO, ServiceNow | 2.6 | 5 |
| 87 | Frances Haugen Founder, Beyond the Screen | 2.6 | 20 |
| 88 | Guy Tytunovich Co-Founder and CEO, CHEQ | 2.58 | 12 |
| 89 | Reid Hoffman Partner, Greylock | 2.58 | 33 |
| 90 | Vlad Tenev Co-Founder & CEO, Robinhood | 2.58 | 12 |
| 91 | Brian Venturo Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder, CoreWeave | 2.56 | 9 |
| 92 | Max Hodak Co-founder & CEO, Science Corporation | 2.56 | 9 |
| 93 | Condoleezza Rice Director, Hoover Institution | 2.56 | 18 |
| 94 | Rona Novick Dean Emerita, Yeshiva University | 2.56 | 9 |
| 95 | Bryan Catanzaro VP of Applied Deep Learning Research, NVIDIA | 2.56 | 9 |
| 96 | Emil Michael Under Secretary of Defense, U.S. Department of Defense | 2.55 | 31 |
| 97 | M.G. Siegler Author & Publisher, Spyglass | 2.54 | 164 |
| 98 | Eugenia Kuyda Founder & CEO, Wabi | 2.53 | 19 |
| 99 | Aaron Levie Co-Founder & CEO, Box | 2.52 | 79 |
| 100 | Matt Wood Chief AI & Technology Officer, AWS | 2.52 | 42 |
| 101 | Dick Costolo Managing Partner & Co-Founder, 01 Advisors | 2.5 | 18 |
| 102 | Monte MacDiarmid Misalignment Science Researcher, Anthropic | 2.5 | 6 |
| 103 | Simon Edwards Chief Financial Officer, Bloom Energy | 2.5 | 6 |
| 104 | Mustafa Suleyman CEO, Microsoft AI | 2.5 | 42 |
| 105 | Rick Heitzman Founder & Managing Partner, FirstMark Capital | 2.5 | 10 |
| 106 | Greg Anugas Founder & CEO, Snowfire AI | 2.5 | 10 |
| 107 | Brian McCullough Host, Techmeme Ride Home | 2.5 | 12 |
| 108 | Nuseir Yassin Founder & CEO, Nas Company | 2.5 | 6 |
| 109 | Grace Shao Founder and Author, AI Proem | 2.49 | 35 |
| 110 | Greg Brockman President & Co-founder, OpenAI | 2.48 | 88 |
| 111 | Sridhar Ramaswamy CEO, Snowflake | 2.48 | 65 |
| 112 | Andrew Bosworth Chief Technology Officer, Meta | 2.47 | 43 |
| 113 | Tony Bates Chairman & CEO, Genesys | 2.45 | 11 |
| 114 | Charles Sansbury CEO, Cloudera | 2.44 | 9 |
| 115 | Josh Brown CEO & Co-Founder, Ritholtz Wealth Management | 2.43 | 21 |
| 116 | Gaurav Nemade Former Founding PM, Google LaMDA | 2.43 | 14 |
| 117 | Bill Vass Chief Technology Officer, Booz Allen Hamilton | 2.41 | 27 |
| 118 | Sebastian Siemiatkowski CEO, Klarna | 2.41 | 29 |
| 119 | Marissa Mayer Founder & CEO, Dazzle AI | 2.41 | 17 |
| 120 | David Pogue Correspondent, CBS Sunday Morning | 2.41 | 17 |
| 121 | Yossi Matias Head, Google Research | 2.4 | 5 |
| 122 | Yinon Costica Co-Founder & VP of Product, Wiz product at the cybersecurity company Wiz. He focuses on emerging cybersecurity threats created by generative AI software and the defensive guardrails organizations must implement. | 2.4 | 15 |
| 123 | Sergey Brin Co-founder, Google | 2.4 | 10 |
| 124 | Koray Kavukcuoglu CTO, Google DeepMind | 2.38 | 8 |
| 125 | Simon Balmain Former Senior Community Manager, Twitter | 2.38 | 13 |
| 126 | Olivia Moore Partner, Andreessen Horowitz | 2.37 | 35 |
| 127 | Michael Intrator Co-Founder and CEO, CoreWeave | 2.36 | 11 |
| 128 | Dylan Patel Founder & Chief Analyst, SemiAnalysis | 2.36 | 14 |
| 129 | Ara Kharazian Lead Economist, Ramp | 2.35 | 20 |
| 130 | Joelle Pineau Chief AI Officer, Cohere | 2.35 | 31 |
| 131 | RJ Scaringe Founder & CEO, Rivian | 2.35 | 20 |
| 132 | Jarek Kutylowski Founder & CEO, DeepL | 2.33 | 18 |
| 133 | Amit Zavery President, COO & CPO, ServiceNow | 2.33 | 9 |
| 134 | Joanna Stern Founder & CEO, New Things | 2.33 | 15 |
| 135 | Max Zeff Senior AI Reporter, TechCrunch | 2.33 | 15 |
| 136 | Mark Chen Chief Research Officer, OpenAI | 2.33 | 12 |
| 137 | Thomas Dohmke Founder and CEO, Entire | 2.33 | 15 |
| 138 | Dallas Dolen US TMT Industry Leader, PwC | 2.32 | 19 |
| 139 | Boris Cherny Head of Claude Code, Anthropic | 2.32 | 22 |
| 140 | Spiros Xanthos Founder & CEO, Resolve AI | 2.31 | 13 |
| 141 | Grady Summers CEO, Netwrix | 2.31 | 13 |
| 142 | Rev Lebaredian VP, Omniverse & Simulation Technology, NVIDIA | 2.3 | 23 |
| 143 | Jitesh Gai President & CEO, Hyland | 2.29 | 7 |
| 144 | Arnab Bose Chief Product Officer, Asana | 2.29 | 14 |
| 145 | Martin Migoya Chairman & CEO, Globant | 2.29 | 7 |
| 146 | Swami Sivasubramanian VP of AI and Data, AWS | 2.29 | 14 |
| 147 | Jack Clark Co-Founder and Head of Policy, Anthropic | 2.26 | 43 |
| 148 | Scott Guthrie EVP, Cloud + AI Group, Microsoft | 2.25 | 20 |
| 149 | Dr. Ben Rapoport Co-Founder & CSO, Precision Neuroscience | 2.25 | 12 |
| 150 | Brad Lightcap Former COO, OpenAI | 2.25 | 24 |
| 151 | Ryan Petersen Founder & CEO, Flexport | 2.24 | 70 |
| 152 | Melia Russell Senior Correspondent, Business Insider | 2.21 | 19 |
| 153 | Ellen Huet Features Writer, Bloomberg News | 2.2 | 10 |
| 154 | Eric Markowitz Managing Partner, Nightview Capital | 2.2 | 10 |
| 155 | Caitlin Kelly Vice President, Communications, OUTFRONT Media | 2.2 | 5 |
| 156 | Cristiano Amon President and CEO, Qualcomm | 2.19 | 21 |
| 157 | Astro Teller Captain of Moonshots and CEO, X | 2.19 | 26 |
| 158 | Nick Fox SVP of Knowledge & Information, Google | 2.18 | 11 |
| 159 | Y-Lan Boureau Founder & CEO, ThrivePal | 2.18 | 17 |
| 160 | David Baszucki Co-founder & CEO, Roblox | 2.18 | 11 |
| 161 | Michael Batnick Managing Partner, Ritholtz Wealth Management | 2.18 | 11 |
| 162 | Johann Hari Author and Journalist | 2.17 | 23 |
| 163 | Gustav Söderström Co-CEO, Spotify | 2.14 | 22 |
| 164 | David Friedberg Founder & CEO, The Production Board | 2.14 | 14 |
| 165 | Prem Natarajan EVP & Chief Scientist, Capital One | 2.13 | 15 |
| 166 | Adrian McDermott Chief Technology Officer, Zendesk | 2.12 | 17 |
| 167 | Matt Garman CEO, Amazon Web Services | 2.12 | 17 |
| 168 | Evan Ratliff Host, Shell Game | 2.11 | 19 |
| 169 | Norman Winarski Founder & President, Winarsky Ventures | 2.1 | 10 |
| 170 | Pat Gelsinger General Partner, Playground Global | 2.07 | 15 |
| 171 | Christophe Beck Chairman and CEO, Ecolab | 2.06 | 17 |
| 172 | Michael Mager Co-Founder & CEO, Precision Neuroscience | 2 | 10 |
| 173 | Joseph George SVP & GM, IT Solutions Group, GoTo | 2 | 7 |
| 174 | Noland Arbaugh Clinical Trial Participant, Neuralink | 2 | 23 |
| 175 | Thomas Kurian CEO, Google Cloud | 1.96 | 24 |
| 176 | Tom Eggemeier CEO, Zendesk | 1.94 | 16 |
| 177 | Sokwoo Rhee Head of LG Nova, LG Electronics | 1.93 | 14 |
| 178 | Antoine Shagoury Chief Technology Officer, Kyndryl | 1.92 | 12 |
| 179 | Stephanie Link Chief Investment Strategist, Hightower Advisors | 1.92 | 12 |
| 180 | Danny Shapiro VP of Marketing, Mythic | 1.91 | 11 |
| 181 | Liz Reid VP and Head of Search, Google | 1.9 | 10 |
| 182 | Mike Krieger Chief Product Officer, Anthropic | 1.89 | 56 |
| 183 | Shiv Ramji CEO, Cellebrite | 1.89 | 9 |
| 184 | Christina Cacioppo CEO and Co-founder, Vanta | 1.89 | 9 |
| 185 | Jamil Ghani VP of Worldwide Prime, Amazon | 1.88 | 8 |
| 186 | Meta's Generative AI Head Chief Technology Officer, Airbnb | 1.88 | 16 |
| 187 | Joe Davis EVP, AI Engineering, ServiceNow | 1.86 | 7 |
| 188 | Eric Kelleher President & COO, Okta | 1.82 | 11 |
| 189 | Sasha Lazimi Co-founder & CEO, Yubo | 1.82 | 11 |
| 190 | Alex Himel VP & Head of Wearables, Meta | 1.81 | 16 |
| 191 | Mark Moffat CEO, IFS | 1.8 | 10 |
| 192 | Partha Srinivasa EVP & CIO, Erie Insurance | 1.78 | 9 |
| 193 | Rubail Birwadker Global Head of Growth Products, Visa | 1.78 | 9 |
| 194 | Panos Panay SVP of Devices & Services, Amazon | 1.78 | 23 |
| 195 | Kellie Romack Chief Digital Information Officer, ServiceNow | 1.75 | 8 |
| 196 | Guillaume de Saint-Marc VP of Engineering, Outshift by Cisco | 1.75 | 12 |
| 197 | Karthik Kripapuri CEO, Promevo | 1.75 | 8 |
| 198 | Aytekin Tank Founder & CEO, Jotform | 1.71 | 7 |
| 199 | Amir Khoshniyati Vice President, Wiliot | 1.7 | 10 |
| 200 | Mike Campbell EVP & Chief Product Officer, Hyland | 1.67 | 6 |
| 201 | James Manyika SVP, Research, Technology & Society, Google | 1.67 | 12 |
| 202 | Jim Lanzone CEO, Yahoo | 1.67 | 18 |
| 203 | Neil Shah Co-Founder & CEO, EZ Newswire | 1.6 | 5 |
| 204 | Adel El Hallak VP of Product Management, Agentic AI, NVIDIA | 1.56 | 9 |
| 205 | Jeff Maroney CTO for Power, Texas Instruments | 1.5 | 8 |
| 206 | Colin Murdock Chief Business Officer, Google DeepMind | 1.5 | 10 |
| 207 | Marty Brodbeck Chief Technology Officer, Priceline | 1.42 | 12 |
| 208 | Keith Zubchevich President & CEO, Conviva | 1.4 | 5 |
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 375 companies, funds and products with at least one bearish claim on the record.
Highest debate potential, by year
2026
2025
2024
Swisher calls Marc Andreessen a small-minded and remarkably stupid person
“I mean, I've never met someone who's so smart, who's so stupid. I don't know how else to say with him. He's such a small minded person.”
Benioff: Microsoft poorly repackaged OpenAI's technology into Copilot without real integration
“What Microsoft basically did was they're, you're exactly right what you said, they just repackaged OpenAI's product and didn't really integrate it very well and didn't really think from the ground up what it was going to be in its best situation to offer value…”
2023
LeCun: OpenAI's technology is well-engineered but not scientifically innovative
“Their technology is not particularly innovative from the scientific point of view. It's very well engineered. So they put together, you know, large scale scaled up system with trained with very well curated data. I mean, they know what they're doing. But in te…”
Vogt: Fully autonomous vehicles will dominate new car sales within 2-3 years
“What I do expect is, you know, within two or three years, most likely, I think the. Majority of new car sales will transition to vehicles where people don't have to drive because once you have that choice, I have a hard time believing that people are going to …”
2022
Haidt: American democracy is likely to fail catastrophically within two decades
“I think that American democracy is likely to fail catastrophically at some point in the next decade or two decades. It's very hard to predict the future, but I think we are, the way we're headed is a very, very bad direction.”
Lemoine says LaMDA passed every scientific test to disprove its sentience
“That conversation was the moment when I began to think that Lambda was sentient, and everything I did in the following months was me scientifically attempting to falsify that belief and utterly failing to, no matter what I threw at it passed.”
2021
Ghonim: Western Democracy-Promotion Agenda Is Naive and Dysfunctional
“I do think that at the end of the day, this agenda is a naive one. And it's and, you know, I don't need much to prove its naivety because at the end of the day, even the democratic solution in the West is being kind of like in a mess right now. It's not where …”
Ghonim: Traditional VC cycles incentivize startups to grow into toxic products
“You can't just build something right in, in that kind of cycle. You're going to build something that grows into cancer. In this cycle of, like, trying to, series A, series B, what is happening? You know, we need to improve this number because the investor is l…”