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 1,004 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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
Hammer: Only education, housing, and healthcare increased as US income shares
“School, housing, healthcare. Some of the, it's like the three, only three categories that has gone up as a percentage of our income as Americans over the past hundred years or so. Everything else has gone down. Even groceries, even going out to eat has gone do…”
Hammer: Modern Individuals Have More Disposable Income Than Any Point in History
“It might be a lower percentage of homeowners, but in terms of disposable income that we have, it's better than anywhere else in human history.”
Sanchez: Three Austin groups made $10B to $50B on SpaceX
“So I mean, just here in Austin, we have like three groups that have made 10 to fifty billion dollars on that.”
Sanchez: The youngest female self-made billionaire came from prediction markets
“I was really upset when I saw the first, like, female young, or the youngest female self-billionaire was from Prediction Markets.”
Do: Rolex throttles steel watch supply to force high-margin precious metal purchases
“They want you to buy so many of the precious metals and the stones, the ones that are 10, 20, 50, 60,000 dollars. If you buy enough of them, they'll let you buy a lower price Submariner, which is a wild thing. The margins are in the more expensive watches, and…”
Sanchez: Portfolio companies double or triple yearly using a standard finance playbook
“Across my private equity companies now, hundreds of companies and we follow it and it works. And that's why, you know, our companies double or triple every year.”
Evans: Amazon employees directly confronted Jeff Bezos over taxes at all-hands
“I've seen people at Amazon actually tell Jeff Bezos, you run an evil company while working for it. Like, why are we evil? I had an all hands, a guy, you know, said, we seem to avoid taxes. Why are you such a tax dodger?”
Evans: Amazon employee jumped from $300K to $750K by matching Meta offer
“He went from making about 300,000 and making about three quarters of a million in one jump.”
Evans: Amazon Considered Dropping Ownership Principle, Retained It After Internal Push
“At Amazon, we had an ownership leadership principle, which is part of how Amazon runs. It has a set of principles. And at one point they were considering removing it and I led the fight to keep it. And some of the words in it That I helped create, say an owner…”
Evans: Bezos banned PowerPoint because nested slides buried the Challenger launch risk
“Jeff hated PowerPoint and the famous story why it it's old now, but when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, They went and found the PowerPoint slide had been used to justify the launch. And this PowerPoint had like seven levels of nested bullets and the ti…”
Sanchez: VC fund has sub-10% default rate and several 100x exits
“I think we've had less than a 10% default rate and we've had a couple hundred Xs, but we've had a lot of four to five to seven Xs.”
Sanchez: Passive information consumption depletes dopamine needed for execution
“Neuroscience shows you're burning the exact dopamine your brain needs for execution. It can't tell the difference.”
Gladwell: Faculty resources across top 100 US colleges are roughly equivalent
“So, if I took the top A hundred colleges in the United States, like probably take a top one 50, but take a top hundred. For an undergraduate degree, there are the quality of, or the resources, faculty resources available to students are roughly equivalent.”
Jain: Bilt is an $11 billion business across housing and hospitality
“So even though the company's an eleven billion dollar business, and we touch housing and hospitality, and we have all sorts of businesses that are hospitality platform services like hotels and restaurants and gyms and pharmacies, we run every business line as …”
Sanchez: Replit turned down a $1B valuation when pre-revenue
“He had turned down a billion dollars for Replit back when they had no cap, you know, they hadn't even made any revenue yet, because he had been grinding for 11 years before they made really much of anything”
Jain: On-time rent payment is the best predictor of mortgage payment
“It didn't make sense that paying your rent on time every month for five years has no bearing on whether you're eligible to get a mortgage payment. That's the best predictor of whether you're gonna pay your mortgage on time.”
Sapp: $500K Car Purchase Led to Record-Breaking Sales Masterclasses
“Well, yeah, I mean, I would argue that it kind of is a business at this point, you know, it's like the investment of 500 K. I mean, the next three master classes I had after that were record breaking.”
Sapp: Top Closer Earned $62,000 Last Month After Earning $4,000 as Barista
“My top closer made 62,000 dollars last month, and she used to be a barista making 4000 dollars a month.”
Zimmer: Jeff Berg fired me from ICM over 'rape and pillage' remarks
“And so what happened is I got called into Jeff Berg's office and he says You know, I can't believe you said this. I can't take it anymore. You know, get your shit and get out of here. I was like, really? Yeah, I'm done. I'm done. Get your shit, get out of here…”
Zimmer: UTA canceled Oscar party to protest Trump travel ban
“We represented this, ah, boy, I'm embarrassed, I can't remember his name, a fantastic Iranian director who directed a movie called The Separation. And we represented him, and he was nominated for Academy Award, and this is in the first Trump presidency where h…”
McDonald: Venting is not beneficial unless paired with cognitive reappraisal
“Also, research shows that there's no form of venting or complaining that is positive. Unless you reevaluate and kind of tell a new story at the end, like you reappraise the situation at the end of the venting session.”
Sanchez: Harvard study shows optimistic women live 11% to 20% longer
“And over this 30 year period, the women who were labeled as more optimistic, not pessimistic, they lived like 11 to 20% longer than the negative communicating women.”
McDonald: 528 Hz Sound Frequencies Can Lower Cortisol and Relieve Stress
“There is a very small study that shows that actually it can have the ability to reduce cortisol and relieve anxiety and stress. And I've actually found in people that I work with that it's extremely effective with people.”
Brooks: Depression has tripled and anxiety doubled for people under 30
“Depression has increased by about a factor of three for people under 30. Anxiety by about a factor of two.”
Brooks: Partners in the happiest marriages grow more religious together
“That's one of the reasons that the happiest marriage is one of the characteristics is that they, that the partners get more religious across the decades together. They get more religious together, right?”
Brooks: US kids average 4-7 minutes outside vs. 4-7 hours on screens
“The average kid in America under 12 spends between four and seven minutes a day in, in, in nature, and between four and seven hours a day on screens.”
Brooks: Two-thirds of men prefer electric shocks over sitting in silence
“Two-thirds of the guys Would prefer to shock themselves painfully. One guy shocked himself a 190 times in 15 minutes, had to be thrown out of the experiment for being a sick and twisted freak.”
Eyal: Trader underwent 55-minute surgery with zero anesthesia via hypnosedation
“He goes into the operating room, and the doctors, for 55 minutes, cut into flesh and bone, pull out metal screws from his body with zero local anesthesia, zero general anesthesia, All through the power of his mind.”
Eyal: Positive aging mindsets extend life by 7.5 years
“There's an amazing study done at Yale where they found that people who have positive views about aging at age 30 live seven and a half years longer. Now, to put that in perspective, Cody, seven and a half years longer, that is more than the effect of exercise,…”
Eyal: Evidence disproves ego depletion unless people believe willpower is limited
“Well, it turns out it's not true. That when we try and replicate those studies, and this happens in the social science, this is how science works. Science doesn't say anything. Science is the process of doing repeated experiments and seeing if they replicate, …”
Sanchez: Negative YouTube titles and thumbnails generate 23% higher CTR
“In YouTube, we know that if you have a negative versus a positive thumbnail and title, you have a 23% higher click-through rate.”
2 Chainz: Esco Bar's Success Was Not Driven by Pablo Escobar's Likeness
“And so to say that we became successful off Pablo Esco Bar's name was so far from the truth. We were like, okay, you talking about this picture? Let's take this picture down. And we put my picture up, and business has been just moving, just how it always has b…”
2 Chainz: The Pink Trap House was one of the most visited US sites
“Like, once upon a time, it was one of the most visited, you know, sites in the United States”
Galloway: Older Generation Receives $1.3T Annually in Social Security
“The wealthiest generation in the history of the planet gets 1.3 trillion dollars a year in the form of Social Security.”
Galloway: Parenthood Rate for Americans Aged 30-34 Fell From 60% to 27%
“40 years ago, 60% of people aged 30 to 34 had at least one child. Now it's 27%.”
Galloway: US will spend more on national debt interest than military
“We're now, this year, going to spend more money on interest on the debt than we spend on our military.”
Galloway: One in three romantic relationships begin in the workplace
“One in three relationships begin at work. And 99% of them are consensual.”
Galloway: Amazon's third-party seller take rate rose from 20% to 45%
“Amazon, 20 years ago, if you were a third-party marketer or a third-party reseller selling your products on Amazon, they took about 20%. Of your gross dollar volume, now they take 45, because they kind of own the market.”
Galloway: Alternative funds underperform the S&P 500 exactly by their fee amounts
“If you look at their performance, they've exactly underperformed the S&P by the amount of their fees.”
Galloway: Major US tech giants rely on taxpayer-funded technology
“Every one of these companies is built on a technology that was funded by American middle-class taxpayers, whether it was DARPA, whether Elon Musk got a three hundred fifty million dollar tax-free loan.”
Codie Sanchez: Homebuying cost rose from 4 years of salary to 12
“Back when boomers were buying houses, it was four years of salary on average. You know what it is today? 12. 12 years.”
Sanchez: US spent $8T on Middle East wars, 100x roads budget
“If you were to look, go to Grok on Twitter, that's Twitter's AI, and you were to ask it how much money we have spent in the Middle East On wars. The answer would be eight trillion dollars. That's a hundred X the annual federal spending on roads and bridges.”
Housel: His parents' 40-year index investing beat 99.9% of fund managers
“They dollar cost average into index funds, and they haven't sold anything for 40 years, ever.
And if you compared their returns to professional fund managers, they're literally not, it's beyond top one percent.
It's probably top .1% at this point that they've …”
AI therapy fills a critical gap for off-hours 4 AM panic attacks
“And one of the things that's really a bummer with therapy is if I have a panic attack, it doesn't happen at two o'clock on a Thursday, two o'clock on a Thursday. It happens at four fucking in the morning. And my therapist, I don't care how much money you have,…”
Zahrai: Research shows individuals can intentionally change personality traits
“We do know from research and my own is you can actually change a personality trait if you choose to.”
Zahrai: Pure positive visualization drains the energy required to reach goals
“There was a study that came out in the, it was probably the mid-twenty tens, and they looked at the role of, they called it positive fantasies. So the term manifesting, or it's not in the literature, but positive fantasies about where you want to be. And they …”
Zoom Founder Modified Software Capacity for Robbins to Host 25,000 Attendees
“And then I called Eric Yon, the founder of Zoom, and said, 1200 people is not going to work. I need 25,000 people. And he's a fan of mine, so he changed the tech so we could do it.”
Holiday: Every Retired Pro Athlete Regrets Not Enjoying Playing More
“There's not a single athlete That you've, you will ever talk to who's retired, who doesn't say something like, I wish I enjoyed playing more, because at some point it just goes away, and then at that point the winning and losing stops mattering, and all they t…”