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 12,668 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 96 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
Tom Rinks: Taco Bell's first three Chihuahua commercials copied his submitted storyboards
“They tested that ad in the northeast, which has happened to be where I was in Michigan, and I just lost it, you know, because it was the commercial that I'd written. You know, the first three commercials were our commercials, like we had storyboarded and share…”
Nike contracts penalized Allyson Felix 25 percent for missing medals post-pregnancy.
“The way that these contracts are set up. You get a bonus. If you win a medal, you get a reduction if you don't win a medal. So here was going to be Allison, you know, 10 months after giving birth and she would need to go to the world championships. She would n…”
Nike requested Allyson Felix's image for a World Cup ad during disputes.
“The Women's World Cup was coming up, and I remember, like, this very vividly. I was sitting in Cameron's nursery, and I got a call from Wes, and he has, he's like, don't shoot the messenger, but Nike wants to know if they can use your image in this campaign. I…”
Basch: Nestlé prioritizes speed and cost over nutrition and the environment
“At Nestle, it's all about how can we produce faster and cheaper? And, you know, there is nothing around how can we improve the health of our consumers? How can we make it better for the environment? How can we make the food more nutritious?”
Wood: Nonprofits Are Less Accountable and More Wasteful Than Companies
“It's actually very difficult to give away money effectively because there's less accountability versus a company. Like if you imagine putting money in a nonprofit versus putting money in a company, well, the company is measured and is very motivated on being e…”
Vogt: Teslas may adopt low-cost LiDAR while Cruise drops it
“I think in the future, you know, the cost of LiDAR is coming down to the point where they basically cost the same as a camera, and so I wouldn't be surprised if in the future you see Teslas with very low-cost LiDARs, and you might see cruise vehicles with very…”
Vogt: Tesla autonomous fleet data is high-volume but low-quality
“And so you've got Tesla that maybe has a large amount of low quality data. It's just camera data from a bunch of vehicles. And then you have crews and others that have a lot of Very high resolution, high quality data from these lidars and radars and other sens…”
Vogt: Software and AI are no longer Cruise's biggest bottleneck
“And so the technical problems, the software and AI problems are no longer the biggest bottleneck. Now we're turning our attention back to manufacturing and scaling and building out charging and cleaning and maintenance infrastructure in cities.”
Brian Lam calls digital advertising one of the world's great evils
“I think advertising is one of the great evils of the world, because it gets in your brain no matter what, and the metrics they use are basically what has made media what it is today, like really shallow, fast cadence”
Altman: AGI is an exception to capitalism and should be government-led
“Obviously I think capitalism is great. But I think AGI is sort of an exception to that. In a well-run society, I think even if we rewound the US, you know, 50 plus years, this would absolutely happen by the government.”
Altman: Open-sourcing AI model weights is an irreversible one-way door
“If we just publish the weights of a model on the internet, and then we realize, like there's actually a safety issue here, we can't take that back. It's done. It's like a one-way door. We also cannot put any usage restrictions on it after we open source it.”
Altman: AI is automating creative jobs before blue-collar labor
“You know, the strong consensus Five, 10 years ago, was that first of all the AI was going to come for the blue-collar jobs. Second of all would be the less sophisticated white-collar jobs. Third of all would be the very high cognitive load white-collar jobs li…”
Zimmer: Successor Doug Ewert was not qualified to run Men's Wearhouse
“Look, I know I told you that Doug would be a good replacement, but after a couple of years, I was wrong. He's not qualified to run the company”
Zimmer: Men's Wearhouse stole Macy's tuxedo rental deal during legal review
“My team and I were in New York in Terry Lundgren's office, the CEO of Macy's, making a deal to be the... Tuxedo. Tuxedo rental, and we had the deal. It went to legal review, and while it was in legal review, Men's Warehouse stole it.”
Baszucki: Exposure to bad content on Roblox is extremely infrequent
“And right now where we're at is it's very, very, very infrequent that anyone on our platform runs into intentionally bad content.”
Solar and wind alone would match CO2's ecological harm, says Araque
“I think it would, but the ecological consequences would be just as bad as putting CO₂ into the atmosphere.”
Araque: Only fission, fusion, and deep geothermal can scale to humanity's needs
“So when you look at that, I think there's only three things that can do it. The first one is indeed nuclear fission. As you just mentioned, it has the scalability and the power density to do it. The second one is fusion, which is what the sun does, but it's st…”
Cuban: Vertically integrated healthcare firms and PBMs manipulate drug pricing
“The way the drug industry is now, the process that takes a drug, once it's been manufactured, put aside all their R&D and the development of the trials, Once that drug manufacturer starts making a drug, the process it has to go through to get to the patients i…”
Cuban: Drug manufacturers fear insurance company retaliation for supplying Cost Plus
“Part of the challenge is getting manufacturers to sell to us because they're afraid of the response they'll get from the insurance companies.”
Cuban: Mandating open drug distribution solves pricing problems better than regulation
“And when you hear all this talk about regulating prices of drugs by different politicians, they're not solving the problem.
They're creating different problems.
The reality is that the solution is, is trying to make sure that all these manufacturers sell not j…”
Cuban blames vertically integrated insurers, not manufacturers, for high insulin prices
“It's not the insulin manufacturers for the most part that are distorting everything.
It's the, these vertically integrated companies, not all are owned by insurance companies, but for the most part they are.”
Cuban: DAOs can align progressive and capitalist goals better than traditional unions
“There's these things called distributed autonomous organizations, DAO. Which I think can evolve to be the best of progressive goals of allowing workers to participate in all upside and capitalist goals where, you know, people who come up with great ideas using…”
Andy Dunn was arrested for assault during a 2016 manic episode
“And I was arrested for felony and misdemeanor assault of my now wife and mother-in-law who were Trying to keep me from running into the street naked out of my apartment on ninth street.”
McKelvey: WeWork failed on capital assumptions, not operational execution
“It wasn't like we were overextended in our ability to execute on the business model. I think what we were overextended in was the Ability that we could get the continuous capital we would need to continue that expansion, you know, and those are two completely …”
McKelvey: Adam Neumann was trying to save WeWork during 2019 crisis
“What I saw him trying to do through that process was save the company, you know, in every step of the way, his goal was to preserve WeWork and to preserve what we had built.”
Dunn: The venture capital system is fundamentally misogynistically wired
“So we have a mismatch where men who don't understand women or how women shop are trying to decide how to make investments, and only nine percent of VCs are women. So it's a fundamentally misogynistically wired system.”
Mullenweg: Wix violated copyright by making derived WordPress code proprietary
“What we often go to bat for and fight for, including with this company called Wix, is what they did was they took our code, and then the code they derived from it, so the modifications they met, were, they said were proprietary and secret to Wix. And so what w…”
Quimby: I was more responsible than Burt Shavitz to manage wealth
“I feel that I was the more responsible party for managing wealth. I could do the right thing with it. And I don't know whether Bert would have really used it very productively. He came from a family that had some wealth, and he chose not to use it. He didn't d…”
Def Jam undershipped Logic's debut album and bought zero shelf space
“And to say what Chris won't, they undershipped us. They didn't believe in us so much that they undershipped my album. And you had all these other huge artists with, you know, 400,000 plus CDs in stores, and I had fans going to Best Buys, having to have the wor…”
Krim: Casper financed the Sleepopolis acquisition but had no editorial control
“They wanted to buy this site, and we talked to them about financing that acquisition so that they could operate it, and they had complete, independent editorial control, and they ran their business. We were just a financing partner for them.”
DuVernay: White male directors often lack know-how but succeed via confidence
“I see white guys all the time don't know what they're, the hell they're doing, but you know what they do have? Confidence. They're gonna get out there and say, I want to figure it out, and I'm sure I'll be okay. I'm sure I can figure this out.”
Eleven Madison Park Decided to Reopen as 100% Plant-Based
“So we decided that our restaurant will be a hundred percent plant-based.”
Peoples Wagner: Cancel culture is unproductive and contradicts forgiveness
“I don't believe in cancel culture. I don't think it's productive. I'm a person of faith, so I am really invested in forgiveness. I'm really invested in redemption, and I'm not perfect, and none of us are”
Troy Carter: White executives literally hold 'head of Black music' titles
“You actually, believe it or not, have white people that are the heads of black music with a title at some of these companies.”
Howroyd: Teacher Stood on Desk Claiming Black People Were Suited for Slavery
“And we had a teacher who stood up on the desk that day, the first day I went into his history class, and explained so eloquently, if you can even see the paradox of that, how blacks are so suited to slavery.”
Emily Powell: Amazon Marketplace will never help independent bookstores succeed
“And Amazon is never going to help us be successful in the long run. They're going to help Amazon be successful, and I don't believe that's good for Powell's. It's certainly not good for our community, so it wasn't something we had to put a lot of brain power b…”
Steve Jobs told Drew Houston Dropbox was a feature, not a product
“He was like, alright, well, in so many ways, he's like, well, you guys are a feature, not a product. You know, we're gonna have to build our competitor, and I guess we'll have to get to work on, you know, in so many words, killing you guys.”
Constantine: L'Oréal was the arch-enemy of cruelty-free cosmetics
“L'Oreal had always been the arch enemy because of testing on animals. They represented those who wished to test, body shop represented those that didn't wish to test.”
Jeremy Stoppelman emphatically denies that Yelp allows pay-to-play review manipulation
“The answer is, of course, absolutely not. That's never been the case. And in fact, you can prove it to yourself. Look at any one of our advertisers and see if you find negative reviews. Chances are you will, because everyone gets the occasional negative review…”
Jeremy Stoppelman claims Amazon does not take review integrity seriously
“I don't rely at all on Amazon reviews because I don't think they take the system very seriously. I think they use it as a way to just sell stuff.”
Zimmer: App-based drivers support California's Prop 22 by four to one
“Four to one driver support Prop. 22 versus the alternative.”
Radenbaugh: E-Bike Supply Chains Will Never Exist in the United States
“The supply chains for electric bikes, they don't exist in America. They're not going to exist.”
Kirban: Vita Coco sabotaged Zico by buying and trashing products
“A lot of that, you know, I mean, literally, like, buying their product out of stores, putting it in trash cans, taking their point of sale material down, hiding it in back rooms, stupid stuff.”
Hughes: The NFL's diversity apology is illegitimate while Kaepernick remains blackballed
“How dare the NFL commissioner talk about how they support diversity, and they, Literally blackball Colin Kaepernick. All right, until he gets a job, their apology is not legitimate in a lot of black folks' mind, including mine.”
Hughes: Jay-Z should not have accepted his NFL partnership deal
“They gave Jay-Z a contract to do the entertainment, which Jay-Z should not have taken, which is not going to be a popular opinion, ok, but we should have stood strong behind Colin Kaepernick, and he's one of the greatest quarterbacks alive today, still, ok?”
Hughes: Only white people can solve institutional racism
“Only white people can solve the problem of institutional racism.”
Troy Carter: America will never achieve true racial reconciliation
“So we're still reminded of our place in, in, in this country, so you'll never get to reconciliation. We all know the truth, but we'll never get to reconciliation.”
Music industry executive diversity is far worse than the NFL
“The music industry is much, much worse than the NFL. What black music has contributed financially to the music industry, What black culture has contributed, you know, financially to the music industry, and when you look at the ratio of actual black executives …”