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 273 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
Bill Simmons: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell lied about Ray Rice
“And they did. Though Rice's told them. No, he lied.”
Make Magazine's first issue perfectly described Square's card reader design
“If you want to know the real story, just get the first issue of Make Magazine. It's publicly available. It describes exactly what we were building, and I knew that when I went to Bob.”
Maldonado: Most retailers make more from slotting fees than product sales
“And these, you know, retailers, most of them, they make more, more money from slotting fees than they do from actually selling products.”
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…”
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.”
Kilgore: Mainstream beauty products carry at least a 1,200% retail markup
“And in all of these different layers of distribution, you would end up with a markup of 1200% At minimum on that product. So something that is manufactured for five dollars would retail for 60 at minimum because the retailer themselves are taking at least half…”
Researchers Took Two Years to Discover GPT-3.5 Could Synthesize Dangerous Chemicals
“It took two years, for example, for researchers to figure out that GPT-III.V, the predecessor to GPT-IV, had research-grade chemistry knowledge, meaning you could ask it questions about, you know, how to synthesize dangerous chemicals, and it would tell you ho…”
Masterson: Drunk Elephant did zero paid advertising from launch until 2023
“So I decided not to advertise early on. Yep. Never advertised till last year, actually.”
Gilboa: Optometry is the only medical field where doctors sell prescribed products
“Optometry is interesting. It's the only part of human medicine where A doctor can prescribe something to their patient and then sell them that product and make margin on it.”
Wood: Steve Jobs rejected Netflix app on Apple TV over hardware rivalry
“And I think Reed sent an email to Steve Jobs saying, are you guys interested in this? And Steve Jobs replied, no, we're not interested because we hear you're building Hardware that competes with Apple TV. And so why would we ever do business with you? You know…”
Kaufer: Fake review farms target Google but explicitly exclude TripAdvisor
“We see these review places offering to write fake reviews on Google and some other sites. And then they say, except TripAdvisor. Cause like, yeah, if like, if they try, we catch them, we shut them down.”
Reffkin: Average agent grows business 19% in first year at Compass
“The average agent that comes to Compass has grown their business 19% in their first year.”
Ben Conniff: Right whale entanglements are not happening in Maine waters
“All the data and evidence shows that any issues with right whales are not, really not happening in Maine waters based on their migratory patterns and where their food is”
Skin bleaching products are the largest skincare category in Africa
“The biggest skincare product in Africa is skin bleaching products.”
Black women receive just 0.0006% of venture funding dollars in the US
“When you go and set up a business, 0.0006% of funding dollars goes to black women.”
Brown: Livestock emissions exceed all global transportation emissions combined
“I became aware of the greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock industry, which are huge. They're greater than all forms of power transportation combined.”
Ethan Brown claims livestock causes 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions
“Look at climate change. You know, it's about 51% of greenhouse gas emissions from lifestyle.”
Zimmer: 3 percent of the US workforce had earned income on Lyft
“Yeah, there were, I think it was when I was leaving, like, three percent of the U.S. Workforce had, had earned on Lyft”
Amy Errett: Madison Reed removed eight ingredients no competitor has eliminated
“We talk about a better for you formula, and we are very factual about these eight things that we factually have taken out. That nobody else has taken out.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo captures 90% of mobile language app users
“If you take all people who are learning languages on mobile apps, 90% of them are using Duolingo.”
On was likely the first running shoe to embed a rigid plate
“We were probably the first brand using plate, a plate in the shoe, we call it speed board.”
Chandra: Kaboodle coined the term 'social shopping' in 2006
“And so we ended up focusing a lot of our energy on fashion and women and coined the term in 2006 social shopping.”
Jim Koch: Truly was the first hard seltzer in the United States
“Truly was the first hard seltzer here.”
Von Ahn: Knowing English doubles income potential in most countries
“And it turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 50x users and 5x revenue of Rosetta Stone
“By now, I would say we probably have 50 times more uses than they do. Our revenue is probably five X their revenue.”
Biofire Pioneered the First Handgun Electronic Fire Control System
“Biofire, we really went back to the drawing board and pioneered the world's first ever electronic fire control system in a handgun. The trigger mechanically is not connected to the firing pin in any way.”
Founders Fund Led the First-Ever VC Investment in a Firearms Company
“Our series a, which we announced last year, that was the first ever venture led investment into a firearms company from founders fund.”
Harvard study shows BCI-timed breaks boost productivity by 4 hours
“Yeah, so we did a large study with a professor from Harvard, who's now a professor at Worcester Political, Technical Institute, and he had created this incredible method for identifying the individual's focus, and so what we were able to do, and we did close t…”
Geothermal cuts home heating operating costs to one-fifth of fossil fuels
“If you look at, for example, in the Midwest, comparing using a fuel to using geothermal, your operating costs, so how much you have to actually spend to heat your home, it's maybe a fifth with geothermal. It's similar in the Northeast, and emissions-wise is si…”
Tarte Cosmetics has never spent a single dollar on traditional advertising
“Yeah, you know, we've never spent one dollar in advertising in Tarte ever.”
Acevedo: 60% of educated Latinos remain underbanked in the US
“So even when Latinos are in the workforce, even when they have college degrees, They're still 60% not fully banked or not fully utilizing the financial services of this country”
The New York Times acquired Wirecutter for more than the reported $30M
“Is that number is actually wrong. It was a leak that was incorrect, but the times published it. It was more, but it wasn't an extraordinary amount.”
Hari: Recovering Focus After an Interruption Takes 23 Minutes
“Think about Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon. Discovered if you're interrupted, it takes you on average, 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted.”
LaFleur: Professional women's apparel is a $100B–$120B market
“There are thirty million women, age 25 to 45, who work in some sort of corporate environment, and these women spend, on average, for women making 75 K and up, 4000 dollars a year on clothes to wear to work, and so that's roughly a hundred to a hundred twenty b…”
Stanford refused to license federally funded router technology, Lerner says
“Stanford said, no, you cannot license this technology. They would not entertain any licensing. We had done our part, and we had taken the government's money. This is all public domain. We'd invented all of these wonderful things, but the Office of Technology L…”
Smith: Ingredients labeled as natural vanilla extract are typically chemical extractives
“So, like, when you see, like, natural vanilla extract, the one thing you can be sure of is that is not vanilla. It is typically chemical extractives”
Von Ahn: Knowing English doubles income potential in most countries
“And it turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
Creelman asserts there is no real standard for natural flavor additives
“There really is no standard for a natural flavor. There may very well be all of the things you described, but there's no assurance of that.”
Flanker brand K&G enabled Men's Wearhouse to raise gross margins 10%
“K&G provides a unique opportunity for an offensive and defensive strategy, and they didn't quite understand what that meant, and so what it means is men's warehouse stores were able to raise the gross profit percentage of By a full 10%, which is a thousand bas…”
Dollar Shave Club captured 20% to 25% of the non-disposable razor market
“I think that, you know, as of now, there's about 20 to 25% of the men's non-disposable razor market that we have.”
Tom's of Maine pushed the personal care industry to end animal testing
“All the other companies stopped testing on animals, so we had a big influence.”
Chappell: The garment and textile industry is Earth's second-largest polluter
“The textile and the garment industry, because it is the second largest polluter on this earth.”
Schultz: Store retraining shutdown cost Starbucks about $24 million
“I think we estimated about twenty-four million dollars that day, in terms of lost sales and labor.”
Systrom: Instagram grew because prior photo apps were closed, friends-only networks
“If you look at every photo service before then, it was basically a closed-only, friends-only network, and we were the first ones to really open that up.”
Toast's share of US restaurant sales volume exceeds its location share
“Even though we have 20 plus percent of the restaurants, we actually have more of the sales volume, because the average restaurant that's on toast has more sales than the average restaurant in America”
Scrub Daddy generated $1M in sales the night Shark Tank aired
“We did a million dollars the night the show aired.”