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 2,273 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
NRA Does Not Publicly Oppose Smart Guns, Says Biofire CEO
“The NRA, as an example, does not oppose the development of smart guns, right? That's their public stance. You can go read on their website.”
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.”
Zimmer: App-based drivers support California's Prop 22 by four to one
“Four to one driver support Prop. 22 versus the alternative.”
White executives hold 'Head of Black Music' titles at some labels
“You actually, believe it or not, have white people that are the heads of black music with a title at some of these companies. You know, it's, and literally you have qualified black executives in the company, but actual white people with a title, the head of bl…”
Cisco CEO John Morgridge abruptly fired co-founder Sandy Lerner six months post-IPO
“I was sitting in my little office in the corner, as I did every day, and he came in, and he sat down in the chair without making an appointment, and he said, ah, you know, I think it's time you retire. He says, you've got all this money now, you just, time to …”
Jim Koch: Heineken and Beck's exported non-compliant, inferior beer to America
“They send us Heineken that's outlawed in Germany because of Germany's strict beer purity law, and the Becks they send us isn't the same Becks they have in Germany. They add forbidden adjuncts to it.”
Wenner: Rolling Stone Published UVA Story Without Adequate Fact-Checking
“But the general report on rape on campus was quite accurate. The Illustrated main story of the rape victim that was made up by that rape victim. And we print that without adequately checking it.”
Angle: China now leads consumer robotic floor care instead of US
“We used to, past tense, lead the consumer robotic floor care industry.
We don't anymore.
China does.”
FDA $365,000 application fees are the primary barrier to domestic generics
“Our biggest inhibitor and why we haven't done it yet is all the fees that the FDA charges. So it's about 365,000 dollars to set up what's called an end on new drug application.”
Chang: Uber Eats and DoorDash take up to 50% of restaurant margins
“So with margins becoming thinner and thinner in the restaurant industry, we find our original strategy of delivery becoming highly unsustainable with delivery apps like Uber and DoorDash taking margins specifically in the city up to 50%.”
Rudolph: Banza lot testing was 97% lower than activist claims
“We published a statement very quickly on our website that, you know, not only acknowledged historical testing results for what was sort of being questioned, but also even tested the same lot. It was 97% lower than what was being claimed.”
Pansino: YouTube's Promote Feature Costs Roughly $10,000 Per Million Views
“And now I think the math that I did, if you, the cheapest I think you can do, cause you can pick region and you can pick but if you want, it's about a thousand bucks for a 100,000 views. So if you want your video to reach a million views, it's about 10,000 dol…”
Grant: Top Individual Salespeople Actually Tend to Make Worse Sales Managers
“And the better you are at individual sales, the worse you tend to be as a manager. Your teams actually achieve poorer performance.”
Harris: Safety controls on open-source AI models can be removed for $100
“I won't go into technical details, but basically for about a hundred dollars, you can retrain all the safety controls off of it.”
Heirloom's direct air capture is 5,000 to 10,000 times more land-efficient than trees
“So compared to trees, these are actually about Five to 10,000 times more land efficient.”
Finke: Brimstone's process can be carbon-negative even using dirty fuels
“The beauty of our process is that actually could be substantially lower carbon or even carbon negative under a wide range of energy sources, including the use of those dirtier fuels.”
Electric flights cost one-sixth to one-half as much as gas-powered planes
“A six to half the cost of flying gas-powered airplanes, and you're doing it sustainably.”
Simkhai: Egyptian authorities actively use Grindr to track and arrest gay men
“It's not alleged. It happens.”
Black women start U.S. businesses fastest but receive disproportionately low venture funding
“The reality is, guy, black women are starting businesses faster than any other group of people in this country, but we're not getting funding, and also, because we're not getting funding, we can't really grow our ideas, so if we really wanna, like, reduce the …”
Co-founder Chris Burch personally sued Tory Burch and her entire board
“So we wanted him to change his concept, and then he sued us. He sued me personally and my entire board.”
Nike offered Allyson Felix a 70 percent pay cut during 2017 negotiations.
“I remember when Wes called me, and he told me what it was and the number was 70% less than what I had been making, and I remember just feeling like somebody had just, like, punched me.”
Female track athletes routinely concealed pregnancies to avoid sponsor pay cuts.
“Women really struggled through pregnancy and motherhood in track and field, and so what they would do is, if they were like in between contracts, like I was, they would Hide their pregnancies, they would sign new deals, and then they would carry on or contract…”
Major athletic brands traditionally construct women's footwear using molds of men's feet.
“A shoe is made off of a lass, which is a mold of a foot, and it's, A man's foot that has been used to make women's footwear.”
Simmons: ESPN canceled scheduled 2008 Obama interview over political bias concerns
“ESPN squashed it, and they squashed it for reasons that... I didn't fully understand. ESPN was very worried about... Bias, or... Seeming like they were biased one way or the other, with Democrats, Republicans, whatever it was. And they were just like, well, yo…”
Eremenko: Lithium-ion batteries will never power planes larger than 10 passengers
“And lithium ion batteries, even if you take them to their absolute theoretical maximum, You are never going to fly an airplane that's bigger than about 10 people and a couple hundred kilometers distance.”
Altman: OpenAI's board can wipe equity to zero for safety
“We also have something in our documents which says if we need to for safety, the board can just totally wipe out everyone's equity value to nothing.”
Araque: Gyrotron millimeter waves can vaporize any subterranean basement rock
“Anything that's down there in the basement rock
Can be vaporized through this.
if you try to vaporize a metallic wall, it's not going to work, but there's no metallic walls down there.
So, so rock vaporizes.”
Araque: Millimeter-wave drilling creates vitrified glass walls that stabilize deep boreholes
“So when you're drilling the energy, you use temperature to stabilize the hole, and it basically keeps itself open.
It creates a glass wall that's very, very, very strong.
We've seen this in the lab.”
Liedtke: Humans ingest roughly a credit card worth of microplastics weekly
“You could argue that microplastics you're eating based upon your diet, you're eating about a credit card worth of microplastics a week.”
Liedtke: FTC rules allow '100% cotton' clothing to contain hidden plastic components
“A hundred percent Cotton shirt that's labeled a hundred percent cotton doesn't have to be a hundred percent cotton because the guidelines were not set from a sustainability standpoint. They were set from a federal trade commission's standpoint, and it was all …”
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
Armstrong: Less than 1% of crypto transactions are for illicit purposes
“And so the best data that I have on it today, like over the last couple of years, is that crypto transactions, it's less than one percent are for illicit purposes.”
Armstrong: Only 5% of Coinbase employees took severance after 'no politics' memo
“It turned out it was about five percent of the company. We offered this exit package to people, anybody who was not on the same page and wanted to make it all win-win, about five percent of the company decided to take the exit package”
Grant: Independent idea generation produces more and better ideas than group brainstorming
“We have over 40 years of evidence that if you had a group of people, let's say five, brainstorming together, if instead you had let them come up with ideas independently, you get more ideas and also better ideas on average.”
Sequoia imposed four-year vesting despite Cisco booking $250,000 a month
“Len and I walked into a four-year vesting plan after funding the company for three years, clearly a mezzanine investment. We're making, we're booking a quarter million dollars a month at that point.”
Don Valentine invested $2.6 million for massive Cisco equity and control
“He gave us 2.6 million dollars, and Len and I got about 30%, but remember, he was the chairman of the board of the company, and he got stock from that, and all of his friends got stock.”
Tenev: All market makers pay Robinhood the exact same order flow rate
“Well, I mean, I would first say they all pay the same rate. We work with the largest firms and you know, the stuff is all highly regulated.”
Tenev: Robinhood's March 2020 outage was caused by open-source DNS failure
“It was a DNS system failure, which was a failure by a system that we didn't even write ourselves, right? Open source software for some of that.”
Tenev: Robinhood faced 4x NSCC collateral hike on $700 million deposit
“Yeah, at the time we had seven hundred million on deposit at NSCC, so the request was a four X increase in our deposit requirement.”
Jack Conte: 8chan launched on Patreon to crowdfund the site's initial development
“The thing that caused the debate was a website called eight Chan that launched on Patreon.
Guy Raz: Yeah.
Jack Conte: And they were using Patreon to fund the development of the site.”
Butler: Black women launch businesses fastest in US but lack funding
“Black women are starting businesses faster than any other group of people in this country, but we're not getting funding, and also, because we're not getting funding, we can't really grow our ideas, so if we really wanna, like, reduce the wealth gap in this co…”
Mark Constantine: Anita Roddick copied The Body Shop from a US store
“It was a totally different company that inspired Anita Roddick to copy it and do it in Brighton.”
The Body Shop went public without owning its own product formulas
“They went public. They were now a listed company, but they didn't own the product they were selling. I owned it.”
Jeremy Stoppelman says Yelp filters out 25% of submitted reviews on average
“Yelp has a mechanism where 25% on average of reviews are not shown on the businesses page, and we are by far the most aggressive of any review site out there.”
White men average $2.2M to start businesses versus $42K for Black women
“Meanwhile, the average white male gets 2.2 million dollars to set up a business. The average amount of money given to a black woman is 42,000 dollars.”
Shake Shack was the first public company to return its PPP loan
“Within 36 hours of understanding the government had run out of money, the company and its board made the decision to return it, and it was the first of any public company to do so, and that actually began a cascade of, What I'm told is well, well north of two …”
Pillsbury threatened independent distributors who carried Ben & Jerry's
“Pillsbury had bought Haagen-Dazs, so they owned them, and they went to independent ice cream distributors, who were distributing all sorts of different brands of ice creams, and you know, told them that if those distributors continued to deliver Ben & Jerry's,…”