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 775 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
Wenner: Early society did not produce great women journalists in rock/culture
“It didn't matter to me, but it's just that the general society just didn't produce great women journalists at that time. There are a few who wrote for the times, but not many who wrote in our area.”
Kevin O'Leary claimed major beauty brands would crush indie competitors like cockroaches
“And they would crush you like the colorful cockroaches you are. You only have so many minutes on earth, don't waste them trying to sell lipstick.”
Peretti: BuzzFeed made the right call publishing the Trump-Russia dossier
“I definitely think it was the right decision, and the reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document even in public communications.”
Huang: AI innovation must be accelerated, not slowed, to improve safety
“There were even attitudes that, that we had to slow down AI innovation, which I believe is exactly the opposite. We had to speed up AI innovation because through innovation, we can make the technology safer, more secure.”
Gabbert: Private Equity Firms Ruin More Businesses Than They Grow
“One, if you'd looked at their performance generally They've ruined more businesses that they've grown. They just don't, one, they think they're smarter than the owners of people that created the business in the first place. Second, they think they can over lev…”
Hastings: Modeling a company on a family is an inferior organizational approach
“Well families are dysfunctional in many ways. And so, yes, I think it's a inferior model.”
Founder Travis Rosbach claims Hydro Flask degraded its product quality post-exit
“They changed the quality. They changed the price. They've changed some of the manufacturing techniques. I don't even really drink out of the bottles anymore.”
Dylan Field claims Adobe is not a direct competitor to Figma
“They're really not. I mean... They're very focused on other aspects of their business, and that was made abundantly clear in the antitrust process to all the regulators, too.”
McKenzie: Billions spent on social media content moderation failed to fix trust
“They've invested billions of dollars on this. They come up with these policy documents that are hundreds of pages long. And it doesn't appear to us like it has actually helped misinformation problems, or it's helped Reduce the level of harassment, or it's help…”
Mason: Yahoo in 2010 was a place where great companies went to die
“And my perception of Yahoo at the time was it was a place where great companies go to die.”
Harris: Applying Section 230 to Social Media Shielded Addictive Tech From Liability
“And that made sense when the internet was just a bunch of bulletin boards and it was not powered by AI, but we used that immunity shield and applied it to social media companies when they came along later. And so when they go and intentionally addict children,…”
Harris: Mark Zuckerberg's plan to open-source AGI is extremely dangerous
“Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated within the last week or so that he wants to build a Open source artificial general intelligence, which is the most dangerous thing you could possibly do.”
Simkhai: Grindr avoided VC to not answer to straight corporate investors
“And I felt that if I would take venture backing
I would essentially become a monkey to them, and that I would need to essentially work for them.
And a lot of them were, you know, straight men who I felt like didn't understand my business, and you know, I didn'…”
A food VC firm plotted a hostile takeover within three months
“They had a very different agenda. I think it maybe took about three months where, you know, we had a little bit of a honeymoon phase where they did connect us with a better sales force and better manufacturing expertise and things like that, but it was very so…”
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?”
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…”
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”
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”
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 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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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”
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…”
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 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.”
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.”
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 …”
Hyman: Dismissing fashion as trivial during the pandemic is an anti-feminist crusade
“And I'm very troubled by what I think is this anti-feminist crusade Around one of the most important and largest industries on earth, fashion, being considered trivial.”
Zimmer admits CEO replacement Doug Ewer was unqualified to lead company
“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”
Quimby Believes She Was More Responsible With Burt's Bees Wealth Than Shavitz
“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.”
Dunn: Venture capital is a fundamentally misogynistically wired system
“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.”
Chen: Pure shareholder profit maximization is unfit for humans
“If underneath the mandate is, at the end of the day, make the most money for shareholders, it's a really, it's not really a good fit for humans, and I don't think it's, It portends very well for society if this is what we accept as the only way to do it.”
Blank: NFL anthem protests address social injustice, not military disrespect
“And I will tell you, there are 1750 players in the NFL, and I will tell you, these players have great respect for the military, and so it's not about the military to them. It's just that becomes an opportunity, a platform for them to speak about their concerns…”
Case: AOL Time Warner Merger Made Sense but Failed on Execution
“I always believe, still believe, the idea of the merger made sense. I think it really was the execution, particularly around people and culture, where things got rocky, and I was very frustrated that the company wasn't able to achieve the kind of vision that I…”
Tindell: Modern retail no longer needs the best, highest-paid salespeople
“There's really no people involved. There's no reason to have the highest paid, best salespeople in the industry anymore.”
Chuck Surack Criticizes Black Lives Matter Leadership for Divisive Rhetoric
“And I think the Black Lives Matter group, the people behind that were not necessarily good and strong. I believed in the movement. I believed in all bunch of stuff, but not the kind of rhetoric that was being thrown about.”
Huang is less concerned than most about a hot conflict over Taiwan
“If you ask me, am I concerned about a hot conflict? I'm less concerned than most. But depending on the actions of the leaders, We may cause the hot conflict, and so I am of the opinion that we all must be more long-term minded if we can. We ought to have a mor…”
Gregg Renfrew felt Carlyle's replacement CEO Marc Rey was the wrong choice
“I felt better with his departure than I did with him staying there. So for me, I didn't feel that he was the right person for the job, and I felt more confident in the choice they made in their interim CEO, Mindy McKenzie, with whom I partnered really, really …”