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 392 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
Losing TSMC Wouldn't Be Disastrous Because Intel Is Only 2x Behind
“And my contrarian take is that it wouldn't be that bad. Supply would take a shock for sure, but The best processes that we have in the West, like Intel, not that far behind, at worst, like maybe two X worst performance per watt. And the gap is just far smaller…”
Thompson: Apple's ATT Was One of Tech's Worst Antitrust Violations
“When Apple passed ATT, app tracking transparency was one of the most One of the worst antitrust violations in the history of technology, like, just Apple unilaterally obliterating all these business models while they're simultaneously building their own, as fa…”
Altman: OpenAI made a mistake innovating on corporate structure early on
“A formative one that went wrong, which I haven't talked about much is we made a mistake to try to innovate in our structure in the beginning.”
Bertolini: The US needs to eliminate employer-sponsored health insurance
“We need to eliminate employer sponsored insurance.”
Kushner: The FDA and NIH Actively Worked Against Trump on Vaccines
“We were able to work with the confines of an FDA that was an NIH that was basically working against President Trump, trying to slow him down.”
Kushner: Displaced Mideast Islamists moved mostly to Africa, West
“And you're seeing a lot of the Islamists that got kicked out of the Middle East. I mean, they've gone mostly to Africa. Some have gone to Europe and the US, which is crazy that we let these people in,”
Mead argues Trump commands more human attention than any historical figure
“The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment, spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied The amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does.”
Mead claims Trump is as skilled at his craft as Napoleon
“So at what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. Now, I observed that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo and ended in exile, so this is no guarantee that, that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle, but he is a…”
Mead argues Trump is the most globally impactful modern personalist leader
“Trump is sort of the greatest of these, the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xi Jinping.”
Mead claims tech companies increasingly need patriotic employees to protect IP
“And I think increasingly companies are starting to realize that they need their employees to be patriotic. That is the. Your employees need to think it's an evil sin to sell IP to China, and that the, your co-workers will rat you out in a heartbeat if they thi…”
Mead argues Israel is too small to act as Iran's counter-hegemon
“Israel, I think, may have hoped that it could kind of Bear the weight of being a counter hegemon to Iran. Israel is too small and too alien to the rest of the Middle East to really play that role effectively, I think.”
Thompson: US AI military superiority would be dangerous for the world
“So I, there's a, just a fundamental disconnect that I have with a lot of the rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley, coming out, I think, of one of the labs in particular, where if we get to a place where we have a meaningful superiority, particularly from, lik…”
Thompson: Jassy and Nadella's narrative on GPU spending is BS
“So you have, like, on the calls, you have both Andy Jassy and Cyanadella are out there saying, look, we're just building data centers. Like, these are the shells. We might not use them now. Maybe we'll use them in the future. And we only buy GPUs when we know …”
Thompson: NVIDIA's neocloud financing deals effectively represent disguised price cuts
“If you actually look at their business holistically, what that is, is a price cut, right? Like they, now the price cut didn't show up in margins. It didn't show up in what they're offering, but a lot of what NVIDIA is doing is how can we maintain our margins?”
Thompson: NVIDIA's CUDA moat is dramatically diminished for AI models
“CUDA's moat is dramatically diminished because the models don't care what they run on, and that's what actually matters, what's built on top of the models, but it still matters. It, it's still something of a mode.”
Altman: Frontier Labs May Need to Pace AI Development for Society
“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels and trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone, and also does …”
Altman: Much of AI safety talk stems from desires to concentrate power
“I think a lot of the talk about safety concerns is well-founded, and then a lot of it is about people that just really, even if it's slightly subconscious, want to concentrate power.”
Altman: Intelligence itself will become a fungible commodity
“Intelligence itself, I would say yes.”
Smith: Many Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Are Still Science Experiments
“Many of the SMRs are still science experiments.”
Giffon: Remote Fridays are a soft launch of the four-day week
“The people, the reason people are so attached to work from home is because they actually have like two or three hours of work to do per day. And so work from home Fridays is like a, is a soft launch of the four hour, four day work week.”
Giffon: Big tech leaders repeatedly echo Curtis Yarvin without naming him
“I thought it was remarkable for years how you could sort of hear Curtis's ideas coming out of the mouth of, mouths of the big tech leaders without being named.”
Loeb: Middle Eastern nations and Azerbaijan are better US allies than NATO
“I mean, who would have thought 20 years ago, or even three years ago, Bahrain, the Emirates, Saudi, Morocco, Azerbaijan would be better allies to the U.S. Than NATO.”
Closure of Strait of Hormuz Is Net Beneficial for US Economy
“That the Strait of Hormuz being closed is actually relatively awesome for America.”
Chesky: Apple Has Largely Not Had to Invent New Products Since Jobs
“I think Apple is very similar. They've had not had to invent new products for the most part. They're still running the iPhone.”
Chesky: A startup's first employee should be a recruiter, not an engineer.
“I think people should think about their first employee being a recruiter, not an engineer, because, like, they are the, like, the most important person, because they are the ones that, like, get you every other person.”
Jerome Powell kept policy easy to secure Biden reappointment, says Jones
“Powell, he overstayed being easy way too long because he wanted Biden to reappoint him.”
Paul Tudor Jones: Bitcoin is unequivocally the best inflation hedge, beating gold
“Bitcoin is unequivocally the best inflation hedge that there is, more than gold, because Bitcoin is finite. There's only so much Bitcoin that can be mined.”
Patel: Altman and Amodei are uncharismatic in media interviews
“First of all, Sam Altman and Dario have to stop getting on interviews. They're so uncharismatic. I don't know what they're doing. Every interview they do is like, wow, normal people are gonna hate you even more.”
Carnell: Semaglutide and tirzepatide are clinically interchangeable despite distinct IP
“Our team's fundamental perspective is that they all achieve the same goals. They were just novel IP strategies to achieve those same goals. And I would say that they're all pretty much interchangeable.”
Mitchell Green: Assuming 20x-25x exit multiples for AI deals is insanity
“I think how they're going to get in trouble today and all this AI stuff is they just assume the exit multiple is 20 to 25 times. That's insanity.”
Mitchell Green: Investing in OpenAI at a $100B valuation is 'a little insane'
“And I think investing in open AI, a hundred billion is a little insane personally, but like, I don't know if it goes on to do like a trillion dollars of earnings. Yeah. I was going to be very wrong. I should have invested.”
Mitchell Green: Overlevered PE-Owned Software Assets Are Ripe for Disruption
“I worry that a bunch of these private equity owned assets that are over levered are ripe for disruption versus like independent software companies that are focused on growth, that are trying to innovate.”
Emerging market bank executives are vastly superior to their Western counterparts
“I'd say you take your like emerging markets, bank executive team, they're hands down is way better than I think probably what you see in the Western world.”
Silicon Valley's safety net prevents the creation of truly great founders
“We've created this, like, incredible environment in Silicon Valley that it's really safe to start a company. And there's, like, a playbook, and you go through YC, and assuming you're, like, moderately competent and went to the right high school and college, yo…”
The startup ecosystem should make failure much more expensive for wealthy founders
“I just think we need to, I think we need to increase the risk for founders. I think we need to make failure much more expensive. I think we need to say, Hey, you're a second time founding of liquidity, like put all of your money into that.”
Sankar: The CCP Believes China Can Only Win if America Fails
“So, I think the challenge for us with the CCP Is that it's not enough for China to be prosperous. America must fail.”
Sankar: AI models are commoditized, forcing providers up-stack
“The model companies have to run up the stack away from just providing a pure model, because the model is commoditized. It's really everything they build around the model that is a solution that they're going to try to build value off of.”
Sankar: The US is in an undeclared emergency having lost deterrence
“I can't look my kids in the eye and not say that I'm ringing the bell that we're in an undeclared state of emergency. That really the first major public thing I put out there was the 18 theses, which is to say, like, we're an emergency. We've lost deterrence.”
Low-income communities may favor surveillance security more than privacy debates assume
“The wealthy communities have decided we want this, and we're willing to trade some of our privacy for security. Meanwhile, like, a lot of the debate happens, like the assumption is that low-income people don't want that, and that they want more privacy at the …”
Sundheim: UBI Will Fail Because Humans Are Inherently Wired to Work
“I don't think humans, as much as people like Dario, who I respect a lot, might say, like, well, we're just gonna give everybody a check and, like, everybody will just kind of live off universal basic income. I just don't think humans are wired to just collect …”
Sundheim: Talent and Leadership Matter More Than Business Moats in Tech Investing
“Buffett always says, like, the business is more important than the leader, because eventually, like, I kind of disagree with that. I think if you look over 30 years, sure, but over any period of time, like, businesses are just people, and if you have amazing p…”
Horowitz: European startup culture suffers from negative societal values and regulation
“They have a, like a, definitely a worse regulatory environment and EU increasingly bad regulatory environment for entrepreneurship, but there, there's a cultural challenge where You know, succeeding, doing something larger than yourself, making the world a bet…”
Companies Should Ban Managers Who Have Fewer Than Ten Direct Reports
“You either need to be managing 50 humans, or you need to be an IC. And so they would, there's something called span of control, which means how many people you manage in some ways. And so span of control less than 10 should not be allowed at any company at thi…”
Venture capitalists building AI holding companies will underperform established private equity
“All these VCs are setting up these holding companies and, you know, we're going to use AI to make traditional businesses better. And, you know, they're really smart VCs and they're great track records, but that's what private equity has been doing for 50 years…”
Meta and Microsoft failed to build competitive internal frontier AI models
“Because Meta threw a lot of money at it and they failed. Jan LeCun had to leave. They had to have the famous billion dollar for AI researchers. By the way, Microsoft also failed. They did not make such an unequivocal prediction, but they hire, but they bought …”
TSMC is making a mistake by expanding manufacturing capacity too slowly
“Taiwan Semi is not expanding capacity as fast as their customers want. And I think this is actually a pretty big, this, they're in the process of making a mistake just because, you know, you do have Intel and with these fabs, they're not as good and it's reall…”