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 355 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Holiday: Trump's effectiveness stems from enraging opponents rather than genius
“What Trump does is I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them, and is so the opposite of what they have experienced dealing with, that It's almost lik…”
Rushkoff: CDC and Fauci communicate for patient compliance, not pure accuracy
“The CDC is not thinking in terms of giving the public accurate information. The CDC is like, Our doctor trying to tell us the things that they need to tell us to get us to take our medicine. And that's different than journalism. You know, when I look at Fauci,…”
Tavel: Ex-operator VCs act as harmful crutches by micromanaging functional roles
“And this is sometimes the weaknesses that ex-operators have when they transition into investing is thinking, oh, I can do this and I'm going to dig in on, in the company and get, you know, help them with growth or help them with whatever it may be. And it ends…”
Greenblatt: Nikola held a $6.5B valuation despite appearing completely fraudulent
“I was just looking after it's turned out that it appears to be mostly a fraud and they really haven't come up with anything that they promised still has a market cap of six and a half billion.”
Ridley: China's declining economic freedom means it won't lead global prosperity
“China has been relatively free economically, but relative, but very unfree politically in the last few decades. I think that's now changing. I don't think it's very free in either respect. And so I don't see it leading the world in prosperity for an awful lot …”
Ridley: Nations shouldn't worry about IP theft if they stay smarter
“My view on the whole is that you shouldn't worry about it. You should, if necessary, sell the stuff to them, because if you can keep ahead, if you can Use your advantage to be smarter. There's no reason you can't just maintain your advantage indefinitely. You …”
Kaufman: Everything taught in business school can be self-taught
“There is nothing that's taught in business school classrooms that you are not capable of learning and understanding and applying on your own.”
Godin: Compulsory education is coercion; genuine learning requires serial incompetence
“Education is compliance, education is Compulsory education is coercion. Learning is serial incompetence on our way to getting better, and so the flip, the pairing, the tandem of emotional labor is, do you care enough to learn something?”
Godin: Stock options are a massive demotivator in almost every organization
“You know, one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They're not, not even close. It's a sort of a prize pool at the end of the gam…”
Eyal: Tech companies are not causing clinical addiction
“I know all their tricks and I will tell you they're good. They're not that good. They're not causing addiction.”
McGonigal: Peer-game benefits should outweigh parental discomfort over on-screen violence
“If there's a game that all your kids, friends are playing, even if it looks a little bit like, Ooh, I don't know.
It's, is there some realistic violence or not?
The benefits they get from playing the same game as their peer group.
Should outweigh whatever y…”
Mullenweg: Open Source Eventually Dominates Every Market It Enters
“So I believe that open source comes to dominate any market that enters over time. And the key word is over time because sometimes it takes many decades.”
Mullenweg: It is easier to slack off in an office than in distributed work
“I think it's easier to slack off in an office than it is in a distributed environment.”
Fully distributed organizations outperform in-person companies across all metrics
“Level five is where I believe that the organization in a distributed fashion is outperforming at every single level, productivity, quality, employee happiness, everything, any in-person organization. Because you've embraced all the power, all the special featu…”
Mullenweg: Proprietary software is an evolutionary dead end
“And I believe all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end.”
Martin: Modern US capital markets harm American competitiveness
“I think in 2020, now America has got a capital market that is a detriment to American competitiveness because it is causing companies to behave in ways that aren't good for the company, its employees, America over overall.”
Roger Martin: The era of widely held public corporations will end
“I think we're going to look back, twenty-fifty, we'll look back on this period, 19, 40 ish, 35, 40 ish to say 20, 20, 25 or 30 as this insane period where we thought the widely held publicly traded corporation was the optimal form. And we're going to look back…”
Martin: Public Company Boards Disciplining Management Is an Absolute Fantasy
“The idea that, that a board will discipline management is, is just an absolute fantasy. And that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets, the equity markets, and the widely held publicly traded companie…”
Roger Martin: Rating agency analysts are inherently worse at assessing bonds than market traders
“The only reason they would be in that chair is that they're not particularly good at rating bonds, right? Because if they had a skillset that made them good at rating bonds, what chair would they be sitting in? ... They'd be either sitting in a chair at Goldma…”
Chamath: 2020 presidential candidates share identical foreign, monetary, and fiscal policies
“We have an election that is now actually of style and not of substance. Now that doesn't mean it's not important. But substantively the positions on critical matters of foreign policy, domestic monetary and fiscal policy and spending will roughly be plus or mi…”
Holland: Ransomware is the easiest malware to detect and stop
“Ransomware in general, I don't get how it even exists. It is the easiest malware to detect and stop. How there's even an industry around that blows my mind.”
Holland: Modern security machine learning is just 2005 antivirus analytics
“The existing machine learning implementations and a lot of solutions out there is the exact same thing that, you know, I've seen in antiviruses back in 2005. They just didn't call it machine learning. It was just training analytics to look for anomalies and.”
Holland: Countries cannot trust Huawei for 5G wireless infrastructure
“If a nation is going to re-kit their entire country with a new type of wireless gear, especially with the complexities of five G, you need to trust that vendor. You need to be sure that the interests of that vendor are at the very least not opposed to the inte…”
Holland: Snowden leaked legitimate programs just to insult the intelligence community
“Why did he, you know, expose completely legitimate legal intelligence gathering programs that have a ton of people's names associated with that? Why did he go out the door with that? And that, I think, is what I have a much larger problem with in that, you kno…”
Barrett: No universal physical signature exists for any studied emotion
“In fact, there is no universal physical signature for any emotion that's ever been studied.”
BJ Fogg: Repetition does not create habits, it only correlates with habit strength
“There has been a lot of stuff out in the world that says repetition creates habits, but that's actually not how it works. If you look at the study that people cite most when they're making that claim, it's a 2009, 2010 study. It was, you will see that that stu…”
McLean: Private equity fracking returns relied on a greater fool theory
“For a long time private equity could get a return on the greater fool theory. They would fund these fracking entrepreneurs who would go out and drill wells, and then they would sell that to a publicly traded company, and the private equity guys would make a to…”
McLean: Fracking executives extract wealth while leaving society cleanup liabilities
“It's another case of capitalism gone wrong, and that a lot of people at the top of these companies have made their billions, and walked away from it, and then the rest of society is left to clean up the mess, because the companies are bankrupt, and don't have …”
Ackman: SoftBank's Mega-Funds Did a Massive Disservice to Startups and Markets
“And so with SoftBank injecting, you know, a hundred billion dollars in marking up the value of companies and giving them capital that they could use to postpone going public, I think it's fundamentally been a disservice to the capital markets and probably to t…”
Calacanis: Work-life balance advocates do not understand how startups work
“These businesses take a level of focus and commitment that is otherworldly. Like, the fact that people are Even talking about life work balance, and oh, you know, you can have life work balance, and that's what's important in life, like, these are people who d…”
A startup could reach $100M in revenue using entirely no-code tools
“Like Airbnb, if it's being built today, could be built on Bubble, Webflow, one of these tools, Squarespace, Zapier, Slack, Airtable. You could glue all this stuff together and do it without a developer and probably get to 10 to a hundred million in revenue wit…”
Calacanis: Accredited investor rules harm poor people by blocking high-upside bets
“The accreditation rules and the fact that our economic system is designed to protect people who are poor by not letting them take risk. That's noble, but it's wrong in today's society. The people who need to take risks and make bets That could have 200 X outco…”
San Francisco pedestrians routinely inhale and track aerosolized fecal matter indoors
“In many cities on the coast of the US, like San Francisco most infamously, you are definitely, people are definitely inhaling fecal matter as they're walking outside. They're definitely getting it on their shoes and so on and tracking it in, even in, like, sma…”
Collins: Pioneering innovators rarely win; scaling the right innovations matters
“There's very little evidence that the pioneering innovators win. And what we found instead is that it's not being innovative that matters. It's the ability to scale the right innovations.”
Nagoski: Suppressing male emotional hurt drives violence against women
“And that patriarchal message is, I think, the primary source of
There's violence against women perpetrated by men, is that they don't know what to do with all their hurt, but they know that, like, they can't control this factor in their life, and they're so f…”
Howey: Traditional Publishing Contracts Are Now the Last Resort for Authors
“Self-publishing used to be thought of as the last resort for writers. Now publishing contracts are the last resort, because as long as you own the rights, you have the freedom to make any decision you want down the road.”
Johnson: Romantic attachment is structured by biology, not social convention
“These things are not social conventions. They're not made up. You know, the New York Times writes articles about how Oh, romantic. Love is changing, and, you know, we're all going to be polyamorous, or we're going to have hookups until we're 60, and it's all g…”
Dr. Sue Johnson: Pursuit of Sexual Novelty Stems From Emotional Numbness
“You need novelty when you're numbed out and shut down, and you need more and more novel sensation to have you get turned on. That's the way I see it. Novelty is about how we've numbed out our sexuality. Not how, no, it's not about freedom.”
Johnson: 70% of North American therapists see couples without specialized training
“The fact of the matter is, 70% of mental health professionals in North America Say they see couples now, because the demand is huge, and most of those people have not been trained in couples therapy.”
Johnson: Teaching couples to 'fight fair' is irrelevant rubbish
“Therapists focus on conflict, teach you how to fight. Fair, and fighting fair is rubbish, ok? It's like, It's irrelevant. It's, you know, it's, so, you know and we don't look at what's going on underneath, which is lack of emotional connection.”
Haidt: Campus victimhood culture awards social status for weakness and victimization
“They say reflects a new moral culture in which you achieve status, not by being strong, not by being beautiful, not by being smart. You achieve status by being, by emphasizing how much you've been victimized, and if you haven't been victimized, then you achiev…”
Haidt: Modern fragility and speech norms make Gen Z bad workplace cooperators
“It's that they've been raised with a set of norms. That's really bad for them. That makes them very bad cooperators. And if you can't cooperate, you can't be employed.”
Haidt: A child would wait 700,000 years in a car before abduction
“There are about a hundred people, a hundred kids abducted a year in the United States by strangers. At present rates of abduction, you'd have to leave your kid alone in a car in a parking lot for 700,000 years before they would probably be abducted.”
Haidt: Academic classrooms must not be safe spaces
“Our argument has always been that the classroom must not be a safe space, that classrooms must be places where any claim will be challenged, not Not attacked not shamed, but counterarguments backed by evidence will be given.”
Gross: YouTube is more important to Google than web search
“I actually believe YouTube is more important to Google than web search if they're thinking about it properly, but that's an acquired asset.”
Gross: Global problems stem from capitalism's short-term outlook
“I think you can trace almost Every major problem that we have in the world today to the fact that capitalism has a very short term outlook. So it maximizes for what is good today, not what is great 10 years from now.”
Gross: Both Marxist communism and Bitcoin are awful things
“Whether it's awful things, in my opinion, like say, you know, Marxist communism or Bitcoin, it always goes through this world.”
Fried: Uber is held up as successful but is a fundamentally terrible business
“I have a hard time though sometimes with tech businesses that are quote successful or held up as successful examples of businesses that are actually fundamentally terrible businesses. I think like things like companies like Uber is an example.”