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 686 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
Gil: Big tech operates like UBI for elite graduates doing little
“One argument I make sometimes is that big tech is effectively a big experiment in UBI, universal basic income, for people who went to good schools, right? You're literally just giving money to people for not doing very much.”
Gil: Big tech companies could cut headcounts close to 80%
“If you look at what Musk did at Twitter, Where they cut 80% or whatever it was. I wouldn't be surprised if you could do things that are pretty close to that at a lot of the big tech companies.”
Tan: Big tech talent hoarding decelerated overall technological progress
“I guess it felt like a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma, because I think the result is that you know, tech progress itself decelerated. You have, like, the smartest people of a generation basically retired in place, working at places that, you know, the worl…”
Poilievre: Government Division Led to Protests Targeting Jewish Institutions
“I think there's been, I think the government has tried to encourage people to divide into different camps, and that has metastasized onto our streets with these horrible protests that target Jewish places of worship and schools and businesses and I think that'…”
Poilievre: Trump Tariffs on Canada Only Strengthen China
“Trump tariffs against Canada actually only strengthen China because they weaken both Canada and the US.”
Wolfe: Samsung will decline like Intel due to sclerotic bureaucracy
“If I had to come up with somewhat pejorative analogy, I think Samsung is going to be more like Intel. I think that they're just a little bit sclerotic and bureaucratic and slow moving, and it's going to sort of ebb and decline.”
VCs are 'hitchhikers with credit cards' focused purely on exits
“I call the VCs I call them hitchhikers with credit cards, and, but what I mean by that is that they're getting into your car, And as long as you take them where they want to get to, which is an exit which either has to be a sale or an IPO... They're not there …”
Mackey: Professional managers view roles at Whole Foods as stepping stones
“In my experience, they're very, they're not usually mission driven. They've gotten their MBA from Harvard or Wharton or Stanford. They're very intelligent. They work hard, but working at Whole Foods or Amazon, it's just a, it's just part of their career path. …”
Mackey proposes 0% capital gains tax on 10-year holdings, 50-60% on short-term
“What I'd love to see is that if you held something for, say, 10 years, maybe your taxes, capital gains taxes went down to close to zero, and if you sold it in less than a year, maybe they'd be much higher. Maybe they'd be 50 or 60%, so that you'd create these …”
Beshore: Companies sold to traditional private equity permanently lose operational independence
“Once you get on that treadmill, like once you sell the private equity, traditional private equity, do a leverage buyout that, that business is forever going to be flipped to the next person. Or eventually might get sold as strategic, but it forever is relegate…”
Mental Health Experts Have Weakened Youth Resilience by Controlling Family Life
“So I think it's all essentially bad therapy, and this is why, because who's in charge? Who's running the show? And today with children, with families, it really is the mental health experts.”
Public School Teachers and Counselors Are Playing Therapist With Students
“Their mandate is trauma-informed care across public schools, social, emotional learning, and parent, teachers and counselors, armies of counselors are playing shrink with the kids all day long.”
The Mental Health Industry Has Systematically Stripped Parents of Their Confidence
“They have so little confidence right now because we've done, because the mental health industry has done everything it can to divest them of any sense that they know what they're doing.”
Stimulants Are Overprescribed to Children Before Making Basic Environmental Adjustments
“There may be kids who need the stimulant, but stimulants are profound, and they are given out way, way too readily without first seeing if we can make adjustments in the child's environment to help them, you know, handle their distractibility.”
Schools Face a Massive Conflict of Interest Managing Student Mental Health
“There is a major conflict of interest with schools getting involved in mental health. Huge conflict of interest. Should never have been allowed.”
Virtually Any Activity Yields Better Mental Health Than SEL Exercises
“Literally anything you could be doing would be better for your mental health than sitting around and doing these exercises.”
Jacobs: Most Fortune 500 board meetings are scripted wastes of time
“Most Fortune 500 company board members, board meetings, are kind of, they're very scripted, and sometimes they even rehearse. And there's a careful It's a story that's being told by management, and it's done by PowerPoint, it's done by rehearsed presentations …”
Davis: Private equity reporting returns without leverage adjustments is despicable
“It's just despicable that you show your returns, but you don't adjust them for leverage. Like benchmark them to the S and P with the same amount of leverage”
Slootman: Mass layoffs expose the hypocrisy of Google and Salesforce family cultures
“Companies like Salesforce and even Google come to mind, but you know, in the end they're laying people off too, by the thousands. Okay. So I guess it's not family after all.”
Rey Flemings: Eliminating multi-generational wealth inheritance would solve massive societal problems
“It would solve a massive amount of the problems.”
Karp: Anyone paying for streaming or Starbucks can afford healthy food
“It's a myth that only people with money can afford healthy food and the reason it's a myth is because we've looked at the data, and it's a choice. So what I mean by that is anyone who has a smartphone, right, and you have to separate people who are below the p…”
Manned spaceflight is a reality TV show with no functional purpose
“I mean, today, the manned space flight is a reality TV show. And in fact, the cutting edge of manned space flight is space tourism. That's what Blue Origin and SpaceX and others are gearing up for, and there's just no reason to take a fragile human up there.”
Globally, society is doing effectively nothing to address climate change
“Currently we're doing, to first order approximation, exactly nothing for climate change.”
Legacy media holds a structural grudge against technology due to disruption
“Media has a grudge against technology for, frankly, understandable reasons. Like everyone in media works for an institution that probably was negatively affected by tech.”
Lütke: Anti-Nuclear Environmentalism Drove Global Reliance on Fossil Fuels
“A lot of our carbon issue in the world comes from the environmentalists convincing the world that even though we're building a
economy that required nuclear power, we could somehow do it with coal instead, and oil.”
Stanley: Direct pursuit of human-level AI is a naive objective
“Like, at some level, there's, like, this really grandiose conception of, like, some human-like computer, and, like, that is, I think, a naive objective right now. Like, you just don't want to know how to do that. We don't know what the stepping stones are that…”
Balaji: Canada's financial crackdown on truckers was an unprecedented PR disaster
“Yes, Canada did implement these unprecedented financial controls. Yes, it did affect these, you know, truckers, but because they were unable to successfully censor social media, Canada suffered probably the gravest PR disaster that I've ever seen in my life.”
Balaji: Western elites inherited a system they could never build
“They inherited a system from their ancestors that they could never have built. And they just assume that this thing, which is at massive scale, they can sanction this person and sanction this person and attack this person and de-platform this person and so on …”
Balaji: Western institutions are retrofitting speech controls onto a free society
“What they're doing is they're retrofitting speech and thought controls onto a previously free society.”
Srinivasan: Modern ideological America is distinct from historic America like Soviet Russia
“Woke America is to America as Soviet Russia is to Russia. Like, it's like a different thing, you know? It's like an ideological different thing.”
Balaji: Remote tools and Web3 make childhood work safe and viable again
“Lots of kids are able to make money at home. Okay. So the quote child labor issue where somebody is in a factory and they're being oppressed by a boss and the parent can't see them and they're like, their little fingers are being worked off. All that goes away…”
Meta is extremely underrated because Mark Zuckerberg remains founder and CEO
“Because Facebook still has its founder and that's the most important thing. Like Zuck will take the hits of pushing them into new territory, even with the five hundred billion dollar markdown or whatever that they just had. Like I'm still more bullish on them …”
Srinivasan: Google is very overrated and 'cruising for a bruising'
“Google, I think is very overrated. It's cruising for a bruising. It'll take a while, but you know, it's possible to get turned around like Microsoft, but that's where they are right now.”
McChrystal: An Individual's Relationship With Risk Is Innate and Rarely Changes
“I think everyone has a relationship with risk, and it doesn't really change. You may get a little better with it, a little more experienced, But you have a certain Ability to deal with that uncertainty. And I think that comes from birth.”
Andreessen: Qualified tech founders do not have bad ideas, only timing issues
“I no longer think there are any qualified people starting tech companies that actually have bad ideas. I think all the ideas are good ideas. I think it's just a question of timing and execution.”
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,…”
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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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: 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…”