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.
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Patrick: Pesticides like paraquat induce Parkinson's symptoms by disrupting mitochondria
“And those are chemicals that actually cause, we use them. Scientists use them. I've used it myself in the lab to induce Parkinson-like symptoms in animals because it disrupts your mitochondria, which are the, they're little organelles inside of almost all of y…”
Folate Deficiency Causes More DNA Damage Than Consuming Pesticides
“So folate, again, we have to get from our diet, and if we don't get enough folate, it actually causes damage to our DNA much more than eating a pesticide would, because folate is required to make new DNA.”
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Minimum protein needed to prevent muscle catabolism is 1.2g/kg
“It turns out using new techniques that are more sensitive that in order to just prevent your body from like pulling from, you know, your skeletal muscle to get amino acids, the minimum amount of protein needed to take in is actually 1.2”
Using a Sauna Four to Seven Times Weekly Cuts Mortality by 40%
“People that use the sauna, for example, two to three times a week have a 24% lower all cause mortality compared to people that only use it one time a week. But people that use it four to seven times a week have a 40% lower all cause mortality compared to peopl…”
Patrick: Running Matches Antidepressant Efficacy of SSRIs
“It's undeniable that doing aerobic exercise, like they've compared running to classical antidepressants like SSRI, so serotonin reuptake inhibitors, right? The, in terms of the antidepressant effects, it's like the same only the running has all the other benef…”
Johnson: Five core health habits yield an average life expectancy of 92
“By doing these five things, you could achieve a life expectancy of 92. So one don't smoke. Two is exercise six hours a week. And that's a combination of strength and flexibility and cardiovascular. Three is eat a blueprint like diet or like Mediterranean diet.…”
Balcetis: Higher BMI individuals visually perceive distances as farther
“And we found that people who have a higher waist to hip ratio or a higher BMI see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist to hip ratio or lower BMI. Those distances literally look farther to people that for whom it might be harder to make it to…”
1980s Japanese Factory Edge Derived From Low Overhead, Not Culture
“And what was really interesting that this isn't in the early 19 eighties, people attributed the Japanese productivity advantage to their culture and to the worker management relations. And if I look what we did, I looked into the numbers, all the productivity …”
Karp: Daily Harvest's foodborne illness outbreak caused organ removals in consumers
“Daily Harvest had a foodborne illness issue where a bunch of people had to have their organs removed.”
Sinclair: Sirtuin Gene Therapy Extends Mouse Lifespan in Lab Studies
“And there are seven of these epigenetic regulators, the things that prevent the scratches, and we can turn them on
With gene therapy.
In mice, we do this, and if you do it in the brain of a mouse, they'll live longer.
Do it in the body, they can live longer.”
Lütke: Global polling shows people are personally thriving while assuming society suffers
“What you get back everywhere in the world is, like, I'm doing great. Everyone's anxiety is based on their understanding of everyone else. Which everyone else literally disagrees with. Like, so, we all think everyone else is doing bad, and everything else is ge…”
Klein: Research shows group brainstorming fails to yield more innovative ideas
“The research on like brainstorming, we're all brainstorming together. The research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas and more innovative ideas.”
Sinclair: One Gram of Daily NMN Raises Blood NAD Levels
“And I know from clinical trials that I've been involved with that taking a gram of NMN, which I do every day, raises NAD levels in whole blood, in the cells in the blood, probably in the rest of my body as well.”
Sinclair: Combining exercise and NMN doubled running endurance in mice
“In the animal studies in my lab, when we gave NMN, this molecule that I take every day, to a mouse that was sedentary, didn't have a wheel, didn't run, it could run further, ok?
And we actually have human data that's looking really promising in that direction …”
Huberman: PNAS Study Shows Hyperventilation Prevents E. Coli Symptoms
“There's a beautiful study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows that when people do this kind of breathing prior to an injection of E. Coli, something I don't recommend people do, they are actually able to remain symptom f…”
McChrystal: Robert E. Lee Killed More US Soldiers Than Any Commander
“No commander in history has killed more American soldiers, United States soldiers, than Robert E. Lee.”
Jane McGonigal: Gaming over 21 hours weekly negatively impacts mental health
“21 hours a week is, like, the tipping point where we do start to see it can get in the way of physical health or mental health.”
Jane McGonigal: Kids retain study material better by gaming before studying
“If you want kids to retain what they study better, you should have them play video games first, and then do their homework, and then study before they go to sleep, because if you study first, and then as your reward, you get to play games, When you go to sleep…”
Isaacson: Feng Zhang Beat Doudna's Team by Two Weeks to Human CRISPR Patents
“And after Jennifer and Emmanuel discover how CRISPR can be engineered to be a tool to cut DNA, a race ensues to say who can make it work and show how it works in human cells first.
And it takes them both six months along with some other labs.
It's a race that …”
Hertz: UK shopping malls deploy high-frequency sound devices to repel youth
“There's even cases in shopping malls in the United Kingdom, where in order to keep out undesirable youths they emit a very high sonic pitch sound, which only young people can hear a very unpleasant sound.”
Encouraging managers to seek feedback fails to create lasting psychological safety
“We found that when we went and encouraged managers to go and ask for feedback, it didn't have a lasting effect on psychological safety.”
One session of manager self-criticism boosts team psychological safety for a year
“When we randomly assign managers to kind of criticize themselves as opposed to asking for criticism, just inviting them to do that once increased psychological safety in their teams for at least a year.”
Jane McGonigal: US President Has Legal Power to Shut Down Internet and Mobile Service
“Our president has the power, according to the war War Powers Act. He can shut down internet, can shut down TV and radio, can shut down mobile service.”
Holland: Samsung Android 11 builds may lack upstream security fixes
“You could have, you know, the latest Samsung phone running Android 11 that doesn't actually have all of the security fixes that the main Android branch has.”
Barrett: Müller-Lyer visual illusion does not occur without exposure to carpentered environments
“So that illusion doesn't happen to, for some people in the world because they didn't, they weren't exposed to buildings and boxes and corners and things when their brain was finished wiring itself for the To be able to see.”
Fry: Judicial sentencing varies based on arbitrary factors like sports losses
“There's studies that show that if you take the same case to different judges, you get a different response. But even if you take the same case to the same judge and just on a different day, you get different responses. Or judges who have daughters tend to be m…”
McLean: Valeant's Pearson Weaponized 'Micro Truths' About Drug Profit Growth
“So Mike Pearson, right, had that argument, I'm gonna get it slightly wrong, but he said that most of Valiant's profit growth was not coming from increasing prices on drugs, it was coming from volume. And that turned out to be true if you looked at only their t…”
CDC's early COVID-19 PCR test failed due to bugs across three loci
“The actual CDC test looks at this, not just for one locus, but for three loci, meaning three different spots on the virus's genome. One of those spots, I believe, is for all coronavirus, and two loci are specific to this SARS-CoV-CoV-II virus, the virus that c…”
Balaji: COVID-19 case volume overwhelms healthcare systems despite mild cases
“All the evidence we have indicates that the absolute number of hospitalizations and deaths when this hits an area is very high. Even if it is true there's lots and lots of mild cases, the N is so large that it overwhelms the medical system.”
FDA bureaucracy blocked US coronavirus testing throughout February 2020
“Net-net a bureaucratic process inhibited the United States from testing for a critical 30 day-ish period from January to February and gave people a false sense of security that there weren't that many coronavirus cases in the U.S.”
The CDC was bottlenecked to running only 12 coronavirus tests per day
“CDC itself was doing 12 tests a day, and that basically meant, you know, for a country of three hundred million people that's testing 12 a day, that's a centralized bottleneck.”
Schwarzman: Hilton buyout made $12B, the largest profit in PE history
“And that deal turned out to be the biggest profit in private equity history. And I just read some articles somebody wrote which makes you wonder who said we were completely irresponsible doing that because journalists can say anything they feel like. But that …”
Collins: Data shows 10X winners were not luckier than comparison companies
“And then, look at all that data, and what you find, what we found, is that If anything, the comparisons were luckier, but it wasn't strong enough to make that case, so we'll call it a wash. Essentially, if you wanted to argue that the ones who beat their compa…”
The Chitlin Circuit forced Black artists to perform for free
“If you were a black artist and you had a single, you went to Cleveland, you played a concert for a promoter who was a partner with the radio station. They played your record. That's why you went and did it, not to get paid. You did it because if you didn't go,…”
Haidt: Youth born after 1995 face surging anxiety, depression, and self-harm
“Kids born after 1995 have really high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.”
Haidt: Adolescent mood disorders surged beginning in 2011, especially among girls
“What they show is a big rise in depression and anxiety only. There's no change in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia no other category. It's just mood disorder, so depression and anxiety. It begins going up around 20 11. It goes up steadily and sharply. It goes, …”
Haidt: Modern working women spend more hours on childcare than 1950s mothers
“There's an amazing statistic we found, that if you look at the total number of hours that women spent doing childcare in the 19 fifties, when very few of them worked outside the home, and you compare that to the total number of hours of childcare that they do …”
Haidt: Randomized trials prove quitting social media directly improves mental health
“There are now a number of experiments in which they randomly assign people to get off social media for a few weeks and lo and behold, you see very direct improvements in mental health.”
Haidt: Female teen suicide is at record highs across the Anglosphere
“They're having exactly the same gigantic increase in girls' depression, anxiety, and self-harm and suicide in the US and UK and Canada. We're all at record high levels for teenage, for female teenage suicide. So this is throughout the Anglosphere.”
The New York Times Increased Revenue by Dropping Behavioral Ads in Europe
“Like after GDPR in Europe, the New York Times Decided to ditch all the behavioral advertising and put up contextual advertising only and they increased revenue.”
Google Still Makes the Majority of Its Revenue From Contextual Keyword Ads
“And if you think about it, that's really still what Google does most of the time on Google search because all the search ads are still bid on keywords, right? They're just using your search history in addition to target ads of you on YouTube and Gmail and the …”
Marks: The ongoing U.S. recovery will become the longest in history
“So my guess is that this recovery will set a record for the longest recovery in history. Because of the slowness and the absence of excesses.”
Marks: US Consumers, Not Chinese Exporters, Pay US Import Tariffs
“Chinese don't pay tariffs. Tariffs are paid by consumers of goods. We have collected billions in tariffs from US consumers of Chinese goods.”
Marks: US lost 24M jobs to productivity gains versus 3M to China
“The point is that we have probably lost twenty-four million jobs to increasing productivity over the last 40 years compared to three million that went to China. And it shows you the scope of the problem and the location of the problem. The problem is not China…”
Gawande: About 30% of All Healthcare Spending Is Waste
“Estimates are that about 30% of healthcare is waste. It's going to things that are either much higher administrative costs that add no value, or are actual treatments and tests and procedures and drugs that are of no benefit or actively harmful.”
Gawande: Up to 42% of Medicare Patients Receive Non-Beneficial Procedures Annually
“And it turned out that between 25 and 42% of Medicare patients of all Medicare patients, 25 to 42% will have one of those 26 things done to them in any given year.”
Lütke: Entrepreneurship is declining across North America
“Entrepreneurship is actually tanking across North America.”
Streaming will eventually cost consumers exactly as much as their old cable bundles
“What's going to happen is people are going to end up paying about the same amount of money every month they do for content today.
There should be paying different people.
And I think that that's going to be the case.
This idea that there's going to be this, yo…”