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 1,976 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 14 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: Over half of biology research in top journals is not reproducible
“If you look at it, about half or more than half of all biology research in top journals is not reproducible.”
Gil: Crash data shows children only need car seats until age two
“If you actually look at crash data, Real data, and people have now reproduced this across multiple countries, multiple time periods, it's the age of two. So for six extra years, we keep people in booster seats and car seats, at least against the data, right?”
Gil: 80% to 90% of AI market cap is in the Bay Area
“If you look at AI, it's like, 80 to 90% of the market cap is all in the Bay Area.”
Tan: 50% of YC companies raise Series A, 25% after year 5
“About half of companies that go through YC will end up raising a series A. That's, you know, much higher than any other pre-seed or seed sort of situation that I know of. But about, A quarter of those who raise the Series A, they do it in year five or later.”
Garry Tan: YC teams staying in SF double their unicorn odds
“One thing we spotted is that the teams that come to San Francisco and then stay in San Francisco or the Bay Area, they actually double their chance of becoming a unicorn.”
Garry Tan: 60% of serial founders who built recent unicorns are YC alumni
“Did you know that 40, you know, of those 40%, 60% of those people, the people who created unicorns the last 10 years are YC alumni.”
Garry Tan: Elon Musk proved Twitter didn't need 80% of its staff
“Elon came in and quickly asked, like, 80 or 90% of the people, and it turns out you didn't need 80 or 90% of the people, so.”
Garry Tan: Indistinguishable voice AI is currently actively replacing call center labor
“The speech to text and text to speech, those things are indistinguishable from human beings now, and you can train these things, the evals are good, the prompting is good you know, I, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, like, what we're seeing…”
Poilievre: Canadian government spends $21B on consultants, double from 10 years ago
“For example, the government's now spending twenty-one billion dollars on consultants. That's twice what they were spending 10 years ago.”
Poilievre cites $500 billion net capital outflow to the US over decade
“In the last 10 years, there's been a net outflow of five hundred billion dollars of investment to the U.S. From Canada, and that's partly because our taxes are extremely high.”
Poilievre: Canadian building permits rank second slowest in the OECD
“We have the second slowest building permits in the OECD, and it takes us 17 years to get a mine approved, three times longer to get approval for a housing development in Canada versus the UK or the US.”
Poilievre: Vancouver police arrested the same 40 offenders 6,000 times
“In Vancouver, the police had to arrest the same 40 offenders 6000 times. 40 guys. Each one of these guys was arrested on average once every two days. A 150 times a year for one guy.”
Wolfe: DeepSeek release accelerated OpenAI model launch timelines
“The second that DeepSea comes out, it suddenly accelerated the internal strategic decisions from OpenAI of when are we gonna release models.”
Wolfe: US SOCOM drone operations require legal authorization for strike ratios
“In the Pacific region with SOCOM, and there's a drone operator who's flying the drone, there's another drone operator who's piloting the weapon system, and there's two lawyers. So, they're helping the commander who is effectively given, like, a godshot of, you…”
Wolfe: 38% of US AI researchers are from China
“In our own country, in the United States, 38% of researchers in AI are from China.”
Zappos's most valuable customers also had the highest product return rates
“We then did this analysis and this is the type of analysis I really enjoy doing, like, let's take our best customers, and let's take our worst customers, and look at their return rates, and it turned out our best customers at the highest LTVs return the most”
Codie Sanchez crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally hundreds of times
“I mean, I saw, I've crossed, crossed the border hundreds of times illegally, documenting sort of what happens in conflict zones.”
Patrick: Low Omega-3 levels have a comparable mortality impact to smoking
“When you look at smokers with a high omega-three index, they have the same life expectancy as non-smokers with a low omega-three index. In other words, smoking was like having low omega-three, or having a low omega-three index was like smoking.”
Bryan Johnson: Cardiovascular Capacity Ranks in Top 1.5% of 18-Year-Olds
“My cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5% of 18 year olds.”
Johnson: Eating dinner at 5 PM halves deep and REM sleep
“When I eat my last meal of the day, I have all my digestion finished. So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around 46 beats per minute. And if it's a 46, I'm going to have a perfect night's sleep. If I eat at five PM or six PM, then my resting heart ra…”
Mackey: Defeated four internal coup attempts across Whole Foods history
“I count four different coup attempts that occurred over the history of the company that I was able to beat back.”
Doucleff: SF parents give 120 verbal inputs hourly versus 2-3 traditionally
“In places where children have autonomy, parents give children, like, two to three verbal inputs in an hour. And I've done it on myself, I've done it with parents in San Francisco, and we are talking about, like, a 120 verbal inputs per hour.”
Exercise and Dancing Outperform Psychotherapy for Treating Mild to Moderate Depression
“And the reason is, is they've measured things. You know what better for mood, for mild to moderate depression than psychotherapy or antidepressants? Dancing. Yeah. Exercise. Dancing.”
School Psychology Associations Stayed Silent on Foreseeable Lockdown Damage to Children
“The school counselors association, school psychologists association, none of these organizations had anything to say about the foreseeable damage that was going to happen to kids.”
Smokers With High Omega-3 Match Life Expectancy of Low Omega-3 Non-Smokers
“Smokers with a high omega-three index, they have the same life expectancy as non-smokers with a low omega-three index.”
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…”
Three Minutes of Vigorous Exercise Thrice Weekly Cuts Mortality by 50%
“I mean, there's studies showing that people just doing one to three minutes of like getting their heart rate up to 80% max heart rate for like one to one to three minutes, you know, three times a week. Is associated with, like, a 50% reduction in all-cause mor…”
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.…”
Valiante: Tiger Woods is the only golfer in history who played better with a lead
“One of the things about Tiger Woods that's so remarkable is, is, He's the only golfer, and I mean this, in the history of the game, who's ever played better with a lead.”
Kobe Bryant created 'Black Mamba' alter ego during 2003 Colorado legal crisis
“We came together during the time of him going through the allegations of sexual assault in in Colorado. That's why, that's where we built the Black Mamba from was in that moment. Cause he felt like he was losing his edge.”
Valiante: Tiger Woods is the only golfer in history who played better with a lead
“He's the only golfer, and I mean this, in the history of the game who's ever played better with a lead.”
Rey Flemings: NY State wired firm $45.9M for ventilators, prompting FBI call
“We got a wire from the state of New York for 45.9 million dollars and a phone call from the FBI.”
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…”
Stalk: Family companies underperform in upturns but outperform public peers in downturns
“The family companies were not as high performing on profitability in the up turns of the market, but nor were they as poor performing as public companies in the downturns.”
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 …”
A Two-Week Supply Chain Has One-Eighth the Variability of Eight Weeks
“If you take two supply chains One that has an eight week time and one that has a Two-week time. The variability of the output at the one that's two weeks will be about one-eighth variability of the other.”
Karp: Over 90% of non-organic US wheat contains traces of glyphosate
“I don't remember the exact number, but it's in the high nineties percent. Might be 99%, might be 97%. Of the US wheat crop that's not organic has traces of glyphosate, which is Monsanto's herbicide also called Roundup.”
Karp: European wheat has lower gluten and is less inflammatory than US wheat
“So in Europe, the glyphosate's banned, and the gluten levels are much lower, and the strains of wheat that they typically use
Are typically a lot less inflammatory than the ones that they use over here.”
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.”
Global temperatures will rise for a century even if emissions stop
“It turns out if you stopped all emissions on day one, the climate will continue to drift, drift upwards for about a hundred years. I have written a bunch of papers on global warming. I've done this calculation. Other people have done this calculation. You know…”
Dr. Lembke: Ambien Adds Only 15 Minutes of Sleep by Inducing Amnesia
“The truth is that Ambien only gives you about 15 more minutes of sleep, which is surprising, right? Because people feel like I slept so much more deeply. What it really does is it makes you amnestic for the periods of awakening. So it doesn't actually have you…”
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.”
Sinclair: Time-Restricted Feeding Extended Mouse Lifespan by 30% Regardless of Diet
“And there's a very famous study that was done by a colleague of mine, Rafael de Cabo at the NIH in Bethesda, and he made three different types of diets for mice.
One that had a lot of protein, the other had carbs, the other had fat, and he thought he would fin…”
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…”