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
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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: 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.”
Wolfe: Childless CEOs over 50 tend to be overly controlling operators
“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”
Greene: Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was rushed and shallow.
“You know, I like Walter Isaacson. I think he's a very fine biographer, but You know, even like the Steve jobs that he's rushed, he's got to write it because she just died. And like, I don't really feel like when I read that book, I understand the man, Steve jo…”
Nutrition Research Lowered Its Standards Due to the Difficulty of Human Trials
“Very difficult, if not impossible, to do right, and so what the nutrition and public health research communities did is they just lowered their standards for what they would consider reliable knowledge, and this just became sort of, ah, inculcated throughout t…”
The Medical Community Has No Idea How to Solve the Obesity Epidemic
“And, you know, we end up in a situation today where we have, you know, these massive, unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes and related diseases, and the medical public health community has no idea, almost literally no idea what to do about it, and e…”
Taubes Admits His Own Nutrition Science Initiative Did More Harm Than Good
“And if anything, at this point in time, we have done more harm than good.”
Grant: Exact replications in social science are nearly impossible to achieve
“The odds that you're going to find the exact same effect with a different group of people who don't have an identical distribution of traits are pretty close to zero in my opinion.”
Sutherland: Economics is creatively limiting by reducing motivation to bribes and fines
“The problem of economics isn't only that it's wrong, it's that it's incredibly creatively limiting, because it tends to posit a very one-dimensional view of human motivation, and therefore, if you wish to change human behavior, the only two ways you can do it …”
Sutherland: Shareholder value short-termism creates psychopathic, untrusted businesses
“And I think the problem with the shareholder value movement, by the way, and short term targets in business, is you're creating in businesses with a focus on the short term, you're creating psychopathic businesses, you're creating businesses which consumers in…”
Ravikant: No one reaches enlightenment or does serious internal work in groups
“Nobody reaches enlightenment or internal happiness or does serious internal work in group settings. It is a very lonely kind of task. And so to some extent, I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work, aren't th…”
Naval Ravikant dismisses macroeconomics as corrupted politics lacking scientific falsifiable predictions.
“Macroeconomics is a combination of voodoo complex systems and politics. And you can find macroeconomists to take every side of every argument. So I think that discipline, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, becaus…”
Naval Ravikant: Belief in the technological Singularity is a religion for nerds.
“I think it's religion for nerds. You know, it's got all the same characteristics. It's unfalsifiable until it happens. It basically says the chosen ones will be saved. The world's gonna end. You know, we will be immortal. It's very hard to tell apart from a
Ex…”
Naval: Humanity is no closer to general AI than 20 years ago
“We are no closer to creating a general AI. I think that we were 20 years ago.”
Domingos: Doctors Gatekeep Medical AI to Prevent Automating Their Own Jobs
“In the particular case of medicine, it's not used more already because, of course, the doctors are also the gatekeepers Of the system, and they're not very interested in replacing themselves or their job that they like best by machines.”
Zweig: Venture capital valuations ramp up without properly accounting for dilution
“They set their own valuations, and there's also a disturbing wrinkle in that the valuations sort of as a new round of capital comes in that ramps up the valuation without accounting for dilution the same way you would in a public company. And I think that's ve…”
Jacobs: Middle-market PE rollups create unintegrated messes for multiple expansion
“You see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that. They roll up these small companies. They're doing five, 10, twenty million dollars EBITDA each, and they bat, they just buy a bunch of them, and now they're up to a hundred million or two hundr…”
Gurley: Vertical AI startups hold defensible workflow and data moats against ChatGPT
“I think that there are workflows and data moats that if you get, and also just understanding, like, there's three or four legal startups in the AI space. They're just spending so much more time making sure they ingest all the case law and really understand, yo…”
Brockman: Distilling AI models fails because frontier progress is exponential
“There's certainly a lot of attempts to distill models. And that comes from companies in the U S it comes from all over the world. But I think that it misses the core point, which is that the way this technology is developing is it is on an exponential. And any…”
Brockman: AI Users Need Legal Privilege Protections Similar to Doctors and Lawyers
“You talk to a doctor, you talk to a lawyer, those are privileged conversations, right? You feel comfortable sharing them. There's certain guardrails on when the healthcare provider would have to, you know, provide that information to law enforcement or alert s…”
Liemandt: 90% of Students Using Academic Chatbots Are Cheating
“90% of kids who are using chatbots for academics are cheating and not learning.”
Teskey: Tech giants backing AI infrastructure hold unprecedented historical credit quality
“These are literally the greatest companies in the world, the highest credit quality counterparties in the world, the large tech companies. They're the greatest companies in the world today. They're almost undoubtedly the greatest companies of all time. That is…”
Tenev: Legacy card issuers are too bloated to match 3% cash back
“I think it's a cost structure problem. You look at the big credit card companies and they have tens of thousands of people, right? Tens of thousands of people that are manually servicing the, these accounts and, you know, that they spend a ton of money on mark…”
Tangen: Contrarians should do less AI and more real estate
“Well, I think the stuff to lean against if you really want to do the opposite of everybody else would be to, you know, do less AI related investments and more real estate investments.”
Housel: Affordable Housing Is the Single Biggest Social Problem in America
“So housing, affordable housing, I think is the single biggest social problem, certainly in America, probably in Canada right now. Because so many other social problems that might seem bigger than that are downstream of housing. A lot of the drug problem, the d…”
Housel: Restrictive Zoning and Underbuilding Entirely Cause the Housing Affordability Crisis
“That virtually all of the reason that housing is so unaffordable is because we don't build enough, and the reason we don't build enough is zoning.”
Companies should shift 20% of marketing budgets to top-tier call centers
“Probably 50% of the time I would advise to a client,
Take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center.
Pay the people too much.
Get the best practitioners.
I think it's perfectly legitimate in some organizations there should be…”
Publicly traded companies are incentivized to behave like psychopaths
“PLCs, or companies on the NASDAQ, or the, you know, stock exchange, are incentivized to behave like psychopaths, because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.”
Sutherland: Tech-Driven Management Optimizes for Metrics Distant from Customer Needs
“When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making, along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy, You're optimizing for something which may be very, very distant from what your real-world customers really care about.”
Parrish: Society progresses by having more outlier entrepreneurs like Elon Musk
“And the point of this is like, we need more people like Elon, not fewer in the world. Whether you agree with him or not, this is how society progresses. We need differences.”
Sutherland: Apple made a mistake by cancelling its urban electric car project
“I lost faith in Apple when they cancelled the car. Because I thought you, they had the brand power to create, for places like New York and London, a form of microtransport, which was really, really cool, really, really efficient.”
Shaich claims 90% of entrepreneurs who go public live to regret it.
“90% of the entrepreneurs that go public live to regret it, because it's a very different enterprise.”
Scilipoti: Apple's Debt-Funded Share Buybacks Pose a Major Financial Risk
“And I look at Apple, and this is what concerns me. Revenues are growing. Minimal. And yet, it generates meaningful cash because it has a brand. People are still willing to pay eight, 2000 dollars for a new phone. There's a lot of competitors, and I'm not sure …”
Cool: Most corporate boards fail to add value to businesses
“What I find is, for the most part, most boards don't add a lot of value to the businesses, and I think they oftentimes go too deep on areas that are less critical and not enough time on the areas that are most critical that they can provide the most value.”
Diller: Tech giants like Netflix and Apple have ended Hollywood's hegemony
“Those tech companies essentially have now taken over the old hegemony of quote, Hollywood, and now Netflix and Apple and Amazon.”
Diller: LLMs cannot easily replicate Expedia's deep consumer travel planning capabilities
“I think from what I know now, it is not easy today for anyone else to do that other than our competitors can do that today. But it's not easy for any large language model or any Modality that, that I know of.”
Diller: The scale of Las Vegas entertainment is impervious to AI disintermediation
“There's no way to disintermediate the experience. I mean, again, if we're in a simulation, we can go into that route, but there's no way as humans, you can find an experience that's going to divert you from all the entertainment offerings that a Las Vegas has …”