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 1,551 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
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.”
Shah: Less than 6% of urban Indian women have independent income
“Less than six percent of urban Indian women have financial income of their own.”
Shah: No SaaS company makes over $10M ARR from Indian businesses
“I wouldn't be able to find one company that makes more than 10 dollars, ten million dollars annual revenue by selling software to Indian businesses.”
Shah is the only Indian unicorn founder with a humanities background
“India has hundred unicorns. I would go on to say that I'm the only founder in the hundred unicorns, which has a humanities background. Everybody else is STEM.”
Sinclair: Slowing US Aging by One Year Saves $86 Trillion
“They calculated that the US alone, just by slowing down aging by one year, and making people productive, more productive for one year, would save over the next three decades, 86 trillion dollars, which we waste now on just keeping people alive in a sick state …”
Sinclair: NIH study found daily feeding windows extended mouse lifespans by 30%
“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…”
Sinclair: Recommended longevity habits add 14 to 15 years of life
“Just by doing the things that I'm talking about today, you'll get an extra 14, 15 years on average.”
Sinclair: Diabetics on Metformin Outlive Healthy Non-Diabetics
“By looking at type two diabetics, and there's a stunning, stunning fact, that type two diabetics that would normally have a short lifespan, when they take metformin, typically at two grams a day, I'm on one gram a day, by the way, they actually have less disea…”
Sinclair: Hip fracture mortality in elderly matches late-stage cancer
“The chances of dying after you break your hip as an older person is about as bad as late stage cancer.”
Sinclair: 80% of human longevity is lifestyle, only 20% is genetics
“80% of our longevity
And our health in the future is in our own hands.
Only 20% is genetic, which we cannot yet do much about.”
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: 15 seconds of bright nighttime light drops melatonin to zero
“Light viewed by the eyes inhibits melatonin, so much so that if melatonin levels are at their peak and you walk into the bathroom at night and you flip on the lights and it's really bright, if you spend more than 10 or 15 seconds in that light, your melatonin …”
Huberman: Cardiovascular exercise increases hippocampal neurons in mice, not humans
“There's some mouse data or studies published on, on mice showing that exercise, cardiovascular exercise can increase the number of neurons in the hippocampus. Turns out that's true for mice, but not for humans.”
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.”
Walker: Sleep Loss Doubles Risk for Specific Cancers, Not All Cancers
“A lack of sleep can double your risk for Certain forms of cancer, and then name those cancers, and those, for example those cancers would be thyroid cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer myeloma, which is a form of a blood cancer linked to, it's in the ilk of so…”
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 …”
Conant: Most companies no longer report quarterly earnings
“Most people aren't reporting quarterly earnings. They're doing annual, they provide guidance, but they're looking more long-term in nature, which is appropriate.”
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.”
McGonigal: 21 Hours Weekly Is the Threshold Where Gaming Harms Health
“By the way, 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: 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.”
Chamath Palihapitiya predicts the world's first trillionaire will be in climate change
“The world's first trillionaire will be somebody in climate change.”
Holland: Google's Project Zero was largely built with ex-intelligence talent
“I mean, Google's Project Zero is largely built from people who have exited the intelligence industry with a chip on their shoulder.”
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 pitched zero R&D and justified price hikes against liver transplants
“Their whole promise to investors was, we don't need to do R&D. So it wasn't an argument of, we're gonna take the profits we're making from this and invent new drugs that are gonna save people's lives or figure out a better drug to take, to treat this disease. …”
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…”
China will build a 'Great Biowall' for continuous pathogen surveillance
“There's a great wall of China, the great firewall, and I think we're going to see the great By the wall of China, okay, where, you know, they'll be sequencing and testing the heck out of everybody, scanning the country constantly to see, okay, is a virus risin…”
International travel will require real-time biological screening before boarding
“Now that's going to go to real time, meaning, you know, within a day or an hour before you get on the flight, you know, imagine a next generation TSA that was actually competent, you know, in, in, in countries around the world, which Needs your biological info…”
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: Blackstone's investing makes about double the stock market
“We've just become more popular because the type of investing we do makes about double the stock market.”
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 …”