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
Hoffman: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner initially found co-founder Alan Blue disruptive
“One of the things that Jeff came to me and said, hey, I'm finding your co-founder, Alan Blue, to be disruptive. He's not fitting in the scheme in which I'm setting up. And, you know, it's up to me to scale.”
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: 80% to 85% of Indian retail investors come from merchant communities
“I would go to the extent of saying that 80, 85% of people who are having more than 200 dollars of investment in any of these assets are people from this community.”
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.”
Shah: Amazon's India GMV matches a small European nation
“The total GMV that Amazon would make in India would easily be done by a small European nation after being here for like maybe seven, eight years that they have spent over here because the people who can spend just do not exist.”
Shah: Several Indian wedding photographers generate over $10M in revenue
“There are enough wedding photographers, I know, who make more than ten million dollars of revenue.”
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: At Age 52, Blood Biochemistry Matches a 20-Year-Old
“My blood biochemistry is equivalent to a twenty-year-old. I'm a 52.”
Sinclair: NMN Supplementation Has Prevented Jet Lag for a Decade
“I haven't had jet lag for a decade because I've been able to modulate my own body clock by using these chemicals, which as I mentioned are activating sirtuins and controlling the clock.”
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: 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: 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: The US Government Possessed All Information Necessary to Stop 9/11
“And I think of the nine 11 attacks where we had all the information necessary to stop the World Trade Towers being hit. Inside the U S government, but we couldn't connect the dots”
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.”
Immelt: GE suffered in 2008 from aggregate size, not toxic assets
“Think about the financial crisis, what did we get wrong? We were too big in aggregate size. It wasn't that we were, we had a lot of toxic assets. It wasn't that we're redlining risk and things like that. We were too big.”
Hertz: Loneliness Directly Drives the Rise of Political Populism
“Loneliness and populism that my research has kind of made really clear. Populism, whether on the right or on the left, in increasing numbers, people are seeking, feeling lonely, feeling marginalized, feeling disconnected from each other, but also from the gove…”
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.”
Parrish: Intelligence agency awarded Holland tens of millions after vowing not to
“I remember going to a meeting a couple of weeks after he left and they were like, oh, we're not going to buy anything from him. And I was like, we're going to end up giving this guy like fifty million bucks a year. I want to say I was closer to reality than th…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Barrett: No fundamental biological difference exists between mental and physical illness
“There's actually no fundamental difference biologically between a mental illness and a physical illness.”
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…”
BJ Fogg: Most people form automatic habits within five days using positive emotion
“In my data, I've seen for years that the vast majority of people report that a habit has become automatic or very automatic within five days, and that's a function of their emotion as they do that new behavior.”
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…”
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.”