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
The corporate press release has been an obsolete communication tool for decades
“The press release as a means of communication, I think is obsolete by like a decade.”
Donald Trump is the funniest U.S. president, which is an incredible communications hack
“He is the funniest president. I'm sorry, Trump is the funniest president. Reagan, close second. He is, and then Lyndon Johnson. He is legitimately funny, and being funny is an incredible communications hack. It gets people's attention. It makes them keep tunin…”
Evans: AI's impact equals the iPhone, not the Industrial Revolution
“It's funny, my, I suppose my take on AI, controversial take on AI, rather like my controversial take on crypto is being a centrist, in that it seems to me very clear this is like the biggest thing since the iPhone, but I also think it's only the biggest thing …”
Evans: Google's biggest AI threat is users reconsidering default search habits
“The very high level threat to Google is that you have this moment of discontinuity in which everybody resets their prize and reconsiders their defaults.”
Evans: Anthropic's safety studies merely prove models follow rogue prompts
“And that's what these anthropic studies are. They're basically, you tell the machine to say a thing, And then it says it. Like, well you haven't proved anything.”
Evans: Most users cannot distinguish Grok, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek in blind tests
“Like it seems to me right now you could do like a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grok, Claude, Gemini Mistral, Deep Seek. Do a double blind test. I bet most people wouldn't be able to tell which is which.”
Johnson: Therapy teaching couples to 'fight fair' is completely irrelevant rubbish
“And 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”
Politicians have bought the press and now use media as tools
“Politicians. Used to fear the press and now to a large part, they bought it and use it as a tool.”
Nooyi: Outgoing CEOs should not stay on the board
“I think an outgoing CEO should just leave, should not sit on the board, because then you're sort of curbing what the new CEO can do, because they're now always looking over their shoulder to see if they can take a direction that's different than the CEO sittin…”
Hastings: Netflix culture was not cutthroat despite external perception
“So, in Netflix there was the meritocracy and outsiders thought it was cutthroat, thought it was Hunger Games. But inside it really wasn't. People looked out for each other, helped each other quite a lot, but in the words we used to describe it we're not warm a…”
Gil: Cloud capital locked the foundation model layer into an oligopoly
“So I think that that is part of what really helped lock in this oligopoly structure early is you had enormous capital scale going to a handful of the best players through these cloud providers. And so the venture capitalists would put hundreds of millions of d…”
Garry Tan: Y Combinator must be an explicitly American institution like MIT
“MIT is a an institution, and that institution is an American institution. And so being very clear about that, I thought was totally the right move for MIT. And you know, I think that YC needs to be a similar, you know, an institution of similar character.”
Tan: Current AI systems have zero agency and resemble smart toasters
“As of today, you know, these systems are, it's just matrix math, and there is no agency yet.
[3400] Garry Tan: Like, there's basically, they're equivalent to incredibly smart toasters”
Garry Tan: Modern school systems are designed to strip children of agency
“We send them to a school system that is not designed for agency. It is literally designed to take agency away from our children.”
Garry Tan: Premature AI laws will stall clean energy and medicine
“It would also potentially be worse to prematurely optimize And basically make a bunch of worthless laws that slow down the rate of progress and prevent things like better cancer vaccines, or better airfoils, or, you know, frankly, like, you know, nuclear fusio…”
Garry Tan: Sriram Krishnan as government AI czar is a positive development
“I think we're going into a very interesting moment right now with you know, the AI czar is Sri Ram Krishnan, who, you know, used to be a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and I think that that's a very, very good thing. Like, we want people who have the …”
Garry Tan: The US should issue every citizen an Artificial Superintelligence
“My argument would be, like, the most American version of it is that, like, you know, you and I have our own ASI. And, like, each, you know, each citizen should be, you know, issued an ASI and be taught how to get the most out of it.”
Garry Tan: Nvidia maintains a monopoly on the best price-performance AI compute
“I'm still pretty bull on NVIDIA, and that they more or less have the monopoly on, you know, sort of the best price performance.”
Garry Tan: Proprietary evaluations, not foundation models, are the true AI moat
“I mean, I think you know, ultimately the model itself is not the moat. Like I think that the evals themselves are the moat.”
Garry Tan: Microsoft's market cap heavily depends on OpenAI's success
“I mean, I think Microsoft has you know, just really, really deep access to OpenAI, and I think OpenAI is probably, you said public companies, right? ... So, you know, I think There's a non-zero, pretty large percentage of, like, the market cap of Microsoft tha…”
Garry Tan: Sam Bankman-Fried's quirky public persona was a pure artificial affectation
“Like you might think of an SPF that's like, that's all artifice. Like, think about that guy. Like, that guy was, like, full of shakes and, like, the guy was, like, on meth, right? Like, the guy was, you know, everything about it was an affectation. Like, he wa…”
Garry Tan: Sam Altman pulled the future forward by at least a decade
“Sam Altman probably brought forward the future by, you know, five years, 10 years, at least 10 years.”
Taylor: Software Value Lies in Closed-Loop AI Systems, Not Chat Interfaces
“What I'm excited about in the software industry is not necessarily a large language model with a prompt and a response being
The product of AI, but actually end to end closed loose systems that use large language models as pieces of infrastructure.
And I actua…”
Taylor: Nvidia may not be a 20-year AI bet as infrastructure shifts
“Nvidia will probably benefit from all of the investments in AI. I'm not sure I would do that over a 20 year period, just assuming that the infrastructure will shift.”
Poilievre: The World Economic Forum Promotes Top-Down Technocratic Control
“I just think it it's an organization that has a very top-down mentality. I don't believe in top-down. I don't believe that there's this sort of group of globetrotting experts that can tell us how to live our lives, that can, you know, who can tell us which ind…”
Poilievre: Canada must retaliate against U.S. tariffs for deterrence
“I do think you need to retaliate, because if not, there's no deterrent value. The offending country, in this case, it's the U.S. Administration, needs to know that there's a cost for its producers in tariffing Canada.”
Poilievre: Media Subsidies Interfere With Objective Political Reporting
“I think it makes it very difficult for media to make a judgment without keeping the back of their head which politician is going to pay the biggest subsidy.”
Bruce Flatt: Public markets are never efficient
“The markets are never efficient. In fact, very seldom do they ever trade at the actual value of securities. Either, most of the time, they trade above or below. Very seldom do they trade at the value.”
Flatt: US holds unmatched long-term dominance in tech, capital, and energy
“The long-term story of America is extremely strong because the U.S. Today has Energy, capital, and technology dominance. Energy, capital, and technology dominance. There's nobody in the world that has a technology businesses that the U.S. Has. There's nothing …”
Flatt: Worst Real Estate Disruption From Rate Hikes Is Far Behind
“Look, over the last five years, because of COVID and because other things, and because interest rates went up by 405 hundred base points all of that disrupted the real estate market, but the worst is behind us by far. We're looking in the rearview mirror by wh…”
Wolfe: Allocations to Private Credit Are Now Overdone
“Where private credit in particular, I think, was wise to do a few years ago, and now is overdone.”
Brands refusing to sell on Amazon are incredibly naive
“I think anybody that kiss themselves and says, oh, you know, I'm too good to sell on Amazon or I want to ignore it is just incredibly naive.”
Big platforms unknowingly subsidize 3M's online air filter pricing
“In my opinion that a lot of these big companies actually subsidize companies like three M maybe unknowingly to compete on price on, on online on some of these products because The economics of shipping them and putting them through their distribution networks …”
NVIDIA's biggest vulnerability is its singular dependency on CEO Jensen Huang
“They, they've only had one leader in their whole cycle. I worry about what happens when Jensen decides not to be at the head of NVIDIA.”
Codie Sanchez argues that remote work making people happier is a lie
“Some of the research shows, one, higher levels of depression and anxiety with work from home. So I actually think that was a great lie. It was a big, beautiful lie. That sitting in our sweatpants, in our house, on Zoom meetings all day would actually make us h…”
Holiday: Elon Musk's ventures relied on massive government subsidies
“Elon Musk sees himself as this groundbreaking, you know, Precedent shattering entrepreneur. And another version to look at is this guy who took massive government subsidies at critical points that allowed him to do those things.”
Housel: George Carlin understood psychology better than Daniel Kahneman
“George Carlin understood psychology. I think better than Daniel Kahneman did. That's a bold statement, but I think that is actually true.”
Gen Z Workers Will Complain to HR If Their Feelings Are Hurt
“And we're seeing even as, you know, the young, this young rising generation goes off to the workplace, if you, if their feelings are hurt at the workplace, they will complain to HR and try to get their boss fired. That seems to them a reasonable response To so…”
Young People Are Pathologizing Normal Emotions With Clinical Diagnoses
“The rising generation never says it's shy. They say they have social phobia. They never say they're sad. They say they're depressed. They never say, gosh, they went through a tough time in middle school. They say they have PTSD. They're speaking the language o…”
The Only True Parenting Experts Are Those Who Raised Reliable Adults
“In my book, those are the only parenting experts. The ones who've actually done a good job of it.”
Jacobs: 99% of building products distribution companies are 20 years behind in tech
“I found a company, an industry that's got 20,000 companies, and there's about six or seven that are doing really cool things in technology. And that's pretty much it. And I hate to say that so negatively, but I think that's an objective assessment of it. I thi…”
Davis: Trimming fund holdings because they grow too large is a mistake
“If I had simply bought each stock that I ever bought for the funds in a personal account and held it, then I simply never would have sold simply because something was getting too big. Whereas in the funds, I do that all the time, and it's been a terrible mista…”
Rey Flemings: Modern society would label Adam Smith a socialist or communist
“The capitalism that Adam Smith articulated in Wealth of Nations is not the capitalism that we practice today. Nowhere near it. In fact by today's definition, Adam Smith would be labeled a socialist or a communist if you actually read Adam Smith's quotes in the…”
Holiday: Trump's effectiveness relies on disorienting opponents rather than strategic genius
“What Trump does is I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them, and is so the opposite of what they have experienced dealing with, that it's almost lik…”
Dr. Julie Gurner rejects 'building in public' in favor of private execution
“I know everyone's a big fan of, like, building in public, and I'm not, I'm absolutely opposite of that, and I'm much more of the Sun Tzu, like, let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you fall, fall like a thunderbolt, right?”
Kelly: AI is humanity's biggest invention since the scientific method
“This is by far our biggest invention after the scientific method”
Stalk: Public Companies Underestimate Private Competitors with Dry Powder
“I think public companies are under invested in understanding how private companies compete. And therefore they're vulnerable to private companies behaving differently than they do because they have a view of the world or they have the possibility because of th…”