The Ledger
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Parrish: Roaring Twenties tax revenues rose while debt fell despite lower tax rates
“The roaring twenties saw tax revenues remain stable or increase even as tax rates dropped, well, federal debt shrank considerably.”
Amazon leadership originally conceived AWS as a low-margin infrastructure business
“They didn't think this was a, this is a high margin business. They thought of it as like, ok, this will be a low margin business too, and we like low margin businesses.”
Lin: DoorDash proactively digitized merchant menus during COVID lockdowns
“They decided, like, these merchants are going to be hurting, and we need to help them, and so they proactively went out and uploaded menus from different merchants onto DoorDash and said, hey, I know you guys are hurting. The only thing you can do is delivery.…”
Women wearing makeup earn 15% more annually than equally attractive peers
“There was a fascinating study showing that women who wear makeup but have the same
attractiveness pull in a group of people. So everybody, so you were all sevens, let's say, but a seven who wears makeup versus a seven who doesn't wear makeup will earn 15% mo…”
Patrick: High Omega-3 Index Correlates with Five-Year Longer Life Expectancy
“People that have a high omega-three index, and that would be eight percent or more, Have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people with a lower omega three index, which is more like four percent.”
Reader Retention Drops by 50% the Moment They Detect AI Writing
“And the data on this is readers will, as soon as they detect it's AI, it Their retention drops in half.”
Doucleff: Nuclear family rise correlates with historical Catholic Church influence
“And this professor at Harvard has, like, tracked down the rise of the nuclear family correlates with how long ago the Catholic Church was brought into a society. And so Europe is the longest, and you see this very strong nuclear family, and then other parts of…”
Doucleff: No data supports using self-esteem praise to prevent youth misbehavior
“There was this idea that, like, The reason why kids started to use drugs and misbehave is because they had poor self-esteem, and that the way to help kids was to have, was to praise them, have, that gives them good self-esteem, but there was, the data don't su…”
Doucleff: Parents in most societies do not play with their children
“Most society's parents don't play with children.”
Housel: Historical Dow components outperformed rebalanced index over 100 years
“If you were to look at the Dow, I think one of the studies showed over the last hundred years, if rather than adding a new company, when one of the original components went out of business or merged, if you just left it alone, don't add anything else. Don't ta…”
Housel: Lower income brackets experienced the fastest wage growth recently
“Now, just in the last three or four years, there's been a huge growth. The segment of society whose incomes have grown the most tends to be the lower. Incomes. We're still kind of attached to this narrative of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But i…”
Teachers Report Experiencing Unprecedented Levels of Classroom Tantrums
“Teachers report that elementary school kids and even high school kids are throwing tantrums in the classroom like they've never seen before.”
Segal: Unlisted additives make up ninety percent of commercial natural flavorings
“A natural flavor just means it was derived from a plant or animal source, but it ends up in a laboratory where about 90% of what goes into these flavors are preservatives and additives that go unlisted on the label.”
High Omega-3 Index Correlates With 5-Year Life Expectancy Increase
“People that have a high omega-three index, and that would be eight percent or more, Have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people with a lower omega-three index, which is more like four percent.”
Every 100mg of Daily Magnesium Cuts Pancreatic Cancer Risk by 20%
“For every 100, you know, milligram increase in magnesium intake, there's something like a 20% decrease in pancreatic cancer risk.”
Patrick: Inorganic magnesium supplements are much less bioavailable than organic forms
“So like magnesium oxide or magnesium sulfate, like they're just not very bioavailable. Like you're not going to absorb as much from those, but if you get like the organic form, so this would be something that has like an organic molecule. So magnesium citrate,…”
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Two Grams of Daily Fish Oil Raises Omega-3 Index to 8%
“Fish oil supplements, generally speaking, if you're taking around two grams a day,
Of a fish oil supplement, that is enough to raise someone from a four percent omega-three index, which is the low end, to a eight percent omega-three index, which is the high en…”
Patrick: Physically active individuals need 1.6g of protein per kg daily
“And they also did some studies looking at, well, what if you're physically active, right? You're causing damage to your muscle. You're using a lot of energy. I mean, lots of things going on. That number goes up to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram body weight.”
High-Dose Omega-3 Supplements Cut Muscle Disuse Atrophy by 50%
“So there's some work from Chris McClory. He had basically done some research that have found omega, high dose omega-threes could prevent disuse atrophy. So like when people are older, they're not using their muscles a lot. And when you're not using your muscle…”
Adding Bananas to Smoothies Destroys Blueberry Polyphenol Absorption
“There was a very, very recent study in 2023 that came out, and this was a controlled trial where people were given a smoothie with blueberries, either with and without the banana. And then metabolites of polyphenols were measured in their urine and blood. And …”
Dr. Patrick: Replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil does not increase CVD risk
“When you look at the data, taking people That are eating like a high saturated fat diet, so they're eating more like butter you know, saturated fat like coconut oil, and substituting that with vegetable oil. There's no effect in their cardiovascular disease ri…”
Patrick: Approximately 70% of US Population Is Vitamin D Insufficient
“And so something around 70% of the U.S. Population Is insufficient in vitamin D three. So that, that is defined as having blood levels of vitamin D less than 30 nanograms per milliliter.”
Patrick: Local heat application reduces muscle disuse atrophy by up to 40%
“Studies have been done where if you apply even just local heat, that you can cut that disuse atrophy by as much as 40%.”
Single Hyperthermia Session Produces Six-Week Antidepressant Effect
“They induce this feverish response, one Oh, 1.3 Fahrenheit, just one time. In people with, like, major depressive disorder, and they, or they did a sham control where they made them feel like they were getting hot, but it, like, wasn't hot enough. And the peop…”
Jacobs delivered 32x to 150x returns across five consecutive companies
“So in my companies, we've been fortunate that we've been able to give back 32 times their money in one, and another company is over 150 times. So really, Really large, large, large returns, like over the top, unusually high returns. That wasn't by luck. That w…”
Davis: Credit ratings reliably predict auto insurance accident risk
“Somebody's credit rating is a great predictor of whether they'll crash their car. Well, because they're responsible and they tend not to cheat.”
Eastman: Video recording observer effect disappears within ten minutes
“The truth is, people, like, will talk about the observer effect with video and all that, it goes away in, like, 10 minutes. Like, if you have, like, a small iPhone, you forget about it, and you're actually seeing patterns of behavior”
Balcetis: Narrowed visual focus makes runners 23% faster with 17% less pain
“And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line. It was always exactly the same distance, and we were using our stopwatches to see …”
Gurner: Kris Jenner built multiple billion-dollar companies from flight attendant start
“She's built multiple billion dollar companies, and people tend to overlook that, and they'll say, oh, you know, she did it because of a, you know, this on her kids, or, you know, they'll find a way to kind of discredit things, and I always think it's fascinati…”
Gurner: Psychological Research Shows Sharing Goals Reduces Motivation
“Research in psychology shows that when you share your goals and people give you praise, it actually pulls from motivation to achieve them.”
Poe: Sleep deprivation during critical development windows permanently impairs brain growth
“Sleep is really important also for a lot of developmental steps that have critical time windows, and if you lose that sleep in that time window, you lose the opportunity to fully develop that part of the brain.”
Stalk: Walmart Beat Kmart by In-Sourcing Trucking and Accelerating Supplier Pay
“They did that by having their own trucking, not outsourcing it. They did that by scheduling deliveries once a week instead of once every two weeks or once a month. They did that by incenting their suppliers to deliver to a very strict and ornerous schedule by …”
Dr. Lembke: 80% of Depressed Alcoholics Remit After Four-Week Detox
“There's a very important study done by Shuckett and Brown many years ago now showing that if you take a cohort of middle-aged men who are addicted to alcohol and drinking on a daily basis, large amounts of alcohol, And also meet DSM criteria for major depressi…”
Narrowed visual focus improves speed 23% and reduces perceived effort 17%
“And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line. It was always exactly the same distance, and we were using our stopwatches to see …”
Pasricha: CDC reports US suicide rates are highest since WWII
“The CDC says they have not seen murder, not murder rates, suicide rates this high since World War II.”
Tversky: Hippocampal grid cells map conceptual and social spaces, not just locations
“And later work, work that came quite a bit later, beautiful work, showed that place, the single cells in hippocampus, also in cold people, Events in time, conceptual relations, and that grid cells map them in temporal space, conceptual space, social spaces.”
Santos: Religious Happiness Comes From Behaviors, Not Theological Beliefs
“When you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors. So going to church, doing nice things for other people, you know, taking part in al…”
Santos: Feeling Time-Famished Damages Well-Being as Much as Unemployment
“In fact, some work by Ashley Willans shows that if you self-report being time famished, that's as big a hit on your wellbeing as if you self-report being unemployed.”
Sinclair: Research Restored Eyesight and Reversed Aging in Mice
“About a year ago, we published that we could reverse the age of an animal. And we restored eyesight to a blind old mouse and cure glaucoma in that animal.”
Srinivasan: China's Three Red Lines policy intentionally engineered Evergrande's controlled demolition
“In China, actually, Xi Jinping has talked about how he did not want houses to be used for investment. And actually that's part of their policy there is to try to intentionally pop the bubble rather than having a bear or Lehman type thing. Evergrande was like a…”
Huberman: Cold water exposure triggers a 2.5x sustained dopamine increase
“There's a paper published in the European Journal of Physiology. It showed that there's a 2.5 X huge increase in dopamine release, very long lasting. 2.5 X is the amount of dopamine that's triggered by the use of cocaine, but the difference is cocaine has a ve…”
Huberman: Sufficient Estrogen in Men Is Essential for Brain Health and Libido
“Having sufficient levels of estrogen for men, provided it's not too high, is important for brain longevity and health. It's actually really important for libido.”
McChrystal: Lehman Brothers Excluded Its Chief Risk Officer From Investment Meetings
“And she wasn't allowed in things like an investment committee meetings where the biggest risk decisions were made.”
Walker: Average US sleep dropped from 7.9 hours in 1942 to 6.5 hours
“There was a Gallup poll that was performed back in 1941 or 1940, I think it was 1942, sorry. And what they found was that On average the human adults in that survey reported sleeping 7.9 hours a night on average. But now, based on data from the National Sleep …”
Walker: Evening coffee can cut deep sleep by 20% to 40%
“What you don't realize is that caffeine can actually decrease the amount of deep sleep that you're getting, stages three and four. And in fact, what we found is that even just one to two cups of coffee in the early or late evening can decrease the amount of yo…”
Walker: Falsely telling people they slept poorly degrades cognitive performance
“And then you have them perform a set of tests, and lo and behold, despite both groups having, on average, about the same amount of sleep, the group that was psychologically informed as to having insufficient sleep performs insufficiently on the cognitive level…”
Andreessen notes that Apple continues to exercise significant gatekeeper control
“Apple, you know, opening up the iPhone and the App Store was a big step forward, but of course, even Apple continues to exercise a fair amount of control. I mean, they're far more open than Verizon was in those days, you know, but even still, like, you know, A…”
Nir Eyal: Science does not support claims that digital media damages brains
“So don't believe these chicken little tech critics that say video games are melting your brain and Facebook is melting your brain and everything is melting your brain. Ridiculous. The science doesn't support that at all, right?”