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 1,118 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
Diverse Global Populations Develop Obesity When Adopting Western Diets
“Inuits near the Arctic Circle or Native Americans or First Nations people or you know, African populations or South Pacific Islanders and Middle Eastern populations or Southeast Asians, they all
Experience obesity and diabetes epidemics when their environment …”
US Diabetes Prevalence Has Surged 700% Since the Late 1950s
“In the U.S., and according to the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S., since the late 19 fifties, diabetes prevalence has increased 700%.”
Former WHO Chief Admitted Odds of Stopping Chronic Disease Are Near Zero
“The Director General of the UN, a woman named Margaret Chan, a year ago referred to them as slow motion disasters, and she predicted, this was fascinating, this was at a keynote address of the National Academies of Medicine in Washington, and she gave a number…”
Hospital Records Show US Diabetes Rates Were Almost Nonexistent Before 1850
“And you find out, for instance, in the U.S. That diabetes rates, ah, in, were virtually nonexistent, even though it was a very, a relatively easy disease to diagnose You saw very little sign of it pre-eighteen 50, and even, for the most part, pre-eighteen seve…”
Pre-WWII German and Austrian Scientists Concluded Obesity Is a Hormonal Disorder
“The German and Austrian clinicians, and Germany and Austria was, you know, these people were doing far and away the best medical science in the world at the time, and they pioneered all the fields of science relevant to Obesity, so metabolism, genetics endocri…”
Grant: Givers are overrepresented at the best and worst performance extremes
“And, you know, I finally, as I took a closer look at the data, I found that, you know, for salespeople, for engineers and even medical professionals the givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum. They made up a disproportionate numbe…”
Grant: Helping others equals core task performance in average evaluations
“We know, for example, that if you look at the meta-analyses that Podzikoff and colleagues have published, that the amount of time you spend helping others is as critical to your job performance as how well you do your actual tasks. They carry about equal weigh…”
Tetlock: Geopolitical forecasting relies on 70% skill and 30% luck
“Well, what we find in the ARPA tournament is, is that there certainly is an element of chance in predicting geopolitical and geoeconomic outcomes but the skill luck ratio seems to be about 70 30.”
Dixon: Traditional public mutual funds are driving late-stage private venture rounds
“It's actually what you, what is happening is firms that are, that historically had been public investors. So for example, Fidelity T. Rowe Price, like a whole Wellington, all of these kind of well-known public market investors. Have now moved to invest in priv…”
Baszucki estimates Roblox captures 3% to 4% of the $200B gaming market
“Well, you can look at where we're tracking on our bookings, and I think if you divide our bookings by two hundred billion, we're in the three to four percent.”
XPO turned a $3B Con-way acquisition into a $15B asset
“We bought it for about Three billion dollars. Roughly half of it was equities. It really bought it for a billion and a half dollars plus, plus some leverage. Today it's worth something like fifteen billion dollars, and that's after having taken out Many, like,…”
Rockefeller's Fortune Tripled to Nearly One Billion Dollars After Standard Oil's Breakup
“Rockefeller owned roughly a quarter of every new company, worth about three hundred million the day the court ruled. His fortune skyrocketed to nearly nine hundred million just two years later.”
Enders: Unhealthy guts contribute to anxiety, depression, and immune dysfunction
“And then also some other things are also a bit more subtle when you look at the effect of an unhealthy gut on symptoms like anxiety, risk of depression, just an immune system that's out of check. Maybe influenced by some disturbances in the gut has an impact.”
Dr. Enders: Cooking and cooling carbs increases prebiotic resistant starch
“Or when you just have carbs like rice and noodles and so on, if you cook them once, let them cool down, suddenly their content of Like the resistant starch, and so with that soluble, water-soluble fiber, rises. So just having your carbs cooked, cool them down,…”
Enders: Long-term soft drink consumption significantly elevates inflammatory disease risk
“We see, for example, people drinking soft drinks high in sugar for 1020 years, They have a significant elevated risk of, like, inflammatory diseases.”
Enders: Half of adults fail to replenish microbes lost to antibiotics
“So we see especially small kids and seniors in studies that they have a harder time going back to their microbiome after a round of antibiotics. Then we have all the adults in the middle area of this. For them, it's like fifty-fifty. Some of them will actually…”
Enders: Squatting Posture Reduces Rectal Pressure and Hemorrhoid Risk
“When we put our legs up a little bit, you could say like a 30 degree angle from just being horizontal, then this gets loosened up, and then there's not this curve anymore, but it's rather a bit straight, and you know, this is just the natural position when we …”
Enders: Ultra-processed foods convert to sugar immediately in the small intestine
“When you look at highly or ultra-processed foods, they're so almost falling apart into sugar particles. White bread, white pastries, white flour stuff. I mean, you can chew, but it'll be very soon just sugar in the very first you know, inches of your small int…”
Enders: The gut microbiome positively adapts within three days of dietary changes
“Some effects you'll see after three days. Some it might take, you know, one, two, or three weeks, but that's really the amount of time. You hardly ever take more than that in the Department of the Microbiome to reach all these really nice, good changes, becaus…”
Enders: Studies show coffee reduces sleep quality even when falling asleep easily
“Because we've seen all the studies, and rarely ever is science so clear on one point. There's always multiple opinions, usually. But with coffee, there's really not been a study where you don't see an effect. People will say, but I have no trouble falling asle…”
Dr. Enders: Time-restricted eating often improves visceral fat accumulation
“When you look at visceral fat, like this Sudden belly coming in in your forties or something, or afterwards. Then, oftentimes, you see some improvement when you actually watch the times where you eat, and if you have some time in between where you really don't…”
Enders: Large studies show synthetic vitamin E increases smoker lung cancer risk
“Some supplements even have disadvantageous effects in big studies. Really, I'm talking big studies like vitamin E at a higher risk of people who smoke having lung cancer.”
Hyundai Bought More Heavy Machinery Than Existed in All of South Korea
“Hyundai alone spent over eight million dollars to buy 1900 pieces of heavy equipment for the project. The entire nation of Korea at the time owned only 1400 such machines.”
Hyundai Built the World's Largest Shipyard in 27 Months
“Two years and three months after Chung had broken ground on an empty beach, the first stage of the shipyard was complete. It could build ships up to 700,000 tons. It was the largest shipyard on earth.”
Chung Ju-Yung Was Forced to Pay $181M in Government Back Taxes
“Chung fought back, but eventually he was forced to pay one hundred and eighty one million dollars.”
Brockman: OpenAI Five neural net was comparable to an insect brain
“And by the way, the neural net we used, tiny, tiny little insect brain, similar number of synapses as to truly an insect brain.”
Brockman: OpenAI Staff Reinstatement Petition Crashed Google Docs
“So many people were trying to sign the petition at once, it actually crashed Google Docs. And so you had to have certain people who were designated as the person you go to actually put your name on the document so you don't have too many editors at once.”
Brockman: OpenAI lost zero employees to competitors during the 2023 board crisis
“People are getting offers and we actually did not lose a single person through that weekend. No one accepted a competing offer.”
Harik: XPO spent nearly $1B acquiring 28 Yellow terminal properties
“And we were able to effectively identify 28 properties that were the ones that we wanted to buy. And We ended up spending nearly a billion dollars on that real estate.”
Tenev: Robinhood gave free GameStop shares to new users in 2020
“GameStop was one of the collection of free, free stocks that was given to customers.”
Tenev: Robinhood Has 11 Business Lines Generating Over $100M Annually
“We become a business that has 11 business lines now with over a hundred million in annual revenue.”
Tangen: Norway fund achieved 25 bps outperformance over ~30 years
“Historically, over the last close to 30 years, we've had 25 basis points of performance.”
Kroc's original McDonald's deal took 1.9% royalty, paying brothers 0.5%
“Kroc would take 1.9% of gross sales from franchisees. He proposed two percent, but the brothers talked him down. Tell a franchisee two percent, they said, and he'll block. Say one and nine 10th, and it sounds like less. Out of that 1.9%, the brothers would rec…”
Ray Kroc built a competing store to bankrupt the original founders
“In fact, Ray would go on to open a McDonald's across the street from them and run them out of business.”
Housel: Tokyo Maintains Affordable Housing Through Continuous High-Volume Construction
“Tokyo, gigantic city. Bigger than the city you and I are in right now in New York. Very affordable housing, relatively. Because they build. They build and build and build and build.”
Parrish: Government Fees Account for 30% of New Home Prices in Canada
“I've seen reports, at least in Canada, that 30% of the price of a new home is basically government fees.”
Housel: Earning Average Market Returns for 50 Years Beats 97% of Investors
“And the idea that let's say if I can be average for 50 years, I'll end up in the top Three percent of investors. That's probably about where it'll be. Historically has been the case that I will outperform 97% of people who tried to beat the market. Maybe it's …”
Parrish: Clayton Homes retained riskiest loan tranches to enforce conservative underwriting
“I had dinner with Jim Clayton a few weeks ago, and he mentioned why they were so good at underwriting. They would Keep the very last payment, the most risky payments. This gave them every incentive to be very conservative with who they were lending money to.”
Parrish: Les Schwab built a $3B tire company while sharing 50% profits
“Les Schwab built a three billion dollar tire company in the mud and gravel towns of the Pacific Northwest. And he did it while charging higher prices than his competitors, and he did it while giving away half of his profits.”
Parrish: Jim Pattison has operated private conglomerate with zero partners or relatives
“He buys back all the public stock. He takes the company private again. He escapes the tyranny of the stock market, and for the last 48 years, he has run his company with the philosophy, no partners, no shareholders, no relatives.”
Poilievre: Oil and gas is Canada's single biggest net export
“Whether we like it or not, and I like it, oil and gas is the single biggest net export in this country, period. And there's nothing that is even close.”
Poilievre: Natural gas fetches 4x domestic price in Asia and Europe
“We just have to get it to coast, liquefy it, put it on ships, send it over to Asia and Europe, where it goes for four times the price that it, that we pay for it here.”
Poilievre: $40B LNG Canada Project Is Canada's Largest Project Ever
“Alice Ross, who's also one of my MPs now, was the chief councillor of the Haisla, and signed a deal to bring the forty billion dollar LNG Canada project, the single biggest project in Canadian history of any kind, public or private.”
Ury: Securely attached people leave dating pools faster, skewing remaining demographics
“What happens is 50% of the population is secure, which sounds like a good thing, but those people are so good at being in relationships that they often get snatched up, and you have the anxious and avoidant people dating each other.”
Royal Mail discovered customer satisfaction relied entirely on liking the postman
“The major determinant of whether you liked Royal Mail or not was whether you liked your postman, or postie, technically, to be used the gender-neutral term.
So people who had a rather unreliable service, but the postman did the odd favor for them, left things …”
Parrish: Co-Pilots in Simulations Fail to Override Fatal Captain Errors
“Co-pilots get simulator training specifically teaching them to ignore foolish orders from boss pilots. From the captain. But even after this training, co-pilots in simulators will still allow the plane to crash because of some obvious error created by the chie…”