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
Shane Parrish: Multiple U.S. billionaires cannot navigate to their children's schools
“There's more than a couple of billionaires that I'm sure we both know in the United States that couldn't drive their kids to school if they had to, because they don't know where their kids go to school. They don't know how to get there from their house.”
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.”
Poe: Poor sleep post-vaccination reduces immunization efficacy by at least 50%
“That immunization will be at least 50% less effective than it would otherwise be and you can't make up for that by just getting more sleep the next night.”
US Public Companies Halved in Number Due to Private Equity Buyouts
“The number of companies traded in the US stock exchanges that are public are down by half. Half of these companies are gone in numbers, and they've been taken private by the LBO firms.”
Stalk: Modern private equity firms hold companies longer than 1980s LBOs
“The private equity firms today actually do have a longer horizon than the ones did in the eighties, the seventies and eighties. And they're willing to stick with the business longer.”
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 …”
Karp: Indigenous populations living ancestrally have zero modern lifestyle diseases
“And thankfully, there's a lot of populations out there that are still indigenous people, and they live the way that we lived 10,000 years ago, or even a thousand years ago. And they have none. And by the way, many of these indigenous peoples are in every conti…”
Karp: Ancient wheat contains magnitudes less gluten than modern wheat
“And the gluten level in fossilized wheat and the gluten level in some of these ancient grains, versions of wheat is, is magnitudes less than the amount of gluten that we're consuming today.”
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…”
Kornfield says the Tibetan language has no word for self-hatred
“And I remember being in a teacher meeting That we helped to organize with the Dalai Lama decades ago. There was a group of us who were Western meditation teachers, and at one point we said, so what do you suggest we do about all the self-hatred that comes up f…”
Santos: Over-Intervention by Parents Causes Children to Give Up Faster
“What she finds is that when you give kids a very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition, where the parents give the answer, give up much more quickly. And if you find ways to survey them about what they believe, like, they probab…”
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 …”
Creel: Bill Ackman offered $200M when asked for $100M in unplanned capex
“I went into the board meeting, and I said, we have an issue. For me to optimize my service, I've got to run west out of Saskatoon, not east, but I need a hundred million dollars to spend on rail and ties and ballasts, and that was not planned for at all, and B…”
Ford executives presented 300 green status charts despite losing $17 billion
“We have about 300 charts with the entire team. And we've also shared with them now for the first time that we lose seventeen billion dollars. And all 300 charts, Shane, were colored green.”
Ford's executive reporting transparency drastically improved within two months
“Within two months, When I arrived at Ford, we were on our way. The colors were all showing up. The behaviors were getting just fantastic. The stress was going down. The issues we're dealing with were considered gems, and we're going to solve them together, and…”
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.”
Pasricha: Decision-making energy is replenished only by sleep and glucose
“Decision-making energy is a finite resource, and you know, there's that great book called Willpower by John Tierney, and it's a finite resource. When it's gone, and there's only two ways to replenish it, which is sleep and glucose”
Pasricha: Turning off bright screens gives an hour of extra energy
“And you know what they're actually also finding, Shane, is that the bright screen, when it turns off, gives you about an hour jolt of extra energy.”
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.”
Kunal Shah: 95% of Financial Products in India Are Bought by Men
“Another interesting thing is 95% of all financial products in India are bought by men.”
Shah: Indian retail data shows living room margins are 3x bedroom margins
“I asked her to check. Can you check if the gross margin on all products sold for living room Is a lot more than the gross margin of all products sold for the bedroom. And nobody had ever analyzed data like that in retail ever. Because it's like kitchen and sof…”
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: Olive Oil and Red Wine Compounds Activate Sirtuins to Improve Health
“And there are actually chemicals within those foods of a Mediterranean diet in olive oil and red wine. That we found in my lab to activate these sirtuins and probably also slow down the clock, but they certainly improve health.”
Sinclair: Cellular Autophagy Requires Three Days of Fasting to Activate
“But once you've gone more than three days, there's a special type of recycling of proteins that's very beneficial called autophagy or autophagy. And that takes about three days.”
Sinclair: 82-year-old father has no diseases after starting longevity protocol
“In his mid seventies, he went on this protocol and is now an 82 year old that's fitter than most people that age. He has no diseases, perfect mental health. His eyesight hasn't changed in all that time.”
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.”
Simmer: The Average American Gained Thirty Pounds During the Pandemic
“And by the way, the average American gained 30 pounds during the pandemic.”
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.”
Huberman: About 10% of people experience a dopamine surge from alcohol
“Now about 10% of people have a genetic predisposition to get a big dopamine increase from alcohol.”
Huberman: Direct brain benefits of exercise stem from load-bearing skeleton stimulation
“The direct effects bring us to osteocalcin, and the direct effects of exercise on brain function and health actually come from stimulation of the skeleton and load-bearing exercise”
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.”
Bloomberg Told McChrystal Only Elected Executives Invest in Long-Term Infrastructure
“I had Mayor Mike Bloomberg one day tell me that he thought that only executives, meaning elected mayors, presidents, and whatnot, are likely to do long-term infrastructure things. At the time he was talking about a project to make New York City more resilient …”
Walker: Being struck by lightning is more likely than being a genetic short sleeper
“Statistically, you're far more likely to be, for example, struck by lightning in your lifetime than you are to be one of those genetic short sleepers. The lifetime odds of being struck by lightning is one in 12,000, just if anyone, if anyone's interested.”
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…”
Andreessen: Bezos said building another startup would be like kindergarten
“We talked to Jeff Bezos about this at one point, and he asked us why we were starting a venture capital firm and not another company. And another startup and we asked him, well, if Amazon, you know, for some reason, Amazon got sold or whatever and you were a f…”
Norena Hertz: Quitting Facebook for two months significantly reduces loneliness
“And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3000 participants 1500 in a control group, and the other 1500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case,…”
McGonigal: Playing Tetris before bed suppresses traumatic flashbacks and nightmares
“Playing a game right before bed will essentially hijack the attention center, and especially the visual centers if it's a game that's very visual. I mean, Tetris is like the golden game in clinical trials when they study this effect. It's like Tetris is The be…”
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?”
Bill Belichick Spent Six Months Recruiting Paul Rabil for the NFL
“It started with a conversation that we had, which was, I think you could play in the NFL. And I was like, I want to play wide receiver. He was like, I think you'd be a strong safety. And I was like, why? He was like, because you have the size and the speed of …”