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 22 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
Gross: The written word was a temporary historical blip
“You could kind of view the written word as a temporary blip, actually, in human communication, where we did not have a way to transmit the spoken and seen words of people globally. So what we did is we minified everything. We compressed everything to this form…”
Gross: Outsized success is catalyzed by scarce feedback from micro-influencers
“The thing that's scarce today are people who are kind of micro influencers to others Giving them positive feedback and catalyzing this loop that ends up creating everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Elon Musk to, you know, Ramanujan or Albert Einstein.”
Gross: Tech success is driven by inordinate luck rather than intellect
“What led to my success wasn't really my intellect, ambition, or talent. It was really luck. I just happened to bump into someone who knew someone who, you know, knew our first engineer. I, you know, one of our Major investors literally overheard me pitching at…”
Gross: Increasing problem-solvers 10x offers more leverage than direct solutions
“I think it's much more leverage to work on creating a planet that has 10 X the amount of people working on, you know flying cars or global warming or curfew. On the meta layer of the problem. And due to the amount of luck involved, I actually believe the world…”
Gross: Over-reliance on A/B testing traps companies in local maxima
“I actually think companies more often than not tend to be over data driven because it's the easiest way to kill the conversation is to say, let's just A-B AB test both options. And that gets them stuck in a local maximum.”
Gross: Breakthrough products come from intuition, not metric optimization
“Doing one thing Apple was, is legendary at, which is saying, let's, let's take a break from the current metrics. And let's just try to envision some type of blue sky idea. Let's not even collect data about how it's going to be. Let's use our intuition and tast…”
Gross: YouTube drives intent proactively while Google Search reacts
“YouTube is proactive and Google is reactive. So when you go to Google, you come with an intent, and they have to satisfy that intent. I mean, since they made this fix in 2012, where they tweak the algorithm a little bit, we can talk about that in a minute. You…”
Gross: Companies cannot successfully reinvent themselves without founder involvement
“Unless you have the founding team, maybe the founder involved, you're not going to be successful there.”
Gross: The potency of books comes from length and narrative repetition
“Many people talk about the length of books and the fact that the content is repetitive and books should be shorter. That way people would read more, but I actually think the potency of it is that it's long and the narrative is repeated over and over and over a…”
Gross: Fiction shapes mental models and worldviews more potently than nonfiction
“I actually think fiction has a more potent effect on your mind that's just a little bit harder to track in terms of how you think, mental models, how you kind of view the world.”
Gross: All actors, even evil figures, are locally rational
“All actors are locally rational, even terrible ones like Adolf Hitler. So it made sense to them what they were doing at the time, and it's an easy thing to just call them evil, but I think the more interesting and important thing, if you really want to suppres…”
Gross: Humans ultimately seek flow rather than meaning or fulfillment
“Happiness to me is flow. I actually think the thing all humans are seeking in life, and this is kind of a weird way to say it, because we usually use different words. You know, we usually use words like meaning, fulfillment, but I think it's flow.”
Gross: Understanding hyper-success requires finding the catalyzing feedback loop
“The most interesting thing to me is when kind of looking at people that are hyper successful is not trying to kind of reverse engineer, you know, their current daily patterns or what they currently do day to day. And it's not even to reverse engineer how they …”
Gross: Humans are terrible at reverse-engineering their own mental wiring
“I think we as humans are quite terrible at reverse engineering the neural net in our head. Much like it's actually quite hard within modern machine learning techniques for you to figure out that that individual thing you fed the neural net led to that specific…”
Gross: Increasing luck requires actively seeking opportunities and acting on them
“The trick to basically becoming more lucky, and there was a cool study about this a while ago, is you can actually increase your odds of luck in the world. You know, you don't even really need pioneer. You just have to do this interesting, hard, psychologicall…”
Gross: Corporate cultures emerge directly from underlying tech business models
“So in, in many ways, I think the cultural differences between Google and Apple or Facebook and Apple are just emerging properties of an ads driven business model versus we sell you shrink wrapped, you know, pieces of hardware business model.”
Gross: Enduring corporate culture is built through scarcity, not early abundance
“It's in many ways in, in scarcity where, where you build culture. It's not in an era of plenty. And one of the most challenging things I think for Google and Facebook's culture is, you know, they really stuck a toothpick into the sand and had a massive oil wel…”
Gross: Defying short-term capitalism requires strong leadership and financial plenty
“Can organizations break away from the kind of capitalistic imperative? I guess I observed one example of it. But it really requires, I think it requires a very strong leader, like incredibly emotionally strong and A sense of plenty. Like, I don't think this wo…”
Gross: The most important leadership skill is third-person emotional detachment
“Probably the most important thing is the ability to distance your thought patterns and your emotions from your actions... But it's the idea that you can kind of play the game of life in kind of third person as opposed to first. That is incredibly important.”
Gross: Managers must act as game designers aligning company and employee desires
“Ultimately, you're kind of a game designer as a manager and as a leader, and you want to design the best game that both aligns company incentives and employees desires. And the real way to understand people is kind of through this deeper substrate level where …”
Gross: Games reinforce tribal bonds because they are non-fatal simulations
“The games are a very interesting way to reinforce tribal bonds because games are simulations, right? So the outcomes are not catastrophic or fatal. If you're losing Quidditch, it's not like, you know, you die. So it's a helpful way to kind of embellish tribal …”
Gross: Major life decisions stem from distinct seed and catalyst moments
“It would not surprise me if the outcome of this research was, there was kind of the seed moment and then the catalyst moment, and those are actually distinct. There could be many months, weeks, or days, or, Would surprise me if there were hours in between.”