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
Wolfe: Tesla got away with accounting fraud on warranty reserves
“And so, for me with Tesla, I think that they got away with accounting fraud. On warranty reserves and a whole bunch of other things. I think there was a lot of prestidigitation and magic of look over here while we're doing this. And today it doesn't matter bec…”
Hastings: Dave Chappelle is not anti-trans
“Which I don't believe that Dave is anti-trans, but he definitely takes on some of the issues”
School Psychology Staff Function Exactly Like Corporate DEI Departments
“Because the psych staffs are like the DEI staffs of an organ, of a corporation. That's what the psych staff now is at a school. They effectively run the schools. They pass judgment on everything. They control what a teacher can assign. What kind of test a teac…”
Johnson: Suicidal ideation in severe depression is a rational and reasonable response
“When people feel suicidal, I am deeply empathetic. It is rational to want to kill oneself. It's reasonable.”
Adam Robinson claims he knows more about financial markets than anyone living
“I, Adam, know more about financial markets than any other living person.”
Srinivasan: Centralized Science Post-WWII Became Equivalent to a State Religion
“The bad that came out of it is you built this centralized funnel as opposed to lots of folks with independent power centers and funding sources, figuring out stuff from their own. Instead, you had like a single Thing, which was like official science and offici…”
Balaji: Corporate journalists act as hit men for old money targeting tech
“You know the names of all the tech people, because media corporations are at war with tech companies, and the owners of media corporations are It's not that they get good coverage. They get no coverage. They're just like blotted out, you know, all of this rhet…”
Srinivasan: Child labor laws triggered a long campaign of societal infantilization
“Reasonably, all these child labor laws were passed that essentially began this long campaign of infantilization. And now it's something where you're like on your parents' health insurance till age”
McLean: Elon Musk has repeatedly lied to secure funding for his vision
“That's certainly true of Elon Musk. Wherever you believe he sits in that spectrum, when you look at his history, he's for sure lied at many points in time in order to keep funding his dream.”
Calacanis: Tim Cook should not be CEO of Apple anymore
“If a company is storing a bunch of capital and paying you a dividend, that signals to us that you are not a bold and ambitious founder, and this is one of the big problems I have with Apple and Tim Cook, which, who I don't think should be CEO of that company a…”
Robinson: The concept of 'intrinsic value' in fundamental analysis is a fraud
“Intrinsic value is a fraud, and I can demonstrate that. It's a fraud for several reasons. First, I'm using air quotes. What he really meant by intrinsic value is true value. But he knows if he used the phrase true value of something, that people would say, hey…”
Robinson: Boys outperform on tests because their unpreparedness breeds psychological resilience
“And boys who tend to be unprepared, more unprepared than girls do better on standardized tests, precisely because when they run into difficulty, they expect it to.”
Nutrition Science Is Not a Functioning Scientific Discipline
“I don't believe nutrition science is a functioning science. That it lacks many of the characteristics that a functioning science has to have, particularly the sort of critical, rigorous back and forth between scientists where they're attacking each other's ide…”
Jacobs: Most Fortune 500 board meetings are scripted wastes of time
“Most Fortune, 500 company Board members, board meetings, are kind of, they're very scripted, and they sometimes even rehearsed, and there's a careful It's a story that's being told by management, and it's done by PowerPoint, it's done by rehearsed presentation…”
Nejatian: Non-founder-led companies become hosts for professional consulting leeches
“Where the founders are no longer there, there's no large shareholder that cares a lot about the company. So over time, many of these companies essentially become hosts for professional leeches whose job it is to suck the company dry while making management loo…”
Nejatian: A culture of 'suicidal empathy' is killing top tech companies
“There is a level of suicidal empathy that people have developed that is just deadly. It is killing our best companies because people are assuming that everyone is thin-skinned, and they're assuming that people are offended by facts.”
Nejatian: Remote work generally fails, with Shopify being a rare exception
“First of all, I don't think remote works. Generally, it only works for Shopify, and that's because we built more software to make remote work than anyone reasonably thought we could. And I think the jury has fully come back on this topic, that companies that a…”
Gurley: Leading AI players are begging for regulation to protect an oligopoly
“I think the thing, you know, that could cut against that, if the regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive, that could actually lead to more oligopoly. And I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.”
Gurley: China's open-source AI ecosystem can innovate faster than the US
“Because it's more intense, everyone's chosen to go open source, and that creates a system that, in my mind, is capable of innovating far faster Then the competitive system we have here.”
Gurley rejects Washington and Silicon Valley's vilification of China
“Having spent a ton of time in China over the past 20 years, it's hard for me to adopt this mindset of vilification that's heavy amongst many in Washington and now many in Silicon Valley.”
Gurley: Traditional IPO process is insanely unfair to companies
“I think it is insanely unfair to the companies the way they're forced to go through this process where The bankers pick the price and pick the shareholders. There's just no need to do that.”
Gurley: Bank regulatory capture blocks instant payment systems in US
“And precisely because of regulatory capture, the banks have kept our government from doing that. They've, the government wanted to, they have something called FedNow, but there's massive pushback in the finance committee in Washington, so it never happens.”
Gurley: Proxy advisory firms operate an opaque 'heist'
“They score you, but they score you with a black box. They don't tell you how they score you. Right. And guess how you can learn more. You hire them. So they get paid on both sides, and it's just, it's more of a heist, I think, than anything else.”
Gurley: Elon Musk's Tesla compensation package is the right model
“The Tesla case is a great example that, that package, that type of package that they did for Elon, I've said this, you know, publicly, I would agree to that type of package for every company I've ever worked with, and most CEOs wouldn't take it. It basically s…”
Gurley: Passive index funds should not vote corporate proxies
“One thing that would be really great is if they just wouldn't vote because then the people that are active shareholders would have More of a say in what happens with these companies, but there's, they own such a large percentage.”
Brockman: OpenAI competitors are struggling with compute availability
“I mean, I think our competitors are not having a good time on compute, let me put it that way.”
Liemandt: Traditional classroom lecturing wastes 90% of students' time
“We waste 90% of their time. Like, we know that teacher in front of the classroom is the least effective way to teach. You know, you can argue whether it's five percent retention, but literally we're wasting 90% of the kids' time because we're teaching them in …”
Ovitz: Businesses should strive to eliminate competition rather than co-exist
“And I'm a monopolist. I believe in Peter Thiel's theory on monopoly. I don't believe that you should have competition. They have to be eliminated. That's the American way, in my opinion. Everyone says there's always room for competition. I don't think there's …”
Ovitz: Forced wokeness put Hollywood's content business in its worst state ever
“I think it contributed to the demise of the content business in Hollywood right now. I think the content business is in the worst place it's ever been, and I think this forced wokeness Has not been productive.”
Poilievre: There is no need for government-provided media
“There's no need for government to be the provider of media.
when people can, you have a, this is a media outlet right now.
Why is it that you need the government to do what other people, with people, free citizens,
Can do for themselves.
And the answer is tha…”
Poilievre: Post-national policy and mass immigration divide Canadians along foreign lines
“And what we've allowed to happen over the last decade is that the government has said the Canada has no national identity. We're a postmodern, post-nationalist state, and there's nothing that binds us together. And as a result of that and mass migration on lev…”
Poilievre: Eliminating Capital Gains Tax on Reinvested Capital Is Economic 'Rocket Fuel'
“There's also, I think, some very exciting things we can do, like get rid of capital gains tax. When you reinvest in Canada, the government's going to get its pound of salt one day anyway. Eventually you'll fully cash out and you'll want to enjoy Everything you…”
Poilievre: Governments and pharma companies perpetuate the drug crisis for profit
“Governments, pharmaceutical companies, and a whole group of parasitical interest groups have created this crisis and perpetuated it.”
Poilievre: Anyone caught distributing over 40mg of fentanyl should receive a murder sentence
“So I, my view is anyone who's caught marketing or producing more than 40 milligrams, enough to kill 20 people, should be given a murder sentence.”
Management consulting gainshare agreements are a scam
“A game share agreement is a management consulting scam where you claim a certain percentage of the cost savings you identify in year one.”
Sutherland: Shareholder Value Focus Prevents Effective Innovation and Customer Investment
“The shareholder value movement's totally incoherent because over what time frame which shareholder... What are you optimizing for? It's a completely incoherent nonsense, which is very, very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly…”
Scilipoti: The AI Ecosystem Relies on Circular Financing Involving Nvidia
“NVIDIA invests in OpenAI, and NVIDIA is a supplier of chips to OpenAI. So it's all circular, what's going on here.”
Scilipoti: EBITDA Is the Mother of All Disastrous Financial Measures
“EBITDA is the mother of all disastrous measures.”
Diller: Google's search monopoly treats dependent web businesses like serfs
“Google, absolute monopoly on search, and all your traffic, I mean, at least half your traffic, if you were healthy, would come from people coming directly to you. But the other half, Without which you wouldn't be able to survive came from Google and Google ove…”
Evans: Claims that AI will produce bioweapons and kill humanity are idiotic
“Personally, like most people in tech, I think the idea that this is all going to kind of produce bioweapons and take over the world and kill us all is just idiotic. Like, I think it's just a bunch of kind of childish logical fallacies within that.”
Evans: OpenAI's weekly active user metric is deliberately misleading
“Now, OpenAI is doing weekly active users, and Sam Waltman was a social media startup founder. He knows this. It's a bullshit number.”
Evans: Opinions on Sam Altman among former colleagues are unanimously negative
“OpenAI Sam Altman is, I was going to say polarizing figure, but actually opinions about him tend to be fairly unanimous and tend to be fairly negative, like everybody who's ever worked with him quit.”
Evans: Tesla is just another Android phone maker in EV market
“What's happening is that cars are becoming Android with no iPhone, and Tesla is just selling, and in that metaphor, Tesla is just another Android phone maker, and they're competing with the whole Chinese industrial policy.”
Johnson: Biology rejects polyamory trends because human love is neurologically hardwired
“The New York Times writes articles about how Oh, romantic, love is changing, and, you know, we're all going to be polyamorous, or we're going to have hookups until we're 60, and it's all going to be great, and, you know, there's going to be lots of freedom, an…”
VCs cannot provide useful business strategy advice to obsessive founders
“It's why, like, no investor ever gives me useful advice, really. Because like, I'm not, sure, they can about people and some high-level stuff, for sure, or capital markets, but like, Business, like, strategy? Like, how could they ever know my business better t…”
Nooyi: Choosing to work from home limits promotional opportunities
“However, I'm also of the belief, Shane, that if you choose to work from home, male or female, I don't care. If you choose to work from home, you might also want to accept that your promotional challenges may be, your promotional opportunities may be limited.”
Hastings argues government-run schools are the fundamental problem in American education
“I came to believe that the government running the schools was sort of the essence of the problem and that it would be better and more effective to have non-profits. Like, if you look at the university sector, you know, and all of our top universities, they're …”