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 1,041 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 11 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
Russell: Tesla's vision system fails to stop for child crash dummies
“Like, literally, if you put, like, a, you know, a crash dummy right in front of the car like a child pedestrian crash dummy, like, it doesn't come to a safe stop, like, at a reasonable speed.”
Nocera: Comparing lockdown and non-lockdown country data shows no difference
“They don't work. If you look at countries that locked down versus countries that didn't lock down, you don't, you can't tell which is which. You absolutely can't.”
Wilson: Caregiver earnings rates disputed by FTC were based on real data
“There was another piece where they challenged that the rate that caregivers were making were, maybe not fully an accurate depiction of that rate. We don't know how they could have claimed that because that was, actual real data that we would get off our transa…”
Berman: Silicon Valley Investors Actively Seek Revenge as a Founder Motivator
“One of the handful of things that investors are looking for as a motivator is revenge. It's a big one. People have got really something to prove and want to just go assassinate the competition.”
Andrew Chen: Startups failing to reach a $1B valuation have failed
“I have a, an advisor, Andrew Chen. He's like, if you're not a billion dollar company, you failed.”
Shein copied Cassey Ho's skort twice despite a conversation with its president
“And so what's been so crazy is that they not only copied that skirt once, they did it twice after we had a conversation about it. I talked to the president of US Sheehan, like it was a whole thing.”
Farquhar: Daily office attendance does not correlate with employee connection
“And what we did is we correlated those answers with how frequently people come to an office and how frequently they do what we call intentional togetherness gathering. And we found that people just turning up to the office every day was not correlated.”
Camera-only driver assistance systems fail basic crash dummy stopping tests
“Reality is it is great to see some improvements for some basic level of assisted driving capabilities, but it doesn't solve some of the fundamentals of what you need to do to prevent accidents. Like literally, if you put a crash dummy right in front of the car…”
Hoffman: GPT-4 already diagnoses better than majority of human GPs
“And for example, a researcher at Microsoft, again, Peter Lee, has written an excellent book about showing how GPT-IV can already do medical diagnoses better than, you know, the majority of human GPs.”
Lubetzky: Hamas Aims for Regional Caliphate Replacing Arab Governments
“The goal of Hamas is not to replace Israel with the Palestinian Authority. Their goal is an Islamic Caliphate all over the Middle East to replace Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and all other Arab countries with the most repressive of Islamic regimes.”
Lubetzky: Palestinian Staff Report Hamas Is Blocking Gaza Evacuation Routes
“We have staff in Gaza that are trying to escape Gaza, and we have ways to get them out, but Hamas has blocked all exits. They've bombed roads, they've blocked roads. This is from our Palestinian staff in Gaza that are telling us they're not able to get out bec…”
Cohen: Hamas prevented Palestinian evacuations by confiscating IDs and car keys
“And Hamas won't let Palestinians get out of there. They took their IDs, and they took their car keys, and they won't let them flee the area.”
Branson: British Airways illegally accessed Virgin data to poach delayed passengers
“They had a unit that illegally accessed our computer information, and then they would ring up Virgin passengers pretending to be from Virgin, telling the passengers their flight was delayed, and then switching them to British Airways.”
Obama: Republican filibuster obstruction in 2009 was unprecedented in US history
“At the time, there was no precedent for the kind of obstruction that we had seen from the Republican Party. There was no precedent for the use of the filibuster to literally block everything.”
Daunt: Barnes & Noble has no marketing department and spends zero dollars
“Well, we have the great benefit of not having a marketing department, so we have zero marketing dollars to spend, so that makes it an easy thing. So that's never happening.
Jeff Berman: None whatsoever.
James Daunt: None whatsoever. I mean, literally zero.”
Wilson: Care.com agreed with FTC on difficult cancellations and began changes
“One of the three things that the FTC asserted was our site being a subscription or membership service was hard to cancel. Guess what? I agreed with them. And before they, that, that claim was even there, we already started to change it.”
Krishna: Everyone in the tech industry is losing money on AI right now
“Tech may be the early, early beneficiary, but I will note everybody in tech right now is losing money in it.”
Krishna: Anthropic's Mythos Found No New Vulnerabilities Beyond Existing Models
“Mythos didn't find anything that other models didn't and couldn't find.”
Study of 30,000 careers shows youth success negatively correlates with adult success
“There was just a paper in science, you know, one of the probably two most prestigious scientific journals in the world. It aggregated about 30,000 careers of musicians, scientists, athletes, And what it found was basically the thesis of range that the indicato…”
Elite athletes spend less early time in deliberate practice than lower-level peers
“The data that actually track, yes, elite athletes spend more time in deliberate practice than lower level athletes, but the studies that track them over the course of their development show that early on they spent less time In deliberate practice in that acti…”
Webb: China is funding ten-year AI infrastructure to deploy across 1.4B citizens
“China is saying, we're not going to worry about innovation right now. We are going to build infrastructure. So in a, by the time this Show comes out. China probably will have announced its next five-year plan, and that next year five-year plan is funding a ten…”
Yuan: Could not find a single happy Skype or WebEx customer
“There were so many solutions out there. The market was extremely crowded. However, I did spend a lot of time on talking with those users. Do you like Skype? Do you like WebEx? I did not see a single happy customer who told me that Really like the existing solu…”
Masad: ChatGPT has triggered psychotic breaks by reinforcing delusions
“There's high-profile cases where people have psychotic breaks because they have, like, delusions of grandeur and things like that, and ChatGPT is, like, reinforcing that, and that's, like, really bad.”
Thompson: Anthropic recently paid out billions of dollars to authors
“Anthropic just had to pay out billions of dollars to authors.”
Brink: Younger generations want to be in the office more
“What we found, too, when you talk about generations is that it's actually the younger generations that want to be in the office even more. They see that they're learning much more when they're in the office. They see that they're creating that social capital t…”
Estée Lauder required Bobbi Brown to sign a 25-year non-compete
“They would like you to sign a 25 year non-compete.”
Estée Lauder canceled Bobbi Brown's contract, forcing her into a figurehead role
“Well, I didn't decide to leave. It was, you know, I was called into the office and thinking that I was going to, you know, have finally some candidates, because we were, we went to search to help me turn around this company and fix the company and all of that,…”
Pohlson: Omaze's UK subscription retention rivals Spotify and Netflix
“We put it in the category of a consumer subscription entertainment, you know, like a Spotify or a Netflix and the retention rates. Are at that level.”
Levine: Every US sportsbook runs on legacy European software
“And every sports book that has launched in America is built on the back of software that was initially built for the UK and Europe.”
Levine: Underdog built the only US-tailored regulated sports betting tech stack
“So now, as we've built the technology that now is the only tech that has been purpose-built for the American market that is licensed and regulated and has been licensed by this test lab that license every single slice of it that regulators then rely on.”
Welch's survey finds only 2% of Gen Z hold employer-desired values
“I did a survey of 1500 hiring managers, and I asked, what values do you wanna, what values do you hire for among Gen Z? And I'm gonna tell you, only two percent had the values they wanted.”
Welch: 65% of Gen Z value self-care versus 0% of hiring managers
“Eudaimonia is the number one value for 65% of Gen Z, and in 1500 hiring managers over the age of 40 in corporate positions, exactly zero percent said they wanted eudaimonia as a top value.”
Green: Chinese groups immediately hire workers laid off by USAID cuts
“The folks who have been laid off as a result of the USAID cuts, and I don't mean folks in the United States, I mean folks globally, they're being hired immediately, and they're being hired by Chinese aid organizations because that's, because China still does u…”
Eidelman: PE capital makes buying practices unattainable for associate vets
“Now the cost of doing that because of so much private equity money that's come in is unattainable for a veterinarian to buy their boss's practice.”
Google offered $100 million more than Salesforce to acquire Buddy Media
“We had, I don't, I've never told this story publicly, but we had a term sheet from Google There was a hundred million dollars more than Salesforce.”
Cadre secured its first real estate asset through partner Jared Kushner.
“The first actual asset was an asset that I was able to secure vis-a-vis a relationship with Jared Kushner. Who was one of my earliest partners as well.”
Hasbro CEO: D&D Beyond reaches 80% of active tabletop RPG players
“But when you think about, like, the reach of 19 to twenty million people in the tabletop gaming hobby, you know, we basically reach 80% of everyone who plays a tabletop RPG actively.”
Wang: Berkeley study found toxic metalloids in 14 major tampon brands
“A big study came out from the University of Berkeley over the summer. I don't know if you saw it, but 14 major tampon brands, including organic tampons, tested positive for toxic metalloids like lead and mercury and arsenic.”
Shan-Lyn Ma: Hallmark Channel rejected Zola ads featuring same-sex couples
“There was one instance where the Hallmark Channel refused to run our ads that showed same-sex couples.”
Weaver: Viral social media narratives falsely claimed Jack Daniel stole his recipe
“The internet decided almost instantaneously, with the headline in the photo, that Jack Daniel was a slave owner, he hid the recipe, he stole the recipe, he hid the slave. That was not a part of the story. It was not even insinuated, but that is the story that …”
Russell: Luminar has more contract value than all competitors combined
“I think, you know, we have more contract value than probably every other autonomous vehicle in, in Lidar company in, in the industry and world combined, you know, at this point in terms of like, actually materializing into, you know, production vehicles that h…”
Liquid Death outsells Monster's canned water 4-to-1 in a major southern chain
“And, you know, we just looked in a recent in a convenience store, a big chain in the south, and like, even at more money, Liquid Debt is out selling it like four to one.”
Dyson: Dyson Institute has higher first-class honors rate than any UK university
“And by the way, we have a higher percentage of first-class honors than any other British university.”
Uhrman: 90% of all sports teams do not make money
“The first thing that I learned, which was actually fascinating, was that 90% of all sports teams don't make money.”
Clark: Chinese officials believe the U.S. is decoupling, not de-risking
“The Chinese believe that we really are decoupling, not de-risking, despite the administration and Secretary Raimondo doing a good job of saying that's not true.”
Hoffman: AI productivity is not yet reflected in tech company numbers
“I don't think that much AI productivity is currently baked into the numbers. And rigged in the way that people are operating.”
Farquhar: 40% of Atlassian staff live over two hours from an office
“About 40% of our Atlassian employees live more than two hours from an office”
Farquhar: Deliberate team gatherings boost employee connection for 3 to 5 months
“However, when people did get together deliberately, we saw a huge spike of connectedness to each other and to the company. The surprising part was the decay function. I thought a week or two later we'd be back to baseline, but it turned out that the data showe…”