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 3,487 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 88 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
Sam Lessin wagers $1M that no human sets foot on Mars by 2040
“I, a million dollars that a human has been on Mars by 2040. Like set foot, like planted the flag, like boot on sand. Like literally went out of a spaceship, like hung out, did a little dance and I'll bet you a million dollars.”
Brit Morin: Anthropic CEO Claims AI Will Write Nearly All Code in 12 Months
“The CEO of Anthropix said, he said, In the next three to six months, AI is probably gonna be able to write 90% of all code. And in 12 months, nearly all code may be generated by AI.”
Lessin: Bezos directs Washington Post opinion to focus on free markets
“Bezos announced today that the Washington Post opinion section is going to wholly, wholly focus on topics that support personal liberties and free markets. So as a result of this, the opinion editor who is award winning, probably Pulitzer Prize winning, but I …”
Dave Morin: Short-form video feeds have become net negative for health
“Look, my opinion is, I think I've said it on the pod already, which is that the, what we are actually talking about topically right now, the reels, the TikTok, the video feed, I believe crossed over in the last three months to being net health negative.”
Sam Lessin: AI and AGI Are Essentially Meme Coins for Rich People
“Cause I'd argue that in a lot of ways, AI and AGI is next to GameStop, the ultimate, it's a meme coin. It's a meme narrative for very rich people. It's like Silicon Valley, very rich people, venture capitalists, et cetera, needed a meme to pile a bunch of capi…”
Lessin: Startups take strategic and hedge fund money when real VCs pass
“Then you have a bunch of strategics and family offices because no smart people would invest in this, right? Like that's like how you end up with strategics and like hedge funds is when like the serious venture people are like, absolutely not.”
Sam Lessin: Best Performing Companies Stock-Wise Strongly Bias Toward In-Person Work
“If you did the analysis of like, Time in office to stock price. I bet what you'd see is that actually the best performing companies are all the ones that are biasing towards deeply in person, and the worst performing ones are the ones that are biased towards n…”
Sam Lessin: Venture Capital Shows Almost Zero Correlation Between Hours and Outcomes
“Venture capital is one of these things where like, The relationship between the work you do and the outcomes is like- The smack talk never ends. Is like almost non-existent. Like it is not an input to output business, right? Like it is, and so I think it's lik…”
Morin: AI agent startups are uninvestable because they just wrap OpenAI.
“You don't need to look at it. None of it's investable. It's all just built on top of open AI.”
Lessin: OpenAI pulled a bait-and-switch on the spirit of its nonprofit mission.
“I also like kind of am sympathetic to Elon on this one, because I also kind of believe setting aside the letter of the law, which again, I don't know, it's not my place, but like the spirit of the law, I do think there was a bait and switch by open AI in terms…”
Lessin: Elon Musk is ultimate cult leader whose stocks behave like meme coins
“And maybe Elon, I would actually argue that Elon in a lot of ways, I've said this a long time is the ultimate cult leader. And in some ways, a lot of Elon stocks behave like this on absolute steroids.”
Jessica Lessin: DOGE workers self-police conflicts despite unprecedented data access
“You have, you know, employees doing this who have a special status. They are in charge of determining their own conflicts of interest. And they are getting unprecedented access to something that is incredibly sensitive and important.”
Lessin: Elon Musk's end game is patronizing global conservatism
“Elon has an end game and it appears to be To basically become a patron of the next set of the conservative movement around the world for the next several decades, right? If you zoom out, like his support of Donald Trump, what he's doing in Europe and around th…”
Sam Lessin: AI labs hypocritically protest distillation after scraping the web
“That like you have this thing where like, oh, you want to have it both ways. So you think it's okay to break the economics of the underlying internet you're leveraging, but then you're mad that someone's doing it to you.”
Morin: China proved it can damage the US economy with a press release
“So China's been proven to be able to release the exact right press release that can, you know, damage the world, damage the American economy.”
Sam Lessin: Reaching wealth through income alone is mathematically impossible
“There's no way to like earn your way into the upper class anymore. Right. Into wealth is not mathematically possible. The way to do it through income. Right. The only way to do it is to make highly asymmetric bets with your time. Right. Or with your capital.”
Sam Lessin: DeepSeek made massive profits from an Nvidia trade
“They made so much money on their Nvidia trade. It doesn't, it's irrelevant.”
Sam Lessin: Software is never a defensible moat
“I actually, I don't believe that technology can be proprietary. It's the whole, it's too easy to copy and too easy to steal. So if anything, I would actually argue that a lot of these, the idea that like you're going to get proprietary software that, or algori…”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI is crawling with spies and its work leaked
“But look, open AI has got to be crawling with spies, got to be, right? And so they can be as close as they want. But I promise you, everyone has copies that cares, right, of what they're doing.”
Sam Lessin: Seed investors must sell the second SoftBank buys in
“One of my number one rules of seed investing is that the second SoftBank buys, you must sell. I've learned this the hard way several times.”
Sam Lessin: Financial Reality Will Ultimately Break OpenAI's Cult Narrative
“OpenAI has built a great cult around itself. It has, it's awesome from that perspective. I do think that the gravity of the financial meme, right, and effectively financial thinking will ultimately break that, right? I don't think that it can survive as a narr…”
Lessin: Sam Altman's great innovation is fear marketing
“Sam Altman's great innovation was fear marketing around, around, I a hundred percent agree with that and he's done a brilliant job if you just think about him as a marketer, right, from, like, from using that narrative to his advantage.”
Sam Lessin: DEI narratives hijacked tech's basic labor supply economics
“I'd actually argue in the last 10 years, those narratives about just straight up Supply and demand and meritocracy got slightly hijacked by like DEI style. We're doing this for equity reasons or for access reasons, as opposed to straight economic reasons. That…”
Jessica Lessin: Musk backed Trump primarily to gain bargaining chips with China
“Elon needs bargaining chips with China. In fact, probably his whole move towards Trump you know, in addition to getting his space regulation and all that kind of stuff, was to get more bargaining chips with China.”
Sam Lessin: Centralized social network fact-checking is impossible at scale and dangerous
“The idea that a centralized platform, a centralized social network, Would be in the business of fact checking was always one of the most dangerous and worst ideas imaginable. And I was very unhappy when the company went in that direction over time because it's…”
Morin: Mark Zuckerberg is surprisingly on 'bended knee' politically
“Politically, I'm very surprised to find Mark on bended knee at this moment.”
Dave Morin: Zuckerberg has global influence rivaling the US President
“I think that he's a leader on a global scale, almost on the scale of the American president.”
Sam Lessin: AI feeds align with what users actually want, not what they claim
“I actually think AI is incredibly aligned with what people actually want, not what they say they want.”
Sam Lessin: NVIDIA's current core business will fundamentally get commoditized
“Look, I think the Nvidia story, which is fascinating is you have a three trillion dollar company that's trying to call up the value chain because fundamentally what they currently do will get commoditized.”
Sam Lessin: Google Antitrust Monopoly Decision Will Be Struck Down
“I personally think if this is, if the case ended up coming down, they, that the courts defined it as the search ad market was not a monopoly, but the search consumer was, and that I, my money says this gets struck down, which is why the stock isn't.”
Dave Morin: Big Tech Regulation Freezes Silicon Valley Startup Acquisitions and Innovation
“And what we do know is that more and more and more regulation of big tech equals less and less and less acquisition of small tech. Which results in the complete and total freezing of the innovation ecosystem of Silicon Valley.”
Sam Lessin: SEC has lost all major cases against legitimate crypto projects
“They've actually, my understanding is basically lost all of the major cases they've tried to do against legitimate projects. They've won them against the things that are pure scams, which there are in crypto, like they've won some cases, but all the major ones…”
Jessica Lessin: US government's current position is that Coinbase shouldn't exist
“The current position of the US government is basically that Coinbase shouldn't exist. I mean, if you look at the breadth, the number of businesses that it's arguing are operating illegally is numerous.”
Sam Lessin: I am personally short Ethereum and long Solana
“You know, I'm very sure the Ethereum world. I'm very long. Dave Morin: Solana. Sam Lessin: It's a personal book.”
Aaron Levie: Decentralized internet infrastructure is costly and makes a bad database
“The thing that lost me was when everybody was arguing that, that what we should do is decentralize all of the infrastructure of the internet. That's just literally, it just costs more to then run every internet service. And it's actually not a very good databa…”
Lessin: Sam Altman is an AGI fundamentalist, not just a business pragmatist
“Like, you know, and it's like, so it's very interesting to me that the story's become Ilya, The fundamentalist versus Sam, the pragmatist who just wants to build a business, because the reality is Sam Altman, the founder, even as a, you know, private conferenc…”
Britt Morin: Microsoft, Sequoia, and Thrive failed OpenAI board diligence
“Frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft and Sequoia and Thrive, like didn't do more board diligence when they were investing all this money to figure out like this board was like not adequate for the type of company that this has become.”
Sam Lessin: I would not vote to reinstate Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO
“If I'm in the seat, I don't bring him back, right? I say it's the ring of power. I threw it away.”
Khosla: Frontier AI compute costs will drop 80-90% within a year
“My bet is, a year from now, it'll cost one-fifth to one-tenth of what it does today, and my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute, because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the…”
Khosla tells his portfolio startups to completely ignore AI compute costs
“My advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute, because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year, and so forget about it.”
Levie: Incumbents like Salesforce, Oracle, and Box will capture enterprise AI revenue
“Now it doesn't mean that it's all startups. It's going to be Salesforce and it's going to be service. Now it's going to be Oracle. And it's gonna be box.net which is not our official brand. We, you know, we will capture collectively all of that.”
Levie: AI's current capabilities plus 20% would justify all VC funding
“If I'm wrong and it taps out sooner, then I think you would just have exactly what AI is good at today, plus, you know, 20% or whatever, and then fully extrapolate it out. So, so that, that to me is, that, that pays all the, for all the VC funding.”
Lessin: AI search will break the internet's truth machine
“And the thing I think is so fucked about this whole AI move is, like, in the one boxes in the direction is, like, You're just going to break the entire machine for truth, right? Because you just get a reflection of whatever the economics are of the system. And…”
Lessin: Vercel will struggle to monetize commoditized AI software creation
“If the marginal cost of building, it goes towards zero. And like, that's the general trend of history. My big concern for your company will be, you're not going to get paid enough for it. Right. Cause like it'll be commodity.”
Dave Morin: Most programming will be done in English by late 2025
“I think a year from now you know, most programming will be done in English. And I think that's the, there's almost no question.”
Sam Lessin: Mega-funds like Thrive Capital are not true venture capitalists
“To the credit of Thrive, to the credit of some of these guys who have gone super huge in late, they're playing this game where the only thing I take issue with is, are they really even technology? Like, are they venture capitalists? They're not. They're capita…”
Dave Morin: Meta is not an AI leader and nobody uses its products
“Meta, like, you know, I think it's actually pretty hard to say that Meta is a AI leader. Nobody's using the AI products that Meta is shipping. Like, they are not used they are using AI infrastructure to deliver their advertising business.”