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 3,713 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 120 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
Maguire: Space-based data centers will become absolutely giant
“The public doesn't yet Like, the public hasn't yet gotten to see the full argument, like, hasn't gotten to see the math, but I'll just say, like, I think the math is really compelling, and I think data centers in space are, and I was on TBPN maybe six months a…”
Maguire: Top AI models outperform average top-five PhD students
“I think we've definitely hit the point where in most fields of math or physics or computer science, like the best models are better than the average PhD student at like a top five research program”
Cliffton: Low-altitude octocopter drone deliveries are terrifying 'lawnmowers of death'
“You're, like, descending this massive octocopter of, you know, sounds like a lawnmower of death to within, like, you know, 20 feet of you. It's like, you know, you're like, it's incredibly loud, incredibly scary. It's actually super dangerous to have an aircra…”
Goldstein: Buttigieg refused meetings, but Sean Duffy meets with Archer monthly
“I literally could not get a meeting with Secretary Pete Buttigieg. I couldn't do it. He just wouldn't take the meeting. And so, I don't know if it just wasn't important to him or whatever his reasons were, but as soon as the new administration, the administrat…”
Goldstein: Full-stack eVTOL models are too operationally complex to be profitable
“So the challenge with being an OEM, and an operator, and, a demand aggregator, an infrastructure player, you know, a pilot training company, a maintenance company, that's a lot of stuff to do at once. It's very hard to actually build a real business that will …”
Senra: Raising money is not an accomplishment, building a durable business is
“Raising money is not an accomplishment, so I'm not going to say congratulations. Building a durable business is an accomplishment”
Katzenberg: 95% of the longevity industry is snake oil
“95% of what's going on around it today is snake oil sales. You know, driven by, you know people trying to sell supplements and, you know, new treatments and process that are really not driven by actual science.”
Mignano: AI-generated feeds will eventually diminish human creator value
“I think where we're inevitably headed is now when you're swiping TikTok or Reels or Sora, We're eventually gonna end up in a place where most of that content is generated on the fly specifically to target you and to capture your attention as long as possible. …”
Luckey: UAPs likely originate from the distant past, not future
“My current working theory is that they come from the past. So. Interesting. Ok. Coming from the future is too hard. The physics just don't seem to work out.”
Stephens: DoD operated like a centrally planned economy for over 30 years
“We think it's really great to have more companies in the space that are, ah, you know, moving away from kind of the semi-communist, centrally planned economy way that the department has been doing business for really the last 30 plus years.”
Stephens: Pacifism is only possible under a government monopoly on violence
“Pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That's just, like, not possible for humanity.”
Schimpf: Traditional cost-plus defense contracts are a disaster
“Versus the traditional approach where it's like the government took all the risk and you get a fixed profit fee. That's a disaster. Like everything just gets more complex and more expensive. It doesn't work out.”
Stephens: AI and autonomous defense fulfill Just War Theory by maximizing precision
“The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs so we're not putting our, you know, men and women, brothers and sisters, in horribly dangerous situations and become as accurate and precise as possible. And that's really what Just War Theory is all a…”
Michael: The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were a net negative for US
“The second war in Iraq and the Afghanistan war, and there were long, expensive conflicts where the benefit to the United States, looking back on it, was negative. It wasn't even neutral, right? It cost a lot of people their lives, and Afghanistan is still, Afg…”
Tusk: Universal Basic Income is the necessary unlock for AI
“The unlocked AI is UBI, Universal Basic Income. It's like Andrew Yang, I think, was absolutely right about this.”
Clark: Every major large model paradigm has originated at OpenAI
“Every single major paradigm In large models at this sort of macro level that has been very successful to my knowledge has come from open AI or at least been originated at open AI.”
Karp: Financial analysts lack common sense and never admit being wrong
“It's hard to be fair to the total bereft of common sense, and in, in practice, not particularly honest, analyst expert class, not because they're wrong the first time, but primarily because they can't admit they were wrong the first time when they're wrong the…”
Karp: Global spread of American values is downstream of military superiority
“All the stuff you're learning at Berkeley about people are just going to inherently absorb American values is really just downstream from our military superiority.”
Karp: LLMs are commodities and orchestration is far more valuable
“Everyone's saying LLMs are going to solve all these problems, but I believed, and it turns out that LLMs are commodity products, and orchestration would be much more valuable than the product themselves.”
Serhant: SERHANT reaches more organic global buyers than competitors combined
“We can put properties in front of more qualified buyers globally, organically than any other firm combined.”
Barton: Reddit Holds the Only Major Corpus of Human-Generated Data for AI
“In the AI era, there's really only one place where actual human-generated content exists, and the value of that content is super valuable, like, really valuable, because it helps train the models.”
Gil: Parker Conrad and Palmer Luckey were unfairly thrown under the bus
“Palmer Luckey is another one where I backed Andrew in the very first round, and he was controversial given what happened at Meta early on with him. I think in both cases, they basically got thrown under the bus in one form or another.”
Gil: State-level regulations like California's could curtail US AI progress
“And the dangerous part in AI was there's state level initiatives that have been very negative or could have been very negative for AI. I think Scott Wiener proposed one in California. I think there's others that have been proposed in other states that you coul…”
Siddharth: Agentic AI will replace services firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture
“So I think like Turing will probably replace companies like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and every services company like Accenture, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, like all of these companies doing vanilla services that's going to be automated with these agentic systems.”
Lowery: Anduril is pursuing a 'me too' strategy against China's manufacturing
“There's an element, one, of folks doing me too, like Andrew's very me too to China. They said, we're going to go toe to toe. We're going to manufacturing in volume. We're going to build computers. We're going to build drones. We're going to build everything th…”
Allen Control CEO: Our counter-drone gun will be on every military vehicle
“I think that like bullfrog is going to be everywhere. Like every vehicle in every military that has a gun on it needs to be replaced with a gun that can hit drones. So, I mean, we're going to be in like every country. This is one of the biggest products of all…”
Rabois: Every successful startup is a cult with a non-consensus worldview
“Every successful company is a cult. And what a cult really means is you have a view about the world that's different than other normal people. And you're right to be successful. Like a cult doesn't have to be right, but the startup is a cult. That's right. And…”
Rabois: Homebuyers should replace real estate agents with ChatGPT
“Instead of using a real estate agent, there's no reason they can't use ChatGPT or an equivalent product.”
Siemiatkowski: Large SaaS firms lack incentives to streamline complex software
“One of the challenges I think with SaaS models is especially the larger SaaS companies. They are less dependent on their monthly subscription fees, but they have this whole ecosystem of consultants who charge on the hour to implement and fix. It's true for Sal…”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna cut headcount from 7,400 to 3,000 while doubling revenue
“Klana has gotten so much attention around our efficiency gains, and we've gone from 7400 people to 3000, while, you know, our revenue has doubled since then. So, our revenue per employee went from 450,000 dollars per employee to over a million now.”
Shadbolt: One-million-qubit quantum computer will outperform all global conventional compute
“A single million qubit quantum computer would outperform The net total of conventional computing on the entire planet. So you take all of the supercomputers on the planet, you take every AWS system, every Azure system, you add them all together, and we trash t…”
Deploying 1,000 REGENT seagliders in the Taiwan Strait deters World War III
“And then in defense, in 10 years, we will not have had a World War III Because of Regents efforts and many other efforts in deterring that conflict, because we put a thousand sea gliders in the Taiwan trait and we said, try it.”
McGee: Tim Cook Pledged $275B in Apple Investment to China
“They do their own supply chain study, sort of Apple internally, and realize that they're investing fifty-five billion dollars a year into Chinese factories, and once they've sort of established this, and they realize, like, how much that could mean to local an…”
McGee: China Exploited Apple for Tech Transfer, Not Vice Versa
“My narrative is not a book about Apple exploiting China. It's a book about China exploiting Apple, right, and getting technology transfer through these arrangements.”
McGee: Apple Funded Supply Ecosystem That Powered Huawei and Xiaomi
“Apple trained all of their suppliers, and then the suppliers in turn supplied Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo. So that's why Nokia couldn't keep up. It's that China had this amazing ecosystem built for the smartphone industry, all paid for by Apple.”
McGee: Apple Cannot Move Manufacturing to India or the US
“I don't think they can move to India. They certainly can't move to the US. Their production plants are basically encircled by Chinese competitors that they themselves created, and they're in a position where they can't make any good moves.”
McGee: Jony Ive and OpenAI's AI Device Will Just Become an iPhone App
“I think it becomes an iPhone app.”
Agrawal: Humans Will Not Need to Work to Earn a Living by 2035
“I suspect in five to 10 years, we wouldn't have to work to earn a living anymore.”
Taylor: Russia funded German environmental groups to shut down nuclear reactors
“This was sort of a theory for a long time, but it's actually proven now that this did happen in Europe over the last 10 years. So Russian groups funded far left environmental groups in Germany to shut the reactors down in order, you know, to make it so that Ge…”
Vasavada: Decisions that make employees happy are usually wrong for the business
“The decision that makes someone happy is usually the wrong decision for the business.”
Vasavada: VC incentives to burn capital contradict founder ownership interests
“An investor's incentive is to get you to burn money because they believe it'll help you grow faster. And if it grows faster that you can always raise more money and burn more money and they can put more money in. So for you to burn, So they can deploy more cap…”
Little: Defense Consultants Mostly Sell PowerPoints, Could Be Replaced by ChatGPT
“These are the consultants and SIs that mostly sell PowerPoints, mostly can be replaced by a subscription to GBT for 20 bucks a month.”
Power: Demographic decline will pressure Xi Jinping to act before 2037-2042
“We just have to last till about 2037, 20 42, and then kind of overnight China's working population will cut in half, and then they can try again in another thousand years. So that will put a lot of pressure in our opinion on Xi to actually do something, becaus…”
Power: Kalshi's 18% odds on Trump reviving manufacturing are severely underpriced
“I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is yes. I would take that bet. I think they're selling, you know, dollars for 18 cents.”
Altman: VCs are very unlikely to actually help with company or product
“It's also a big part of what informs my view that it's very unlikely for VCs to help in ways that have to do with the actual company or, like, the product.”
Founders should not start companies without aiming for $100M ARR year one
“If you don't believe that you yourself can get to a hundred mil ARR in the next year, then you should just don't fucking build a company cause you don't have the balls to do it.”
Investors using assistants to schedule founder meetings will not get allocation
“Like, there's nothing that turns, like, I can, like, if you've done this, you're probably not getting any allocation, because you've, like, ticked me off, because you've just told me I do not find you important enough. I need my assistant from the fucking Phil…”
35-year-old marketers lack the viral sense to create massive hooks
“You need to be tapped in with young culture to understand what's funny, and you can have like a thirty-five-year-old marketer who's like Scrolls as much as they want. For some reason, they just won't have the viral sense to come up with hooks that are capable …”