Venture capital, startups and investing, on tape.

Every prediction, opinion and bold claim from TBPN: extracted from the transcript, verified against the tape, checked against cited public sources, playable at the exact moment it was said.

2,353 assertions1,069 opinions1,057 insights813 predictions469 disclosures43 what-ifs

Recently on the ledger full ledger →

Assertion Partly supported
Torre: Kawhi Leonard was contracted for $48M from Aspiration to do nothing
“And what they say and what they provide in the tonnage of all the reporting I did for months, seven months before we came out with part one of the series one year ago today, was documentation that attested to the fact that Kawhi Leonard was paid According to t…”
Pablo Torre Sep 3, 2026 ▶ 4:19 Pablo Torre Explains the Steve Ballmer & Kawhi Leonard Scandal
Assertion Supported
Torre: Steve Ballmer used four companies to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard
“And I say that because, according to the NBA's investigation and my own, this was not merely a scheme that he ran to funnel money with one company aspiration. He did it with four. He did it with the scoreboard manufacturer, multi-million dollar deal for Kawhi …”
Pablo Torre Sep 3, 2026 ▶ 7:23 Pablo Torre Explains the Steve Ballmer & Kawhi Leonard Scandal
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Andreessen: D.C. Officials Told VCs Not to Fund AI Startups
“They said, look, AI, AI is one of these technology, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, don't start, don't do AI startups. Like, don't fund…”
Marc Andreessen Mar 3, 2026 ▶ 22:28 Anthropic v. DoW, Paramount wins WB, OpenAI raises $100B | Diet TBPN
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Andreessen: Biden Officials Told VCs Not to Fund AI Startups
“They actually said flat out to us, don't start, don't do AI startups. Like, don't fund AI startups. Let's not, Something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point. They basically said AI is going to be a ga…”
Marc Andreessen Mar 2, 2026 ▶ 34:25 FULL BREAKDOWN: Trump BANS Anthropic
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Andreessen: Officials Warned Government May Classify Mathematics Behind AI
“They literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and, like, entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed and that if we decide we need to, we're go…”
Marc Andreessen Mar 2, 2026 ▶ 35:00 FULL BREAKDOWN: Trump BANS Anthropic
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bishop: CIA allegedly financed promotions for rising Chinese PLA officers
“And this was and there are, there's been certainly, I don't think it's been in the media, but I'd certainly heard that among the funders of some of these officers in years past was our America CIA, because it was a great way to push people in and, you know, ev…”
Bill Bishop Feb 10, 2026 ▶ 12:31 FULL INTERVIEW: Bill Bishop Thinks China’s Military is Still Deeply Corrupt

How the calls resolved the full record →

Assertion Supported
Coogan: Ken Griffin bought a Stegosaurus fossil at Sotheby's for $44.6M
“Sotheby's is to auction a sixty-seven million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex two years after it sold a stegosaurus fossil to hedge fund owner Ken Griffin for 44.6 million.”
John Coogan May 30, 2026 ▶ 17:49 New Glenn Explodes, Enterprise AI Enters ROI Era, The Dinosaur Fossil Boom | Diet TBPN
Assertion Contradicted
Europe has not produced a hundred-billion-dollar company in fifty years
“It really captures, like, why there's no hundred billion dollar company in Europe that was started in the last, like, 50 years or something like that.”
Jordi Hays Dec 12, 2024 ▶ 1:14:48 Billionaires XMAS list (ep21)
Assertion Supported
Wen: There is no cap on US O-1 extraordinary ability visas
“There's no cap to it. As long as you meet their bar for and convince USCIS that you're extraordinary, you can get it.”
Sigil Wen May 31, 2025 ▶ 2:28:23 Weekend Special: Elon Recap, Balaji, Chris Dixon, Brian Armstrong, Crypto Day + Thiel Fellows
Assertion Contradicted
Coogan: No frontier model has been trained on older than 5nm hardware
“No frontier model to date has been trained on hardware older than five nanometer.”
John Coogan Mar 6, 2026 ▶ 22:54 Daniel Gross’ AGI predictions, SpaceX IPO news, Trump takes control of US chip exports | Diet TBPN

Open predictions the full timeline →

78days Gerstner: California wealth tax will fail and asset protection referendum will pass Brad Gerstner · prediction date: 2026-11-30 109days Shotwell: SpaceX will achieve orbit and second-stage recovery with Starship this year Gwynne Shotwell · prediction date: 2026-12-31 109days AMP will bring several billion dollars of compute online in 2026 Anjney Midha · prediction date: 2026-12-31 109days Vaynerchuk: China will do $1 trillion in live commerce GMV this year Gary Vaynerchuk · prediction date: 2026-12-31

Track records all people →

Ordered by full support rate, then by supported count. Minimum three resolved. Partly supported claims count as resolved but not as fully supported, same as everywhere on the ledger.

PersonEpsStatementsSupportedPartly supportedContradictedFull support rate
Tyler Denk 1 10 9 0 0 100%
Jake Adler 1 17 7 0 0 100%
Marc Andreessen 4 44 6 0 0 100%
Car Dealership Guy 1 16 6 0 0 100%
Mike Isaac 1 11 5 0 0 100%
Ted Feldmann 1 18 5 0 0 100%
John Gedmark 1 13 5 0 0 100%
Eric Ries 1 13 4 0 0 100%

From the Wisdom Wall all quotes →

“What AI can't do is grow up in a terrible home. A.I. can't have a broken heart.”

“The moment that a company, an industry, wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate, is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would…”

“It's where all the value in space truly lies. But in order to exploit that value to the fullest, you need a few other things. The first thing is unfettered access to space. So you need your own…”

Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 500 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.