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 5,804 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 130 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
Steinman: CCP intelligence officials likely access DJI's US topography data
“Like if you don't think that senior CCP Intel officials have the ability to just walk into DJI headquarters and be like, give me everything you know about the topography of the United States. Like, you're smoking crack. They probably have access to it right no…”
Steinman: ByteDance's prize is algorithm control to influence US youth
“Yeah, they absolutely want to retain control of the algorithm because that's like the prize is the ability to like inject ideas into the youth of the United States or elsewhere.”
Wealthy founders retiring into passive angel investing is a moral failure
“And they've taken, like, the route of Big Head in Silicon Valley, the HBO show, where they're just kind of, like, resting, investing, just kind of chilling out, making lifestyle decisions while writing angel checks. And that feels like a real moral failure of …”
OnlyFans, online gambling, and dating apps harm society despite feeling good
“Only fans you know, gambling, I think falls in the feels good is bad camp. This is like society has somehow managed to convince ourselves that there's some like freedom of expression or something like that that should be protected. And I agree, like freedom of…”
Authoritarian regimes hold a massive advantage by conscripting elite engineering talent
“They have a massive advantage against democratic governments because they can mandatorily conscript their most talented people into working on the society on society's greatest problems.”
Asparouhov: DOGE's aggressive 'chainsaw' approach is reasonable given 2-year window
“I feel like they're taking, you know, sort of a chainsaw, which is not unreasonable when you need a scalpel because it's just like the scalpel may take too long and the, you know, admin only has two years before like Congress potentially flips. And so it's pro…”
Lessin: VC is in an AI supercycle of lighting money on fire
“I think we are in a super cycle of mimetic venture capital money lighting on fire. In AI right now because, and there's a bunch of structural reasons for it.”
Lessin: OpenAI is trapped in the middle and will lose
“Candidly, even companies like open AI, or should we say nonprofits like open AI, the problem is they're kind of in the middle, you know, they can't compete. With the hyperscalers from just access to capital perspective. If this is a capital game, they're going…”
Lessin: Startups with transformative tech should buy customers, not sell SaaS
“So if you have an actually transformative technology and you can swing it, you're better off buying your customers. Right. And then deploying your technology, but that credit that's predicated on actually having a better technology.”
Lessin: MrBeast's broad, low-income audience creates poor customer lifetime value
“And his audience is so broad and candidly pretty poor, right? Which means that like, they're not great customers, right? Like there's a reason you sell chocolate because it's one of the only things you can sell to everyone that's cheap, right?”
Will Manidis: Legacy healthcare companies will win the AI wave over startups
“Legacy healthcare companies are actually going to be the winners during this wave.”
Carter: US government has no strategic purpose to hold crypto
“There's no strategic purpose to owning crypto at the government level.”
Carter: Crypto Should Shift Away from Real-Time Settlement Toward TradFi Mechanisms
“What I think we should do is take crypto away from being a real-time gross settlement network, or like a bearer asset, a digital bearer asset, and then make it more like the way that traditional finance works.”
Tan: YC founder conference unlocked $10B–$100B in value
“I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. You know, there are about 60 or 70 unicorns represented. And I think that we unlocked, you know, easily 10 to a hundred billion dollars in new market cap like that very night”
Tan: Albedo builds spy satellites superior to the US government
“Albedo is super hardcore because they basically have made spy satellites, but you know, they're better than what the U S government can do. And, you know, they might just replace replace that market for that.”
Maguire: Starlink's 10x cost advantage will replace subsea fiber optics
“Almost all long-range data movements in the future is gonna be done via Starlink, in my opinion. I think Starlink has, like, a 10 X plus cost advantage per gigabyte for long-haul data transmission compared to, say, putting a fiber optic cable line under the oc…”
Maguire: Mars colonization spinoffs will be history's most profitable endeavor
“I am now at the point where I actually, I really believe that Mars is going to Be like one of the biggest profit generating endeavors in history, and not necessarily, not like from the direct Like building a city on Mars, but from all the indirect things”
Rabois: China is ahead of the US in humanoid robotics
“Well, spicy is that look, Chinese are ahead of us and it's very dangerous politically, geopolitically.”
Rabois: Trump administration will find a way to ban Chinese robots
“I would be shocked if this administration doesn't figure out a way to ban Chinese robots before it's too late.”
McCormick: Cancer is probably gone in 10 years
“I think a hot take would be cancer is probably gone in 10 years, I think is one of my favorite hot takes. There's just so many different attacks on it, and CAR T cell therapies are doing well, and it's a matter of kind of scaling, scaling those out.”
Petersen: Get teams working weekends via impossible deadlines, not requests
“The way to get people to work on nights and weekends is not to ask them to work nights and weekends. It's just give them a deadline that can only be met if they work on nights and weekends.”
Altman: Musk uses lawsuits and takeover bids to slow OpenAI down
“I think he's probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. It's, you know, he's working hard, and he's raised a lot of money for XAI, and they're trying to compete with us from a technological perspective, from you know, getting the produ…”
Hims bends rules because GLP-1 cash outweighs risks, says Hays
“Yes, of course they're bending the rules around compounding and like, but they seem to be okay with that risk appetite because they're printing so much cash off of this that they're like, it's one of those situations where they're like, even if we get, you kno…”
Hays: Chinese E-Commerce Coordinates With TikTok to Manipulate US Consumers
“The Chinese companies coordinate to use TikTok as a channel to influence activity in the U S.”
Coogan: DeepSeek R1 Trails OpenAI by 18 Months and Lacks 0-to-1 Innovation
“Basically, you know, for years, that's covered and working on ways to allow language models, like GPT four to solve tasks that involved reasoning, like math and science problems in 20, 21, he launched a project called GPT zero. What did they launch? Deep seek …”
Hays: Nvidia valuation is hard to justify as competitive moats crack
“So at the high level, Nvidia faces an unprecedented convergence of competitive threats that make its premium valuation increasingly difficult to justify at 20 x forward sales and 75% gross margins. The company's supposed moats and hardware software and efficie…”
Hays: Chinese labs have insiders at all major American AI labs
“Well, one thing, but I'm sure Chinese labs Have people inside at all the major American labs, and so anything that is being discovered at the American labs is being ported back.”
Hays: DeepSeek is China's Next Subsidized Tech Trojan Horse Like TikTok
“I'll go out on a limb to say this is China's next attempt at a DJI TikTok type. Product where, hey, let's basically sell this product in America for way less than it costs. Give it away for free. Try to get a bunch of important, you know, companies using it or…”
Hays: Any Important Chinese Tech Company Defaults to CCP Front
“The main thing from my point of view is China has repeatedly shown that they're willing to lie, they're willing to sell things for less than they cost to make in order to get an edge in the U.S. Market, and I do think this is, again, the default state of any i…”
Hayes: Warren takes record finance donations and is 'most toxic politician'
“Elizabeth Warren has, like, taken more money from, like, big finance than, like, any politician in history. Like, she is truly the most toxic politician of all time.”
Hayes: China stalls foreign tech until domestic clones replicate their products
“They will let you come and they will let you build, but they will stall you. They'll kick you off banking rails. They'll do all this stuff to just make it so that you cannot succeed over there until a Chinese clone is able to copy and learn enough about your f…”
Hayes: Jeff Yass funneled millions of dollars into Vivek Ramaswamy's PAC
“Turns out Jeff Yass has funneled millions of dollars into Vivek's pack.”
Jordy Hays: Mayor Bass Stayed in Ghana After Wildfire Briefing
“She was briefed on the fires on Monday, decided to stay in Ghana. ... She was fully briefed.”
Coogan: Developers cannot train AI models on AMD due to software bugs
“Like you literally cannot train a model on their chips because it's so buggy and their software is so bad.”
Jordy Hays is partnering with a robotics startup to film armed robots
“I'm, we're, I'm working with a portfolio company that I won't name yet, but we're going to be able to go. We're, they're going to give it a gun. And we're going to be able to go make some content.”
Tesla and Comma AI possess the only scalable autonomous driving architectures
“You can actually go end to end and have a machine learning model from start to finish, just look at the images and decide what the output should be. Just translate from, if you see this, apply braking pressure. If you see this, apply the accelerator. If you se…”
Hays: Tech Aligned with Republicans Because the Party Became More Pro-Technology
“It became obvious this election cycle that the Republican party was more oriented around technology, right? And big part of that is because some of the biggest donors to the Republican party are technologists, Peter Thiel Elon Musk. And so I think that a lot o…”
Hays: Sequoia Will Make Money on Its X Investment in 10 Years
“I would be willing to bet my house that they'll make money on this investment in 10 years.”
Coogan predicts chip controls and datacenter slowdowns are the likeliest AI brakes
“The big hammer is just chip controls and data center build out, slow down. That's the easiest thing, and I think that's, like, the biggest valve that they're going to be, that we're going to see twisted around to actually slow down capabilities.”
Jordi Hays predicts high-valuation startups will sell at 90% discounts within three years
“We're gonna see this exact same thing play out right now, where there's companies that are around this valuation now that, that three years from now will sell at a 90% discount.”
Coogan: AI created one million US jobs versus 200,000 related layoffs
“Add it all up, and the economist estimates that AI so far has created around one million new jobs in America that easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI since mid-twenty-twenty-three.”
Brockman: Advanced AI Models Bring Curing Diseases Much Closer to Reality
“And I think that talking about curing diseases and new medicines we're going to be able to develop, all of that starts to become much more real when you have models that are at this level of assistance and capability.”
Brockman: 300 million people use ChatGPT for health queries weekly
“If you look at how many people use Chat for Health, three hundred million people every single week. With health queries, right?”
Brockman: OpenAI reached computer-use parity with Astra
“So if you have an AI that can operate that way, and even from the very beginning of OpenAI, we had a dream that one day we could create such an AI, it becomes able to help you across everything that you would be able to do with a computer yourself. And so I th…”
Torre: NBA Settled With Kawhi Leonard to Box Steve Ballmer Out of Arbitration
“When Kawhi Leonard got a slap on the wrist, only 700,000 dollars, no suspension, no voiding of the contract, no nothing. He agreed to a settlement that was quite favorable, and the question was, why? Well, Kawhi Leonard's settlement meant that the arbitration …”
Torre: The Los Angeles Clippers will not sell for $10 billion or more
“My point being that they're not gonna get 12 and a half, they're not gonna get 10”