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 2,353 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 20 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
Asparouhov: Cruz conditioned Isaacman's NASA hearing on supporting the ISS through 2030
“He's finally relented and said, fine, I will set a date, but I want Jared Isaacman, you know, sort of coming out and explicitly saying that he's in support of the ISS going through the end of the decade in support of these commercial space stations.”
Power: Off-the-shelf AI fails in manufacturing because ITAR blocks training data
“Because American manufacturing is largely regulated in ITAR, there is no training data on the internet. So the, one of the reasons why our internal models actually work for manufacturing, you know, machine learning models is because we're the only ones with th…”
Schneider: More money flows directly from firms to journalists in China
“I think the one difference is that there is more money that flows directly from firms to journalists in China. So the sort of discount factor that you have to apply to Chinese technology coverage is, Specifically positive technology coverage or even negative t…”
Schneider: Huawei stockpiled AI chips made at TSMC using shell company
“Huawei was able to manufacture an enormous amount of chips at TSMC by basically creating a shell company, TSMC you know, deciding to look the other way about some Chinese firm manufacturing all these AI chips, and then the US government catching them and be li…”
Anduril leadership frequently warns investors about fake primary allocations
“We've been long time and real investors and they have tweeted a ton about fake allocations in their primary rounds being marketed to investors.”
Sadeghi: 23andMe is not HIPAA compliant
“One of the most shocking things about 23 means is it's actually not HIPAA compliant, right? It doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded.”
Masad: Replit deployed the first AI agent capable of full-stack app creation
“We were the first agent in the market to be able to Configure services, databases, deployment, and go all the way to deploying deploying an app and it kind of transformed our business just in the past seven months.”
Stebbings: AI coding startup Lovable adds $2.5 million in ARR weekly
“They're growing, you know, 2.3 to 2.5 million ARR per week.”
Stebbings: Lovable maintains over 85% retention, beating ChatGPT
“Their retention is better than chat GPTs at over 85%.”
Meta contact called current climate for DTC brands a "bloodbath"
“The second point that I have is from our contact at Meta who described the current climate for DTC brands, at least the growth oriented ones as a quote unquote bloodbath.”
Frank: Sub-$10M e-commerce brand shutdowns have surged since Trump's election
“What we're seeing right now is a wave of shutdowns in smaller sub ten million dollar brands, right? Like that's always been a trend, but it's really ramped up the past like three to probably the past three months since Trump got elected because they just can't…”
Adler: Most US Adversaries Are Building Biological Weapons
“The reality is that, you know, most of our foreign adversaries are building out these laboratories. They're building out these weapons.”
Adler: Dozens of BCI Startups Bypass FDA Using General Wellness Loophole
“A lot of the companies in the space are building brain computer interfaces and trying to circumvent the food and drug administration by trying to fall into this general wellness category. I've seen like dozens of companies do this.”
Jake Adler Cut Holes in His Legs to Demo Wound-Healing Tech
“So on limited time, I had to cut holes in my legs on camera to demonstrate the rapid healing abilities of one of our composites.”
Asparouhov: China Copied Falcon 9 Designs But Still Cannot Land Rockets
“If you look at the, you know, sort of Chinese rockets, they look a hell of a lot like the Falcon nines. And they're still not landing.”
Mercor scaled from $1M to $100M in revenue in two years
“And then fast forward two years, we scaled from one to a hundred million in revenue, and so we're only 21 and running this really exciting company that's working with most of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley.”
Joe Weisenthal: The anticipated Trump M&A green light has not materialized
“This expectation that the new administration was going to be sort of this, like, at least on the regulatory side, or at least on the deal side, the sort of like libertarian green light, everything is not really panned out.”
Weisenthal: FTC Chair Ferguson is keeping Lina Khan's merger guidelines
“And it's interesting because he's keeping Lena Khan's merger guidelines in place.”
Online car buyers are largely subprime consumers using it as last resort
“First of all, I learned that online car buyers
By a large percentage are subprime car buyers, right?
Subprime consumers.
They can't otherwise get approved anywhere else, and this is sort of their last resort.”
Bartlett: Sovereign wealth replaced pensions and endowments in mega VC funds
“I think if you talk to smart endowments or pension plans or stuff, they, they've definitely as fund sizes have gotten to three, four, five, six billion dollars. Like those people have raised eyebrows and maybe voted with their feet to either scale down or walk…”
Megafund 'relievers out of the bullpen' are driving up startup prices
“I've probably seen more of Hey, this fund has a bunch of money and you might not be getting their number one person. It could be their, you know, whatever, their reliever out of the bullpen that's coming in to do the round. And those are the ones that they're …”
Steinman: Twitter buyout documents revealed foreign intelligence operated inside the company
“I mean, you can read the papers that came out of like the Twitter buyout, you know, transition to X, and they basically are like, yeah, we had foreign intel services, foreign governments, like operating inside
You know, ex formerly known as Twitter.”
Mares: Exercise and sleep treat chronic conditions better than pharmaceuticals
“If you look at studies, they show that exercise, sleep supplements, all these things actually work better for treating many chronic conditions than, you know, SSRIs or any such sort of other like pharmaceutical intervention.”
Mares: Average American food is 40% to 70% less nutrient dense than 50 years ago
“Like, you know, the average American's food is something like between 40 and 70% less nutrient dense than it was even just 50 years ago.”
Asparouhov: DOGE fired NOAA sensing team, then rehired them a week later
“They laid off a bunch of, like, the NOAA commercial, remote commercial sensing team, and then there was a huge, you know, sort of backlash, and so some of those people got rehired, like, a week after getting fired by, you know, sort of Doge and crew.”
Asparouhov: China relies on mass manufacturing over reusable rocket technology
“On the Chinese side, they don't have anything that is anywhere close to landing, but they're clearly just willing to throw manufacturing and bodies at the problem where I think it's something like SpaceX has launched 27 times so far this year. China has basica…”
Mignano: Many explosive AI startups suffer from very high customer churn
“With a lot of these explosive high ARR companies that we've seen over the past couple of years with AI, it's not really a secret. You guys have probably heard of this as well. Many of them are very, very churning, right? They churn very quickly.”
Lessin: MrBeast spent more on his Amazon show than his $100M deal
“Like, you know, the, you know, everyone's excited that he gets a hundred million dollar Amazon contract, but then he spends more than that on the show, right?”
Garry Tan: VCs hard-allocate over $1B yearly to Y Combinator companies
“The other thing is I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just, like, hard allocated to YC companies, ah, not from us, from, like, you know, Hundreds of VCs who now are all coming back to Demo Day in droves.”
Doricko: Rainmaker supplies water more cheaply than desalination
“We can bring water more cost-effectively than even desalination.”
Hays: Humanoid Robot Startup Raising at $40B With One Customer
“And we got humanoid robot companies with one customer raising at forty billion.”
Ferrari has a documented history of suing its own customers
“There's a history of Ferrari suing their own customers, which is like, Unheard of, right? All business, all traditional business advice is don't sue your customers.”
Ferrari 12Cilindri sales suffer as buyers reject massive immediate depreciation
“And so they're hitting this wall where they've now seen terrible sales on the cylindry, 12 cylindry car because people are like, I'm not going to spend 700 K on this car. That's going to, you know, have terrible depreciation. And you're not even giving me conf…”
Coogan: SSI Pledges No Product Releases Before Achieving Superintelligence
“So they have pledged not to release a product until it has achieved a safe super intelligence.”
Coogan: The De Minimis Exemption Fueled the US Fentanyl Epidemic
“This has also played a significant role in the fentanyl epidemic,”
Luke Farritor Has Read Access to US Treasury Payment Flows for DOGE
“He has read access to the U S treasury and payments flow and has been doing a whole bunch of data science and machine learning to understand where money is going in the government.”
Coogan: DeepSeek V3 Was ~45x More Training-Efficient Than Competitors
“V-III remains the top ranked open weights model despite being around 45 X more efficient in training than its competition.”
Coogan: Anthropic has an unreleased chain-of-thought model
“Like anthropic does have a chain of thought model. They just haven't released it publicly. And the reason for that is just financials and like their safety stuff.”
Coogan: Nvidia booked $7.7B in Singapore chip sales in Q3 2024
“In the three months ended October, 27, 20, 24. So like deep chip ban, just not last quarter, but the quarter before Q three 7.7 billion dollars of chips to Singapore. And it's like, Singapore's not buying that many chips.”
Coogan: DeepSeek-V2 matched near-GPT-4 performance with one-twentieth the FLOPs
“DeepSeq V-II training required one-twentieth as much energy, essentially, one-twentieth the flops of GPT-IV, while not being far off in performance.”
Coogan: High-Flyer Quant Stockpiled 10,000 Nvidia GPUs Before US Bans
“High Flyer Quant managed to buy more than 10,000 NVIDIA graphics processing units before the U.S. Government imposed the chip bans, according to a local media outlet.”
Coogan: Stargate $500B figure represents total cost of ownership not upfront capex
“We believe this project is being measured on the total cost of ownership, not capital expenditures, i.e. The one hundred billion and the five hundred billion is TCO, which includes the capital expenditures for data centers, servers, Networking costs, power cos…”
Hays: Nvidia captures over 100% of all AI industry profits
“Nvidia is the real winner here. You've said it before, they have more than a hundred percent of all the profits in AI right now.”
Hays: Stargate consortium lacks even 20% of $500B committed
“It's clear to everyone involved that they certainly don't have 20% of the five hundred billion just sitting in an account. Like, that money has clearly not been committed.”
Coogan: AI training scaling laws show diminishing returns since GPT-4
“When you 10 X the energy and tokens and data and all the work on the training, you do get a smarter model, but the increases have been diminishing. So as you spend 10 times more, It, you don't get the same increase from GPT three to GPT four.”
Hays: Karen Bass Was an Active Communist Working With Cuba in the 1970s
“Karen Bass was the target. It turns out her political career, well, I guess this was just the beginning of her political career. She was a very active communist working directly with the Cuban government in the seventies.”
Hays: LA Mayor Karen Bass strategized with communists in 1970s Cuba
“In the seventies her favorite trip was to Cuba where she would go and she would coordinate. I'm forgetting the exact name of the group, the extremist group that she was a part of, but she would coordinate with the Cuban government to sort of strategize on brin…”