The Minutes is a record of what public figures actually said: the words
themselves, the moment they were said, and a link to the source. It covers
investors, executives and policymakers across podcasts, video, television,
speeches, the press and their own posts. When someone makes a claim in the
eighteenth minute of a two-hour conversation, that claim is hard to find
later and easy to misquote. This is an attempt to fix that.
The name is the old one for the written record of a meeting: not a report
of what happened and not an opinion about it, but an account of what was
said, kept so it can be checked afterwards. Every page here is the minutes
of one person — The Minutes of Gavin Baker, and so on down the
roster.
It is not a news summary and it is not commentary. Nothing here tells you
what to think about a claim. Each entry gives you one line saying what the
point was, the speaker's own words underneath it in quotation marks, and a
timestamp that takes you to the second it was said so you can check it
yourself. Where a person's position on a topic has moved, both statements
are shown side by side with the gap between them, and you can read them and
decide what it means.
House rules
Quotes are verbatim. A quote is a continuous stretch of
the transcript. It is never tidied, never shortened in the middle, and
never has words put into it.
Every quote has a source and a timestamp. If we cannot
point at where and when something was said, it does not go on the site.
Every quote is checked by machine. Some of it is also checked
by a person. Every quote is verified character for character
against the transcript before it can appear, automatically. Editorial
review is a queue we work through, not a gate everything passes first,
so a quote can be on the page before a person has read it. Anything
suggesting someone changed their mind does need explicit approval
before it appears.
We link out and do not host audio. The full recording
belongs to whoever made it. We send you there.
Summaries and themes are ours. The one-line summary
above a quote, and the sentence describing a theme, are written by us.
They are never inside quotation marks, because they are not what the
person said.