Sam. We came to this world. To reach the stars. To shape our future. We came to feel the new. It. You're watching TVPN. Today is December 16th, Tuesday, 2020. Merry Christmas. Oh, oh oh. We are live from the TVP and ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, the north pole. The north pole of net income. Ramp time is money. Save both, save both. Easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. You know what to get for that loved one in your life this Christmas. Get them on ramp. Introduce them to a ramp sdr. They will appreciate it. It's the gift that keeps on giving. It really is. Anyway, you know what else is the gift that keeps on giving? Hiring a storyteller. Which apparently is the hottest topic in Silicon Valley. Thanks to our friend Katie Dayton over at the Wall Street Journal, who made this go mega viral by posting an article in the Wall Street Journal all about how startups are hiring storytellers. Companies are desperately seeking storytellers is the headline. Of course we are going to dive into it. Jordy wrote a take. If you have a storyteller, you want to tell a story, why don't you tell it on all of the streaming platforms simultaneously with Restream One livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com Storytelling is the only way to impose meaning on abundance, says Signal. Coherence on noise, legitimacy on power, strategy, ops and capital are all downstream. Without narrative control, none of it will ever stick. This has been one of the core premise of my account. In a world of infinite output, story is the scarce primitive. He's a very good writer. Signal whoever can compress chaos into something people can feel, remember, forgive and rally around actually runs the system. This skill is worth more than the entire C suite combined. Okay, so lay off the CEO, the cfo, the ctmo. You just need a storyteller. You're good to go. Is that the pitch? No. People are having fun with this one. What was your take, Jordy? Break it down. So I frame this. How do you process this? I mean, should we read through the article briefly or at least summarize it? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So Katie writes, companies are desperately seeking storytellers. Brands trying to wrest great greater control from their narratives are seeking storytelling skill sets without a camp campfire in sight. Maybe some of them have a have a warm hearth like we do. Anyways, Corporate America's latest campfire thing. Normally you'd be telling a story, oh. Around a campfire yeah, that makes sense. I usually think of smoking cigars around campfires. That's what I associate. Mostly focused on the cigars. But you like to yap between puff. I do, I do. Corporate America's latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history Storytellers. Some companies want a media relations manager by a flashier name. Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelist playwrights as storytellers, a Google job ad said last month, we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long term growth. The listing sought a customer storytelling manager to join the company's Google Cloud storytelling team. That sounds like a fantastic opportunity. In another life, personally, I'd be on the Google cloud storytelling team. In some ways we are. One article the unit published this year was titled Lowe's Innovation How Vertex AI Helps Create Interactive Shopping Experiences. Microsoft Security Organization, meanwhile, is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling. Described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator and part marketer. Sure. Vanta is also hiring a storyteller Notion head of storytelling. That's right, productivity apps Notion recently merged its comm, social media and influencer functions into one 10 person team, a so called storytelling team. And so anyways, Katie goes on and on. She talks about how more and more of these listings are popping up. They're growing year over year. They're showing up in earnings calls. Yeah, and I went, I have a. Different take on this. I think as soon as there's a Wall Street, I mean we love Katie, but as soon as there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a trend, the trend is effectively dead. And so there is no more alpha in hiring storytellers. You need to hire a yarn spinner. You need to hire a fabilist, someone who will go around to group chats and tell wild lies about your product, your company, how successful you are. You recruit this person and then they go around seeding little anecdotes, little tall tales, and they spin yarns. I think that's called securities fraud. I don't know. It certainly depends. Maybe if there's no securities changing hands. Anyway, so by telling tall tales, I. Tried to find a storyteller from a long time ago and I found none other than the legend Steve Clayton. He's currently vice president of Microsoft's communication strategy. But back in 2010, what was he hired for the chief storyteller? No way. They were using that term 15 years ago, he held that title. Feels like a very modern term. He held that title from 2010 to June 2021. And he says, in this role I led a team of 40 who engage in a wide variety of storytelling inside and outside Microsoft. And anyways goes on and on. I was trying to also kind of understand the. From like the early 1900s to the 1950s, you had copywriters like that. It was, it was like pretty elite to be a copywriter. This was like a high status job you were using. Don Draper isn't Don Draper. He was a creative director, but also a writer. And the people that he worked with were copywriters. Because at that time print media, you could. Being able to use your words to get people to take action that you want, that you benefit from is a very elite skill set at some point. One more example that I mentioned earlier, early storytellers in Silicon Valley, Guy Kawasaki, he was one of Apple's employees originally responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line. In 1984 he actually popularized the word evangelist in marketing the Macintosh as an Apple evangelist and the concepts of evangelism, marketing and technology, evangelism, platform evangelism in general. And he became this idea of word of mouth marketing. Not quite storytelling, different keyword around it. But he was also sort of one of the early turning points in Internet marketing. Anyway. Yeah, around that time you started to get content strategists, right? Yeah. And if you look back to the. To the 80s and 90s, it was about. That was kind of like the boom of brand strategy, brand identity. Think like the Nike era of marketing. Biology recently went viral because there was a clip from an older podcast that was re reposted on. Axe went viral and it was his take a few years ago during the creator economy boom and arguing that companies need a founding creator or like a. Or like a co founder in resident. It was higher than creator in residence. It was like. It was like on the co founding team you should have a CTO and then you should have a creator. And it was like, you know, it's an interesting thought experience, probably good for some companies, maybe not good for every company. You know, like any piece of tech advice or wisdom, you know, there's going to be a variety of cases where it makes sense. But it went viral and everyone was saying like, oh, this is so. It's. He's so behind. And I was. And I had to correct someone. I was like no, no, no. Like that clip is actually a couple of years old. He. When he was saying it, it wasn't. So it was sort of interesting that way. Early insight. Yeah. Anyways, I wrote a piece for the newsletter today at tpp, and of course I titled it, you Don't Need a Storyteller said according to a friend of the show, Katie at the Wall Street Journal, companies are desperate to hire storytellers. Hiring a storyteller is not a new phenomena. But it makes sense that companies feel the need to hire them right now. Why? Because it's never been more obvious that the best storytellers in the world create billions of dollars of value for their companies and create massive advantages using only their words. Their words are so powerful that no matter where they appear on the Internet, they draw millions of views and create a vortex of talent, capital, and customers. Yeah, yeah. There's this thing where, like, if you have a hot take, you don't actually need to own the platform. Platform. You can just go do a circuit. Of appearances, a podcast tour. Anyways, I'll continue. So the reality distortion field that emerges. Emerges often results in 100 XP ratios. Of course, every company in the world wants this. The problem is that it's impossible to hire the most elite storytellers because they are founders. Think Elon Karp and Palmer. New Coinage alert. I call these types Joe Rogan CEO. Right. You know, if you have a Joe Rogan CEO, it's fine. If you don't, there's great CEOs that are not Joe Rogan CEOs. Yep. But there's a certain type of CEO that's a Joe Rogan CEO. And to, to be clear, you're not saying that the, that the CEO has to have the same esthetics as Joe Rogan or the same style even. Karp has not been on Joe Rogan. That's true. You know that if he went on, you would crush. It would be a. It would be a electric slam. It'd be electric. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. So it's more about being able to put on a performance in that particular environment. Can you capture people's attention for three hours? Yeah, just like rambling, basically. Whereas there have been CEOs that have gone on Joe Rogan successfully, but they just haven't delivered a Joe Rogan experience. And I think if you think about, I think if you think about like early stage founders who, who would deliver, who would go on and just crush Joe Rogan just like immediately comes to mind. You know who these people are. And there's, there's CEOs, founder CEOs of his generation. He's a JRC that are amazing, even though they wouldn't necessarily. They're not necessarily a JJRC is a JRC. So I continue. The Internet is noisier than ever, with thousands of startups competing for mindshare. When every startup has a great launch video, no one does. And yet these storytellers consistently break through and dominate the timeline. Even though Genai allows marketing teams big and small to massively increase their output, it is often not even 1% as effective as one of these elite storyteller founders going on a podcast or just posting stream of consciousness on X. The white pill for savvy marketing teams is that even as we're seeing an exponential increase in content production, I'm not sure we're seeing an exponential increase in great ideas. That means that companies large and small that don't have the luxury of having an Elon or Palmer on the payroll still have a chance to break through the noise and be remembered. As I was personally reflecting on 2025, there were only a handful of like truly corporate storytelling moments that I remember, and each of them worked for different reasons. One don't work at Anduril. Iconic campaign. Palmer makes like a cameo in it, but he's not the star. He's just like a. He's like a kind of. He's just like a character in it. But it's. You could remove Palmer and the ad would like still carry weight. I thought that was one of the best campaigns of the year. The other one was Astronomer. Their reaction to the crisis and the viral moment they had. The campaign is titled thank you for your interest in Astronomer. It obviously featured Gwyneth Paltrow. I think this one will be studied in 10 years. It was like really a perfect reaction to that moment. And I did not know Astronomer before then. I do now. I will never forget them. I thought Ramp's expenses should do themselves with Saquon. That one was this combination of like, luck, incredible execution and timing and ultimately it just like having the Eagles got it done and that like was the cherry on top. It was a great campaign. It was a great first super bowl commercial for them. Next is Keep Thinking from Anthropic. It felt like very Apple inspired. They even had the piano crashing and then sort of like reversing up, right? Oh yeah. Which I felt was a reference to that iPad ad in some way. And then finally Avi Schiffman's campaign, which I call Buy Every Billboard. He literally bought every billboard. We've talked about this before, but near our office there was a Billboard that you could only see like a third of it. You could only see it say end.com because it was just facing. It was like 10ft away from a apartment building. And so I said, Friend did something absurd, which we can call the buy every billboard strategy. Many people criticize the campaign in the product, but the results from an awareness standpoint are undeniable. Avi spent 1 to 2 million, was my estimate, and became a household name, at least on the coast. And a lot of other brands have spent like 10 times that amount. And you don't even know who they are. Right? You wouldn't. Somebody could rattle off a handful of them. You'd be like, what? I'm actually not familiar. So that pain was notable to me because I think if you utilize that for the right product, it could be super impactful. Right? It could have. You know, I don't know if that campaign transformed Friend as a business, but it certainly put them on the map. And I think, like, it's very possible that billboards can have increasing returns to scale. So you might buy two billboards. Not really see any noticeable, like lift and awareness and attention and traffic, but if you buy like 200, it's sort of undeniable. You can't miss it. I kept. Well, we had a great result with literally two billboards. Could have just been one, basically just one billboard. But we were able to get a lot of photos taken of it. And so it broke through in a very interesting way. And so we probably got way more value out of that just because it was such a small. Just one billboard. And then Avi went the opposite direction and bought every billboard. When he came on the show and was like, it's the biggest billboard campaign in history, I was like, there's no way. And then I saw it everywhere and I was like, okay, maybe it is. But I thought it would. It cost more than a million dollars to get that big of a billboard buy. I thought a billboard buy of that scale would be like 10 million or 20 million, but I guess not. I guess I know he didn't spend that much because he hasn't raised that much. He hasn't raised that much. But I don't know. He also. He was like financing his dot com, so is there possible, is it possible that he has like financing agreement to like pay these billboards down over time or something? Like, I don't know about that. You can finance a domain because the domain gets held in like third party custody. And so if somebody stops making payments, you just claw back the domain yeah. Whereas billboards is like you ran the ads, you took the spot of another advertiser that could have been cash today. So I don't really know about that. I wouldn't be surprised if avi's levered up in more ways than one. That. Anyways, I said hiring a storyteller to craft narratives and tell your story internally and externally is fine, but if the goal is to be remembered and you lack a Joe Rogan CEO, remember that one great campaign is worth 10,000 posts. And yeah, I would just like to see people, companies, instead of, you know, frantically just trying to make a lot of noise in a bunch of random ways as you go into 2026. How do you have one breakout moment campaign and truly be remembered? I like that. Yeah, that's interesting. I have more to say about that. But first let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers develop and fine tune models of serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Yeah, I'm trying to square the problem that these job posts are trying to solve. So in the Wall Street Journal article it says the percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the US that include the term storyteller doubled in the year ending November 26th. I guess to include some 50,000 listings under marketing and more than 20,000 job listings under media and communications that mentioned the term storyteller. Storytelling executives on earnings calls and investor days mentioned it 469 times relative, which is like three times as much as 10 years ago. So clearly, clearly people are, you know, business leaders are interested in storytelling both as a, you know, a narrative for investors, but also as an actual physical job. But I'm wondering, like, you get in the seat, it does feel like a little bit of what this, what this story is, what this Journal article is saying is like, is like you're going to be storytelling every single day. It's kind of counter to what, which I guess is what your whole point was, but it's very much counter to your point of like one big campaign, one breakthrough idea. And I'm wondering just like, I don't know, is there a world where you need both, where you need inspiration, but you still need like, you know, at a certain point? You know, there was an example here. It's like, you know, they did a Lowe's case study on how Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences. Like, is that going to be the. Standout, standout moment for me this year from Microsoft? Was Satya saying, I'm happy to be a leaser. Yeah, I'M good for my. I'm good for my 80 billion. Yeah. So when you think about when I, you know, I think, what does that. Do for Lowe's partnership? You know, like, if you're like. Like, this was actually Google's cloud storytelling team. They publish an article, and so if they just have to get out a blog post, maybe there is some benefit to just, like, shifting their mindset to at least being like, hey, instead of just doing, like, a list of facts, like, why don't you try and, like, tell it like a story? Meaning, like, three act, structure, conflict resolution, characters, antagonists. Like, you know, like. Because, like, a lot of it sounds like a low bar. They didn't want Lowe's to have efficient cloud infrastructure. They didn't want the shopping experiences to be interactive. But then Google came in and changed it up and changed up the game. Yeah, I mean, that is a little bit of it. You know, if I'm at a big company, if I'm an employee at a big company, it would be cool to have a re. Like a centralized resource that's like, here's how we talk about this product. Here's how we talk about our mission. Here's how we talked about. Talk about our roadmap in the near term and the medium term and the long term. Right. But ultimately that when you think of the companies that are great at storytelling, it is because a CEO is a great storyteller. Yes. I mean, yeah, there's two. I would argue that Apple, who's historically been an amazing storyteller, is not currently an incredible storyteller, because Tim cook is like 11 out of 10 operationally. And he's not the guy to go on Joe. He's not. Like, I don't see Tim Cook popping up on a bunch of. They're also paying him enough to go do extra stuff. Like, if you're making that type of money, you're not gonna be like, yeah, I'm gonna go work on the weekends. You're gonna. Five o' clock rolls around. Exactly. You're bailing, you're bailing. But no. So. So again, and that's not. It hasn't mattered. Like, he's told the story through the company's performance, which is that he is one of the most elite operators. Last night's history. Last night, I feel like we had dinner with a great storyteller, and he told us his entire life story. And what was interesting and why I thought it was a really great story was two things. Like, one, the facts of the story. Just the Truth was a lot of up and down, a lot of conflict. Yeah. It was rivet. It was riveting. Failure wins. He's the protagonist. But they were antagonists, and there were. And there were mentors and trials and tribulations. Like, it really did fit the hero's journey. So the facts were there, and you could go fact check them and be like, oh, yeah, there were. There were these story points, but then also, the way he told the story didn't hide those. There wasn't. There's another version of that story where he only tells you the good moments in the story, and he doesn't tell you about any of the trial and tribulations. And we're like, okay, yeah, we get it. You're successful. You know, it's boring. Yeah. Instead we were like, whoa, like, another. Another downturn, another up, another swing. It was emotional. It was a roller coaster. It was a great story. And I feel like if. If there. If there's anything that comes out of, like, the storyteller era of corporate marketing, it should be giving marketers, writers, storytellers permission to actually inject conflict into their marketing materials. Yeah. Look at the way that Palmer responded to that Journal piece about how Andrew had a fire at one of their test sites. Right. He was like, yes, we had a. I'm paraphrasing, but it was effectively, yes, we had a fire at the. At the missile test site or whatever. At the explosives test site. Right. Like, yes, we. And he was trying to do that. He was. He was. He was trying to do that in the Journal article when he clearly. When he was talking to them. But they. They pulled out moments where it was like, we fail a lot. Yeah. Whereas Palmer was trying to tell a good story, which is like, yeah, we fail a lot because we test a lot, and we're trying to iterate faster than our competitors, and through that, we'll succeed. So, yeah. I don't know. I wonder what the net impact of that Journal article will be. Yeah, Ultimately. Ultimately, I think tech needs to fall, like, fall in love with advertising again. Advertising is amazing. Like, I want to see companies hiring advertising specialists, Somebody that. That's funny. Somebody that is just focused on doing really great advertising. Right. Not just like, you know, I think. I think this gets lost because we're in this era of rapid testing, iterating through a bunch of assets, you know, volume. Right. You see this with, you know, companies that say, like, yeah, we just need to create 100 new ads for Meta every single week forever. And we're trying to get to 200. Right. But in that it can oftentimes get lost of like, what. What story are we telling? Right. Like what is the. What is the through line between all this noise that we're creating and all this attention that we're getting? Yeah. Numeral compliance. Handle numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. Do you think companies. We have some. Ben made some new sound effects. Let's have a couple. List just got a bit longer. What was that one? Santos Naughty. List just got a bit longer. There's a couple other good ones. You're surrounded by enemy snowmen. Walk it down. You're surrounded by enemy snowmen. Hostile drummer boy. On your six. Take the shot. Hostile drummer boy. Very funny. Friendly reindeer in back. Friendly reindeer inbound. I like it. Really fun. Anyways, so do you think it's going to be hard for companies to hire great storytellers? Ties here. Bronco says the Venn diagram of people who get tech get people can explain complex things simply and can make people care is tiny. So will these folks be. I think a lot of these, I think a lot of these people actually are at advertising agencies. And if you're Coca Cola, you've been working with hundreds of advertising agencies for decades and decades and decades. Right. This has worked well for them. You're bringing in new ideas, new perspectives, you're hiring. It can be great to say, hey, we're gonna give this agency like $100,000, but in exchange, we're gonna get a great campaign out of it. Right. So I just think people need to know what they actually want. I think what they want is to be remembered and to be thought about and to be, you know, have certain ideas associated with their company. Right. And I think just people that are like, oh, we want to be remembered. We should hire a storyteller. I don't think that's gonna work really that well. Right. Because I mean, for. Again, just because like in order to. It's about like cutting, cutting through the noise. Like you need an idea that is so good, like don't work at Anduril that it will just break out and people will remember it. Right. And people will watch a two minute ad. Yeah. There's a little bit of like the. Just like, you know, the story still has to be. We're talking about. We're not talking about yarn spinners. We're talking about actual real stories that potentially could be fact checked. And so you do have to do a little bit of the hard work to actually deliver Some facts and some story points. Which is probably why it's extremely hard to tell a compelling story as like a seed stage company. Because you're a young company. That's why usually your story leans on like your backstory, like how you grew up or what you were doing before, why you quit that big cushy job to go out into, cross into the unknown and become the intrepid entrepreneur. I was reflecting on Keller at Zipline as having a great story this year in particular, that sort of manifested itself in Zipline's solarpunk style launch video. And Keller going around on different shows, coming on our show multiple times and talking about the progress of the business. But a lot of that story is just the fact that he's been running the business for a decade and it's now finally working. And it's this thing that the story of drone delivery was told a decade ago. Like, I remember in San Francisco, people were saying there was somebody who was like building a drone delivery company as like a small startup and it would basically just be like a DJI drone that he would just like clip it to and like fly it to you. Like. But it was like, well, an example. Also in the drone space of good storytelling is the nearest guys. So like Soren, for example, when he comes on, he's like, yeah, I was competitive. Drone racer. Yeah. It immediately doesn't matter that he's like young and doesn't have the most experience in the category. Yeah. But you're like, okay, the guy that is making killer drones, you probably want him to be one of the best in the world at actually flying. Yeah, I completely agree with that. The hard part is that like, if you're, if you don't have that background, if you don't have the plot points, if you don't have plot, then no amount of storyteller hiring can fix that if you have a boring plot. So you got to go do things. It's easier to be a great storyteller if you have motion than if you have aura. It is. But also, yeah, I don't know. Plot points. Plot points are. Things happen. Things like facts occur. Like, you know, things you know. Soren actually competed as a drone racer. Like, aura motion, that ties to it. But it's really. You're saying that adds to the aura. Right. If you think about if Soren rewind a little bit, he starts fundraising for his company. Yeah. Like that. That kind of just by that that gives him a huge advantage. If that's just circulating of like, there's a New startup raising and the founders were competitive. Drone race. Yeah. I mean even, even just like being on your second company, having sold your first company, that's just a plot point. No, no storyteller can come in and say like, hey, why don't we go tell everyone that you sold your last company for a billion dollars? It's like, yeah, that would make your story better, but it's not a fact, so you can't use it. Yeah, there's always, you know, there's always something to latch onto. I think about with the Ridge Wallet guys, they never raise money. There was never any hype surrounding the business. And like, as a storyteller, everyone's a storyteller. So when I introduce them to people, I'd be like, you should talk to Sean and Connor. Yeah, They've bootstrapped this business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and profit by being truly elite marketers. And that like, creates like a catalyst for people to be like, wow, I'm paying attention now. So yeah. Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Ali is chiming in. She says, wow, 23k likes. She says, tech bro obsessed with storytelling, but hasn't read a book in the last five years. Probably not a good sign. A lot of the classic stories have been told again and again and again and go back to the classics. Instead of a launch video, somebody should just write an announcement in the full hero's journey. That actually sort of works. I mean, I would use the story circle when I would write YouTube videos. Dan Harmon's story Circle, it's basically like a three act structure but in eight parts. And so there's like the crossing into the void. I would try and map out like, you know, all the different story beats pretty deliberately and try and map them on there. It's hard though. I would like to see a launch post written in verse. Ooh, getting back into poetry. Yeah, I mean homeric. You should maybe drop an epic poem like a true, true, like thousand page book of poetry. Or you could drop 20 haikus on your startup. Yeah. Graphite.dev code review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. This really did become the current thing. There's a clue. Eric Zaworski says there's a big clue in the middle of the viral Wall Street Journal article by Dolly Dayton that explains why the people who would otherwise crush the role of storyteller, the hot new job at hot startups, rarely get the Gig in the end, as designer Stefan Sagmeister Observed back in 2014, it's all the people who are not storytellers who now suddenly want to be storytellers. Interesting. Says every so often an article like this drops. Remember, brand's the new moat or taste can't be taught. That lays bare the repackaging of an often taken for granted concept in communication human to human relation, just enough that it entices reaction discourse. Today, it's the idea that stories are telling stories is an important function of extending the lifespan of companies. A familiar debate on the timeline. Many are correctly pointing out that this is nothing new. Marketing 101 always has been. Jpg tier stuff. So how did storytelling and an idea fundamental to our existence get Rubik's Cubed into a novel optimization strategy? That is funny. Rubik's Cubed is good. Yeah, I just think a title like this would. I think a good test if you're trying to hire for a role like this is would the person be. Do they want the title storyteller or would they be okay with the title copywriter? Right. Because in my view, if you're hiring somebody to be a storyteller, their job is to like, write down words in a structured, impactful way and help the entire organization, like share those words in a consistent manner. And I would say a lot of the people, a lot of people want the title creative director, but do they want to be a project manager? No, they want to be a creative Director. Right. There's just like a status associated with that. There's maybe a status associated with Storyteller, but at the end of the day, if you're trying to hire for this, do you want somebody that is obsessed with writing? You should be willing to take the job of storyteller. If I come to you and you say you want to work for me as a storyteller, I say I'm going to start you off with a title fabulist. And if you're cool with that, then maybe we'll upgrade you to Storyteller. If you're okay coming to the organization with your title being Yarn Spinner, just Tall Talesmith. First project, you just hand them a bunch of yarn. Say, spin this for me. Just tell me a lie. Tell me a lie about my company. You're actually a generational founder. You sold your last company for $10 billion. Yeah, write the blog post and post it anyway. What is this? Andreessen Horowitz has a laws of new media coming from Marshall McLuhan, the laws of media the new science. There are four of these. The laws of media. One is enhances awareness of inclusive structural process. Obsolesces dominance of the logical method reverses into technology. Hardware becomes software. Retrieves metaphor logos. That is I like some McLuhan. Where else is this Xerox? Enhances the speed of the printing press. Obsolesces the assembly line book reverses into everyone becomes a publisher. Retrieves the oral tradition. That's a cool framework. I like this dig through, you know, different value props. Essentially the iPhone one. It enhanced bringing the world into your yourself into the world, the world into yourself into the world. Obsolesces the house's home. Flips the end of the individual. Retrieves the nomadic hunter. What? That's weird for the. Here's. Here's one of his tetrads on the computer. The computer enhances instrument replay of information. It obsolesces hardware it retrieves hunter. It flips pattern recognition. Huh. What a fascinating framework. ChatGPT has a new image model. They just launched this. Sam Altman teased it with a photo that at this point, you know him and a bunch of polos. Looks great. He says most likely to launch a new image model. And Sam Altman says launching something really fun today. What is the actual announcement? How is this framed? I know the model got better, but what is. It's a good model. It's a good model, sir. Yes. Yes. Okay, so image 1.5. Image 1.5. What were they on before? GPT image. Now there's GPT image 1.5. Were they on 1.0 before? Yeah. Okay. Today we're releasing a new version of ChatGPT images powered by our new flagship image generation model. Now, whether you're creating something from scratch or editing a photo, you'll get the output you're picturing. It makes precise edits while keeping details intact. And it's four times faster. You know that's a big deal. You know that that like that is the real thing where nanobanana has been very, very fast. They got to speed this thing up and they clearly figured out a way to do it. Alongside, we're introducing the new Images feature within ChatGPT. Designed to make image generation delightful to spark Imagine inspiration. And it is cool. It has its own little corner of the app. It's a little surface area. Before I tell you more about this, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one agent for the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate. The most complex customer service queries on every channel. Why is Jordy Going over to the Gong. It's gong worthy. Just check. Finn is gone. Fantastic. So around here we have a benchmark for images, for image generation. You come to us, you come to us with a new model. You know, we're going to try and generate a Where's Waldo. And we have some Where's Waldos pulled up and we're getting better, we're getting closer. They're not ready for prime time, though. Not ready for print. We didn't pass our personal internal benchmarks. Can we pull it up? Let's pull up this, this first image of this Where's Waldo? It's going to be very small, so I don't know if you'll actually be able to see that. Can you zoom in a little bit? Yes. So this is the Where's Waldo. Okay. The important thing is that from far away, this looks, this looks. It looks like a Where's Waldo. It looks ready to rock. Now, part of what makes Where's Waldo special is it has this unique perspective. Like the, it has, it's like infinite depth of field. It's. It's this 45 degree angle. Isomorphic. It's an isomorphic image. This is not perfectly isomorphic, but it's not bad. And there's a lot of interesting detail and texture. But as you zoom in, you start. Noticing it's actually isometric. Oh, isometric. Isometric. Thank you. And so as you zoom in, you start to notice that some of the people are not quite to scale. And the telltale sign of a Where's Waldo is that there is story. Back to storytellers. The creators of Where's Waldo are storytellers because as you move around the image in the Where's Waldo, you see little scenes playing out. It will be a dog that is hungry for a ham, a Christmas ham. And that's part of what he goes for. As he goes for the ham. He knocks over a ladder where someone is painting and the paint bucket falls. And it tells you, like, there's these little vignettes that are playing out. That's what makes it enjoyable to look. Around for Waldo 100%. Because you notice. And in fact, if you go to the back of the book Where's Waldo, oftentimes there will be bonus things to search for. So you will get a list of prompts for what to hunt for. Outside of just the main Waldo, you will also be prompted to. Is this a real Waldo or is this an AI one? No, this is. You made this. I made this one. This is the. By hand. It looks Great from this direction, but as you zoom in, you'll see that you're not quite getting the level of storytelling. And also, the final check is, like, there must be one and only one Waldo. And I'm not actually sure that this one included a Waldo. Put it back in ChatGPT and say, Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo? Can it find it? So I'm not seeing a Waldo on this one. On the beach, there are a number of people that look sort of like Waldo, but none of them have the precise, like, walking stick backpack. Old Rock in the chat says, couldn't you just generate that picture and then drop in a Waldo with an edit feature? Which is true. You could just say, generate a Where's Waldo scene, but don't include Waldo and then add him afterwards. No, I think you're 100%. Where's Waldo was created by Martin Hanford, a British illustrator. Yes. He gained worldwide fame in 1987 with the release of the first book. He, prior to that, specialized in drawing massive, detailed crowd scenes for commercial clients, which ended up becoming the foundation of the Where's Waldo series. A single illustration would take him up to eight weeks to complete. Wow. And also imagine kind of like a generator verifier setup where, like, the generator gets better and better at generating them, the verifier can find them. So soon you'll have kind of Where's Waldo superintelligence. Do you think that would be adversarial? One could say that it could be generative, adversarial, network, potentially. They could network these two together. Can we work on. So Martin is based in the UK, just under 70 years old. We should get him on the show. The creator, Where's Waldo? Yeah, let's go. Let's get that new challenge. New challenge for the team. Let's get Martin on the show. But, yeah, the OpenAI news. The model excels at editing, adding, subtracting, combining, blending, transposing. It seems very clear that with a little bit of a harness, dare I say a wrapper, you could in fact create a proper Where's Waldo. But you probably need to generate the images tile by tile, one tile at a time, and kind of work piece by piece, and then combined it all, blend it all together. And then, yes, you probably want to add one Waldo at the very end in some random spot. But you would not want to just one shot, the full image, because it's still a little bit too complex. But it's remarkable. I mean, these images are remarkable and yet there's still room for improvement. It's crazy. It's like every time we see one of these, I'm like, okay, this is the final thing. We're done. It's good enough. It's great. And then another year goes by and there's more challenges. Pull up this post that says, also very fun. Way to use it to easily get fun images and then scroll down. I thought this was somebody messing with Sam as a reply, but it is Sam himself as a firefighter with a calendar. And then there's a Sora video from Ramp Capital. Let's pull it up. That's funny. I'm the product. Oh, it's showing up in my replies, but not your replies. I'll put it up. Yeah. Going Back to the OpenAI announces ChatGPT images creative transformations. The model's creativity shines through transformations that change and add elements. Here, let's play this one. Well, this is not. What does it say? Impressive. Very nice. That's pretty funny. I like it. Now let's see more slop. The ability to use Sora to make jokes at Sam's expense is truly new territory for. I mean, I guess there were probably people that were in Ms. Paint making fun of Bill Gates back in, like, the 90s, but mocking him. Yeah, mocking him. And he's just like, you wrote this takedown of me in Word. You wouldn't have been able to do this without me. But the feedback loop, the. The iteration cycle is way, way faster there. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the team behind the AI software engineer Devin Crusher backlog with a personal AI engineering team. So these transformations work on both simple and more intricate concepts and are easy to try using preset styles and ideas in the new ChatGPT images feature. No written prompt required. That's very interesting. So in an effort to make it easier to prompt, we are now instantiating more ui. So as that image shows you, it's. Like, as the models get better, we need more sass. Yeah, it's something like that. It's just that, like, it is. I mean, this was David Holz's insight during the midjourney boom was that if you gave someone a blank text box and said, this is a magical text box, it's artificial intelligence. It can generate an image of anything. They would just type like, dog, and they would just get a picture of a dog. And the picture of the dog was so photorealistic. It was just like, okay, cool. You could go to Google Images and get that. Like, what is special about this? There's nothing special about it because, like, we have images of dogs. Like, yes, it's amazing that a computer can generate it from nothing. Like, that's remarkable. Can always have more, but that fades away. And so. And he was like, then you ask them again. You can do anything and be like, dog, dog, happy dog, you know, and people just weren't fully inspired. And so the beauty of midjourney was putting everything in this big chat room on discord so that letting people inspire each other, each other, each other. And it became this collaborative thing. And so with this, it feels like. It feels like OpenAI and the ChatGPT app are definitely sort of embracing this idea that you will need to bring a little bit of idea generation. I mean, when Images and ChatGPT launched for the first time, I wasn't the person that came up with the idea of Studio Ghibli. I needed to see that. And then once someone told me this is a great prompt, I was like, okay, I'm in. I'm going to go create a few more. I needed a jumping off point. And they're bringing that jumping off point to their users in the images tab. And, you know, there's going to be Disney in there pretty soon, and that's going to be very cool. As you wrote in the newsletter last. Week, Ty in the X chat says, no beards. I've never seen beards are coming. Beards are coming. Well, thank you for supporting the coziest podcast in all of. In the entire world right now. We really complete victory on the, on the cozy maxing. We've been going back and forth on what does it look ridiculous? I think the answer is yes, and. That'S why we do it. But Merry Christmas to everyone and only a few more days. Only a few more days. One really good Christmas gift. Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search for grandma. For your grandma. This is built on fantastic. I know. Your grandma's saying, you get me a sweater every year. Well, this year, what about serverless vector and exactly linear? She's gonna, she's gonna ask, she's gonna appreciate. She's gonna unbox turbopuffer and she's gonna say, is it built from first principles on object storage? You're gonna be able to say yes. And she's gonna say, does notion use this? Does notion use this? Yes. You're gonna be able to say yes. Yes, yes. She's gonna say, well, is it. Is it extremely scalable? That's what, that's what most grandparents care about when it comes to Christmas. Scalability scalability. They want something scalable, they want something fast and they definitely wanted to be 10x cheaper and so get your grandmother Turbo Puffer this Christmas. Get them. Bobby already got his grandma Turbo Puffer. She says she's going to be so happy. That's amazing. OpenAI hires an executive from Google to lead M and A according to Walter Bloomberg According to the information more notably OpenAI hire comms chief Hannah Wong is departing the company came out yesterday. She's stepping down. She's going to depart the company at the end of January, Axio says. Why it matters Wong was the AI giant's first chief comms officer and guided the company through the launch of ChatGPT, heightened regulatory scrutiny, controversies and a slew of deals and lawsuits. The bigger picture her departure part departure comes as the company is pushing on a variety of fronts. Trump 1.4 trillion do you think she. Asked for the Storyteller title and she didn't get it so she quit? And Protestant? Very, very possibly. John. It's very possible. Yeah. I feel like she deserves, she deserves like a little bit of a vacation at this point. I can't think of a more stressful job since 2021 as the OpenAI.coms role. She joined OpenAI from Apple in 2021 and anyways so Vesting Cliff reached well. First off, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing and they're trusted by millions. Speaking of Merry Christmas, there is a fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal. We gotta go through it in the Business and Finance section. It says advertisers start Christmas season early. This was written for us. This is fantastic news. Brands chase inflation Weary shoppers with plentiful TV spots. There's a whole bunch of interesting stats in here. And so it starts with a very controversial question. It says, are you tired of Santas? And relentlessly cheerful snowmen filling every screen? No. Blame the advertisers. This is so funny. Advertisers kicked off the holiday season even earlier this year and they are inundating televisions with commercials. The activity comes despite continuing efforts by many businesses to rein in costs to contend with tariffs. Holiday TV ads started in earnest in early October and companies have spent a combined $1.47 billion over the past nine weeks, a 13% jump compared to with the year ago period, according to AdTracker. I spot. So keep this in mind. 1.47 billion on holiday TV ads. Guess how much holiday retail sales are expected to be this year. Counting Counting Black Friday, everything. Everything? What do you mean? It's big. All retail spend. Are you asking for all retail spend in Q4 or do I have to, like, pull out grocery and sales from. November and December each year? Does it include grocery spending? Food spending? I don't know. I think it might include everything. I'll give you a hint. In 2020, it was 0.7 trillion 700 billion. Then it went to 850 billion, then 900, then 950. Last year came in around 99. Something really close. What was it? It was $0.98 trillion $980 billion. This year it's expected to be over a trillion. We got to hit the gong for that. That is a. That is some fantastic news for this holiday season. Truly the first holiday season in history that will be over a trillion dollars. There's a bunch of interesting facts in here. So there are massive investments in digital promotions flooding social media, email inboxes and text messages. So of course the 1.47 billion that's happening on TV is just a small slice of the overall advertising that's happening this holiday season. Retailers spent 5.8 billion on digital ads in the US from November 1 to November 7, a 4% increase from last year. Holiday shopping season remains a critical moment for retailers, with inflation still weighing on household budgets. But brands aren't taking any chances of losing out on the action. The National Retail Federation is projecting. Let's give it up for the national. Sales will surpass 1 trillion. A handful of retailers are proving particularly busy on the TV ad front. So far, Walmart's ads feature a Dr. Seuss inspired world starring Walter Goggins as the Grinch. Target, meanwhile, brings brass. Brings back Chris K, a jolly, bearded Christmas enthusiast introduced in a 2024 campaign in Target Spot, a woman who with whom he is on a coffee date gets a peek at his gift list and leaves him confused by referencing his naughty list. Interesting. Amazon.com this is the most interesting stat. So, total minutes of US advertising by retailer. So Amazon last year was in 2023, they were around 7,000 minutes of US TV advertising. And to be clear, that's right in line with Walmart. Target was around 6,7000 minutes. Macy's was around 6,7000 minutes. The joke's old. Even Verizon. It's an old joke now, John, stop making it said six, seven. Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. That is ridiculous. That's actually where it is. But they doubled in 2025. They went to. They went to 14,000 minutes. Yeah, they went up to so Amazon has doubled the amount that they're spending on TV advertising. AB in the chat said Coca Cola invented the red and white Santa. I was trying. I was trying to fact check it a little bit. Apparently it's an urban legend that Coca Cola invented the red and white Santa. In reality, Santa Claus was already appearing in red suits long before he appeared in soda advertisements. But apparently they did standardize the Santa look. Right. They're spending probably more on advertising than most other companies in the world for like many decades. Right. They had an opportunity to really define the look. Define the look that we are delivering this delivering today. Let me tell you about Adeo, the AI native CRM. Adeo builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Friendly reindeer. I'm glad. It's good to hear that it's a friendly reindeer. Did you see the Journal going after core weave? Yes, we should get to that. There's one last stat that we need to share. Basically, it's like there's a lot of jitters in the economy as AI overheated. We're going to go into the core weave story. But overall, the health of the consumer seems to be good. Holiday retail sales are higher than ever in history and over a trillion dollars. Now everyone's advertising. There's one interesting stat in here, which is at the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article. They polled consumers. How do you feel about the timing of holiday ads? And so when holiday ads start? So Amazon, one of the largest advertisers in the country, aired its first holiday TV ad on October 13th. Okay, but you got to give me more. Was Santa in the ad? Because I'm kind of a purist. I like to go full speed ahead on the Christmas spirit. The day after Thanksgiving, day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. I got our tree. We went and got our tree on Black Friday. Yes. And that just feels like the right moment. Right. I like to have enough. So you don't want to see Santa until. I don't want to see the day after Thanksgiving. But then I want to see him everywhere. Yeah, you know, of course. 0 to 100. So I'm with you. I generally agree with that. Tyler, how do you feel? When is it appropriate after Thanksgiving, after Thanksgiving? Anytime before. I can't even listen to them. Okay, so I will describe the ad and we could potentially pull it up here. But Amazon Home for the Holidays was the name of the ad, so let me. Oh, dammit. We got more Christmas lore in the chat. Red and white Santa is because of amanita mascaria mushrooms. Reindeer Eat them. What? What is that? Okay, anyway, no, I can see, you. Know, the red and white mushrooms. I know. Candy canes. Sugar plum player. Plum fairies. So, October 13, they run an ad. It shows a college student arriving home to see that her childhood bedroom now contains a treadmill with her father running on it, awkwardly wearing short shorts, the young woman checks the Amazon app for more appropriate workout gear, and it's called Home for the Holidays. So no Santa. At least that I can tell from this ad. We can actually pull this up here. The Amazon TV spot. Home for the Holidays. Maybe it's not playing. Oh, it is. It is here. I have it here. If we can pull it up. Yeah. So we need to determine whether or not Jordi. Why are we zooming out like this? We need to determine whether or not Jordi decides that this ad is too early. Too early. And so let's pull up the Amazon TV spot on our side. We have been drinking this podcast in a can all year. Yes, it's very Christmas themed. Okay, I think we have it here. So, Jordy, based on this is. What is the. What is the earliest day you could. I'm getting red flags already. Red flags already. Okay, play it, play it. You're home for the holidays. You've dreamt of this moment back in your old room. Oh. Hey, kiddo. I'll be right there. At least you can get a deal. On new shorts for dad, something with a little more coverage. Hmm. There's no Sansa. Way too early. You think that's too early? What's the earliest day you still. You. You wouldn't even run that before Thanksgiving. And that's like two. That's like, almost two months before winter. It's before. I mean, they ran it before Halloween. Well, so, yeah, I mean, this is October. There are some places in the US where it snows in October, right? You go up to Alaska. This could be like. This could be there. The college students, fall break. Yeah, this could be. They're coming back for a weekend. They could be targeting Anchorage. Yeah. Or Juneau. Yeah. We don't know where it ran, so I did. I did find an article from the Fungi foundation called the Influence of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms on Christmas. The story of Santa Claus is not the creation of Coca Cola nor St. Nick or a children's story. It exists because of a small living being with great powers, the Amanita muscaria mushroom. So I'm go out on a limb and say, like, the Fungi foundation might have a little bias. Are you doing this research on Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning with next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Why don't you vibe code something for your family for Christmas? So would you say that the Christmas ads are A much too early, B slightly too early, C about the right time, slightly too late or much too late? In terms of the timing of holiday ads this year, I think you can. Start doing holiday advertising without putting snow on the ground and without. How would you do that? Wait, describe a holiday ad that doesn't at least have a little bit of snow? I would like to see Amazon do a plain text ad that's Star wars style where the text is just scrolling and it's like, get ready to buy stuff. This is about to be the super bowl of just buying stuff. Do it on Amazon.com it's time to buy. It's time to buy. It's time to buy. It sounds like you think that the holiday ads are at least slightly too early. Maybe much too early, much too early. Or do you think it's about the right time? I think Amazon should start dropping a billion dollars on ads just on Black Friday. I mean, they probably already do because. So this is the interesting stat from here. They pulled a bunch of consumers in and boomers complained the most about the ads being too early. We're all the boomers because they're locked. In, they're paying for gen Z. Over 50% said, yeah, Christmas in October is great, sits perfectly with me. Only 20 something percent of boomers said, yeah, the holiday ads are about the right time. Whereas over 25%, 30% of boomers said the ads are much too early. Only 10% of Gen Z said how. Many said that they were too late? Did any say that? Yes. Millennials. Millennials actually led the whole pack by saying 4.34% of millennials said that the holiday ads started too late this year. Which is funny. Gen Z, only 2% were in the we're in the too late camp. Basically. ABC, the boomers. The boomers. Actually less than 1, less than 2% of them said slightly too late. They were all saying too early. Too early. Did they hate Christmas, the boomers? Yeah. AB in the chat says Santa discovered ChatGPT and now Christmas is 30% faster and the elves are unemployed. Trey says every time Jordy pitches back on Christmas on when Christmas starts, I'm going to move it up one month. It starts September 1st. Now September 1st is great. September 1st. Well let's. Here's a I would like to see Coca Cola get a blimp. You know, I'm a blimp maxi. I want to see more companies leveraging blimps for marketing. They get a blimp, but they hang a sleigh and a bunch of reindeers and so they fly the blimps in the crowd and they have sort of like clear, you know, wiring so that it just looks like Santa's flying over the United States. Okay, somebody's got to do it. I like it. I like it. Well, let's talk about Core Weave static. But first, let's talk about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. Very aggressive title Core Weave staggering fall from market grace Highlights AI bubble fears the data center providers terrible six week slides picked up speed when a famous short seller piled concerns on top of delays. Core reeves value dropped by 33 billion due to AI bubble concerns, a failed merger and short seller criticism. Core Weave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the AI boom, has watched 33 billion of value vaporizing six weeks. The share price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble fallout from a failed merger and public criticism from high profile seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron. Yeah, but some of the high tech companies biggest problems began with a very low tech nuisance, unexpected turbulent rainstorms in North Texas over the summer. Heavy rains and winds caused a roughly 60 day delay at a construction site in Denton, a small city north of Dallas, preventing contractors from pouring concrete for a major complex. As a result, the completion date for the huge data center cluster, consisting of about 260 megawatts of computing power that Core Weave plans to lease to OpenAI, has been pushed back several months. There were additional delays caused by revisions to design plans for some of the data centers a partner is building for Core Weave in Texas and elsewhere. According to filings, the slowdown was compounded by mixed messaging from CoreWeave's Chief Executive Officer Michael which spooked investors and accelerated the company's share price decline at a particularly vulnerable moment for the AI trade. CoreWeave's business model involves using high interest debt to pay thousands to buy thousands of advanced chips from Nvidia, installing them in server racks inside data centers that it leases from third party landlords, then renting access to the chips as capital spending on Infra has intensified. Core weave, which is 7% owned by Nvidia and backed by hedge funds such as Magnetar Capital and CO2 Management has become the standard bearer for both the promise and the risk of the AI boom. Some critics point to the high levels of debt it has taken on to finance its data center build out, while others worry that the company depends on just a handful of large customers such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta for the bulk of its revenue. Core Weave saw sales more than double in the most recent quarter to nearly 1.4 billion from half a billion a year earlier. But the company is unprofitable and lost 110 million in its most recent quarter in early November, before the construction delays were widely discussed. Intra Tor played down fears of an AI bubble at a Wall Street Journal event in Northern California. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business, he said, adding that the number of buyers of data center computing services had convinced him that there is not a bubble inflating. I think this is the same Wall Street Journal event where Sarah Fryer made the the backstock comment that sort of went super viral. I think he this quote is actually pretty reasonable. This is something that I agree with. The question is always just like the dance of like, how much is it accelerating the economy? Is it showing up in the economic statistics yet? How much value is there being created? And then how are you financing that? Because naturally the capital markets will push everything to the edge. And if you're underwriting it against 10% GDP growth and that doesn't show up, you could have a bad time. But if it's more like, oh yeah, like, you know, new SaaS, boom, bunch of great companies building on top of us. Like, I think it's super important to put it into context to their last private valuation in November 2024 was $650 million secondary. Jane street was in that magnetar. So again, the company today is at a $34 billion valuation. So meaningful premium in the last private. Round, like it was in the tens of billions. 23. 23 billion. So it's still up 50% since the last private round, but its round trip. Yeah, it was seven in December, seven in December of 2023. And I mean even just today, 23 in November 2024. Rough, rough, rough. Anyways, it's a lot of debt, but it's a lot of demand. Yeah, it was interesting yesterday. There was a pretty viral post from an account called Hunter Brooke. Okay. They said Bethany Maclean broke the Enron scandal. Tomorrow she publishes her first investigation for Hunter Brook on A company that may epitomize the AI bubble. Sign up and say what it is. And then they shared it this morning. So I'm expecting, like, she broke the Enron scandal. She is. Her new investigation is on the company that epitomizes the AI bubble and the company. I saw something. Radnet. Whoa. Okay. Do you know the company? No, I wasn't familiar. I'm not familiar. I'm somewhat of a bubble enthusiast. I used to pray for a bubble. And I did see a clip of her talking about how it's not the hyperscalers. So it's kind of like we're on the hunt for the. For the. Yeah. So Radnet is a. As of today, it traded down on this report. It's a $5.37 billion company. I was expecting something in the hundred to trillion dollar range. Right. I wanted some real meat. Didn't get that. Hunter Brooks says RadNet, the AI story that doesn't add up. It's a radiology firm. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay, okay. Interesting. Yeah. But again, like, this company. Huh. I like. We'll dig into it. But again, this company, like, collapsing wouldn't make a dent in the broader kind of like, AI trade. Yeah. There's like 25 different funds that could just write this off and be like, yeah, zeros are part of the game. You know, Like. Yeah. Anyway, so Hunter Brooks says radnet's much hyped AI business is a sideshow. Less than 5% of the medical imaging company's revenue, about 65 million out of 1 1/2 billion in the first nine months of 2025, comes from its newfangled digital health division. Much of that division's revenue and two thirds of its reported revenue growth, excluding recent acquisitions, come from selling software to Radnet's own imaging center. Imaging center. Radnet also charges mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. Again, I'm not seeing anything. The pre AI stock price of this company was around 20 bucks a share. Now it's 70 bucks a share. Something like that. And so you have seen, like a 3x pump. The stock has definitely benefited from the AI narrative, if that's what they're alleging. But it's. Yeah, you're going to have to do better if you're going to try and bring down the entire global economy. You got to service up something that's worth at least 100 billion. I agree with you on that. That. Yeah. Somewhat of a clickbait and yet the company's stock has soared in value since its AI rebrand, trading at a much higher multiple than historic norms and competitors. Yeah, and so again, I didn't. I. I think. Okay, well let's tell everyone about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails securely, spin up white label wallet sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Now there is interesting like everyone's been hunting for the Enron of this cycle because there was one in the past, there must be another one. We of course were joking around doing the, you know, the letters lining up from OpenAI or Nvidia or whatever when those are obviously very real businesses and no one is alleging that they are doing anything inappropriate. It's more just like how fast will they grow? Will they be complete winners forever? Will there be. Will they face competition? Those are the questions that people are asking. But Buco Capital bloke had a good rebuttal to this question of Is it possible to argue that AI is not a bubble right now? Someone in the chat was putting AI bubble in quotes, kind of sarcastically. Well, Buko Capital is arguing that AI is not a bubble. He says real businesses are seeing real impact from AI coding and tech support help. Are the, are the two clear, immediate role beneficiaries. Advertising is another clear beneficiary. Meta has talked about it in detail. We of course are sponsored by profound get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Traditional boring companies like C.H. robinson are pointing to AI and agentic workflows as making them more efficient. The market is responding quite rationally and scrutinizing these AI input companies diligently. See Broadcom and Oracle this past week. So that is the sign of. Yeah, I agree with him. Like the fact people are taking a victory lap dunking on Oracle. It's like this is how the market should be working. Like it should sort of be like, okay, we're regarding this future RPO five years out with some skepticism. We're not going to give you that much credit for it up front, but you got to actually deliver some real value. You got to get some cash flow into the business. You got to actually deliver on the build out that you're promising. We're not just going to moon your stock because you said the biggest number mag 7 minus Tesla have reasonable valuations and the hyperscalers have more demand than they can handle. He says. I've been vocal that indiscriminately gunning all AI input companies is a dumb thing to do again, as Oracle, Broadcom, neoclouds have shown this last week. But it doesn't mean AI is a bubble. I like it. I think it's a good, a good take. But Duchant. Yeah, it's just, it's interesting going back to this Rad. RadNet analysis. Sure. Saying that they also charge mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. It's like, how is that? Like, they're positioning that as a bad thing when this company clearly has distribution and they're just going to like vend in technology into that and it doesn't like. I don't, I don't. That's like. It's basically making the argument that like, rap, a rapper can never have value when clearly, like, they have a captive audience here. Yeah. And they can put in commodity technology and charge premium for it. Yeah. I mean, there's a huge incentive once everyone is. Is giving the stuff's overvalued take to then move into the like, it's fraud, it's crime take. But the bar for that is so much higher because it's legal. Obviously, anything can be overvalued or undervalued at any moment in time, but fraud is very much like binary. The company's either cooking the books or they aren't. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. You got to stay compliant. Automate compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. So let's move on to the EV debate. Tomorrow I want to get into how Rivian beat Ford in trucks, in electric trucks. That seems crazy to me. I want to get to the bottom of it. But there's a little bit of an op ed in the Wall Street Journal that I thought it might be useful to go through some extra context. They say Ford learns brutal. You're taking the gloves off. I'm putting the gloves on. Putting the gloves on. Wouldn't you be taking the gloves off to fight it out? I don't know if we're going to be fighting yet. Okay, okay. Maybe we'll be agreeing. Ford learns a brutal EV lesson. The carmaker takes a $19.5 billion write down on its electric vehicle business. And in this op ed, they say not long ago, automakers were touting electric cars as a future. Well, now they are slamming the brakes hard on that future as market reality has hit them like a 16 wheeler. See Ford Motors stunning announcement Monday that it will take a $19.5 billion charge on its electric vehicle business. Instead of plowing, quote, instead of plowing billions into future, into the future, knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting. Ford CEO Jim Farley said as he explained the company's plan to boost its lineup of gas powered cars and hybrids. Ford will also scrap Its all electric F150 Lightning pickup. Full scrap has been full scrap. They're not going to sell them anymore. Which has been a favorite of the EV loving press. So it got very good reviews and obviously it was positioned in this interesting way. It has the aesthetics of the F150. It doesn't have the baggage of the Elon brand. Although does that really matter to the F150 buyer? It's so complicated. I just hope they make a Raptor, you know, the Raptor Raptor R, the high performance version of the F150. Of course they need to do the Raptor R Plus with a V12 that. You wouldn't want it to be. The R Max. R Max would be good too. So Ford has lost 13 billion on its EV business since 2023, with bigger losses expected in years to come. Last year ford lost about $50,000 for each EV sold. That's so much money to lose. Don't do that. The true is that the business case for EVs has always rested largely on government subsidies and mandates. Now that is now that this combination of government favoritism and coercion is mostly going away, most carmakers have much less reason to make EVs. I was listening to an interview with the CEO Ford yesterday and he was talking about some of the challenges of the supply chain. I think that they're doing it sort of like almost a JV with a Chinese company that has IP around battery manufacturing. But they're going to make them in the United States and so they're very much negotiating.

NEWSMAX