PODCAST · business
Telltales
by by Top Mark Capital
An investing podcast + substack for people who want to compound their wealth over the long run and don't mind sailing analogies telltales.substack.com
Episodes
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Data Centers Earn, Washington Doesn't
Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo: an oil strip pricing a long stalemate, a $2 trillion deficit and a grinding 10-year, what hyperscaler data center capex actually earns, the hyperscalers against the chipmakers, BioNTech’s cancer vaccine miss, and…
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Weekend Update - W2641
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → The Tape — W2641 Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-10-02 → 2026-10-09. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately. Telltales...
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$1 a User vs. 15%
Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo: oil stuck in triple digits, a 10-year Treasury headed toward 6%, SpaceX’s $40 billion Nvidia build, the agent threat to Apple’s App Store, and what a trillion-dollar valuation buys at Eli Lilly. The Cashflow Memo…
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Weekend Update - W2640
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → The Tape — W2640 Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-09-25 → 2026-10-02. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately. Telltales...
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Three Times GDP
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo as Hormuz flows recover, the fiscal year closes near a $2 trillion deficit, and the 10-year pushes toward 6%. Then Hunt’s case that the 12 trillion-dollar tech companies compound at three times nominal GDP, what $70 billion run rates at OpenAI and...
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Weekend Update - W2639
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Berkshire Gave Up the Quiet Exit Berkshire’s real commitment to Lennar this month was the paperwork, more than the two hundred and twelve million dollars. On Thursday, September seventeenth, Berkshire crossed ten percent ownership of...
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The Radiologists Are Still Here
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo with WTI near $101, a $20 discount to next year’s strip, and the 10-year above 5%. Then the data against AI job doomers, and what it would cost Meta to serve its new Muse agent at scale. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt holds oil flat on Exhibit...
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Weekend Update - W2638
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Read the Vesting Schedule Amazon signed two documents with Generac on Tuesday. Everybody covered the smaller one. The supply agreement is the small document: backup generators for Amazon data centers, initial deliveries expected to total…
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AI Is an Engineering Problem, Not an Extinction Event
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo with oil back near $100, the 10-year above 5%, and the AI labs talking about extinction. Plus notes from the All-In Summit and a Vertex update. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt holds oil around $90 with the 12-month strip ~$20 lower despite WTI...
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Weekend Update - W2637
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → The Biggest AI Builder Just Chose Dilution Four weeks ago the argument in this column was that the AI buildout had turned into a credit trade — that what prices the complex from here is whether somebody else’s lender says yes. Oracle...
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$500,000 vs. $50,000: Montana's Cancer Treatment Loophole
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo across an escalating Iran-US oil standoff, the widening federal deficit, a wave of new AI agent products from xAI and Meta, and a Montana law reshaping the economics of cancer immunotherapy. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Iran-US tensions escalated...
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Weekend Update - W2636
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → ONEOK Bought a Ratio ONEOK announced a four-point-four-billion-dollar acquisition last weekend and raised nine billion dollars to pay for it. The gap between those two numbers is the story, and it is not what the headlines carried....
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Moderna Only Owns Half of Its Own Cancer Vaccine
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo across energy, the federal balance sheet, and healthcare, joined by Montana in San Diego for a deep session on cancer vaccines and how immunotherapy actually works. Nvidia’s quarter and the robotaxi launches close the show. The Cashflow Memo Key...
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Weekend Update - W2635
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → The Bid Was the Business PayPal spent the summer being priced by a buyer rather than by a business, and on Friday it found out which of the two it actually had. Advent and Stripe abandoned an approach that had run to roughly fifty-three...
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"I Don't See How An Investor Can Not Own SpaceX"
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo: oil and gas exhibits, the deficit math nobody wants to do, the Moderna/Merck cancer-vaccine economics, and the SpaceX position Hunt says he’ll probably regret saying out loud. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt left Exhibit C’s supply/demand...
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Weekend Update - W2634
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Twelve Times Free Cash Flow Bought One Company and Trapped Another Two of our companies signed deals this week, and the Cash Flow Memo prices them almost identically: about twelve times trailing free cash flow, roughly an eight percent…
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This Time, the Hare Beat the Tortoise
Hunt, Mike, and Jason go more than half healthcare this week: Moderna’s Merck-partnered mRNA cancer vaccine cleared phase 3 in melanoma and the stock doubled. Plus Hormuz at a standstill, $7 trillion of federal spending with only one line left to cut, and xAI putting agents on the shelf. The...
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Weekend Update - W2633
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → The AI Buildout Just Became a Credit Trade Broadcom put up the best AI guidance in the semiconductor industry and lost five percent for it. Nobody who read the release thinks that was a demand problem. The buildout has passed the point…
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Sold Out Through 2028
Hunt, Jason, and Mike walk the Cash Flow Memo through $90 oil that will not change oil-patch spending, a compute market sold out through 2028, and a healthcare desk that still found time for Eliquis. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt’s $70-$90 oil range still holds at the top - crude is ~$90...
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Weekend Update - W2632
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → A note from the desk: this week’s update is landing a few days late. We hit a technical problem over the weekend that took our production pipeline down. Everything below is as of Friday’s close, August 7. We’re back on the normal cadence...
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900 Gigawatts, 90 Gigawatts of Grid
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo through an oil tape driven by Hormuz headlines, a power grid that has started saying no to data centers, and the valuation question underneath the Tesla-SpaceX merger. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Oil is trading the Hormuz headline, not the...
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Weekend Update - W2631
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Microsoft Bought Twenty Years of Power. The Market Graded the Buyer. The AI build spent this week being graded on the buyer’s income statement. The most consequential thing that happened to it was signed by a seller. Chevron agreed to…
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Open Weights vs Closed Labs
Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo for value in a still-expensive market — with Iran re-heating the oil tape, open-weights politics reshaping who captures AI rents, and a full-page scan of who benefits from cheaper tokens. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Iran–US flare-up leaves Hunt...
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Weekend Update - W2630
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → GE Vernova Is Already Selling 2031. The Scarcity Was Manufactured Twenty Years Ago. Every company in this week’s news was selling capacity it still has to build. GE Vernova was selling a place in line. It shipped three gigawatts of…
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Where the Value's Hiding in an Expensive Market
Hunt, Jason, and Mike walk the full 20-page Cash Flow Memo, from a shut shipping channel in the Strait of Hormuz to a tiny ophthalmology compounder, hunting for value in an elevated market. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Energy desk: the Strait of Hormuz South Channel is effectively closed…
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Weekend Update - W2629
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Wall Street Called PayPal Dead Money for Two Years. This Week, Private Capital Sent a Term Sheet. Two markets looked at the same cash flows this week and reached opposite verdicts. The public market has spent two years pricing PayPal,...
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Value Hiding in Plain Sight
Hormuz risk pushes Hunt’s oil call toward $80 (not $90–100), the team hunts for value on a high market — and lands on hyperscaler infrastructure over AI models — while healthcare delivers the first MRD-guided cancer approval and a live UNH margin-recovery setup. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways *...
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Weekend Update - W2628
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Micron and Intel Poured the Same Concrete This Week. The Market Paid One and Punished the Other. Micron and Intel spent the same seven days making the same bet: tens of billions of dollars, poured into American fabs, on the promise that…
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The Midyear Predictions Scorecard
Oil holds steady despite Hormuz drone strikes, SK Hynix tests a $25B US listing, and the team runs its mid-year predictions scorecard across energy, tech, and healthcare — including Vertex’s $10B endocrine bet and Palantir’s Karp taking on Anthropic and OpenAI. The Cashflow Memo The Prediction...
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Weekend Update - W2627
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Microsoft Is Funding the Next AI Layer With the Last One Enterprise AI stopped being a story about models this week and became a story about invoices. On July second, Microsoft — page one of the Cash Flow Memo — stood up a unit called...
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Regulatory Capture Comes for the Labs
Mike, Hunt, and Jason run the exhibits fast, then dig into the AI buildout math that keeps getting worse, Oracle’s brutal week, and a healthcare block anchored by Lilly’s 340B fight. As always, download the Cashflow Memo at telltales.us. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Oil has settled into a…
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Weekend Update - W2626
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → The Week Memory Stopped Being a Commodity For forty years, memory was the worst business in technology. Brutally cyclical, structurally commoditized, a graveyard of balance sheets that overbuilt into every upcycle and got buried in the…
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Who Owns Your Data Now
Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace dig into the looming Treasury market stress, proprietary-data risk in the age of frontier AI models, and a Medicare for All blueprint that could reshape healthcare investing. A 30-minute tour across energy, technology, and healthcare, anchored by...
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Weekend Update - W2625
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Three Bottlenecks, One Multiple, and Only One Monopoly The AI argument flipped sides this week. For two years the only question that mattered was whether anyone would actually buy all this compute, and Wednesday’s show put that one to bed....
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The End of the Subsidized-Token Era
All three hosts in one room: a macro tour through oil, gas and a new Fed chair, then a deep dive on NVIDIA at $5 trillion, the software stack’s capex problem, and the Anthropic export-control fight that turns proprietary data into the next moat. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Macro (Hunt’s...
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The One Week We Were All in the Same Room
For the first time in four years, there’s no new Telltales episode this week. The one week all three of us were finally in the same city — Hunt, Jason, and Mike, in one room in New York instead of scattered across two coasts — the recording gremlins picked their moment. The primary recording…
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Weekend Update - W2624
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Good News, Sold: The AI Buildout’s First Bill Came Due Every capital cycle has the same tell. It is not the day the spending stops. It is the day the market stops clapping for it — when a company does exactly what it promised and the stock...
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Data Centers in Space: How SpaceX Justifies $2 Trillion
Hunt, Jason, and Mike work through an oil market frozen by the US-Iran standoff, then spend the back half stress-testing SpaceX’s ~$2 trillion valuation against Tesla’s — landing on data centers in orbit and a chronic compute shortage as the load-bearing assumptions. Plus Apple’s WWDC miss, the...
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Weekend Update - W2623
▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Even the Cash Machines Are Borrowing Now The story this week was not that the AI build is expensive. Everyone knew that. The story was that the companies best equipped to pay for it out of their own pockets stopped doing so — three of…
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The Greatest Insurance Business Ever Built, and Why It's Bankrupting Us
A wide-angle look at the three forces colliding in the market: oil supply through a contested Strait of Hormuz, the AI capex boom propping up the economy, and a US healthcare system whose broken incentives now intersect with an unsustainable federal deficit. Pull up the Cash Flow Memo at...
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Weekend Update - W2622
The Trillion-Dollar Bet That the Cycle Is Dead The market just handed a memory company a trillion-dollar valuation at roughly a hundred times trailing free cash flow, on a yield under one percent.¹² Strip the letters AI off that sentence and it is a bet that the most violently cyclical business…
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How Do You Get to $2 Trillion?
Hunt, Jason, and Mike break down the freshly filed SpaceX S-1 and ask the only question that matters: how do you justify a $2 trillion valuation on a company with almost no free cash flow? They work through the AI stack, the Starlink connectivity business, and the launch economics that quietly...
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Weekend Update - W2621
The Cashflow Memo Capital Structure Week Nvidia confirmed the demand picture. Three companies restructured this week to monetize it. The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 94 companies in the…
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Google's Real AI Risk Isn't Just ChatGPT
Hunt Lawrence, Mike Nicoletti, and Jason Wallace unpack why the Hormuz panic doesn’t hold, where Google’s real AI risk actually lives, and how the PBM business model is unwinding in real time. Get the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt’s oil base case holds at...
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Weekend Update - W2620
The Cashflow Memo Earnings Week Is a Split Screen — Nvidia, the Big-Box Gauntlet, and the Retail Read-Across The AI trade and the tariff trade get tested on the same three days. By Friday, the market knows which side delivered. The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham…
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"Senator, We Run Ads": Inside Meta's AI Cash Machine
This week on Telltales: Hunt, Jason, and Mike pressure-test Meta’s position as an AI cash machine, walk through the Iran-driven oil setup, and unpack the FDA shake-up and a second consecutive Harrow miss. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Meta is the most profitable AI application ever built:...
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Weekend Update - W2619
The Cashflow Memo AI Is Finally Paying. The Question This Week Was How The Suppliers Got Paid. Micron’s 2026 memory is sold out, with customers writing prepayment checks for chips that don’t exist. AMD’s Q1 data center revenue was up 57% — but the strength was EPYC CPUs, not the OpenAI GPU deal,...
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Hyperscaler Stack Decoded (e2619)
This week we walk through the post-Hormuz oil setup, the Intel stake math, and a layer-by-layer review of the hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Meta — as they navigate the AI buildout. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Iran ceasefire path holds — Project Freedom (defended…
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Weekend Update — W2618
The Cashflow Memo Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon all printed in 48 hours. Same capex cycle, three different cloud margin stories — and Apple and Meta both quietly repositioned the balance sheet. The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what...
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Why Costco Is the Most Challenged Big Retailer at 47x Earnings
Mike, Hunt, and Jason work through a revised oil thesis, the converging big-retail battle between Amazon, Walmart, and Costco, a hyperscaler preview, and the most-favored-nations finish line in pharma. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt revised his oil thesis: the Strait of Hormuz impasse…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Telltales have?
Telltales currently has 312 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Telltales about?
An investing podcast + substack for people who want to compound their wealth over the long run and don't mind sailing analogies telltales.substack.com
How often does Telltales release new episodes?
Telltales publishes regularly with 312 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Telltales?
You can listen to Telltales on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Telltales?
Telltales is created and hosted by by Top Mark Capital.
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