Jim Prosser

This is what a spine looks like. And at the same time, how is any other CEO in AI signing up for a military domestic surveillance program? Did we learn absolutely nothing from PRISM?

When Fan Fiction Hits the S&P Why AI narratives are moving markets more than AI products

www.personfamiliar.com/p/when-fan-...

The Tomorrowland Effect Walt Disney’s original Tomorrowland was compelling because it was a narrative about the future first and an engineering project second. Walt worked with scientists and engineers, but what made it resonate was the storytelling, making you feel something about what was coming, not just showing you a spec sheet. The Citrini piece is a high-quality markets version of Tomorrowland: speculative fiction with financial fluency, built by people familiar with constructing market narratives. The Shumer piece is the gift shop version: mass-produced, shiny enough to catch the eye, but not something you’d put on a shelf. Yet both move the same audience to the same action, and that’s actually the more concerning case. If only the Citrini piece had moved markets, you could chalk it up to the quality of the analysis. But when a clearly-AI-generated blog post produces a comparable reaction, you’re seeing something structural: the audience is grading the narrative, not the prem

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Why are posts about AI from random Substacks and blogs moving markets more than AI products? It's a calibration gap between Narrative Consumers and Tool Users. (link in next post)

It's true, and I go into it eyes wide open. I do pay for the highest tier of Claude access, so there are some additional SLAs surrounding data privacy/not training on it that give me more confidence.

AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome A communications intervention

Read here: www.personfamiliar.com/p/ai-humani...

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Public trust in AI is already deteriorating. Execs' rhetorical focus on capital-H Humanity over real people isn't helping. I'm calling it Dr. Manhattan Syndrome—and the nuclear industry already showed us how it ends. (Link in next post)

Yeah, @obsidian.md Gang rise up. Seriously, though, Claude Code plus Obsidian is ridiculously powerful in ways no other productivity app's baked-in "assistant" can ever be. Has completely stopped my productivity app promiscuity. (For now.)

That's the one.

Rogen has quite a different recitation of this timeline in his book, including (crucially) that both he/his production company and Sony were warned by RAND researchers to harden their security systems well before the hacks likely took place.

I Wanted to Fit In With Hollywood’s Cool Kids. So I Made the Biggest Mistake of My Career. In an exclusive book excerpt, the former CEO of Sony Entertainment opens up about his role in unleashing one of the worst cyberattacks in corporate history.

If you've read Seth Rogen's book, you can't help but come away from this Michael Lynton excerpt feeling there's some serious retcon'ing going on. www.wsj.com/tech/cyberse...

The SaaS-pocalypse Is a Comms Crisis, and One CEO Gets It Dylan Field is doing something almost nobody else in SaaS is doing right now: telling the truth with a thesis.

www.personfamiliar.com/p/the-saas-...

Salesforce's Marc Benioff in a suit sits amidst flames with a coffee cup with the Salesforce logo. He casually states, "THIS IS FINE."

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The market isn't punishing SaaS companies for bad earnings, but for not having an answer to "What are you in five years?" But @zoink.bsky.social and @figma.com do. I analyze the many lows and a few highs of SaaS-pocalypse comms. (link in reply)

Threads post screenshot: So people of other races and cultures that never heard of this band don’t count?  You do realize being a fan of a top 40 band of white men is “garden variety“ right?

Published the same bit over on Threads to see what it'd do and... well, that site's never beating the charges of Twitter for Midwits.

The ultimate litmus test of whether someone is an elder Millennial or just the garden variety kind: ask them who these guys are.

See Adam on tour https://theadamfriedland.show/pages/tour--JOIN THE FRIEDLAND FAMILY FOUNDATION / PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAdamFried... TAFS Unplugged: MJ Lenderman

As a 40-something white guy rockist, I'm legally obligated to share MJ Lenderman solo-covering Warren Zevon www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmL...

Nvidia is a $3T company and one of the most widely held stocks in the world. Microsoft owns half of OpenAI. Amazon has billions in Anthropic, as does Google. Meta, AMD, TSMC, Broadcom, Arm — all public, all riding AI, all ludicrously profitable for retail.

X post from @sourceryy paraphrasing/quoting an interview with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev: Robinhood CEO @vladtenev says AI lacks public support because everyday investors are shut out of the upside, and can’t invest in any of the significant AI companies: “Aside from Google— OpenAI, Anthropic, all the startups, they’re basically out of reach for normal people.”

A take so bizarre it's borderline disqualifying for a CEO of a trading platform. The AI trade has been one of the most accessible investment themes ever. Retail investors have made fortunes on it. If anything, that should be catalyzing *more* public support for AI, not less.

Every generation gets the Harvard Facemash it deserves

personfamiliar.substack.com/p/the-start...

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: I wrote about one of the sneakiest traps startup founders encounter with their comms: knowing when to steer away from the siren song of VC Twitter dopamine hits and toward deeper waters. Be Odysseus. (The Matt Damon version or whoever you have in mind.)

"Much can be accomplished by teamwork when no one is concerned about who gets credit." - John Wooden

"Fuck everybody else, that shit was all me." - Bill Belichick (probably)

Sunset-lit San Francisco hillside with winding Lombard Street, flanked by homes and a cable car crossing at the bottom.

No matter who wins on the field today, San Francisco won this week. Most beautiful city in America.

(h/t portra_papi on IG - go follow, he’s outstanding)

ME, TO MY 70-SOMETHING PARENTS: How do you watch so much cable news!? I’d just be mad all the time!

[Proceeds to stare at political news on social media for multiple hours daily]

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: J. Cole finally dropped "The Fall-Off" after an eight-year wait. I wrote about the very different ways he, Kendrick, and Drake cultivate attention — and the surprising applicability to tech comms. open.substack.com/pub/personf...

The Pat Spencer Threes Explosion

(is this anything?)

personfamiliar.substack.com/p/main-char...

According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 71% of global consumers agreed with the statement “I trust companies less than I did a year ago.” That’s a straight-up crisis. Similarly, the Citizen Brands 2025 study found that 56% of consumers believe brands spend too much time talking about their values, up from 47% just a year earlier. More damning: 68% doubt the truth behind those claims. University of Adelaide research found that consumers are “becoming more uncertain of brand communication due to misinformation, deep fakes, misleading claims, and perceived hypocrisy.” A majority of young people believe a brand is hiding something if it avoids certain topics. Let me translate that from consultant-speak: people think companies are full of shit. This tracks with lived experience. If a friend tells you they “got sold a story” about something, are they speaking in a flattering way? So yes, storytelling matters, but there’s something wrong with the stories, obviously. It’s not that a

Corporate storytelling and storytelling jobs are on the rise. I'm all for more importance placed on comms! But something about they *way* we're telling stories is wrong, because consumers don't trust them. I explore that and how to remedy it in my latest Person Familiar.

Interesting fact of the day: you’d need to stream an artist’s 12-track album once a day for 240-330 days to equal the approx. equivalent rev share they get from a vinyl sale.

If you love a music artist, buy their vinyl.

open.substack.com/pub/personf...