John Walter

Founder of & President of the Contact Center AI Association (

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@FreddyLA7 Will you make it up to Birmingham, AL?

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@fin465 Send

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@lilyjclifford Lily, how did you get looped into this?

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@ScottPresler Scott, you are awesome.

[How To Prompt @HowToPrompt__]

The entire RAG industry is about to get cooked.

Researchers have built a new RAG approach that:

- does not need a vector DB.
- does not embed data.
- involves no chunking.
- performs no similarity search.

It's called PageIndex. Instead of chunking your docs and stuffing them into pinecone, it builds a tree index and lets the LLM reason through it like a human reading a book.

hit 98.7% on financebench. beats every vector RAG on the leaderboard.

no embeddings. no chunking. no vector DB.

100% open source.

[John Walter @jpswalter]

It’s amazing people can accomplish this.

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@elonmusk the @Tesla service center in Birmingham AL needs some help.

I dropped off a Tesla today at 8:15am. My app told me it would be ready by 5:00pm.

When I got there at 5pm no work had been performed.

There were three other customers in the lobby who were also having disappointing experiences.

I’m a big Tesla fan and want to bring this to your attention because I know this doesn’t meet your quality standards.

Thank you and your team at @tesla_na

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@nahuelhilal @Tesla 100% Tesla is now my preferred traveling for any drive that’s under 12 hours

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@legit_scumbag You can do it! I’m proud of you.

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@ycombinator, check your website. Error code 500.

[John Walter @jpswalter]

Great interview.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Wolfgang Hammer helps founders and CEOs, at both startups and massive fortune 100 companies, use storytelling to better understand what they do, and why it matters.

In many ways, this conversation is a manual for how to find that story and communicate it in a way that resonates.

Wolfgang (@Beuysaunt) is a film producer and executive who helped create House of Cards and ran several major studios. He’s now building a new kind of film studio with support from Mitch Lasky and Marc Andreessen.

We talk about how stories work, what great ones have in common, and why understanding your own story can be transformative. Wolfgang explains the three layers every story must have — the external, the emotional, and the philosophical — and how they apply to building companies and leading people.

So many CEOs have Wolfgang to thank for changing how they think and talk about their business, and I hope this episode gives you the tools to do the same.

Enjoy!

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:50 The Three Layers of Story
04:44 Prompts for the Three Layers
05:54 Why Companies Struggle to Tell Their Story
08:11 The 80/20 Rule: Familiar vs. New
10:17 Suspense from Minimal New Information
11:16 Understanding the Customer's Story First
14:07 What CEOs Can Learn From Filmmakers
15:30 The CEO's Job: Master Communicator
17:12 The Definition of an Iconic Character
18:23 All Stories Are About Death
19:20 Two Kinds of Stories: Desire Fulfilled or Anxiety Purged
21:09 Story as an Ultimate Concern
23:31 Deconstructing Great Stories
26:25 The Relentless Role of Status
30:57 The Story So Big It Terrifies You
32:29 Inner Conflict: The Heart vs. Itself
35:06 A Unified Theory of Storytelling
36:09 The Two Core Truths
38:15 Kindest Thing

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@guilleflorvs FOUNDER

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@patrick_oshag Excellent interview. Thank you for producing this.

[John Walter @jpswalter]

Kids are a great joy

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@elonmusk There are no Tesla stores in Alabama. We have to drive to drive out of state to get a Tesla. I understand this is due to AL law requiring cars to be sold through a third party dealership, which you understandably oppose.

So the solution is to lobby the AL legislature.

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@RayDalio Historically, what asset classes perform best in nations when they go through the process of losing their global reserve currency status?

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@KobeissiLetter @friedberg @chamath @Jason @DavidSacks

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@battleangelviv It’s looking like Americans will have A/C on Mars before Europeans have A/C in Europe.

[John Walter @jpswalter]

@gdb That turned out well.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

I’m drafting a constitutional amendment

To oust every member of Congress

Whenever inflation exceeds 3%

It’s better to disqualify politicians

Than for an entire nation to suffer under the yoke of inflation

Please let me know what you think

And share if you like the idea