Hello and Happy Nvidia Day to those who celebrate! The world's most valuable company will report Q4 earnings today, as investors' eyes remain glued to the stock that's come to encapsulate the entire market — for better and worse — so far in 2026. Today we're exploring: |
- Stating the Union: President Trump's address notched a record word count.
- Bulking up: Planet Fitness gyms are getting more crowded.
- The USAI: Which American states use ChatGPT the most?
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Trump's speech broke the record for the longest State of the Union address ever |
Much like the US men's hockey team as they walked into the House chamber during President Trump's address, there would have been plenty of "mention" traders celebrating at least a few of the president's ~10,600 words on Tuesday evening, including "hottest," "egg," and "alien." Lasting almost 108 minutes, President Trump's speech yesterday officially became the longest State of the Union address of the television age, surpassing the previous record of 89 minutes set by President Bill Clinton in 2000. According to data compiled by The American Presidency Project (APP), the president's address was almost double the average length of all recorded SOTU speeches since 1964, which works out as 55 minutes. |
The speech also marked what could be a new personal best in terms of length for Trump, beating his remarks to Congress in March 2025 by 8 minutes, though this was not included in the average as, according to the APP, it was not an official "State of the Union" speech. The APP also calculated a preliminary figure for 2026 in terms of word count, and the current president trumped all other spoken-word SOTU addresses. Some addresses, however, haven't been verbally delivered, and a couple of the written versions have racked up considerably greater tallies — most notably Jimmy Carter's 1981 address, which came in at 33,667 words in total (or about 30 Chartr newsletters' worth). |
How many people can you cram into one gym? For Planet Fitness, the jury's still out |
Running a gym group in 2026, there's really only three ways to make more revenue: open more gyms, squeeze more members into your existing gyms, or charge higher prices. Planet Fitness, America's largest gym company, counting an eye-watering 20.8 million members — about 800,000 more people than live in the state of New York — has been putting in the reps and getting pretty good at all three... the second one especially. Indeed, since 2011, the company has grown its membership count by 617%, while its total gym count has lagged behind, only increasing by 493% over the same period. The result has been that the average Planet Fitness gym, which is mostly run by franchisees, went from packing in a little over 5,900 members per unit in 2011 to 7,262 members at its peak two years ago. |
After years of remarkable execution and expansion — opening an average of 167 gyms annually over the last 15 years —, Planet Fitness might now finally be pushing up against the limit of just how many members it can cram onto its gym floors. PLNT's average members per store figure has now fallen for two years in a row, suggesting that future growth might need to come primarily from new gym openings, price hikes, or squeezing more ancillary revenues — like equipment sales — from franchisees, rather than crowding the machines and racks any further. That pressure already seems to be weighing heavily on the minds of investors. Yesterday, the company's stock fell 9% after revenue guidance underwhelmed Wall Street, with system-wide club sales expected to climb 4% to 5%, missing analyst expectations for a 6.2% increase, per Bloomberg. It now seems like the easiest gains are gone for the $6.7 billion gym giant. |
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The way different states use ChatGPT could tell us a lot about their economies |
Last Friday, OpenAI launched a new public dashboard tracking global non-enterprise messages on ChatGPT sent between July 2024 and the end of 2025. Of the 118 countries analyzed, the US ranked 25th by number of messages sent per capita, with a little over three quarters of all conversations clustering around just three subjects: practical guidance (~29%), writing (~27%), and seeking information (~20%). But zooming into the data at the state level, it becomes clear that not all regions are using the chatbot in quite the same way. |
Washington D. C. topped the list of ChatGPT messages per capita — echoing patterns seen in the use of Anthropic's Claude — and it's not hard to see why. The capital, dense with federal agencies, think tanks, and law firms, runs on drafting documents, from memos and policy briefs to endless email chains. It makes sense, then, that nearly a third (32%) of DC users lean on AI for writing, above the national average of 27%. The pattern holds across other top-ranked states, too: New York (#3), California (#4), and Washington (#8), for instance, all show writing as their top use case. Flip to the other end of the rankings, where the states that use ChatGPT the least sit, and the picture looks different. In West Virginia (#51), South Dakota (#48), Mississippi (#46), and Arkansas (#45), practical guidance is the dominant use case, accounting for 33-35% of all prompts across these states. |
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- Alphabet's Waymo expanded its driverless ride service to four new cities — Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Orlando — bringing its total US footprint to 10 cities. Uber wants to be next.
- The Milan Cortina Olympics drew the biggest Winter Games audience since Sochi 2014 for NBCUniversal, averaging 23.5 million viewers across its platforms.
- AMD struck a $100 billion AI chip deal with Meta, which could see the social media giant buy up to 10% of the chipmaker's current total shares outstanding.
- Oui, je regrette tout… The director of the Louvre has resigned months after the infamous $102 million jewel heist at the museum and amid a 10-year-long ticket fraud scandal.
- Workday shares tumbled on weak subscription revenue guidance, extending a slide that left the stock down roughly 45% year-to-date on Wednesday morning.
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- Gold standard: This Reuters analysis shows how national income can split teams at the Winter Olympics.
- Kontinentalist's viz-heavy exploration into why Bollywood fell out of love with the romance genre.
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Off the charts: On Monday, which company had its worst trading day since the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century? [Answer below]. |
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