Rusty Guinn 
It’s the Wednesday Zeitgeist, chock full of belied recessions, a little bit of humility, a little bit of YOLO, an expensive investment sold on yield, a less expensive investment sold on yield, slow maybes and a peek into the Widening Gyre.
Disney is making a play to return to Neverland, a land where valuations are based on establishing market share and dominance of an emerging industry, where the moment you start worrying about how much money you’re making is the moment the narrative breaks. For students of markets and narratives alike, it will be worth watching.
It’s the Monday Zeitgeist, where we keep the Star Wars image streak alive at 2, celebrate the return of a beloved phrase, laud the arrival of a very dumb phrase, listen to political predictions from economists, and hear a political proposal from a journalist.
It’s the Weekend Zeitgeist, where we try to forget about markets for a day or two to see what matters in the rest of the world. This week, it’s robots, the 1980s, self-made men, Star Wars (more than an ACTUAL black hole), Moroccan exceptionalism and the Power of Google.
The arrest of Julian Assange presents one of the most fascinating, explainer-laden, Fiat News-driven narrative maps we have seen. Tread carefully in taking what you read about this one at face value, friends.
The gravity of political polarization is real, and the mass which lies at the base of its well are narratives of existential risk.
Today’s Monday Zeitgeist is all about book report analyses, central bank common knowledge, a new form of home finance in which you make principal payments over time, multi-level-marketing surprises again, and believability.
When it comes to telling us how ‘the smart money’ and ‘the dumb money’ are playing it, there’s always someone who will tell us it’s Duck Season, and someone who will tell us it’s Rabbit Season. The reality is that it’s always Elmer Season. You and me? We’re Elmer in this cartoon.
It’s the weekend, which means it’s a (mostly) finance-free zone on The Zeitgeist. This week-in-review gives us a glimpse into purchases of fine art, the comedic stylings of David Brooks, the continued relevance of Marvin Gaye, a marketing word salad and a solemn hymn to solemn hymns.
An interesting question with a straightforward answer. Put simply, if a fund manager tells you they’re selling, ignore the reason they give and replace it with “Big founder wants liquidity.”
Today’s Zeitgeist is all about trust in the trustless (ugh), hope springing eternal in Value Added, benchmarking the unbenchmarkable, Fiat News through bad Googling, and why we can’t shake fat fingers.
The weekend Zeitgeist, in which we are reminded that we need Silicon Valley to tell us what art is, that we need Zucker and Murdoch to tell us what news is, and opposing politicians to tell us what we should be mad about.
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We take a break from Fiat News to talk about the much simpler, much more straightforward ways that we are told how to think.
They’re not new, but in the widening gyre of our current political Zeitgeist, they are becoming the main attraction.
The weekend Zeitgeist, in which the Gray Lady’s news coverage gets even grayer, everybody loves Beto, Rusty discovers a new Hall of Fame about which he has opinions, and abstracted thinking in cheese research.
Helicopter parenting produces kids whose ability to evaluate and take risks has been crippled. If we’re not careful, helicopter parenting from policy-makers will do the same to us as investors.
In which we are told that China is not the AI-powered dystopia we we were looking for, we encounter the “seen to” Fiat News tell in the wild, and we take a longer look at something over the better part of…an evening?
All the Fiat News that’s fit to scrutinize.
One of the missionary’s most powerful tools is admiring the unsolvable problem – finding new ways of describing what’s wrong without an honest effort to actually fix it.
With apologies, add this to the list of things that you will now see everywhere.
Today’s Zeitgeist is about tweet nudges, massive law partner payouts, a big reason for massive law partner payouts, your closet, the people who want to sell you…rope, and more.
Ben has already talked about the biggest and most important thing we can do in the face of the admissions bribery scandal.
But many remain convinced that this scandal is an inflection point, a change in the Zeitgeist. It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be watching for our opportunity to weaken the influence of the Church of Credential.