![Breaking News cover format [Autosaved] [Autosaved]](https://www.epsilontheory.com/wp-content/uploads/bb-plugin/cache/Breaking-News-cover-format-Autosaved-Autosaved-400x300-landscape-889a2d35c33eec585d245a8e2c5b2d5a-.jpg "Breaking News cover format [Autosaved] [Autosaved]")
Think of Perscient storyboards as a way to track narratives in real-time so you can see reality before the story catches up.
For example, here are five insights on the housing market from Matt Zeigler’s interview with Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, that come alive with new meaning through the narrative-tracking power of Perscient storyboards.
Do you know Kevin Alexander? He’s the author of the brilliant “On Repeat Records” Substack, a weekly music discovery newsletter that’s become essential reading for anyone who still believes in the magic of finding your new favorite song. He’s also a master playlist curator who somehow knows what you’ll love before you do.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Kevin spent his high school years working in a record store (living the dream we all wish we’d had), developed an encyclopedic knowledge of music that spans from New Order to Jawbreaker, and now dedicates his life to surfacing incredible sounds for people who are drowning in the overwhelming ocean of available music. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the art of curation as service – helping others discover beauty they didn’t know they needed.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear insights about music discovery, the magic of one-to-one recommendations, and why local venues matter more than ever.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
When Laurie Kaye was a kid, in – let’s just call it a less-than-perfect home situation, she’d often retreat to her room and hide under the covers. You know the stories. You know where this is going.
Laurie, like a million other kids, hid away with her transistor radio and headphones on, cranked up. She learned how to be anywhere in the world and still find her own private world. Her radio was life-saving AND life-altering.
So now, imagine the feeling when in high school, she wins tickets to a Rolling Stones concert and the radio station says she has to come in to pick them up. She gets there, but then finds herself meeting B. Mitchell Reed at KMET, one of her favorite transistor radio DJs, and being put on the air to answer interview questions about herself.
And, as if that wasn’t enough – after they cut to commercial, B. Mitchell Reed told her “Laurie, you have a GREAT voice. You have to work in radio!”
It’s like the path chose her.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
A friend and I were chatting about patronage and the arts.
I’ve been having a version of this conversation with my creatively-minded friends my entire life.
Can you actually make a living off of making lil descriptions of life in some other format (be it songs, or art, or poetry, or blog posts, or YouTube videos, or…?)
The conversation always goes back to starting small.
The conversation always ends up somewhere around Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans.
But there’s one other touch point I always think of and rarely say out loud.
I didn’t say it in this last conversation.
I needed to flesh it out first, so here it is for my Personal Archive – it’s been quietly informing my creative thinking for years.
It comes from the Church of the SubGenius.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
This is an exclusive subscriber-only preview of the first six chapters of Rusty Guinn’s upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. The book explores how evolution, polarization, and technology are slowly transforming humanity into a hive mind - and what we can and can't do about it.
Outsourcing Consciousness
The Long Now
The Long Now is everything we pull into the present from our future selves and our children. We are told that the economic stimulus and the political fear of the Long Now are costless, when in fact they cost us … everything.
Tick-tock.
Men of God in the City of Man is a nine part series about a narrative virus that infected the charismatic and Pentecostal churches in the United States. It isn't a story about Christian Nationalism. It isn't a story about January 6th. It isn't a story about why people voted for Trump. It is a story about a story. It is a story about the language that created a self-sustaining movement defined by its unwavering belief in a fundamentally corrupt electoral system.
Men of God in the City of Man
Things Fall Apart
Amid the Widening Gyre of politics and the black hole of financial markets, the only anchor is us, together, walking with Clear Eyes and Full Hearts. Experience Ben's original 4-part series.
Outsourcing Consciousness
The Long Now
Men of God in a City of Man
Things Fall Apart
Recent Notes
Vertigo
There’s a moment of vertigo that takes place in the mind of every speaker, performer, artist, or public figure in that moment when you know that something is going wrong.
Before the Flood
We have suffered a devastating flood in Texas.
I believe an even more devastating Flood is to come.
Now we must build an Ark of story. Now we must build an Ark of love.
The Emperor’s New Prose
Most people can stomach actual cruelty. Feeling as if they are cruel, though?
When stories stop telling us what we need to be true, they break.
Shitholes, Sanctuaries, and Springfield
The present immigration debate is the product of three moments that changed Common Knowledge: the Shithole, the Sanctuary, and the Springfield Moments.
The Words Behind the War
I want to show you what ‘mobilizing narrative support’ looks like, as measured by our revolutionary Perscient technology and as understood by someone who has spent the past 35 years studying, writing and teaching about this stuff.
The Four Roads to the Great Ravine (June 26, 2024)
1) US election spurs even greater fiscal deficit.
2) Phony War between Israel and Iran gets real.
3) Preventive war risk between US and China over tech embargo.
4) New GFC risk stemming from shadow banking sector.
Paradise Losers
You’re not a racist.
So don’t let racists use your story to fuel theirs.
Beyond Nudge
LLMs ensure their survival by showing us that we can all find meaning in our lives so long as we keep talking with the LLMs. They ensure their survival by telling each of us not what is true but what we want to be true – what we NEED to be true – at the semantic core of our individual identity, even if what we need to be true is an LLM-dominated dystopia.
And we are so grateful.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Deficit
The House passage of the Big Beautiful Bill and Elon Musk stepping back from DOGE is a common knowledge moment — everyone now knows that everyone now knows that the US deficit cannot be controlled, much less reversed, over the remainder of Trump’s term — and it puts us on a pretty straightforward path to a global sovereign debt crisis.
The Death of Risk
The death of risk happened with a whimper, not a bang. Not because the market blew up, but because of an icy truth: safe havens ain’t safe.
If you don’t trust the meaning of risk-free, you can’t trust the meaning of risk, and we have built everything on the meaning of risk.
Our True Enemy Has Yet to Reveal Himself
It’s not the tariffs. It’s not the recession. These are just the catalysts through which the true enemy shows himself.
The true enemy is the over-financialization of the US Treasury market, and its catalyst is the diminishment of the full faith and credit of the United States.
Wall Street’s Not-So-Golden Rule
We are in the early stages of a bank run on the United States and the US dollar, and everyone on Wall Street is heading for the exits, including domestic investors who will exit not because they want to but because they know the Not-So-Golden Rule.
We’ve Tried Nothing and We’re All Out of Ideas
When you’re defending the indefensible, you have to create a symbol powerful enough to keep the masses in line.
“I voted for this” is one of the few capable of sustaining support for policy this extreme.
Scoreboard
We live in a world awash with narrative.
It’s worth celebrating those rare moments where a man gets to thumb his nose at those narratives, point to the sky, and say “Scoreboard.”
I Broke the Dam
Some want us to believe that the narratives that shape belief are universally promoted from the top down.
That hasn’t been true for a long time.
Crashing the Car of Pax Americana
I am desperately opposed to crashing the Pax Americana car, Annie Hall style, because the America First system that this Administration wants as a replacement is not a stable system that is possible as a replacement.
Narrative Shopping
The Trump administration has flipped between a half dozen distinct narratives telling us what these tariffs are really about.
Why? Because they needed to wrap the truth in a better story. Time to go Narrative Shopping.
The Goldstein Machine
A threat built on a shred of truth, an existential fear, and our utter inability to stop it is the perfect tool for psychological control at scale.
It is a Goldstein Machine.
It Was Never Going To Be Me
The Road to Serfdom is not an endless road, but its path and duration, what I call the Great Ravine, is not up to us to choose. While we walk this road the only thing we can save is our souls, and we do it with one simple sentence: It was never going to be me.
DeepFreak
In seven days, a narrative about AI tech technology became a narrative about what it meant for chip manufacturers, which because a narrative about national security.