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.
Do you know Bryan Moore? Host of the Active Advisor podcast at Harbor Capital, former trading floor veteran who’s built ETF desks from scratch at major firms like Morgan Stanley, RBC, and WisdomTree, and one of the most thoughtful voices on how active ETFs are reshaping the investment landscape.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Bryan has spent over two decades in the trenches of financial markets – from trading futures in the Chicago pits to building international ETF operations to educating institutional clients about the evolution from passive indexing to smart beta to active management. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the ability to synthesize complex market knowledge with genuine curiosity about human behavior and psychology.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Epsilon Theory YouTube Channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear how a colorblind kid from Virginia who joined the military became one of the most connected voices in ETF education, why he drives in silence to cultivate quiet thinking time, and his legendary Vatican trade story.’
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Jared Dillian came on Just Press Record to discuss his excellent new book, Rule 62: Meditations on Success and Spirituality – and he surprised me with this statement:
“You can teach pretty much anything in writing, except for two things: voice and imagination. You either have it or you don’t.”
But what if you don’t realize if you have it or not yet?
I’m only asking because I’ve felt this way before. More than once. In more than one domain too (I remember feeling this with writing music and writing words, very distinctly!).
So what is voice?
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Somebody was talking about the power of thinking big the other day. It was all about impact.
Then I saw somebody else talking about the power of thinking small. It was all about little efforts compounding today into bigger results later.
They’re both right and they’re both missing the real point.
It’s not about the size in the first step (although the size is obvious in end result).
It’s all about the action, today.
It could be brilliant business idea nobody has thought of before.
Everybody might say its weird or dumb or whatever, but it could change the world.
It could also be a boring act that everybody has thought of before but executed in a way nobody will ever attempt.
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.
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
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
Chapter 4: Out of Eden
If we care about the influence of social networks on our minds, why are we talking about bipedalism and the 8 million year cycle of co-evolution it kicked off?
Because it defined how our young were parented, how we taught them, and what they were exposed to. Because it changed how our symbolic brains evolved.
Chapter 3: Caliban’s Garden
Man’s road to becoming a storyteller began with a single step.
That step kicked off millions of years of co-evolution of the human brain, society, language – and our relationship with story.
Chapter 2: What is Story?
There are a lot of ways to define a “story.”
But to understand how story interacts with human consciousness requires us to be more specific.
Chapter 1: Overhearing Ourselves
Shakespeare invented the human by inventing a device which spoke the language of consciousness:
Story.
Introduction: David Bowie’s Alien
David Bowie was right.
Social networks aren’t a tool. They are an alien force that transforms human consciousness.
I Think Representative Democracy is a Good Idea and We Should Give It a Try
I am 60 years old.
I am a (very) patriotic American.
I have never felt represented by any elected official.
Never.
I, Nazgûl
Being clear-eyed and full-hearted doesn’t mean being passive, weak, or silent.
It means resisting every effort to supplant our autonomy of mind with symbols of identity, no matter the source.
Apocalypse Always
Extreme language during election season isn’t anything new.
But this time it really is different. Our response must be different, too.
The Open Window
Creating two tightly bounded political extremes is NOT opening the Overton Window.
It just adds a second, equally closed window behind which all of our worst ideas can and will fester.
Remembering the Face of Your Father
For the past 28 years, since the death of my father, I’ve been hearing a steady tick-tock in my head.
How do we tell our stories to our children and our children’s children before it’s too late? Before we pass as all humans must pass?
Generative AI is a communion machine.
Manufactured Consensus
The more we believe the lie that social networks democratize narrative formation, the more systematically we make ourselves part of their manufactured consensus.
Generative AI is a Resurrection Machine
Each of us has a unique story. A story that makes you you. A story that is the engine of your consciousness. A story that is your thread of life.
A story that today can be inferred from your words by generative AI and restored computationally, so that the thread of life remains uncut.
Everything is about to change.
Donald Trump and the Common Knowledge Game
The question is not whether Trump will accept the election result if he loses. He won’t.
The question is whether a Missionary with actual power will join him.
Metametastasis
We are all concerned about how Gen AI may untether us from reality.
We are not nearly concerned enough about how media will have the ability to do the same through mature social networks.
The Weird Thing
The weirdest thing about this “weird” campaign is how convinced some are that it represents a thoroughly directed, planned, systematic propaganda effort.
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. Not any more, anyway.
We Are Losing Our Minds
Your brain evolved to perceive symbols.
Symbols evolved to be perceived by your brain.
Human society is evolving around a technology which exposes our brains to a barrage of seductive symbols.
And it’s making us lose our minds.
This is the Great Ravine
Our mediated cultural transition from sadness to generalized anger to focused anger at specific people and institutions of the Other Party is an entirely intentional effort by Big Politics, Big Tech and Big Media.
This is the Great Ravine, and it’s all going to get much worse before it gets any better.
Joe Biden and the Common Knowledge Game
Common knowledge is what everyone knows that everyone knows.
Common knowledge is why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed.
All that remains is the cope.
Four Roads to the Great Ravine (June 26, 2024)
1) US election spurs fiscal deficit
2) Phony War between Israel and Iran gets real
3) Preventive war between US and China over tech embargo
4) New GFC stemming from shadow banking sector
IT’S. ABOUT. THE. MONEY.
If you were a smart guy like MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor and you thought a stagflationary tsunami of enormous proportion was going to wash over the US economy regardless of who wins in November, what would you be doing right now?
I think you might be doing whatever you can to get liquid in the global reserve currency without spooking the marks.