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.
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.
The outcomes of NFL games are inordinately influenced by officials relative to other sports. This is not new. The Narrative environment faced by the NFL in 2021, however, IS new.
I’m not sure they’re ready for it.
When a famous person shakes his or her finger at you, they’re not telling you a fact.
They’re telling you how to think about a fact.
Called It - Election Edition
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.
Recent Notes
Fidelity Reminds ETF Industry It Doesn’t Have To Care
Free is a good price. It’s how we got Fortnite, and Radio, and a terrible internet. People hate paying for things.
That’s what Fidelity was counting on when they decided to make a stink about 9 ETF issuers not signing their revenue sharing deal.
And they’ll win. They always win.
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.
I Think The Gun Helps
Our kids are being rewired.
The data implicating the smartphone-based childhood are compelling but not conclusive – and may never be.
So how should governments, communities, schools and families decide what to do?
Bitcoin Endgames & The New Hyper-Agents
If the HODLers are right, they’re also the new Elites.
Not in a “my thumbdrive will make me the Duke of West Hartford in this post-apocalyptic hellscape” sort of way, but in ugly-but-mainstream scenarios with ugly-but-mainstream power/wealth transfers.
And You Wonder Why Bitcoin and Gold are at Record Highs
The Fed’s inflation-fighting credibility is shot and everyone in Washington and on Wall Street is in the bag for nominal growth, ie Number Go Up on EVERYTHING, through the November election.
After that … well, as Louis XV so aptly put it: après moi, le déluge.
Wheeee!
Financial Nihilism
The Boomers have all the money. The American Dream of upward mobility is dead for you. That is Financial Nihilism.
So if you’re on the wrong end of this, what do you do about it?
You gamble. You f**king gamble.
The Semantic Universe
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Why We Don’t Trust Each Other Anymore
We are saying everything, but also we are saying nothing, just sort of talking at each other about things like “rizz” and “Price-to-Earnings Ratio”.
How do we fix that?
The End of History and the Triumph of Fiat World
The great danger of generative AI lies in its use by governments and corporations to cement the most anti-human misalignment of all – the misalignment of rulers from the ruled, of the State from the People.
Fannie Mae’s Affordable Housing TM
Last month, Fannie Mae launched a new financial product they call a Social Mortgage Backed Security, designed to “improve access to affordable housing” by lowering credit standards for borrowers. As ET contributor Chuck Marohn points out, this makes home prices in affected areas go up, and doesn’t touch truly cheap housing.
How Does Technology Rewire the Intricate Circuitry of the Teenage Mind?
The central course of our children’s lives is being mind-warped by social media and smartphones, not in some ethereal ghost-in-the-machine sort of way but in an actual neural-wiring sort of way, and this research note by Kiril Sokoloff and the 13D team shows how.
The Washington Pravda and the Wall Street Izvestia
Today both Wall Street and the White House are determined to tell you a story that inflation is over and mission accomplished. Wall Street because they want a cheaper price of money and the White House because they want to win an election.
It’s not a lie, per se, but it’s not a truth, either. It’s all just story, all the way down.
And like all sclerotic institutions, Wall Street and the White House rely on their media organs to tell the story.
Useful Idiots
Yes, Virginia, western news media are often useful idiots.
But let’s be real: so is Tucker Carlson.
The Bitcoin ETF Tipping Problem
ET contributor Dave Nadig was there at the beginning of ETFs, and he’s forgotten more about their structure and operations than I will ever know.
In this excellent note, Dave digs into the Bitcoin ETF “tipping problem”. It’s a fascinating read on where narrative runs headlong into the real world of market mechanics.
Death and Rebirth: In Precious Metals, Crypto, and the 6th Grade
“Nice yellow pants, freak.”
Nobody is immune to getting slapped with a label, especially when you’re a new kid in middle school. The trick is not selling out. The trick is owning your identity.
That’s true for Wall Street, too.
It’s All True
Eight thoughts that I can’t reconcile about about Justin Mohn, the 32-year-old in Levittown, Pennsylvania who murdered his father, cut off his head, and made a YouTube video showing off his trophy and saying he did it because his father, who worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers, was part of the “Biden regime” and was a “traitor to his country”.
It’s All True (Eight Thoughts on Justin Mohn)
Eight thoughts that I can’t reconcile about about Justin Mohn, the 32-year-old in Levittown, Pennsylvania who murdered his father, cut off his head, and made a YouTube video showing off his trophy and saying he did it because his father, who worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers, was part of the “Biden regime” and was a “traitor to his country”.
Men of God in the City of Man, Part 9: Pathogenesis
A single virus can cause disease of the body in several ways at once.
A single narrative can cause disease in society in several ways, too.
This is the story of a new disease from an old acquaintance.
The Intellectual Rot of the Industrially Necessary University
The intellectual rot of the modern University perverts and diminishes the works of its faculty and administrators, no matter how smart they are, no matter how well-intentioned they are. It is a rot that requires plagiarism and promotes antisemitism.
We require a new Reformation, and here are its theses.
Non-Linguistic Inflation Framing in the Wall Street Journal
We do a lot of work here to understand how the media frames issues linguistically, but we haven’t done much to see how that carries over in graphical narrative representations. Would the same patterns we see in the WSJ’s words be represented in the WSJ’s pictures?
Oh yes.