Rusty Guinn

Rusty Guinn

Co-Founder and CEO

 @WRGuinn

Rusty Guinn is co-Founder and CEO of Second Foundation Partners, LLC, and has been a contributing author to Epsilon Theory since 2017.

Before Ben and Rusty established Second Foundation, Rusty served in a variety of investment roles in several organizations. He managed and operated a $10+ billion investment business, led investment strategy for the second largest wealth management franchise in Houston, and sat on the management committee of the 6th largest public pension fund in the United States.

Most recently, Rusty was Executive Vice President over the retail and institutional asset management businesses at Salient Partners in Houston, Texas. There he oversaw the 5-year restructuring and transition of Salient’s $10 billion money management business from legacy fund-of-funds products to a dedicated real assets franchise.

He previously served as Director of Strategic Partnerships and Opportunistic Investments at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a $12 billion portfolio spanning public and private investments. Rusty also served as a portfolio manager for TRS’s externally managed global macro hedge fund and long-only equity portfolios. He led diligence, process development and the allocation of billions of dollars across a wide range of indirect and principal investments.

Rusty’s career also includes roles with de Guardiola Advisors, an investment bank serving the asset management industry, and Asset Management Finance, a specialized private equity investor in asset management companies.

He is a graduate of the Wharton School, and lives on a farm in Fairfield, Connecticut with wife Pam and sons Winston and Harry. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Houston Youth Symphony, and with Pam has been a long-time supporter and founding Friend of the Houston Shakespeare Festival. He plays guitar and drums on the worship team at his church in Connecticut, and dabbles in cooking, whisky, progressive rock and beating Ben at trivia.

Articles by Rusty:

Men of God in the City of Man, Part 4: Epimemetics

By Rusty Guinn | July 7, 2023 | 152 Comments

Every Narrative is built on memes that have evolved and adapted to human culture over centuries.

But some environments change the way that those memes are expressed. The effects can be explosive.

The Launch of FiatNews.com

By Rusty Guinn | July 6, 2023 | 0 Comments

Today we announce the beta launch of FiatNews.com, an Epsilon Theory sub-site devoted to the measurement of opinion content in news.

Our goal? Giving citizens the ability to know when they’re being told how to think.

Men of God in the City of Man, Part 3: Memetics

By Rusty Guinn | July 5, 2023 | 152 Comments

In the same way that genetics governs how physical viruses reproduce within a host, memetics governs how narrative viruses reproduce within a culture.

And the memes which govern our narrative virus are powerful.

Noseblind

By Rusty Guinn | March 1, 2023 | 23 Comments

The half-life of just about every major news story is one week.

Barring major new developments, practically nothing captures our attention beyond six.

So how do we stay focused on things that matter for much longer than that?

They Fought the Gyre … and the Gyre Won

By Rusty Guinn | February 15, 2023 | 61 Comments

He Gets Us gets a lot right about our world today.

But there’s something important He Gets Us didn’t get.

Hodor

By Rusty Guinn | January 10, 2023 | 39 Comments

The Story of Adequate Liquidity doesn’t exist and shift on the margin. Instead, it exists in two states: it is normal, or it is broken. Once the threshold between these states is crossed, it is very hard to tell the old story. Sometimes impossible.

There is almost no price too high to keep that story from jumping over that threshold.

The Recipe for Agent Orange – The Projection Racket, Pt. 3

By Rusty Guinn | December 1, 2022 | 27 Comments

There is a true story of free market capitalism. It is one of humanity’s greatest and most important stories.

There is also a myth of free market capitalism. It is one of humanity’s most manipulated stories.

The Fifteen Faces of Fiat News

By Rusty Guinn | July 26, 2022 | 35 Comments

We’re building a Narrative Early Warning System (NEWS) as our first major research project in a larger effort to inoculate ourselves against the weaponized narratives of Big Tech, Big Media and Big Politics.

You’re Not Wrong, Walter

By Rusty Guinn | January 20, 2022 | 0 Comments

The first actual rich person I ever met, I met at Wharton. Same goes for the second, third and probably 100th, for that matter. At…

An Inconvenient Truce

By Rusty Guinn | January 3, 2022 | 72 Comments

Polarization often isn’t an accident. It is the result of intentional narrative construction – constructions designed to make us believe that we are sane and unfairly judged, and that our opponents are insane and hypocritical.

Understanding how to recognize and respond to these constructions in the wild is now an indispensable skill of the citizen.