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.
I am impossibly betting that sometime in 2002 I saw Atmosphere on the God Loves Ugly tour in the 300ish person room below Pearl Street in Northampton, MA. If you know otherwise, or if you gave me a ride there, or whatever, feel free to clarify. The internet has failed me in this regard.
And, more specifically, I saw Atmosphere, a bunch of Rhymesayers artists, and Mr. Dibbs.
DJs have always been fascinating to me. Mr. Dibbs included. The curation and choices and room-reading (and occasionally lack of room reading) fascinates me.
It was probably all the years in high school I spent playing for real money in cover bands in bars, relative to the time I spent playing for minimal door money in original bands in indie/all-ages clubs.
Getting a room to appreciate an original is really hard. It’s your art and it’s being judged. LIVE.
Now, copying an oldie but a goodie in a cover band, while easier and you have better odds of achieving audience approval, you still need to do something to either make it your own or strive for the level of mastery the original artist had.
I won’t turn this into a rant on my hatred for lazy cover bands. They exist.
But, I will take this back to my admiration for DJs who don’t have to play cover songs because they can play the source material. The best DJs can even make something special out of it. Originality in DJ routines is magic to me (and massively undercelebrated).
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Name Your Critic
The most paralyzing creative fear isn’t real criticism – it’s the imaginary collective judgment we carry in our heads. James Clear’s insight cuts through the fog: when you worry about “what other people will think,” you’re usually not worried about any specific person’s opinion. The moment you name the actual critic, you often realize you don’t respect their judgment anyway. This simple practice of naming your critic dissolves most creative paralysis because cruel critics usually reveal themselves to be people whose opinions don’t actually matter to your work.
The Raw File Approach to Networking: Morgan Ranstrom Returns TO JUST PRESS RECORD
We have a compression problem. AI and algorithms compress human experience the same way Spotify compresses audio files – technically functional but missing crucial data. Morgan Ranstrom’s insight about treating genuine conversation as “raw file” networking versus algorithmic compression explains why so many professional connections feel hollow. Real relationships preserve all the data: pauses, tangents, cross-industry pollination, and moments where ideas actually compound in real-time. Your Personal Archive matters because you’re building an uncompressed library of human experiences while everyone else accepts compressed files.
Grow Your Network: Morgan Ranstrom Is A Purposefully Thoughtful Advisor and Musician
Everything compounds – for you or against you. Morgan’s framework for intentional living centers on recognizing that neutrality doesn’t exist in personal development. His decision to trade Friday nights for Saturday mornings captures the profound challenge of right living: making choices today that your future self will thank you for, even when present benefits aren’t visible. The Napoleon tree story illuminates legacy thinking – planting trees you’ll never see requires ego reduction but creates the most lasting impact because it frees you from needing immediate validation.
Grow Your Network: Rupert Mitchell Is A Market Translator Who Turns Chaos Into Clarity
The greatest competitive advantage isn’t being in the thick of every battle, it’s having perspective to see patterns others miss. Rupert Mitchell’s transition from investment banking to independent research gave him something invaluable: distance that allows pattern recognition impossible under execution pressure. His celebration of generalism – from feeder cattle to SaaS companies to Japanese rice harvesters – isn’t scattered thinking but strategic diversity. Fresh perspectives reveal insights that specialists, trapped in expertise, completely miss. The transferable skills that matter aren’t technical ones that become obsolete, but human skills that compound across decades.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Do you know Morgan Ranstrom? He’s a wealth advisor at Trailhead Planners, author, musician with Stone Arch Rivals, and someone who thinks deeply about compounding in all its forms – from right living to generational legacy.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Morgan combines financial planning expertise with a musician’s creative soul, and he’s written thoughtfully about the intersection of money, meaning, and multi-generational impact. I wanted to connect with them because they embody something I value deeply: the rare ability to see how everything compounds – relationships, habits, creativity, and wisdom – over decades.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear us dive deep into time as a filter, the power of being a good ancestor, and why Morgan traded his Friday nights for Saturday mornings.
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
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.