All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
A revamped Cursed Knowledge is back! In this brand new episode, Ben joins Harper in the studio to talk about the all too common trope of killing off female characters to motivate male characters. Trust me, you’ve seen it. It’s everywhere and can tell us a lot about how hard it is to capture and maintain an audiences attention.
Physical viruses sometimes jump from one species to another.
Narrative viruses sometimes jump from one culture to another.
All it takes is the right virus and a susceptible host.
Narrative viruses are not immune to events in reality world – especially when we have made those narratives part of our identity.
And when a narrative becomes part of our identity, it changes what we need to be true.
Surprising outcomes in reality world that seem to confirm a narrative often produce explosive growth in its scale.
But also in its scope.
“I can’t find Dad.”
In which a stressed-out family makes an active choice to look past the totems of Team Red and Team Blue to find the truth of their Pack.
Men of God prophesied as early as 2007 that God would make Donald Trump the President of the United States.
Our narrative virus gave these predictions fertile ground to take root.
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.
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.
ET contributor Brent Donnelly captures the spirit and the content of our Epsilon Connect conference better than anything we could have done ourselves. Plus you get the slides from our presentations!
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.
Every virus needs carriers to spread. Even a narrative virus.
We can learn a lot from what they have in common.
This is a story about a virus and the gain-of-function research that produced it.
It’s not what you think.
A synthetic basketball lasted only one year (2007-2008) in the NBA.
But Synthetic Basketball? Oh, that’s here to stay.
The best speaker at Epsilon Connect 2023 was my Uber driver.
Buckle up, honeys.
A grown man made a wager. He lost. He made another wager. He lost again. End of story.
– Tony Soprano
This is the story of weak men and rapacious men.
This is the story of Bed Bath & Beyond.
This is the story of America today.
With the passing of Doyle Brunson, it’s a good day to compare poker to trading.
The City of Man always wins.
The Visigoths always sack Rome. The Vandals always sack Hippo. Augustine always dies in the siege. Bad things always happen to good people … at scale.
Here’s how we use generative AI to flip the script.
People like to throw around the phrase “gradually, then suddenly” as a witty rejoinder to suggest a dedollarization of the world is a nonlinear process that will unfold any day now. That only sounds smart when Hemingway says it.
There is no structural dollar depreciation or dedollarization story. Global usage of the USD is stable and changes in the value of the USD are cyclical.
These are the major topics and ideas we discussed during the 03/24/2023 Office Hours as well as some of the biggest takeaways. If you have something you want to add to the conversation, let us know in the comments and join us next time.
These are the major topics and ideas we discussed during the 03/17/2023 Office Hours as well as some of the biggest takeaways. If you have something you want to add to the conversation, let us know in the comments and join us next time.