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.
After 25 years in the music industry, making beats for some of hip-hop’s biggest names, Alchemist was burning out. Maybe even burned out. But then he discovered a formula from – of all places – Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor that changed everything for him.
After all those years of chasing bigger features, bigger budgets, bigger everythings. After being inspired by Jim Jones verses for “crazy money.” After four different versions of the same song that went four ways to nowhere. Trent Reznor breaks through to him on a video.
The moment came as he watched one $20 payment at a time show up via direct payments in PayPal, for an instrumental album (French Blends) that he otherwise couldn’t put out on a label, but he very much could self release on Bandcamp.
Up that point, he had always been a record industry guy. He had only done distribution the old way, because he was succeeding that way, but at the prompting of some friends he tried something new and – it blew his mind. Instead of writing, recording, sending it off and then waiting forever to maybe get paid, this was immediate. One day you’re finished, the next day it’s in the fans’ hands, and the money is in your bank account.
I want my mind blown too. Don’t you?
Read more at cultishcreative.com
In 1996, Philly scenesters The Roots, put out a video for “What They Do,” to help promote their less live-band feeling third (official) record, Illadelph Halflife. The sheer contradictions in 1996 are hard to remember, let alone explain if you weren’t living it, but the song – it’s like being early on a market-timing call or something.
They wanted to declare, “Hey, we do it differently and that’s cooler than you realize” with a parody type video. Given how different the group was, it wasn’t a punch down in any way, I thought it was a great joke whenever I first saw it too, but – the rest of the world didn’t quite see it that way.
You should probably watch the video before we get too far into this. You have to see it because of the sarcastic subtitles especially, calling out every mid-90s rap video cliché, by putting “Rented for the day” over mansion shots, “It’s really ginger ale” over champagne pours, etc. Like I said before, to suburban punk rock me, this was AWESOME.
However, as The Roots would soon find out, sometimes, when you draw a line in the sand, it can create a situation for something else to blow up in your face.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
You know all those things everybody is doing that you were going to start when nobody was doing them but now, everybody is doing them so you talk yourself out of ever starting?
Maybe you don’t, but I do. I know I’m not alone. Morgan Ranstrom said this to me in the second part of his recent return to Just Press Record.
I still feel late. I don’t think you ever stop feeling late. Unless you were actually early… for the rest of us, I don’t think we get to ever feel like we’re not late. You just go anyways.
Morgan Ranstrom on Just Press Record
The topic came up while discussing a clip from Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Chris Mayer’s Just Press Record appearance. Anne-Laure had shared her Google story on that episode – how she felt like an impostor because “everyone was way smarter than me.” Now she’s brilliant with massive post-Google success, so what even was that feeling?
Here’s the paradox: whatever we focus on feels saturated because we only see the 20% already doing it. We forget about the silent 80% of humanity for whom this isn’t even an option yet. It really does suck to feel late – so how do you cope with it?
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Anderson .Paak is sitting at home, smiling (presumably, because he always is?), when he sees the announcement on social media for Dr. Dre’s Super Bowl halftime show.
It’s a big announcement on a number of levels. Dre helped bring him up, for starters. They’d actually just finished some serious album work together too.
Part of him felt like he’d be included in something like this? That part of him was feeling pretty hurt by not seeing his name on the flyer. Especially since his name would have been next to a nearly endless list of other incredible features.
So, for a moment, he was upset. Then, he did what creatives do. Nothing particular surprising here – he got creative.
He said on Drink Champs, “I hit my people. I’m like, look, you got to figure it out.” They didn’t know what to do, so he made a flyer for the halftime show and put himself on it. “I threw myself on there.” He sent it to Dre and, “I was like, ‘Yo, what’s good?'”
Dre saw it, laughed, and that’s how .Paak ended up on drums for one of the craziest, largest, and most iconic halftime performances in Super Bowl history.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Scott Bradlee just wrapped up a 12-part lecture series called MusicX. They’re all on his Substack, Musings From The Middle, and if you’re a music dork too, you’ll want to go back and watch them all.
In the last episode, Scott said something I’ve wrestled with a lot in my head over the years:
Art is more of a spiritual pursuit than it is a technical pursuit. There’s nothing mystical about building this toolkit, but there is something mystical about creating art. It’s the pursuit of something transcendent, something that is beyond the material world, and – it’s also something that’s really uniquely human.
Scott Bradlee, MusicX Lecture #12
When I was 5ish, after much begging, I got my first guitar. It came home from the store. If I close my eyes, I can smell the smell of the case opening and me looking at it, thinking “Hey, it’s not an electric guitar, but it’s A GUITAR and it’s my sized and, this is going to be so cool.”
So I pick up the guitar, I hold it the way I hold my toy guitars, and I get ready to play it just like my aunts and uncles in the parties at my grandparents house…
Read more at cultishcreative.com
The cure for the cancer of gun culture and police culture is not to be found in reform laws around guns and police, but in reform ideas around culture, ideas that create a new dimension of American society that rejects LARPing and LARPers alike.
Inflation
What made Bitcoin special is nearly lost, and what remains is a false and constructed narrative that exists in service to Wall Street and Washington rather than in resistance.
The Bitcoin narrative must be renewed. And that will change everything.
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Crypto
Recent Notes
Lack of Imagination
The structurally bullish will warn us against failure of nerve. The traders will warn us against hesitation. The structurally bearish will warn us about being unable to shift into a defensive shape. But what we should be worried about now is a lack of imagination.
The Python and the Pig
The NYC healthcare system – one of the finest in the world – is about to be slammed beyond anything they have ever seen. ER visits and patient testing is where it begins. It moves from there through the system, ending in ICU wards. The process is like a python swallowing a pig, except this isn’t a pig. It’s a whale.
Tick-Tock
For the first time our federal government is treating the fight against this virus like the war that it is.
Is it pathetic and sad and a corrupt betrayal of the public trust that it took this long? Absolutely.
But now here we go. And there is no country in the world that mobilizes for war more effectively than the United States.
Office Hours – 3.10.2020
Covid-19 is a fertile ground for narratives and missionaries of all kinds – from politicians to central banks, corporate leaders and financial media pundits. Join us as we discuss them.
The Non-Linearity of Need
In a potential recession, need isn’t evenly distributed. In a pandemic, that’s even more true. The time to start helping is now.
Don’t Test, Don’t Tell (10 Days Later)
Originally published in Quillette, it’s the Epsilon Theory take on Don’t Test, Don’t Tell” – the single most incompetent, corrupt public health policy of my lifetime.
The Elton/Hootie Line
In 1995 we crossed a line in music.
In 2009 we crossed that line in markets.
In 2016 we crossed that line in politics.
Music charted the way back. Let’s listen to its lesson.
The Narrative Matrix
New from ET contributor Pete Cecchini …
We talk all the time about the informational efficiency of markets. What if the real dimension we should focus on is narrative efficiency?
The Mozilo Market
After a Countrywide earnings call in 2008, I trusted NO ONE in government or Wall Street to tell the truth about the mortgage crisis.
And that’s the way I feel about COVID-19 today.
Don’t Test, Don’t Tell
The CDC’s Don’t Test, Don’t Tell policy came crashing down last night. So did Trump’s “buh, buh the flu” and “Yay, Containment!” narratives.
Now let’s get to work preparing for the fight to come.
Not in panic. Not in fear. But with resolve, sacrifice and righteous anger for those who would use us instrumentally for their own political ends.
Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can’t lose.
Covid-19 Cargo Cults
Quantitative analysis is all well and good, but when someone starts peddling you charts or measures when you KNOW that the underlying data is unknowable, you are dealing with a cargo cultist. When it comes to Covid-19, nobody has time for that.
As of February 27, even after a 10% drawdown, we believe the narrative about Covid-19 is complacent.
Join Us. No, Really.
Second Foundation Partners is looking for a new member of the team to help us spearhead the development of technologies for narrative analysis.
The Fall of Wuhan
Containment has failed. And so now we must fight.
That means doing everything possible to bolster our healthcare systems BEFORE the need overwhelms the capacity.
That means calling out our leaders for their corrupt political responses to date, and forcing them through our outcry to adopt an effective virus-fighting policy for OUR benefit, not theirs.
Kitchen Sink It
To receive a free full-text email of The Zeitgeist whenever we publish to the website, please sign up here. You’ll get two or three of these emails every…
Thanksgiving
A moment to say thanks and accept responsibility.
Office Hours – 2.18.2020
This Office Hours is all about Coronavirus, except it’s not – it’s all about how institutions who solve for narrative outcomes invariably create bad results in the Real World.
Love in the Time of COVID-19
Within a few months, the reality of COVID-19 will overtake the propaganda of the CCP and their toadies at the World Health Organization, as real-world companies begin making real-world economic decisions to maintain their enterprises in the face of a real-world threat.
Those decisions will be led by sports franchises.
The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros
To date, WHO leadership has simply been part of the Chinese narrative machine.
It’s not just a betrayal of the researchers and clinicians who do important work under WHO auspices. It’s a betrayal of the world.
Options
Our social institutions require of us many songs. One of those songs is about the roots of poverty in immorality. If we’re going to stop singing their songs, this may be a good place to start.
Body Count
China is fighting nCov2019 exactly like the US fought North Vietnam … with policy driven more by narrative control than by what’s best to win the war.
That was a disastrous strategic mistake for the US then, and it’s a disastrous strategic mistake for China today.
After 25 years in the music industry, making beats for some of hip-hop’s biggest names, Alchemist was burning out. Maybe even burned out. But then he discovered a formula from – of all places – Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor that changed everything for him.
After all those years of chasing bigger features, bigger budgets, bigger everythings. After being inspired by Jim Jones verses for “crazy money.” After four different versions of the same song that went four ways to nowhere. Trent Reznor breaks through to him on a video.
The moment came as he watched one $20 payment at a time show up via direct payments in PayPal, for an instrumental album (French Blends) that he otherwise couldn’t put out on a label, but he very much could self release on Bandcamp.
Up that point, he had always been a record industry guy. He had only done distribution the old way, because he was succeeding that way, but at the prompting of some friends he tried something new and – it blew his mind. Instead of writing, recording, sending it off and then waiting forever to maybe get paid, this was immediate. One day you’re finished, the next day it’s in the fans’ hands, and the money is in your bank account.
I want my mind blown too. Don’t you?
Read more at cultishcreative.com
In 1996, Philly scenesters The Roots, put out a video for “What They Do,” to help promote their less live-band feeling third (official) record, Illadelph Halflife. The sheer contradictions in 1996 are hard to remember, let alone explain if you weren’t living it, but the song – it’s like being early on a market-timing call or something.
They wanted to declare, “Hey, we do it differently and that’s cooler than you realize” with a parody type video. Given how different the group was, it wasn’t a punch down in any way, I thought it was a great joke whenever I first saw it too, but – the rest of the world didn’t quite see it that way.
You should probably watch the video before we get too far into this. You have to see it because of the sarcastic subtitles especially, calling out every mid-90s rap video cliché, by putting “Rented for the day” over mansion shots, “It’s really ginger ale” over champagne pours, etc. Like I said before, to suburban punk rock me, this was AWESOME.
However, as The Roots would soon find out, sometimes, when you draw a line in the sand, it can create a situation for something else to blow up in your face.