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.
A friend and I were chatting about patronage and the arts.
I’ve been having a version of this conversation with my creatively-minded friends my entire life.
Can you actually make a living off of making lil descriptions of life in some other format (be it songs, or art, or poetry, or blog posts, or YouTube videos, or…?)
The conversation always goes back to starting small.
The conversation always ends up somewhere around Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans.
But there’s one other touch point I always think of and rarely say out loud.
I didn’t say it in this last conversation.
I needed to flesh it out first, so here it is for my Personal Archive – it’s been quietly informing my creative thinking for years.
It comes from the Church of the SubGenius.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
John Darnielle tells an incredible story involving his habit of finding out what music people were into.
On an overnight train ride, he spotted some older kids/young adults sneaking off to drink beers and smoke.
He got one of the guys to himself, asked his standard music question, and received the answer, “Ozzy Osbourne.”
All the concerts or videos or posters couldn’t deliver the weight some cooler, older, stranger on a train could deliver.
Nothing passes passion down like word of mouth or quietly shared experiences. For as much self-discovery as I’ve done, there’s still an act of curation at the core of everything I love.
My Ozzy experience (tied to my dad and classic rock radio) is no different than my Beastie Boys experience in this way (tied to a school/church friend’s older brother).
With Ozzy’s passing, I’m guessing – if you’re like me – you’ve been taking all sorts of reflections in on his career.
I keep seeing YouTube videos and reading obituaries and falling down all sorts of rabbit holes – but I think I’ve found the one that will stick to me far into the future.
John Darnielle wrote my favorite Ozzy obit.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Classic Rock radio was THE radio choice with my dad in the car on the way to school for my entire childhood. When I say that before 3rd grade, I knew to automatically do the “ay ay ay” vocal at the beginning of “Crazy Train,” or – that probably by 5th grade I could play “Iron Man” on guitar, I’m being as serious as I am nostalgic.
The news of Ozzy Osbourne’s passing took me there this week. It took me to being a kid, knowing the music was powerful, and recognizing as I entered my mid-90s teenage years that I wanted to know more about them during that alternative moment. The stories would come with age (and better internet access). But, what started with those “he bit a head off a bat” tales, gradually evolved into a much deeper understanding and appreciation – that I don’t think we talk about enough.
What might be my favorite part of the Ozzy/Black Sabbath history is how much of an impact they had on music despite not seeming that revolutionary by modern ears. And, I get it. You don’t hear Pantera or Slayer or – even (the side project) Down or, more recently – Power Trip, or ANY of those great bands, and not think Sabbath sounds a little tame in comparison.
And you’re not wrong. BUT – then somebody tells you, like a variation on the Simpsons joke, how Black Sabbath did it first, and your world momentarily stops turning once you accept it.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Sunday Music: AI And The New Agency Style
The Beastie Boys in 1986 were three friends making each other laugh with samples, drum machines, and inside jokes that scaled into cultural movements. Their approach offers the perfect mental model for how we should think about AI today – not as replacement intelligence, but as creative samplers that reveal how human creativity actually works. Just like a drum machine isn’t a drummer but shows you how drumming works, AI agents can’t replace human agency but can illuminate it. The key insight from Seth Godin and this entire exploration: we’re not building digital brains, we’re building culture machines that compress and reconstruct patterns of human expression. The magic happens when you remember that whether it’s 1986 or 2025, you better be doing this with and for your friends.
Building Bridges: Why Gen X and Millennials Hold the Keys to Community
Amy Poehler’s generational joke reveals a deeper truth: Boomers believe money matters most, Gen Z questions if money even makes sense, and that leaves Gen X and Millennials perfectly positioned to bridge the divide. Through insights from my conversation with Dave Nadig about Neil Howe’s generational theory, we explored how Gen X brings practical wisdom and BS-cutting skills while Millennials bring systemic thinking and urgent motivation for change. The solution isn’t sorting by generation but harnessing generational diversity as strategic advantage. We understand both digital and analog, we can focus on shared problems rather than shared demographics, and we can build institutions that blend old stability with new flexibility. In a world where manufactured conflict destroys real community, this bridge-building might be our best hope.
Joan Westenberg deleted 10,000 notes and 7 years of captured thoughts, choosing to inhabit her first brain rather than build a second one. Ben Hunt writes about building an “Ark of Story” filled with human sacrifice, love, and peace that surpasses understanding. Both understand what I’ve learned through my Personal Archive work: the act of writing things down only matters if it unburdens us and makes us feel sharper. Accumulation as mental weight is as dangerous as any addiction. The question isn’t what system you use to capture knowledge – it’s what that capturing serves. Raw materials don’t mean much, but materials transformed through consciousness create stories worth preserving. Never forget: you are the secret sauce, not the system. If you’re going to capture something, don’t edit yourself out of it.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Do you know Lindsey Bell? She’s a labor market strategist, TED Talk speaker, and board chair at BetterInvesting who sees economic shifts before they happen.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Lindsey has this incredible ability to spot workforce trends that are still brewing beneath the surface and translate them into actionable insights for investors and workers alike. I wanted to connect with her because she embodies something I value deeply: the courage to call out uncomfortable truths about where our economy is heading, especially when it comes to how we think about work and purpose.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear her predict the coming explosion of entrepreneurship among skilled workers, why the traditional W2 safety net is cracking, and how community will become the secret weapon for surviving economic fragmentation.
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.
This Time Last Year
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Crypto
Recent Notes
Whom Fortune Favors: Things that Matter #1, Pt. 1
Of all the decisions you make as an investor, how much risk you take outweighs all of them. It is more important than costs, more important than diversification, more important than picking the right stock / fund / investment.
Post-Fed
Follow-Up
A quick post-Fed follow-up to “Tell My Horse”, the best-received Epsilon Theory note to date (thank you!). I’ll jump right into what I’ve got to say, without the usual 20 pages of movie quotes and the like. Well, I’ve got one quote above, because I can’t help myself. They’re the lyrics to the best break-up song ever, and they’re what Janet Yellen was singing to the market on Wednesday.
AI & Video Games, Tricky Chatbots and More… (by Silly Rabbit)
AI and video games, tricky chatbots, the quantum age has officially arrived, and your high dimensional brain.
Does It Fly, Really?
On episode 22 of the Epsilon Theory podcast, we’re in Las Vegas at the 2017 EQDerivatives conference. Both Dr. Ben Hunt and our guest, Devin Anderson, managing director in equity derivative sales at Deutsche Bank, were speakers at the event this year. In a nod to David McCullough’s 2015 book, The Wright Brothers, this episode explores whether the ubiquitous ideas floating around finance today actually have wings and can fly.
Long Short-Term Memory, Algorithms for Social Justice, and External Cognition (by Silly Rabbit)
DARPA funds a graph analytics processor, exploring long short-term memory networks, auditing black box predictive models, fast iteration and language from police body cameras.
The Summer Reading List (by Jeremy Radcliffe)
In which Jeremy Radcliffe recommends Bob Lefsetz, Scott Galloway, Scott Belsky,Tim Urban and the gang at Hoisington.
Tell My Horse
So yeah, I’m overweight and I need to get more sleep. I’m not happy about the market, and I’m anxious about living up to my obligations to my partners and clients. But I wake up every morning thinking independent thoughts about idiosyncratic risks. I’ve got a Tribe. I’m nobody’s horse. And that’s about as good as it gets here in the Hollow Market.
Chili P is My Signature: Things that Don’t Matter #5
The second moral license from a wise emphasis on passive investing is spending inordinate amounts of time on tilts, trades and tactical ideas that will never influence our portfolio results.
Quantum Supremacy, Correlating Unemployment, and Buddhists with Attitude (by Silly Rabbit)
What web searches correlate to unemployment, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and methodologies with a fragility problem.
Complex Systems, Multiscale Information and Strange Loops (by Silly Rabbit)
Complex systems, machine learning software creating machine learning software, one-shot imitation and the power of the platform.
She Screams, He Kidnaps (by Silly Rabbit)
Proximity of verbs to gender, wiki-memory, fool me once (and twice), and a veritable zoo of machine learning techniques.
And They Did Live by Watchfires: Things that Don’t Matter #4
For the bored (read: profitable) investor, the bias to action is a constant threat. As we become more passive in our strategies, the moral license to ‘do something’ is exaggerated, and must be curtailed.
Mo’ Compute Mo’ Problems (by Silly Rabbit)
On hard problems, lazy XKCD references, the myth of superhuman AI, and valley grammar.
Westworld
If political parties in Western democracies were stocks, we’d be talking today about the structural bear market that has gripped that sector. Show me any country that’s had an election in the past 24 months, and I’ll show you at least one formerly big-time status quo political party that has been crushed.
1999 v2.0
On episode 21 of the Epsilon Theory podcast, Dr. Ben Hunt is joined by Brad McMillan, CFA, CAIA, the chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network®. Brad graciously hosts us at Commonwealth’s headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. Ben and Brad talk about their mutual love for Terry Pratchett, narrative causality, the French elections, and how technology is changing the financial advisory business.
Future Flash Crashes, Digital Darwinism & the Resurgence of Hardware (by Silly Rabbit)
My view is that we are heading into a far more ‘interesting’ era of flash crashes of confused, or deliberately misled, algorithms.
Alibaba’s AI, JP Morgan’s Risky Language & the Nurture of Reality (by Silly Rabbit)
Starcraft mastery from AI, risky language, and the map of physics. Also Zen vs. Tantra, because why not?
Break the Wheel: Things that Don’t Matter #3
Almost as much as we love stock discussions, we love talking about our favorite fund managers. These discussions are unfortunately almost always a complete waste of time.
AI Hedge Funds, Corporate Inequality & Microdosing LSD (by Silly Rabbit)
On DARPA explainer videos, Burning Man invocations, and the impact of bad weather and high taxes on AI talent pools.
Change is in the Air
By the time we got to episode 20 of the Epsilon Theory podcast, change was bound to happen. Coming to you from our New York office, Dr. Ben Hunt and producer Michael Corrao talk about changes to the Epsilon Theory website, Ben’s role, and the entire political system.
A friend and I were chatting about patronage and the arts.
I’ve been having a version of this conversation with my creatively-minded friends my entire life.
Can you actually make a living off of making lil descriptions of life in some other format (be it songs, or art, or poetry, or blog posts, or YouTube videos, or…?)
The conversation always goes back to starting small.
The conversation always ends up somewhere around Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans.
But there’s one other touch point I always think of and rarely say out loud.
I didn’t say it in this last conversation.
I needed to flesh it out first, so here it is for my Personal Archive – it’s been quietly informing my creative thinking for years.
It comes from the Church of the SubGenius.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
John Darnielle tells an incredible story involving his habit of finding out what music people were into.
On an overnight train ride, he spotted some older kids/young adults sneaking off to drink beers and smoke.
He got one of the guys to himself, asked his standard music question, and received the answer, “Ozzy Osbourne.”
All the concerts or videos or posters couldn’t deliver the weight some cooler, older, stranger on a train could deliver.
Nothing passes passion down like word of mouth or quietly shared experiences. For as much self-discovery as I’ve done, there’s still an act of curation at the core of everything I love.
My Ozzy experience (tied to my dad and classic rock radio) is no different than my Beastie Boys experience in this way (tied to a school/church friend’s older brother).
With Ozzy’s passing, I’m guessing – if you’re like me – you’ve been taking all sorts of reflections in on his career.
I keep seeing YouTube videos and reading obituaries and falling down all sorts of rabbit holes – but I think I’ve found the one that will stick to me far into the future.
John Darnielle wrote my favorite Ozzy obit.