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.
Do you know John Stoj? He’s a flat-fee RIA who survived Wall Street’s mortgage-backed securities trenches, ran a sushi business during the financial crisis, and emerged as one of the most grounded financial advisors I know.
If not, allow me to introduce you. John spent 15 years navigating everything from Nomura’s trading desk to CDO management (with timing that was spectacularly unfortunate) before building Verbatim Financial. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the wisdom that comes from learning what you can’t do through actually trying and failing at it.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Epsilon Theory YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear how childhood bullying built resilience, why getting fired twice taught him humility, and how a boss who asked relentless questions saved him from the massive fraud he couldn’t see coming.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Switching up what someone is doing can feel and look so easy. And then you start thinking about doing it for yourself. Next thing you know, a few years have slipped by, you’ve slipped into low-level depression, and… am I speaking from experience already? Yikes. At least it’s not just me.
When Julia Carreon came on Just Press Record, she took Hal Hershfield‘s idea that ‘You don’t know what you don’t know’ and made it personal (as only she can do). She told the raw story of leaving her prestigious job to join a startup she deeply believed in – only to discover she hated the actual work. “I love the mission. I hated the work,” she said with that characteristic Julia Carreon honesty. Meanwhile, Hal represented the mystique – the romantic notion of unknown possibilities waiting on the other side.
What do you do when you know it’s not you but then changing feels more like a bunch of faceplants and stumbles trying to kill you?
It ain’t easy. Culture has romanticized “the pivot.” But it still sucks in real-time. It’s about how you get through it. Which is why I wanted to talk to Lindsey Bell about it.
Not just because Lindsey has been through it more than a few times herself, but because she’s done extensive work on the topic, not to mention, she has a whole TEDx Talk on it.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Joan Westenberg shared a post about how she, “Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save.“
Maybe it’s because I’m a touch over 7-years into capturing my reflections on Cultish Creative, and maybe it’s because I’m already on the record as thinking a second brain isn’t all that useful.
What definitely resonated with me though was – the act of writing the stuff down only matters to the extent it’s un-burdening us and making us feel sharper in a genuine way.
I can’t press delete on mine because it would be more stressful than relieving – my Personal Archive has become part of my thinking/collaborating/networking process, not a burden separate from it. But that doesn’t undermine the importance of the relief factor. Accumulation as a mental weight is real – productivity as an end and not as a means to an end is as dangerous as social media, smartphone, and drug addiction.
All of it comes back to this: what is what you’re doing in service to?
My friend Ben Hunt writes about building an “Ark of Story” – the idea that raw materials alone don’t mean much, but materials transformed through consciousness create stories worth preserving.
Westenberg has a “WHAT” file. Hunt has an “Ark.” I’ve got a “Personal Archive.” All of us have some form of intentional curation we’re focused on. All of us have an awareness of mindless accumulation we’re rebelling against.
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.
Outsourcing Consciousness
The Long Now
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
Things Fall Apart
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.