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 don’t think it’s the standout track. I don’t think it’s anything new. I don’t think it’s anything you need to spend more than 30 seconds thinking about.
I do think, and I’ll stand by this, that Pusha T and Malice, especially with Pharrell, are the Larry McMurtry wild west books about drug dealing, and I don’t care if it’s one-lane and shallow, I want to hang out with them forever.
The choice to make this so heavily accapella with that slight reverb fascinates me.
The choice to let the beat that does come in be so old-school chopped fascinates me.
The choice to have a run on the album of acronym titles fascinates me.
And I don’t think any of my fascination warrants being deeply probed so much as deeply experienced.
This is my fascination now and forever with Clipse. Nothing is new. Everything fits like an old glove.
Even the lyric video has style. This is culturally inappropriate. Get into it.
Clipse are forever proving that if you define your own norms the area to explore is infinite – making acronym titles feel inevitable rather than gimmicky, making minimalist beats sound maximalist, making the same corner feel like a whole universe.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Grow Your Network: Laurie Kaye Is A Rock Radio Pioneer Who Conducted John Lennon’s Final Interview
Laurie Kaye’s journey from transistor radio sanctuary to rock radio pioneer illustrates the power of trusting your readiness and finding chosen mentors. Her professor’s advice to leave school because “you already know how to write” represents those pivotal moments when formal education has served its purpose. More importantly, her relationship with news director Jo Interrante shows how chosen mentors can provide the support and belief that families sometimes cannot. Conducting John Lennon’s final interview on December 8, 1980 – hours before his assassination – taught her about the fragility of peak moments and the responsibility of cultural curation.
Sunday Music: RIP Ozzy
The passing of Ozzy Osbourne this week sparked a reflection on why Black Sabbath doesn’t receive the same cultural reverence as the Beatles, despite fundamentally changing music forever. Four rejects from industrial Birmingham created something entirely new on February 13, 1970 – meeting critical scorn (“bullshit necromancy”) but finding their audience through word-of-mouth and underground appreciation. The contrast between Simon & Garfunkel’s refined sophistication and Sabbath’s Birmingham grit reveals how outsiders often have to fight for recognition that insiders receive automatically. By year’s end, they’d proven what the Beatles proved in the 1960s – that you could reshape popular music entirely. The difference is Sabbath had to fight for that recognition, and they’re still fighting for it fifty-five years later.
The Day The Music Died Vs. The Days The Music Lives: Laurie Kaye and Kevin Alexander on JUST PRESS RECORD
Both Laurie and Kevin discovered that being a receiver of great music eventually turns you into a transmitter. Laurie’s transistor radio refuge as a child led to her becoming a voice that guided others through their own musical discoveries. Kevin’s field trip revelation with Talking Heads and record store obsession evolved into a life dedicated to surfacing incredible sounds for others. Their conversation reveals how the “village of voices” – DJs, record store clerks, cool friends with perfect tapes – serves as both sanctuary and bridge across generations. Music doesn’t just soundtrack our lives; it’s the vehicle that carries us to our peaks and the lifeline that pulls us through our valleys.
John Darnielle on Ozzy
Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle wrote perhaps the most moving Ozzy obituary, weaving together personal, micro, and macro scales in his signature style. His story of meeting a stranger on a train who simply said “Ozzy Osbourne. I’m just telling everyone I know, Ozzy Osbourne” captures how music passes between people through intimate, authentic moments rather than marketing campaigns. Darnielle’s reflection reveals how art that ages with us understands something about life that we don’t yet grasp – it becomes the voice of someone who sounds like they understand us when we can’t find our own words.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
Do you know Laurie Kaye? She’s the rock radio pioneer and author who conducted what tragically became John Lennon’s final interview on December 8th, 1980 – just hours before his assassination. She’s also the brilliant mind behind some of radio’s most legendary specials, including the 17-hour “The Beatles from Liverpool to Legend.”
If not, allow me to introduce you. Laurie started her career as a news editor at KFRC radio, eventually becoming an on-air newscaster who interviewed everyone from Mick Jagger to David Bowie to the Ramones. She’s the author of “Confessions of a Rock and Roll Name Dropper: My Life Leading Up to John Lennon’s Last Interview.” I wanted to connect with her because she embodies something I value deeply: the courage to turn personal passion into professional purpose, even when that means diving into the unknown.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear stories from the golden age of rock radio, behind-the-scenes moments with music legends, and wisdom about building a career around what you truly love.
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.