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Before the Flood

By Ben Hunt | 7 Comments

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.

Four Funerals and a Flood

By Jeremy Radcliffe | 0 Comments

In the face of unimaginable tragedy this month in Texas, Jeremy Radcliffe shares the inspirational stories of four beautiful departed souls and their families who have come together, leaning on one another and their communities as they begin to grieve.

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.

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.

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.

Recent Notes

Before the Flood

By Ben Hunt | July 18, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | July 15, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | July 13, 2025

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

By Ben Hunt | June 25, 2025

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)

By Ben Hunt | June 16, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | June 14, 2025

You’re not a racist.

So don’t let racists use your story to fuel theirs.

Beyond Nudge

By Ben Hunt | June 2, 2025

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

By Ben Hunt | May 28, 2025

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

By Ben Hunt | May 15, 2025

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

By Ben Hunt | May 5, 2025

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

By Ben Hunt | April 21, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | April 18, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | April 15, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | April 10, 2025

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

By Ben Hunt | April 7, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | April 3, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | March 9, 2025

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

By Ben Hunt | February 18, 2025

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

By Rusty Guinn | February 2, 2025

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.

A Death in the Family

By Ben Hunt | January 20, 2025

Today I know that the meaning of the American Presidency is dead, and like the loss of a beloved family matriarch it’s a loss I’ll never get over. I know that I have to accept it, but I’ll never get over it. And right now I’m still pretty angry at ALL of them.