10 Stories Worth Sharing (And How We're Building A Network Around Them)

The Epsilon Theory and Cultish Creative YouTube channels are officially collaborating. In an effort to prove how our projects fit together, we came up with a 10-clip supercut from The Intentional Investor. In the Just Press Record / Cultish Creative tradition of connecting cool ideas and interesting people, this is about as good as it gets.

Watch the video here. Read on for some deeper insights into what this is all about.

Before I break down this video, there are two related posts I want to flag.

In “Why Does YouTube call Them Channels” I wrote about broadcast potential. If you start with the legacy TV idea of channels, or how you can carry multiple shows down different paths to reach different audiences, it’s incredibly useful. We are very focused on this as a concept behind the scenes.

In “What’s The (Podcast) Strategy?” I shared the bigger multi-channel architecture my partners and I are experimenting with right now. I broke down how Excess Returns is broad financial education, Epsilon Theory is nuanced strategic thinking, and Cultish Creative is hyper-intentional, one-person-(or-idea-)at-a-time networking.

The theme of those posts is that none of our shows/channels compete. If you zoom out, you’ll realize they’re all designed to amplify each other. It’s on purpose and its really starting to gel.

The Intentional Investor, which exists in between our shows on Excess Returns and Cultish Creative in terms of content, seemed like the perfect place to make a highlight reel/commercial about the types of insights we draw from crazy interesting people.

At face value, the show may look like a familiar, long-term interview format, but you won’t find any standard questions, hot takes, or quick tips. This is not Joe Rogen or Howard Stern, or Patrick O’Shaughnessy or Tim Ferriss, or Dax Shepherd or Esther Perell. What you will find is detailed personal histories, in each guest’s own words, drawn out in terms of a deep conversation with a very (very) curious host.

While many of the guests overlap with Excess Returns thanks to their investment/finance/business acumen, you won’t find any investment advice here, and that’s a feature, not a bug.

What these interviews do contain is the stories for how these brilliant thinkers see the world formed. Nobody gets the background details like we do, because the entire point of the show is gathering this level of detail from this quality of guests.

The compilation we put together for this episode plays like this:

Goal vs. Vision (Justin Castelli)

Entrepreneurs as Risk Mitigators (Jason Buck)

Mentorship and Gratitude (Jenny Rozelle)

Competition on Merits (Perth Tolle)

Gap-Fillers (Tyrone Ross)

Creative vs. Craft (Pablos Holman)

Authenticity (Kris Abdelmessih)

Earnestness and Cynicism (Rusty Guinn)

Openness (Jared Dillian)

Time and Presence (Grant Williams)

10 people with 10 different ways of thinking and one overarching thread: if I admire how these people think today, wouldn’t it be amazing to know what happened in their lives to get them to this point? I think so, and maybe you do too.

Here's the most important thing: we're not trying to be everywhere. We're trying to be useful in specific ways to specific people.

• Excess Returns: "I want financial education in multiple formats" - scroll through our shows, from the academic episodes to the pop-culture infused, you’ll learn something.

• Epsilon Theory: "I want to understand why unique strategic thinkers see the world the way they do” - The Intentional Investor spends more time on pre-professional experiences than anybody else, for a reason

• Cultish Creative: "I want to meet interesting people and connect more ideas in my life" - Just Press Record delivers that, largely by putting new people in front of new ideas and always adding at least one new layer of introspection

This supercut doesn’t dilute any of those value props. It’s very much on purpose.*

20 minutes is enough of a taste, I hope, to see why the constraints are not the content. The constraint is discoverability. The constraint is your time plus whatever new angles you can be exposed to an idea.

With help. With, in many cases, friends. Take a listen, pick a few favorites, and explore the back catalogue - this is only the beginning.

And if you know someone who should hear one of these stories - send them the link. That's the whole idea in practice.

*and, you might notice how several of the guests have appeared on all three channels in various shows too. We are creatively networking here people. Don’t miss that detail. We’re doing it without a single cocktail party or brain picking email. Not enough people, besides some astute guests, seem to have caught on to this yet(!).

psst. that networking idea is the whole concept behind the Grow Your Network posts you’re already getting here on CultishCreative.com