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Awake and Intentional: How to Stay Curious, See Through Narratives, and Create Work That Actually Matters
Matt Zeigler
November 15, 2025
Let's connect some dots from this week's notes...
If you're reading this as a daily subscriber, you know I send these out seven days a week. If that's too much, you can manage your preferences by viewing this site on the website, and then look for your profile in the top right to switch to the weekly recap only. Either way, I'm glad you're here.
Ben Hunt and Rusty Guinn aren't just teaching you how stories work - they're showing you how to see the architecture underneath everything you consume. The core insight: governments, corporations, and organizers don't run massive campaigns to see how things turn out. They run them because they've already decided where things are going, and they're inviting the public along for the ride. When you understand that narratives are designed to precede action rather than follow it, you gain cognitive distance. Not emotional detachment, but the ability to ask better questions about what you're being shown and why. It's a literacy thing. On Panoptica, Ben and Rusty have built tools to track these narrative patterns across media - visualizing stories as they float past us in the ether. The real work isn't cynicism. It's paying attention.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Ben on how campaigns shape reality, not reflect it
"Governments and corporations don't engage in massive advertising campaigns because they're waiting to see how it turns out. You do it because you've already made a decision that this is the direction you're gonna go, and here's how we're going to bring the public along to support the decision we've already made."
(This is a Zeitgeist column I wrote for Panoptica I wanted to share here too! It’s not a political post. It is a policy cautionary tale.)
Bill Pulte walked into Mar-a-Lago with a 3x5 posterboard pitching 50-year federally-backed mortgages to President Trump. Simple graphic. Clear narrative: "Great American Presidents." Within 10 minutes, Trump had posted it to Truth Social. Within days, Politico was running headlines about whether it was innovative or reckless. But both miss the actual story. The 50-year mortgage is a perfect real-time example of "Snip!" - Ben Hunt's term for when policy intent gets severed from policy action. The math is brutal: you save $250/month but pay $365,000 more in total interest and build equity half as fast. The real affordability crisis isn't financing - it's a shortage of homes. But the optics of solving it? That's the political strategy. The theater of promising the best party ever has become the only game in town. This is what happens when narratives precede reality and we stop asking what's actually being propped up.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Daryl Fairweather on what this policy actually does
"For home sellers, this could expand the buyer pool. But for the market as a whole, stimulating demand without increasing the number of homes for sale could simply push home prices even higher, erasing any affordability gains."
Kevin Alexander has built something remarkable: a music newsletter that matters because he's never tried to scale it. His secret? The post-it notes with real names. He writes as if sitting across a table from someone he actually knows - Janet, who loves The Cars. Sarah, who's been through heartbreak. Not everyone. If you write to everyone, you're writing to no one. His gold standard of engagement isn't likes or metrics - it's 5-paragraph email responses from readers. A Talk Talk review he published 30 years after the album's release still gets read four or five years later because people reach out to tell him how it got them through college, through darkness, through life. He never saw that coming. You can't force what resonates. You can only create conditions for it. And you have to have a system - formal or informal - to sit with it and shut up. This is the antidote to the narrative machine. Specificity over scale. Connection over metrics. People over algorithms.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Kevin on what actually moves people
"Great art doesn't scale. It spreads."
Kevin came back on Just Press Record for round two, and this time we dove into something even more important than what to listen to: how to actually think and write about art in a way that matters. The distinction he articulates - between scaling and spreading - is the most important reframe in modern creative work. Scaling is mechanical. Spreading is organic. He's built a 200-person club that's more valuable to each member than a 20,000-person audience would be, because everyone feels seen. The practice of radical authenticity - writing the review only you could write, showing your real-time thinking instead of a polished conclusion, letting it go before you overthink it - this is what creates work that matters. In a world where AI can generate technically competent reviews in seconds, the only defensible position is authentic messiness. The risk is what begets the returns. And knowing when to let something go before you get in your own way? That's the judgment call that separates people who create culture from people manufacturing content.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Kevin on the practice of shipping imperfection
"Usually I've gotten to a point where I've made the point I wanna make. I feel like I've made an effective argument for or against something. And then if I do one last read through and I really think, okay, now it's ready, or ready enough, then I just let it rip before I start getting in my own way."
Chris Sacca and Crystal backed Augustus Doricko - the guy with the mullet, the American flag, the biblical quotes - not despite the team's discomfort, but because of it. Because a muse elicits a feeling worth exploring. The weirdest signal is often the truest one. And in a venture portfolio obsessed with pattern matching and spreadsheets, "the alpha is in the f***ing weirdos." This isn't about being contrarian for its own sake. It's about staying curious enough to recognize when something is triggering a reaction - whether that's discomfort or excitement - and treating that as a clue rather than a warning. Once your curiosity is triggered, it's time to get creative with it. Once a round of thinking is done, the real habit is to get back out there and search again. The creative flywheel isn't about finding the right answer - it's about falling in love with finding it.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Chris on trusting the discomfort
"If we invest in normal people, all this money is going to go away. The alpha is in the f**ing weirdos. Immediately go back there."*
Pablos Holman has been right about cryptocurrency, AI, nuclear power, and on-demand manufacturing - all roughly a decade before the world was ready for them. But being right too early is functionally the same as being wrong. The real lesson isn't intelligence. It's timing and positioning. What separates Pablos from the people who got frustrated by being early? He learned to separate his smartness from his excitement. He doesn't optimize for validation or perfect timing - he optimizes for staying genuinely excited across decades. His network isn't a strategy. It's 25 years of showing up to speaking engagements to meet people smarter than him, and now those people - the ones with bestsellers and TED talks - are his friends. Friendship compounds. And his real work now? Creating Deep Future, a fund designed to fix the cultural narrative that erases inventors while celebrating artists. We celebrate curators while ignoring the people doing zero-to-one work. That has to change. Being early, being weird, being outside the pattern - that's not a liability. That's your actual value. You just have to care about the scene, the community, the work itself, more than you care about being validated for it.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Pablos on separating excitement from validation
"I'm right about the on-demand manufacturing that is literally happening now. I'm right about nuclear reactors that is happening now. These are all things I worked on at least a decade before their time. But not because I'm just so smart - it's that I'm willing and open to the technologies and the potential for them."
You know that rare magic that happens when a band you love splits apart and then their members create three different bands that are all incredible? That's what Jeff Tweedy did with Uncle Tupelo - it became Wilco and Son Volt. And now Katie Crutchfield is doing something similar with Snocaps, a collaboration bringing together Katie (Waxahatchee), her sister Allison (Swearin'), and MJ Lenderman. It's a family affair. It's a sonic hydra. One band becomes three. Greatness springing up all over the place, organically. Seeing people grow apart and grow back together in all new ways - it can be so rewarding. The love levels vary over time, but the multiplier effect of those friendships creating new things? That's the real vibe. This is what happens when you stay curious about the people you care about and you're open to what they might create together. It's not planned. It's not algorithmic. It's the kind of thing that used to happen before the internet was everywhere, and it still happens if you're paying attention.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Matt on the joy of creative recombination
"I had one band I loved and then I got 3. Like a hydra. Just - greatness springing up all over the place, organically."
Where Else I Showed Up This Week
The 100 Year Thinkers series on Excess Returns is back with new episodes - Jack Forehand and I broke down Michael Mauboussin as part of our ongoing book project. We also clipped it up for the Excess Returns audience, and you can find the full written piece on Substack.
But the real highlight of the week was sitting down with Jared Dillian and Tony Greer on the Macro Dirt podcast. These are two people I genuinely respect, and the conversation went to places I wasn't expecting. If you're into market narratives, policy theater, and how to stay sane in a world that's increasingly hard to parse, this one's worth your time.
Personal Archive Prompts
When was the last time you let someone see you think instead of just showing them your finished conclusions?
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU'RE OPTIMIZING FOR SCALE INSTEAD OF SPREAD?
What's one "weird signal" in your world right now that you've been dismissing as noise instead of treating as a muse?
WHO ARE THE "OTHER SPEAKERS" IN YOUR WORLD, AND ARE YOU ACTUALLY SHOWING UP TO MEET THEM?
If you had to write a post-it note with one person's name on it, who would that person be - and what would you want to say to them that you haven't said yet?
WHAT PROJECT ARE YOU SITTING ON RIGHT NOW THAT YOU KNOW IS READY ENOUGH?
What would change if you treated the people who create entirely new things (inventors, artists, builders) with the same cultural reverence we currently reserve for movie stars?
As always, I did my part, now it's your turn to write some reflections in your own Personal Archive.
(then, be sure to let me know where you're keeping it, I'm in search of the others too)
ps. Claude helped me organize and synthesize these thoughts from the week's posts. If you are curious how I use AI, read this post: Did AI Do That: Personal Rules