Playing With Networking (Weekly Recap 11/22/2025)

Channels, Earnestness, and the Architecture of Real Conversation

Author

Matt Zeigler
November 22, 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 post 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.

Quote from the Personal Archive - here’s what made his show different

"Cavett wanted to challenge the system by going deeper with people inside of the system itself. He carved out a whole new type of space for these guests, that no other host was making proper time and space for."

This week I realized I've been chasing something without fully naming it. Dick Cavett, launching his show in the late 60s during America's most fractured moment, did something radical: he chose his guests deliberately. Not for buzz or promotion, but because they represented something culturally astute. He held space for real conversation - the kind where you go awkward, where you go weird, where you let people actually think out loud.

The setup was everything. No hierarchical "host as star" complex. No performance. Just a conversationalist willing to lower his own status enough to draw genuine responses from everyone in the circle. He made it look easy to engage anyone.

I want to be more like Cavett in my work. Not copying him - thinking about what he'd do if he were starting fresh in 2025. And I'm building that across three channels. Each one holds space differently. Each one serves a distinct audience. But all of them operating on the same principle: know who you're talking to, and build the whole thing around serving both guests and audience as deeply as you can within the medium's constraints.

This is the operating system. Everything else this week flows from here.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on the communal aspect coming full circle

"The thing about Russin's hardcore to post-hardcore to bedroom synth pop to this is - the communal aspect arc is finally coming full circle. This song feels like a band song, not a solo joint."

Ned Russin and Glitterer just unlocked something rare. "Stainless Steel" is the sound of someone figuring out how to be an adult in the modern era - life feels impossible, you're broken in two - but you're doing it with your people. It's got Blue Album Weezer accessibility mixed with post-hardcore intensity. The singalong chorus has that gasp-break before it hits, pure Fugazi energy.

But what's actually happening here is more profound. Glitterer has gone from solo project to band project. The communal aspect that disappeared into the bedroom is coming back full circle. You get all the experiments from 20 years of music evolution distilled into one song about staying together while everything gets harder.

That's the signal I'm tracking: the people who figure out how to do the work they love, with their friends, without losing the intensity of what made them fall in love with it in the first place. Nothing says the kids are ok like when they figure out how to become adults and realize they still need their friends to figure it out with them.

Quote from the Personal Archive - what “channels” actually means

"Channels don't just carry water down a preset path, they can carry it down a ton of paths all at once. Channels can broadcast. Channels, like on TV, can have shows. Plural!"

Here's a piece of internet history worth knowing: YouTube called creator accounts "channels" because people understood what TV channels were. The metaphor stuck. But somewhere along the way, social media flattened that vocabulary. Your account became your identity. Your handle. Your brand.

The original word still means something though. A channel carries multiple things down multiple paths. It broadcasts. It has shows - plural. It has a unique audience value prop. And if you're willing to lean into that while everyone else is still treating the platform like another social media feed, there's an advantage to be had.

The choice is yours right now. While everyone is focused on people not brands, having a channel that more fully represents a brand (or a vision, or a mission) feels pretty crazy big as an opportunity.

Quote from the Personal Archive - why Excess Returns doesn't feel stale (and more)

"We saw plenty of other finance channels growing, but there was an undeniable staleness to so many of them. So we decided to start treating Excess Returns like a TV network. Instead of just host + guest interviews, we created a lineup of shows."

I get asked about this a lot. It sounds like I have 30 podcasts, but the strategy is really clean: three channels, three distinct audiences, three different principles operating at different scales.

Excess Returns treats the channel like a TV network. Multiple shows (2 Quants and a Planner, The 100 Year Thinkers, Click Beta, clip shows) all serving the same core audience of people interested in investing and financial education - but at different depths and formats. Volume matters, but variation is what keeps it from feeling stale. A guest like Bogumil Baranowski becomes a collaborator and co-host. Network effects compound.

Epsilon Theory operates differently. The audience is less interested in education and more interested in strategic analysis. They're fascinated by who's framing the stories and why. That's the brilliance of Ben Hunt and Rusty Guinn. The Intentional Investor - my personal profile interview show - captures those stories at the human level. How did these brilliant thinkers come to see the world the way they do? If we weren't capturing these stories, it doesn't seem like anybody else would at this level of detail.

Cultish Creative operates on yet another principle. The audience is the smallest of the three, but the most intentional. Just Press Record exists on the margins of all the other shows. The value proposition: connect interesting people and ideas. If only the guests meet, I'm still delivering. If other people watch, great.

YouTube's new collaboration feature lets us manage each channel separately while bleeding over show content when there's appeal. It increases volume and reach without forcing everything into the same mold. The strategy is to figure out who an audience is, entertain them with something they expect and respect, and then cultivate shows worth sharing. I want to do it at three different scales. I want to educate, entertain, and maintain my humanity.

Quote from the Personal Archive - thinking about what makes these 3-channel guests special

"Across the three shows I have a bunch more two-timers... But my Cultish 3-wayers have to have financial education chops, a backstory worth sharing, and then some deep enough side-interests where I get all excited about wanting to introduce them to another connection of mine. That's what makes these people special."

I was putting together a clip show for Just Press Record and realized something: there's a rare breed of people who show up across all three channels. They have the financial chops, the backstory worth telling, the side interests that make me want to introduce them to other people I know. And - this matters - we can laugh together.

These are my favorite conversationalists. The ones willing to show up in different contexts, take risks, and let me introduce them to interesting people they might not have met otherwise.

The (current) Triple Cult Crown holders:

  • Ben Hunt

  • Jason Buck

  • Kris Abdelmessih

  • Eric Markowitz

  • Grant Williams

  • Eric Pachman

  • (Honorary: Justin Castelli)

This glorious title means nothing in any official sense. Maybe that means it means everything. Like the SNL Five-Timers Club, it's a sign of their personality. It's a sign that they're the kind of people willing to spend time with me across different layers of conversation - from actual business strategy, to personal history, to cold-introducing them to strangers. You have to like them, respect them, admire them. And there has to be at least a few good laughs along the way.

Life can be so much fun. More than anything - this is me saying you should be playing more with your network too. You have a version of this list in you somewhere. Stop for a second and think about it.

Quote from the Personal Archive - what all these shows actually contain

"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."

The Epsilon Theory and Cultish Creative channels just went official with a collaboration. We built a 20-minute supercut from The Intentional Investor to prove how our projects fit together.

The show may look like a familiar long-form interview format, but it's not Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss. No standard questions, hot takes, or quick tips. Just detailed personal histories in each guest's own words, drawn out through genuine curiosity. Nobody gets the background details like we do because the entire point is gathering this level of detail from this quality of guests.

The compilation 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?

We're not trying to be everywhere. We're trying to be useful in specific ways to specific people. The supercut doesn't dilute any of those value props. The constraint isn't the content. The constraint is discoverability. The constraint is your time plus whatever new angles you can be exposed to an idea.

From Panoptica: Strategic Narratives & Culture

This week I published two pieces on Panoptica exploring how stories shape markets and culture - one celebrating the signal of earnestness (further reflections on the Intentional Investor supercut above), and one examining how that same signal can be weaponized at scale.

Quote from the Personal Archive - Rusty Guinn on cycles of earnestness

"I think a lot of us in the industry go through cycles of earnestness and cynicism. We open ourselves up. We realize that the world is a rough place for people who are too earnest. And then we fall into cynicism, we crash, we burn, we hopefully figure out a way to return to earnestness."

We spend a disproportionate amount of time documenting how narratives get distorted, weaponized, and manipulated. But meanwhile, the inverse - the people who actually mean what they say - hasn't become any less rare, even if it's nowhere near as newsworthy. Headlines live on conflict, contradiction, collapse. The people who think clearly, act with integrity, and actually mean their commitments? Too boring for the algorithm. Too quiet for the discourse.

But in an attention economy built on narrative capture and performance, earnestness has become a fresh type of competitive advantage. Not because it's trendy, but because stakes and decency never go out of style.

The thread isn't people who never get cynical. It's people who do, crash hard, and then consciously choose earnestness again. Those are the people worth paying attention to. The ones with clear eyes, full hearts. The ones who separate their smartness from their excitement. The ones who only commit to things they're willing to stake their credibility on.

These aren't outliers. We found 10 of them easily. Enough to scratch the surface. Enough to whet your appetite. And many of them, you already know.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on what happens when narratives serve power

"The threat is real enough. But the narrative serves a function beyond warning. It creates permission to end the debate about whether we're building the right things, at the right pace, with the right safeguards. Once that debate is settled, there's no undoing it."

Anthropic released a report on November 17 documenting the first "AI-orchestrated cyberattack." The threat is very real. The US is competing with China over AI leadership. But the way the story gets told - what data gets amplified versus what goes quiet - highlights something worth examining.

Buried in Anthropic's own report: Claude "frequently overstated findings and occasionally fabricated data during autonomous operations." That hallucination problem isn't dominating headlines. Meanwhile, narrative density around "big AI capex is needed to compete" hit an all-time high. And skepticism about whether these capex commitments will ever generate returns simultaneously hit an all-time high - a mirror image playing out in real time.

Whatever is happening, we're seeing the most credible voice on AI safety accusing the most credible geopolitical threat to legitimize the exact spending that benefits that safety voice. The threat is real enough. But the narrative serves a function beyond warning. It creates permission to end the debate about whether we're building the right things, at the right pace, with the right safeguards.

Once that debate is settled, there's no undoing it. The machine doesn't need to become sentient to ensure its own acceleration. It just needs the most credible voices in the room to tell us it's inevitable. And we'll believe them. We'll fund them. In the name of national defense.

Where Else I Showed Up This Week

I was on Excess Returns' Click Beta episode discussing financial nihilism with Dave Nadig and Cameron Dawson. We dove into how market behavior, culture, and economic incentives shape decision-making - everything from the rise of sports betting to the shortage of housing, the structural effects of monopolies, and why supernormal growth in tech has created a generation that feels broke in a bull market. Watch it here.

Personal Archive Prompts

What would change if you treated the people who build, create, and invent entirely new things with the same cultural reverence we currently reserve for entertainers?

WHO ARE THE PEOPLE IN YOUR NETWORK WHO SHOW UP ACROSS DIFFERENT CONTEXTS OF YOUR LIFE?

When was the last time you chose earnestness again, consciously, after realizing how rough the world can be for people who are too earnest?

HOW MANY CHANNELS ARE YOU ACTUALLY OPERATING - AND ARE THEY ALL SERVING THE SAME AUDIENCE, OR ARE YOU DELIBERATELY BUILDING DISTINCT SPACES FOR DISTINCT PEOPLE?

If you had to identify your "Dick Cavett moment" - the time you held space for a real conversation that surprised everyone including you - what would it be?

WHAT NARRATIVE ARE YOU BUYING RIGHT NOW THAT MIGHT BE SERVING SOMEONE'S INTERESTS MORE THAN IT'S SERVING THE TRUTH?

Are you spreading or are you scaling? And do you know the difference?

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