Playing With Networking (Weekly Recap 11/29/2025)

Artifacts, Authenticity, and the Conversations That Actually Survive

Author

Matt Zeigler
November 29, 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.

Thanksgiving at my grandmother's house followed a predictable pattern: the meal would be nearly demolished - rolls half gone, turkey plate empty, gravy down to its final third - and then, without fail, someone would swear in the kitchen. "Goddamnit, I forgot the creamed pearl onions in the microwave again."

Every year. Same ritual. My uncles sneaking the forgotten dish onto each other's plates just to see if someone wouldn't notice. Me daring my brother to take a bite of pie and onions at the same time. All of us laughing about something that made zero logical sense - why eat them at dessert? - but made perfect sense because it was us.

The tradition wasn't the dish. It was the choosing - year after year - to find the funny in being a family (together).

Quote from the Personal Archive - on what actually matters most

"Laughing together always was and always will be my favorite family tradition."

Sam Raimi's been driving the same 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 since he was a teenager - his dad bought it new. Since then, it's appeared in almost every film he's made. Not as a plot device, just as an anchor. Bruce Campbell calls it "The Classic" for a reason - he's been riding in that car since the '70s. And here's what gets me: Sam ships it everywhere. To Doctor Strange for the multiverse scene. To Spider Man for Uncle Ben's car in Queens. Places where it makes absolutely no logical sense.

The point is unglamorous. It doesn't need to be there. And because it doesn't need to be there, it has to be there. That commitment to remembering matters.

I don't have a classic car. But I have Gallery of Sound - thirty years in the same indie record store. Maybe I've got a lot of classics when I think about it.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on choosing what to remember

"Choose to remember. That's the move. And choose what you want to remember to keep the experiences alive, even in small ways, especially if they made you feel the most like yourself."

(This post first appeared on Panoptica.ai). Everyone's talking about Thanksgiving dinner costs - Trump says 25% cheaper, the Farm Bureau says 12% down, fact-checkers are running around recalculating in the opposite direction. What’s a regular person to do? Because here's the signal from the noise not discussed enough: each of them chose which groceries they count. Walmart removed items and replaced them with cheaper brands. Trump caught that wave and made it his story too. The Farm Bureau's showing turkey cheaper but carrots more expensive so there’s a much more nuanced netting effect.

And none of these are conspiracy theories! They're just choices. They just don’t show up all that well or clear on social media or as soundbites. The takeaway here is that when you get to pick which data counts, you get to control the narrative. The abstraction is the weapon. We have to be sensitive to how it’s used against us. One solution is to track your own data. It will tell you an actual truth - not some cartoonified abstraction. My thoughts in the post.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on what the real story is

“None of these priced-out menus are conspiracy theories. They just represent choices. See them that way.” 

You have taste. You have friends. So when you have a good idea or a story that excites you - tell them. Notice how they react. If they get excited too, you've just focus-grouped an idea. I used a story about sushi at work. I told professional colleagues over lunch I was focus-grouping them without knowing what yet. That turned into a post. Almost every one of my posts started as something I said out loud to my wife, or friends in a group chat, or anyone who could give me actual feedback. Feedback doesn't have to be scary. It can just be noticing how your friends react. Tiny tests for the win.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on what actually works

"Almost every one of these posts is something that I said out loud to my wife, or friends in a group chat, or - anyone who could give me actual feedback."

I wrote an essay last Sunday about needing to experience things live to fully understand them. It felt incomplete just on the page. So I recorded myself reading it and put it on YouTube. Testing a format. Exploring the difference between consuming something alone versus experiencing it in community. Reading it out loud revealed where I'd overwritten. It made me think about how jokes land with pacing, how pauses matter when you're speaking versus writing. I'm not emotionally invested in whether this works, but it felt worth a shot. If you have ideas about where this goes - live readings, group discussions, something else - let me know.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on format as part of meaning

"I wanted to explore, like I did in the piece, the difference between consuming something alone versus experiencing it in community."

My wife and Kenny both love Underworld. I'd never heard of them, so I started joking I was going to a "goth rave" - which annoyed them enough that I kept saying it. Three-plus hours later, standing in a room full of people experiencing something I thought I understood from home, I realized I was completely wrong about electronic music. Not because of the volume, but because of what happens when you're actually there - feeling the frequencies shift, watching a crowd of people (mostly in their 50s and 60s) know every word, seeing the musicians embrace at the end. What I thought was repetitive monotony was actually a spectrum of textures I could only understand by being present with other people experiencing it.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on why presence matters

"The way you can be in a room full of people, experience a music that lulls you to an inside your head state within the communal reality of a gigantic dance party - that's as powerful as any church or great meal can be."

Dave Nadig has lived through three different eras of ETF.com. He survived the dot-com bubble, the financial crisis, algorithm-driven social media. And he keeps coming back because Matt Middleton is building it as a conversation engine, not a broadcast platform. Not one-to-many. Two-to-one. Real relationships. Dave learned something essential: legitimacy starts with two people actually talking to each other. No algorithm mediating it. No engagement metrics deciding what matters. Three lessons anchor this conversation - boldness paired with accountability (livestreaming trades in 1998 when Cramer called it criminal), authenticity as a survivor (the stuff you carefully curate often disappears, but the conversations on Usenet still exist), and the core belief that real things only start when two people are in dialogue. In an attention economy built on performance, that scarcity drives value. Real stuff happens in reality. Presence can only be experienced.

Quote from the Personal Archive - Dave on what actually builds

"If it doesn't start with two people talking to each other, it's probably not legitimate."

Where Else I Showed Up This Week

I paired two conversations on Excess Returns that hit harder together than apart. Louis Vincent Gave gave us a deep dive into the state of markets and macro in China - the real economics, the real constraints. And then Ben Hunt looked at the way the US is talking about the story of our need to continue developing AI, framing it as a war effort. That narrative directly influences our relationship with China. Ben's piece World War AI on Epsilon Theory sits underneath both conversations - worth reading alongside the episodes.

And I was a guest on Vicki Reyzelman's show - which was genuinely interesting because she's coming from tech/AI, outside my normal industries. Always good to share stories with someone who wants to hear them, especially outside of my regular contexts.

Personal Archive Prompts

When was the last time you chose an anchor - something unglamorous and specific to your world that kept you grounded?

WHAT DATA ARE YOU CHOOSING TO COUNT, AND WHAT DOES THAT REVEAL ABOUT THE NARRATIVE YOU'RE BUILDING?

If your friends were focus-grouping your best ideas without you asking them to, what would they tell you about what actually lands?

HOW MUCH OF YOUR CREATIVE WORK HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED IN COMMUNITY VERSUS ALONE ON A SCREEN?

What conversations from your past still exist somewhere - not because you carefully preserved them, but because they mattered enough to stick around?

IF EVERYTHING YOU BUILD HAD TO START WITH TWO PEOPLE TALKING TO EACH OTHER, WHAT WOULD CHANGE ABOUT HOW YOU WORK?

Are you optimizing for the performance, or are you optimizing for the presence?

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