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Playing With Networking (Weekly Recap 11/8/2025)
The Revolution Starts With Permission, Not Credentials
Matt Zeigler
November 08, 2025
Let's connect some dots from this week's notes...
This week, we explored what happens when you stop waiting for permission and start recognizing the people already operating without it. We looked at how intuition, presence, and the willingness to leave your house (literally and metaphorically) become the architecture for real change. Whether it's music that scares the elders, venture capitalists betting on hunger, or bridge builders moving between worlds - the through-line is the same: portfolio beats pedigree, hunger beats credentials, and showing up beats waiting.
Before we dive in, a quick reminder about managing your newsletter preferences. If you're getting both daily and weekly notes from me and want to streamline things, head to the website to see this message, look in the top right corner for your preferences, and adjust. The daily reflections are great for constant connection, but the weekly recap gives you the synthesis. Pick what works for your life right now - I'm just glad you're here either way.
When the scale of a problem is too big to solve alone, most people freeze. I watched myself do it this week: 8 billion people on Earth, 1.46 billion English speakers, and the problem is "nobody knows how to talk to anyone anymore." So what do you do? You could give up. Or you could embrace being one. Just one. Me and you are both stuck on one and one. The revolution isn't something you organize at scale - it's something you become, one conversation at a time. Just Press Record, the project that sits at the center of this week's recap, lives in this exact philosophy.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Ursula K. Le Guin on the only revolution that matters
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
In a season when everyone's obsessed with year-end reviews and next-year planning, there's a quiet rebellion in simply enjoying the climb. Harold V. Melchert's wisdom hits differently when you're stressed about fitting everything in: glance at the summit, yes, but don't miss the view from each vantage point. My imagination doesn't operate in reality - it never has. But my body does, and so do the people who make my life worth living. That's why staying present, even while planning forward, becomes essential. The mountains are real. So are the moments between summits.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Harold V. Melchert on where the real joy lives
"Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point. Climb slowly; steadily, enjoying each passing moment; and the view from the summit will serve as a fitting climax for the journey."
Kevin Leahy left NPR because he understood the machine well enough to rebuild it differently. That's the move. And here's what I love most: he spent a decade mastering one corner of the radio-to-podcast transition world, but instead of staying comfortable, he decided he wanted to understand more. When he started talking about leaving, other people helped him pull it all the way out. Now he's building bridges between traditional media and the podcast revolution, advising creators on strategy, production, and how to actually make this thing sustainable. But the real insight? Portfolio beats pedigree. He learned more covering court cases as a curious young reporter than any credential could have taught him. The actual work you finish matters infinitely more than the box you checked.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Kevin Leahy on what credentials actually measure
"I had always heard of college as a proxy for, you know, 'how to finish something.' That was the line my parents always gave to me. And everyone just accepted it. But people like my brother, who dropped out of college, or plenty other people I know, were they finishing other things in their life? They were finishing albums. My brother finished a novel when he was like 21 years old."
What happens when two people who've both spent years helping others get off and running finally meet each other? The energy in the room shifts. Danielle saw homeschooling parents hungry for something more and didn't stop at "yeah, but what?" - she launched a charter school that now serves 450 kids. Kevin left one of the biggest media machines in the world because he wanted to understand how things actually work. Both of them take that same energy that got them moving and dedicate their time to helping others. Kevin's now helping creators see what their podcasts could actually be instead of what consultants say they should be. Danielle's literally a professional fairy godmother, raising and allocating VC money to wildly talented young people with her unshakeable intuition for pursuing magic. In a world obsessed with best practices and proven playbooks, we need more people willing to bet on the weirdos. The dogs want to play. Get them outside.
Quote from the Personal Archive - on what real permission looks like
"Permission is overrated. But, you know what's not? People."
Danielle Strachman's entire investment thesis can be seen in one phrase: "dog on a leash energy." She's not backing business plans - she's backing hunger. Don't fund ideas, fund the person with the unshakeable conviction who just needs resources to move. You can see it immediately when you're sitting with someone who's really chomping at the bit. They don't need motivation, don't need validation, don't need obedience school. What they need is the leash cut. This is how the Thiel Fellowship backed teenagers who became billion-dollar founders. This is why her team at 1517 Fund is constantly finding the next generation of founders everyone else overlooked. Her business cards literally say "Professional Fairy Godmother" and that's not irony - it's the whole strategy. She also understands something most VCs miss: the ROI isn't visible on day one. It's in the unexpected co-founder meeting three years later. It's in the mentor who met a young founder at a foosball table and bought their company. It's in the girlfriends who met at her gathering and changed each other's lives. These stories don't fit spreadsheets. So she makes a choice: she stops trying to measure them and operates on faith - evidence-based faith, but faith nonetheless. That trust is exactly why her portfolio has outsize returns by every VC metric that does get measured.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Danielle on the faith-based component of building real things
"There's a faith-based component of like, you just gotta trust that you're doing something good and that the ripple effects will be good and that it's just worth it. No matter any little number you try to ascribe."
The number one rule for finding music with staying power: find what the kids love that their parents hate. If parents think it's dangerous? Great. Too risqué? Even better. If they declare it's "not even music" or ruining something? It's going to be amazing. "Children In Heat" is a mess of poppy sounds played a little too fast - classic rock meets Danzig's goth-Elvis swoon, moving like a roller coaster car barely touching the tracks anymore. The words are easy to shout along to but hard to sing well, and there's playful vulgarity wrapped up in operatic "He-ee-eat." You don't want to hear this coming from your teenager's room. And that's exactly the point. Deep within that rocking reckless abandon is the intoxication of social construct-challenging threat. When music can capture singalong catchiness AND the power to scare the elders, it just can't die. The Misfits have an entire catalogue of this - the sound of scaring the elders. Like a great Halloween costume. There's great power in not fitting in for a recognizable reason, you know?
Quote from the Personal Archive - on why the music that scares us matters
"And when music can capture this level of singalong catchiness AND social construct challenging threats - this is the kind of music that just can't die."
Where Else I Showed Up This Week
I always love talking to Richard Bernstein. I learned so much from him when our careers overlapped at Merrill Lynch (during the Global Financial Crisis) - he knows how to separate his thinking from the herd, and I so appreciate that. Justin Carbonneau and I had him on Excess Returns this week. Watch:
And, since the theme seems to be “What’s going on that’s not the biggest companies in the US” this week - only appropriate that I did a macro roundup with Rupert Mitchell (of Blind Squirrel Macro) this week too. Rupert’s got such depth of perspective on emerging and frontier markets from his years of global investment banking experience. Pair this with Rich’s interview:
Personal Archive Prompts
What's one thing you finished this year that you're prouder of than any credential you could have earned?
WHO in your life has "dog on a leash energy" right now - and what would it take to cut that leash loose?
If you evaluated yourself (or your team) based purely on portfolio rather than pedigree, what changes?
WHAT would you build if you didn't need to measure its success with a spreadsheet?
When was the last time you left your house without a perfect plan and discovered something worth the risk?
What relationships or communities are you building that you can't justify to metrics - and what would shift if you simply decided to trust them anyway?
IF the revolution only happens one conversation at a time, what's your next conversation going to be about?
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