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Playing With Networking (Weekly Recap 12/19/2025)
What We Keep, What We Change, and the Stories That Matter
Matt Zeigler
December 20, 2025
Let’s connect some dots from this week’s notes…
If you’re reading this and you prefer your Cultish Creative daily posts in a weekly digest format, you’re in the right place. But if you’d rather get them daily, head to the website, look for your settings in the upper right hand corner, and visit settings to switch your preference. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.
There’s a difference between fandom and nostalgia, and it’s the difference between a living culture and a museum. Nas and DJ Premier’s “Madman” doesn’t just sample five decades of hip-hop history - it breathes them into something new. The real story isn’t the song though. It’s Mass Appeal, the platform that chose to keep hip-hop a subculture instead of turning it into a heritage brand. Peter Bittenbender and Sacha Jenkins built something the blues never quite got and jazz lost when it went conservatory - a space where legacy artists could keep making new work, where entire communities could get respect and maybe even get paid, all without the art form losing its contemporary power. That Gen-X choice to flatten institutions instead of institutionalize them is what’s keeping hip-hop alive instead of archived.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Nas on the lineage he’s honoring
“Still Nasty since ‘91, nothin’ competes. Before Snoop, before Wu, before Big. There was this young kid with small dreads from the Bridge.”
Advent isn’t just about waiting for something better - it’s about honoring what’s actually here while we wait. Anne Lamott reminds us that life is about experiencing a full range - the pain and the possibility, the getting worse and the getting better - all of it existing at a level bigger than our individual lives. That’s humbling in the best way. Before the year ends, the invitation is simple: find a moment to work together on some stuff, any kind of stuff. Connect. This is the way.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Lamott on the promise of Advent
“God has set up a tent among us and will help us work together on our stuff. And this will only happen over time.”
The origin story of a superhero and a supervillain starts the same place - pain, abandonment, the feeling that nobody has your back. From that fork in the road, one path leads to making sure others never feel that pain. The other leads to not caring about anybody at all. It’s the same start. Different choice. But here’s what most of us miss: life doesn’t play out in elaborate plans. It’s the moment-to-moment decision to help instead of hoard, to lift instead of take. Tyrone and Neils both hit that fork young. Both chose the hero’s path. And both are spending their lives showing up again and again - without respite, with minimal reward - in messy community work that fills me with hope.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Neils on the fork in the road
“You have to be equal parts feel like you are alone and no one has your back. When you are alone and no one has your back, you either feel like you don’t want anyone to ever feel the pain that you felt - and you become a superhero. Or you’re like, no one has my back, I don’t care about any of y’all, and that’s the origin of super villains. But it’s the same start.”
Olympic hopeful turned financial advisor, Tyrone Ross builds frameworks for how we actually work, live, and leave a legacy. From the athlete’s perspective, scarcity isn’t something to overcome - it’s the thing that forges resourcefulness when everything else is equal. The hungry lion hunts best. In life, real help doesn’t start with where you wish people were. Financial planning for someone on SNAP looks different than financial planning for someone with six figures, but it’s still planning, still dignity, still a partnership. In legacy, the move is to educate, empower, and then endow - to return with more resources, to set sights way out into the future for the next generation. One session isn’t stewardship. Returning with more is.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Tyrone on hunger as unfair advantage
“If you had the same access to tutors, you had the same amount of money, you had all those, all things being equal - you’ve got one thing that they don’t. The fridge was empty. And if the fridge is empty? Hungry lions hunt best.”
Executive Director of Why We Lift, Neils builds frameworks from the nonprofit architect’s perspective - same architecture, different materials. The first move is deceptively simple: write the idea down. Most people never translate internal dreams into external commitments. Once it’s written, it exists in the world outside your head, and that changes everything. The deeper move is understanding that when you’re alone and unsupported, ego becomes the real threat - not choosing wrong, but letting ego sabotage the right choice. The legacy move is the one Neils has already made: choosing to be a superhero, daily, actively leaning into how to support others so they don’t carry the pain you carried. That’s not a moment. That’s a lifetime commitment.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Neils on the choice he’s made
“I have chosen to be a superhero. I don’t want folks to feel the pain that I felt. And so I actively lean into how can I support folks so they don’t have to go through experiences that I’ve felt or had.”
Virgil Abloh’s insight cuts clean: a 3% change confers ownership. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You’re allowed to be inspired by the wheel’s very existence. Samuel Johnson to Jadakiss, James Brown to Dilla - the genealogy of creative work shows us that transformation isn’t about erasing what came before. It’s about making it roll the way you want it to. That’s what stewardship actually looks like at the creative level. You honor the source. You take what’s there. You make it yours.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Virgil Abloh on creative transformation
“A 3% change confers ownership. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You’re allowed to be inspired by the wheel’s very existence.”
The US is telling a $4 trillion story about an AI war with China - Genesis Mission, Manhattan Project scale, existential threat. Meanwhile, China is quietly solving a practical problem: building infrastructure faster and securing supply chains. Two countries. Same moment. Completely different wars. The mismatch is instructive. The US narrative is about winning a competition that China doesn’t seem interested in fighting. China’s narrative is about independence and resilience. Both stories drive massive capital allocation and policy. Neither one needs to be true to reshape the economy. The story matters more than the reality - at least for markets and policy. While the US fights to own the narrative of the future, China is busy building it.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Ben Hunt on the power of narrative
“That presentation is at least as important as the reality itself - when it comes to markets, politics, and the way we lead our lives.”
Where Else I Showed Up This Week
Two conversations on Excess Returns that both circle the same idea - the gap between what we’re told and what’s actually happening.
The 100 Year Thinkers with Chris Mayer and Robert Hagstrom pulled together a wide conversation on how great investors actually think - philosophy, language, psychology, long-term business fundamentals instead of formulas and labels. Robert and Chris spent time on how abstractions distort decision-making, how general semantics shapes investing mistakes, why reversion to the mean is a flawed framework, and what happens when you think of markets as complex adaptive systems instead of predictable machines. Watch it here.
Special Episode with Adam Butler and Ben Hunt unpacked what happens when official statistics stop reflecting lived reality. Building on Adam’s essay “The Bureau of Missing Children,” we dug into economic precarity versus poverty, the role of debt and housing and childcare in creating instability, how labor mobility broke down, the role grandparents play in subsidizing families off-balance-sheet, Darwin’s wedge and positional goods, and what human-centered solutions might actually look like when the numbers and the lived experience stop matching. Watch it here.
Personal Archive Prompts
WHAT HAVE YOU INHERITED THAT YOU’RE CHOOSING TO KEEP? (And what are you intentionally changing?)
What’s one daily choice you’re making right now that’s shaping who you’re becoming?
WHO IN YOUR LIFE CHOSE THE HERO’S PATH when they could have chosen otherwise - and what did that cost them?
Where are you keeping ideas vague in your head instead of specific on paper?
IF THE STORY YOU’RE TELLING ABOUT YOUR SITUATION CHANGED, WHAT WOULD CHANGE WITH IT?
What community or group of people do you need to commit to returning to - not just visiting?
HOW ARE YOU STEWARDING WHAT CAME BEFORE while making space for what comes next?
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