If you prefer to receive these recaps weekly instead of daily posts, you can manage your subscription preferences right by viewing this email on the web. Look for your profile icon in the top right of the browser, and you can update your settings from daily to weekly (and vice versa) there. However I can get you the full narrative arc without it feeling cluttered - I'm just happy you're here!

Let's connect some dots from this week's notes...

The Super Bowl halftime show became a lens for something much bigger this week - a way to see where culture actually is right now. My take: monoculture is dead, long live mini-culture. Bad Bunny didn't try to become the new cultural center of gravity; he leaned deeper into specificity - all Spanish, hyper-Puerto Rican references, a football spiked with "Together, We Are America" - and that's precisely why 128 million households showed up. The people mourning monoculture and trying to resurrect it (see: the alternate halftime show) are missing the point entirely. The pendulum has swung, the transition feels disorienting, and the trick isn't to fight it - it's to find your mini-culture and go all in. Creativity didn't die when the dominant medium shifted; it just got redistributed.

Quote from the Personal Archive - as the song itself puts it

"I should've taken more pictures when I had you / I should've given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could / Ayy, I hope my people never move away"

Hollywood's disenchantment with itself isn't a tragedy - it's an opening. The Panoptica Storyboard data keeps showing the same thing: every time the entertainment industry's crisis enters the zeitgeist, the signal gets louder. And that noise is actually signal for anybody making creative work. You won't have Hollywood's reach, but you also don't need it. The gap between what used to be the dominant entertainment machine and what people are actually hungry for right now is the most interesting creative real estate available. Make something inspired. Put yourself in it. Invite your friends. An audience of two who feel genuinely connected to what you made beats a million passive scrollers every time.

Quote from the Personal Archive - Dave Nadig on the thing AI can't replicate

"The challenge as a creator is to distinguish craft from codes."

This one is short and I want to keep it that way. People are angry. People are sad. Some of them are monetizing it, building platforms on grievance, confused about the very freedoms they're performing outrage about losing. I don't have much to say to them. What I do know is that joy is free, contagious, and eternally in short supply even though it's completely abundant. Smiling, calling an old friend, stretching out with the dogs - none of that requires permission. Joy is the act of resistance that nobody can take from you, and in a week full of big cultural ideas, this was the simplest and most important note.

Quote from the Personal Archive - the whole point, really

"Joy is an act of resistance. They can't take that away from me. Or you. Or us."

An Epsilon Theory Office Hours with Adam Butler, Dave Nadig, Brent Donnelly, and Ben Hunt produced one of the more honest conversations I've been part of this year - centered on whether anyone is even reading anymore, and whether there's a reason to. Adam's piece on the strip-mining of trust formed the backdrop, and what emerged wasn't despair but something more honest: we all still love the act of writing, even when it feels like screaming into the void. The consensus landing spot was clarifying - your friends are still the best filter. AI is a remarkable tool, but it can't tell you what's actually cool or worth your time. The people in your life who know you? Undefeated at that job, and probably always will be.

Quote from the Personal Archive - the filter that never fails

"Friends make the best filters."

Julia Duthie has built nearly 50 episodes of People Are Everything across four seasons by refusing to do the one thing most podcasters feel pressured to do: shorten the conversation. She measures success not in downloads but in the four or five genuine friendships that have emerged from the work - and that orientation toward depth over metrics is exactly what makes her worth knowing. Her insight about friendship being the only major relationship category without inherent structure is one I keep turning over. No conventions, no defined stages, no official language - just the bespoke rules you write together as you go. In a week about mini-cultures and creative real estate, Julia is doing the work: building scenes, not audiences, one genuine connection at a time.

Quote from the Personal Archive - Julia on the beautiful chaos of friendship

"There's all kinds of ways you can talk about friendship and there are no rules and there are no books and there are no films."

Roger Mitchell went from accounting to investment banking to sports journalism to the music industry to running Scottish football to building an advisory firm that works across all of it - and somehow the throughline is perfectly coherent in hindsight. What ties it together is his early commitment to making himself indispensable rather than just employed, a distinction that opens entirely different doors. His move to Bologna at 21 with zero Italian is the story I keep coming back to: treating displacement as curriculum rather than punishment, choosing to improve by one degree every single day until the compound interest of experience becomes the thing people pay you for. His point about the real value being the insight delivered rather than the hours logged is something every knowledge worker - and every creative - needs to internalize. Roger is 3,000 feet ahead of most of us on this. Take the view.

Quote from the Personal Archive - Roger on the juice that actually moves things

"The real value that is going to move an organization is an insight... you don't know when the real juice is going to come."

Ilia Malinin hadn't lost in over two years. Lindsey Vonn came back from a ruptured ACL and still made it to the start gate. Neither outcome went the way anyone hoped - Ilia choked when the podium was expected, Vonn caught a gate and ended up in a helicopter. And somehow both stories feel more clarifying than a clean victory would have. The Olympics do this to me every time: compress the whole arc of risk, variance, and what it means to just go for it into a few days of television I can't stop watching. Vonn said it from her hospital bed - we take risks, we dream, we jump, and sometimes we fall, and that is also the beauty of life; we can try. I'm writing it down here because I want to remember it when the torch goes out and we go back to watching whatever series is next.

Quote from the Personal Archive - Vonn from the hospital bed

"Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don't achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try."

Where Else I Showed Up This Week

New Click Beta on Excess Returns! These are always so much fun. Cameron Dawson of NewEdge Wealth and Dave Nadig of ETF.com joined me (and bonus points to Dave for helping inspire most of the “trust” posts this week based on this recording). We had a typical wide-ranging conversation on markets, AI productivity, and the narratives driving investor behavior in 2026. The part that connects most directly to this week's spine: we spent real time on media fragmentation, cultural distribution, and how market narratives form in an era when there's no single dominant medium shaping consensus. Mini-cultures aren't just a music and entertainment phenomenon - they show up in how investors form views, too. Dave was sharp as ever on the AI productivity angle, and Cameron brought the macro grounding the whole conversation needed. Especially worth the full listen if markets are your thing.

Personal Archive Prompts

Where in your life are you trying to resurrect a monoculture instead of committing fully to the mini-culture that's actually yours?

WHAT SMALL ACT OF JOY HAVE YOU BEEN POSTPONING THAT COSTS NOTHING AND COULD CHANGE YOUR WHOLE DAY?

Who in your network functions as your best filter - the person whose taste and judgment you trust without needing an algorithm to confirm it?

What creative gap right under your nose are you not filling because you're waiting for a bigger platform?

ARE YOU TREATING YOUR FRIENDSHIP RELATIONSHIPS AS TRANSACTIONAL - WITH RULES - OR AS THE MOST OPEN-ENDED AND MAGICAL CATEGORY IN YOUR LIFE?

Where could you make yourself indispensable rather than just useful - and what's the first piece of grunt work you'd need to own to start?

What would you do differently tomorrow if you treated today as an event with a before and an after - something worth going all in on?

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