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...
Post-punk wasn't "after punk" so much as punk that stayed around long enough to become a cartoon of itself - so the new version had to both give up the ghost and then become the ghost that could haunt the people still holding onto the past. A$AP Rocky is doing exactly that to rap right now. The new album isn't “bars” heavy, but (my take is) it's all flow, texture, and atmosphere. You can't deny the rapper DNA, but you also can't deny how utterly unlike most other rap from the last three decades ASAP is, especially at this commercially viable a level. This is what happens when an artiste stays visible and keeps exploring - he gets to haunt his own former self in the coolest possible way.
Quote from the Personal Archive - Joy Division and The Cure colliding with 2026
"I wanna fall in love / don't want no broken heart / don't wanna grow apart" is devastatingly emotional and flat, all at once. Pretty genius candidly. Pretty Burton/Elfman on all the levels too.
Here's how creative ecosystems actually persist: not through marketing or endowments, but through people showing up, staying visible, and creating the conditions where young people can see that this is possible. Allison Wolfe and Brianna Collins both understand the leave-to-learn-return-to-witness pattern - they go out to understand possibility separate from where they started, and then they come back with context. That's when the relay happens. Thirty years after a Bratmobile tape in a high school hallway, you're introducing voices from one generation to the next, watching influence ripple in ways nobody fully sees until they stop long enough to look.
Quote from the Personal Archive - as both Allison and Brianna understood it
"You watched someone do what you're doing at some point in time. Maybe not exactly. But enough so that you figured you could try. And now? Someone's watching you."
Real practice sucks. The kind where you're happy you did it in hindsight but miserable while you're doing it. Summer two-a-days, conditioning runs, feeling dumb in podcast interviews with experts you're supposed to understand - that's when you have to ask yourself: is this just suffering, or is this the practice part? Because if it's practice, it changes everything. The discomfort becomes a signal that you're actually building something. A few months down the road when you realize you've got this, you're grateful you put in the work. That's the only real proof that practice works.
Quote from the Personal Archive - the moment recognition happened
"Practice sucks. But having practiced - that can be a very comforting thing."
Authenticity is becoming a competitive advantage precisely because AI slop is everywhere. When anyone can generate content that looks passable, the only thing that actually matters is being a person who genuinely matters in a community of non-bots. Spencer Kier and Carly Valancy both figured this out - they build bespoke communities around genuine curiosity rather than optimized metrics. Spencer runs Audience of One (a podcast for himself, open to anyone). Carly spent five years meeting strangers one at a time. Neither of them was chasing scale. Both of them became unmistakable. Just because something won't get a million views doesn't mean it's not worth doing - and right now, that restraint is becoming the most radical move you can make.
Quote from the Personal Archive - the gravity of staying authentic
"You are all you've got when anybody can imitate anyone or anything else with a supercomputer behind their strategy."
Spencer embodies the belief that you don't need to specialize in one thing to be remarkable - you just need to be genuinely curious, stay in constant beta mode, and let your spikiness be the thing that makes you unmistakable. His three-part framework: Find your unique traits and stop smoothing yourself out (Work) - empathy as the foundation of real conversation, not an afterthought (Life) - treat yourself as always in beta, always experimenting, without waiting to specialize (Legacy). The compounding doesn't happen within a single track. It happens across the collection. And that's where the real power lives.
Quote from the Personal Archive - the competitive edge of being weird
"Most people shift to the norm to the mean... But I think you have to find your unique traits, your unique qualities that help you stand out in a way that nobody else is. Cultivate those, lean into them."
Carly spent five years breaking every "rule" of networking while staying authentically herself. Her framework: Break the networking rules that don't serve you - remove the apologies, leave the personality in, trust that something wonderful will happen (Work) - stop thinking in terms of ladders and start thinking in terms of ecosystems where everything connects to your core (Life) - commit to five years minimum just to build the thing, knowing you'll fail repeatedly and publicly along the way (Legacy). The people who told you to climb the ladder have vested interest in you having horse blinders on. A creative person sees the ground under the foot of the ladder, the environment, the alternatives. Creative people can't follow predetermined paths. They can only follow what's coherent.
Quote from the Personal Archive - the five-year truth
"You have to find the thing that makes the brand worth building and just keep showing up for that, over and over again for a long, long, long time. You're going to flop, you're going to fail... just keep showing up."
Peak Deepfake (Panoptica)
Our Panoptica Storyboard tracking “deepfake concerns” went nearly vertical from November 2025 to January 2026 - surpassing the 2024 election peak. xAI launched Grok's "Spicy" mode with intentionally disabled safeguards. This was no technical failure - it was a corporate choice, and the growing list of allegations don't frame this as an innocent mistake - They say xAI built the tool, set the parameters, and enabled the output. (Note: Pair this with the current legal challenges against social media platforms, 2026 will test user-generated content and arguments beyond free speech)
Quote from the Personal Archive - the moral clarity
"They're saying xAI built the tool, set the parameters, and enabled the output. They are only calling this a corporate choice."
Where Else I Showed Up This Week
Rupert Mitchell from Blind Squirrel Macro gave me an international perspective on what's going on in markets. Robert Hagstrom and Chris Mayer joined us for our latest installment of The Hundred Year Thinkers to get very philosophical and expand on Chris' General Semantics work as it applies to investing. Daryl Fairweather of Redfin was back to unpack her 2026 Housing outlook. And Tony Greer came to give a trader's perspective on the explosive moves we're seeing as the year starts.
Personal Archive Prompts
What trait or interest of yours have you been hiding because you thought it would make you "less professional"? What if that's actually your competitive moat?
IN YOUR LAST DIFFICULT CONVERSATION, were you trying to understand the other person or trying to win?
What would you give yourself permission to try if you knew it didn't have to be your forever?
Which "networking rule" have you been following that actually makes you less authentically you?
ARE YOU CLIMBING A LADDER THAT WAS NEVER BUILT FOR YOU? What would change if you stopped thinking about "up" and started thinking about "coherent"?
What are you building that you're willing to show up for even when nobody's watching?
What happens to your sense of integrity when you watch a company choose harm over safeguards? How do you stay good in a world that's increasingly choosing not to?
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
