There’s a moment in any good story where you realize the end was inevitable all along.
Sometimes it’s a surprise, like a Tyler Durden twist (and that’s the mastery of Chuck Palahniuk), and other times it’s just the way the plot settles down into what we’re dreaming of, like a Vivian Ward real-world Cinderella story (and that’s the mastery of Garry Marshall).
A story needs to end. And an end simply needs to satisfy closing some loop on some idea from however it started. Any story that accomplishes this arc has done its job.
It’s all about the organization of beats along the way. How the little moments, presented from different perspectives, can make us feel like we know the characters, and their intentions, and their desires, and where it’s all going to land. It’s pretty. Really. Oh, pun intended, of course, like,
Vivian: People put you down enough, you start to believe it.
Edward Lewis: I think you are a very bright, very special woman.
Vivian: The bad stuff is easier to believe. You ever notice that?
Pretty Woman, Gary Marshall and J.F. Lawton
When David Foster Wallace, or Rusty Guinn, or Ben Hunt invokes story as “the water in which we swim,” they’re invoking the presence of beginnings and endings. Their invoking the magic by which most of those arcs disappear from our awareness because they’re how we talk about everything.
They’re the only way to make sense of the story beats, as they endlessly drip past us in a mostly boring fashion. It’s not paint drying but it’s soap making. You don’t care so long as you have soap in the shower (or bubbles in the bath).
You actually have to proactively step back and ask a question like, “Why am I reading this now” to break the spell we walk through life under.
Not because we’re childish or easily fooled. Because it’s literally the way we talk about everything. We tune out looking for the beginnings and twists and ends in most of life because why ruin the last Dorito at lunch with pondering what the ending of Succession signified, right?
On Panoptica, we’re getting to highlight some of the very (very, very) cool work we can do with seeing Narratives in the Perscient data base. Take a look at the Pulse page or the Storyboards in particular. These are newfound ways to visualize the stories floating by us in the ether.
And, since most of the friends I have who are familiar with the Epsilon Theory stuff come from markets/macro/investing backgrounds, the real kicker with Panoptica is the stuff we are tracking is wayyyyy more than finance.
The Palahniuk’s and Marshall’s aren’t just in the books and TV shows anymore. Sure, they’re modern examples of how to make sure every beat supports the arc and eventual landing. They’re masters of that kind of control. But every other form of media has been studying that craft, too.
If you can't script the events on purpose, can you at least script the frame through which people perceive them?
One of the biggest stories right now that’s weirdly inescapable and either ever so slightly or ever so plainly tied to a ton of headlines right now (in late 2025) is the idea of sending in the National Guard to states, cities, or wherever - and how that’s not just necessary but normal.
I'm not here to argue right or wrong with you about it. Make up your own mind, then put your support where it feels right. I am here to say this is a perfect teaching example of what this tool can help you tease out.
Ben’s got a personal tie to this whole concept. He’s written about it before in “Letter from a Birmingham Museum.” In the piece he’s wrestling with coming to the understanding of why his dad, who he holds in appropriately high regards, wasn’t involved in the Civil Rights movement in the greater Birmingham, Alabama area where they raised young Ben.
The takeaway, about his dad, is that - the story the news presented him in real time wasn’t about the problems with the fundamental laws and what needed to be changed, they were focused on the illegality of the approach organizations like the NAACP were taking.
Ben’s dad didn’t do anything to help or stop anything. He had a life and a family to take care of and, you might relate to this - that’s a lot. So the stories swirled around him when they were happening, and adult Ben, on a trip to the Birmingham Museum with his family all those years later, found himself realizing he had the ability to see the story from an entire new angle.
The headlines don’t lie. They just tell the story the people who write the headlines are looking to convey. They have endings to justify the beginnings, and ways to make it feel clean and tidy, so we can go back to worrying about the much more demanding aspects of our everyday lives, most of the time, at least.
I want to emphasize the way Ben puts this statement, because it frames the entire conversation he and Rusty had with me:
Governments and corporations don't engage in massive advertising campaigns because they're waiting to see how it turns out. You do it because you've already made a decision that this is the direction you're gonna go, and here's how we're going to bring the public along to support the decision we've already made.
Ben Hunt, November 2025, Epsilon Theory YouTube Interview
There’s value in attempting to see these campaigns. They can help us understand what we’re feeling. They can help us understand the generations before us and after us and what they’re feeling. They can help us talk about how it’s being presented, and if we’re comfortable with the underlying realities so we can either go back to regular life or figure out how to do something more.
It’s not just a financial markets thing. And it’s not a contrarian or cynical thing, either. It’s a literacy thing.
When you understand that narratives are intentional, that they precede action rather than follow it, you can gain some distance. Not necessarily emotional distance, but cognitive distance.
Everybody knows there is a crime problem in cities. There’s a crime problem anywhere there’s crime, fundamentally. But Truth with a capital T is different from truth with a lowercase t. Crime being bad, as in criminal activity against non-criminals, is a Truthful fact. Stories about crime designed to push an agenda can be a truth unto themselves - designed to prepare us to accept a predetermined action.
Citizens of global 60s-made-modern-day Birmingham, learn to tell your Martins from your Bulls, your Edwards from your Vivians, and your Tyler’s from your mild-mannered narrators.
Watch our talk. Watch Rusty explain it to my non-statistically gifted brain how they can track density in language across media of all types. The technology is amazing. The story-structure recognition is timeless.
It’s modern movies to Shakespeare to the Bible. But it’s on social media feeds and TV and wherever you get your info. And it never stops.
We all just want a break sometimes. We want to be entertained. We want it to be made easy.
Governments and corporations and organizers of all stripes have never been better at doing this - at making it easy, essential, and obvious how they frame any beat along the path the world is on right now.
It’s time to have better tools to talk about these narratives. This is the water in which we swim. The architecture is built on currents and you should at least be able to choose whether you are letting it carry you, or swimming deliberately against it.
We all know stories need endings. The question is whether we're discovering the ending, or whether we're being led toward a predetermined one.
Pssst! We have a tool for that.
