We are just cavemen sitting around a campfire.

Telling stories, talking to each other about our day, communicating to our kin what is important to us, expressing our feelings, and illustrating it all through visual art.

As we move about the world, we find ourselves enveloped in the human experience.

We work, we love our spouse, we play with our kids, we practice religion.

Although the shape of those things has changed dramatically (we are no longer hunting mammoths for food), what was intrinsic to humanity 300,000 years ago is still intrinsic to humanity and expressed by us modern-day Homo sapiens.

Picture us 10,000 years ago, sitting around a campfire, telling stories.

Some of those stories are boring, and they are forgotten by morning. Some of them are interesting enough that the listener remembers them for a time being.

Some of them clear a certain threshold and animate the listener to care enough that they tell someone else about it.

This happens every day, by the way.

You tell me something compelling, I go home and tell my wife, and (if it's interesting enough) she tells her friend.

And then there are other stories that are so enthralling that the stories are retold again and again, passed down from one generation to the next.

Run that play a few thousand times over a few thousand years, and the only stories left standing are the ones that got at something that people actually care about.

And since we live in the year 2026, we are the beneficiaries of thousands of years of retelling that has already happened.

The evidence is alive and well, and we can see that the oral traditions which have stuck around are often describing realities about the cosmos and human experience itself:

These oral traditions are ancient and have survived the test of time.

This phenomenon is called the Lindy Effect:

Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, the religious texts, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics aren’t going anywhere because they have true staying power.

You are more likely to be around for 2,000 years if you have already been around for 2,000 years.

But this is not because time itself is magic.

This is because survival is evidence of truth and an approximation of the human experience.

Our stories, the ones our societies are built off of (the Greco-Roman tales, the myths, legends, and stories of old), these are what are true.

These are what are eternally true, because what is intrinsic to the human experience doesn't actually change.

A scientific theory is only true up until the point at which a breakthrough proves it actually isn't.

But from King David to Caesar to Napoleon, the retelling of the historical greats is always true. Not because those men were perfect, but because certain themes arise.

Transcendence, power, greatness, pride, humility, greed, hatred, love, virtue.

Narrative.

I have chewed on this pattern internally for months now, and have done what I can to map it accordingly to world of sports, culture, and capital.

Today I conclude this unexpected trilogy by naming how it is remembered.

Class is in session, let’s begin. 📝 📝 📝

🎙️ All-In style show on the business behind sports, media, and entertainment with Brent Peus and Dominyck Bullard.

A lot of you are new here, so before we go any further, I want to explain the sentence this whole publication is predicated on:

Here is what I mean by that.

A derivatives trader who lived through 2008 is a more effective trader than one who didn't. Not because he is smarter, but because he has seen what leverage and a frozen repo market do to each other when the music stops.

A surgeon is only as good as the cases he has worked on. The thousandth appendectomy goes better than the first, because by then his hands have stored the pattern of the surgery.

A linebacker who has watched enough film reads the guard's stance and knows the play before the snap (see: Luke Kuechly).

In every case, the formula is the same:

Pattern recognition = experience = effective application.

Experience is just stored pattern recognition, and effectiveness is what happens when you pull a stored pattern into a new situation and act on it.

That loop is what I call Pattern Resonance: recognize a pattern in one domain, remember it, and apply it in another.

Each application expands what you are able to recognize next, so the loop compounds. The more patterns you store, the more you see.

↓↓↓

Twenty editions in, and most of what I have written has lived in the recognize and apply buckets.

I name a pattern (IRL, hierarchy, ritual, endurance), and then I apply it to the world of sports, culture, and capital.

But I have spent very little time on the middle step, and the middle step is where everything is either won or lost.

How do you remember a pattern?

You don't remember it as a list of facts. Nobody ever does. If we did, we would have all of the proverbial wisdom and inspirational quotes from throughout the ages memorized.

You remember it the way humans have always remembered everything that has ever mattered to them.

You remember it as a story.

You’ve probably heard the infamous saying, “facts don't care about your feelings.”

And while I understand the sentiment, the saying misses the point. 

Hot take: there is no such thing as "the facts." There is rather an indefinite number of facts in any and all things. 

You could spend an hour describing the corner of a chair or the personality of a person if you wanted to, and your relationship to that chair or person is what would inform your facts.

The real question is never whether facts matter, but which facts, and why you are pointing at them in the first place.

Imagine you are in a house fire.

Same experience. Totally different hierarchy of what matters, because the purpose behind the action is different.

Human care organizes facts.

Before you ever look at the world, something you care about has already decided what you will see.

And the tool humans use to hold that ordering together is narrative. Why?

Stories are fact compression mechanisms.

They take an infinite field of facts, select the ones that matter toward a purpose, and squash them together in a pattern of coherence.

Boring stories are forgotten. Interesting stories are retold. And every retelling is another round of selection.

Over enough rounds, the stories get refined and purified, until all that is left is that which contains the structure of human attention.

This is why you don't even have to know why a story hooks you. You just know that it does. "There's just something about it."

Yes, that story is expressing the human experience in a hyper-compressed manner. And the stories that survive 10,000 campfires are a map of what humans actually care about.

If you want to watch care organize facts in real time, see the religious texts.

Genesis was a story passed down for generations before it was written down by Moses.

The Gospels went through a compressed version of the same process. The life and ministry of Jesus was carried orally for 20-60 years before Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote it down.

The authors even tell you, explicitly, that they compressed the facts.

Care is actively organizing facts, but it goes further than even this.

Each author was writing to a different audience, so each one's care selected for different facts.

Same seed, same person. Four different hierarchies of facts.

The stories were fact compression mechanisms, and it's critical that you understand those stories before you tackle the theology.

As it goes, Gospels before Letters.

Okay, so what does any of this have to do with sports, culture, and capital?

Sports is narrative. Sports is storytelling. Sports is the humanities.

And we remember the patterns that underpin sports through an active participation in the stories we live in.

Just as Christians voluntarily sit through Good Friday and re-enter into the Easter story every year, it is the structure of participation in one's own story that produces its significance.

And that significance is what helps us remember.

Participating in Good Friday pulls us deeper into the Easter story, and it makes Sunday that much better when it comes.

So when the Cubs wait 108 years for a World Series, it's no surprise to see grown men cry.

And when the 2022 World Cup Final morphs into a larger-than-life storyline of "Messi vs. Mbappé: King vs. Prince," with the GOAT chasing the one trophy that had eluded him as the heir tries to seize it for himself, it's no surprise that when Messi clinches the title and Mbappé settles for the Golden Boot, you tip your hat to the beauty of a story well told.

And stories always continue onwards: Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in the most recent World Cup final. Messi went scoreless in his last international match, Mbappé took home another Golden Boot, and a new heir, Lamine Yamal, lifted the cup.

Rocky Balboa. Jackie Robinson. The Miracle on Ice.

Underdogs. Kings dethroned. Bitter feuds. Lane Kiffin vs. Ole Miss.

We do not remember the most recent fact. We remember the story.

And there is a difference between a story that is your story and a story that you only consume.

You cannot be a Jedi, but you can be a fan.

You can watch Star Wars, but you cannot actually enter into it.

But you can live out the stories that sports has to offer, and in doing so, retell and remember those stories with your friends and family.

This is why I will always bet on properties whose relationship with their fan is predicated on ceremony and not content.

Content is a story you consume. Ceremony is a story you participate in.

Most emerging leagues these days give you a whole lot of content, but college football gives you ceremony.

You are not merely watching that story. You are in it. You lived it as a student and now as a fan.

Cool. So how on earth is this relevant? How does this translate to commerce and capital?

I’m glad you asked.

The answer is everything, because the market prices stories.

Every sports asset has two layers of value:

Contracted cash flows. Media rights, sponsorship, ticketing, real estate. The things you can underwrite in a spreadsheet.

Everything above the floor. The multiple a buyer pays because people keep retelling the story of this asset, and will keep retelling it long after the buyer is gone.

I will demonstrate this reality with, yet again, my favorite case study of all time.

The Dallas Cowboys.

In 1978, an NFL Films producer named Bob Ryan was cutting the Cowboys' season highlight film. He noticed Cowboys fans filling away stadiums all over the country, and asked himself how he could use that.

The film opened:

Head Coach Tom Landry hated it, as he thought it would give every opponent bulletin-board material.

But that didn't matter. Pat Summerall said it on CBS the next fall, fans started repeating it, and nearly 50 years later, nobody can say "Cowboys" without knowing that they are . . .

. . . America’s Team.

Retelling the story kept it alive, and it translated to immense commercial value.

I have called the Cowboys the Disney of the NFL.

This is because of the way the team has replicated the classic "Disney flywheel" business model: take one piece of IP and monetize it across a number of nodes.

The nodes (a movie, soundtrack, merchandise, Disneyland ride) eventually out-earn the core IP, because the core IP is capacity-constrained.

The Cowboys' core IP is football in Dallas on Sundays, and it caps out at just 8 home games a year.

Everything else is the platform: the real estate, the hospitality, the events, the Cowgirls series on Netflix, WrestleMania and Final Fours at the stadium.

But I might as well add storytelling to the reasons I draw this parallel.

Disney has been the keeper of our stories for the last century: Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi. The Cowboys are running their own version of that same playbook in sports.

Their Disney flywheel is just the monetization of their story.

When Roger Goodell stood up to honor Steve Sabol, the man who turned NFL Films into a myth-making machine, he quoted a line Sabol lived by:

The floor of value is what is contained in the fact, but the premium is placed on the story.

If you are underwriting a sports asset, the question is whether people will still be retelling this story in 30 years, and whether you own the nodes that monetize it.

Which brings us to a through line of nearly everything I have written this year.

AI has made facts free.

Every stat, highlight, recap, and summary is available instantly and at zero marginal cost.

Our world is full of immediacy and near-infinite knowledge. But we lack embodiment, lived experience, and wisdom.

A world solely focused on automating the functional spheres of the human experience has no time for and places no value on contemplating the stories it has inherited.

And this world, one with no stories and no coherence to or connection with that which has come before it, is a world that cannot remember its patterns.

We scroll Netflix for 30 minutes before turning the TV off because none of the stories look good.

Your AI agent is emailing my AI agent, my Claude /diligence skill is analyzing your Claude-created financial model, and >50% of both of our LinkedIn feeds are completely synthetic.

What is left is the moment when two people sit face to face.

And the most valuable skill in that moment is the oldest one we have: telling a story with real intention, to a specific person, about something you care about.

In a world of AI abundance, the premium shifts to storytelling. 

This is why I am bullish on the anti-AI bet and IRL, and it is why I believe the next decade of sports, media, and entertainment belongs to whoever can still tell a story worth retelling.

Long on storytelling. Long on the human experience. Long on anything that will be passed down to my kith and kin.

I want to be a great man, so I study the great men of history.

But I don't reach for the specifics of "David wrote this," and "Augustus said that."

I reach for the narratives underneath, and I find the stories that tell me what it means to be a good man, and what it means to be a bad one.

As I go about my day and try to be faithful to my purpose and those around me, I don't recall an inspirational quote or Chinese proverb.

I think back to the great men of history.

As I endure hardship, I reflect on David in the cave, with Saul's life in his hands, choosing not to take it. And I am inspired to be better, to live better.

When you remember the story, you are pulling from a deeper playbook, because you remember how the conclusion was reached. You can then rebuild that in a situation a proverb could never anticipate.

Or, as I would say, you can recognize, remember, and apply it.

So here is how I would apply this.

If you build or invest in this ecosystem, ask what story the asset is retelling, and whether anyone would retell it without being paid to.

Underwrite the floor, then ask whether the story survives the campfire test. Most importantly, understand whether you own the nodes that monetize that story.

Content can be bought, but ceremony must be earned.

If you are simply trying to be more effective, in your work and in your life, stop collecting facts and start collecting stories.

Store the pattern as a narrative and you will be able to apply it long after the details are gone.

And we only remember what is retold.

Ten thousand years later, and we are still the same people sitting around the same campfire, telling the stories that are most true to us.

Thank you for sitting at this one with me.

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