The Art of Disruption

Wall Street Just Named the Most Crowded Trades of 2026

AI stocks. Metals. Crypto.

Surprise, surprise; gold crashed 16%. Silver plunged 34%. Bitcoin dropped to 1 year lows.

All supposedly "uncorrelated" assets moving in lockstep largely because of overleveraged margin.

JPM strategists warn that the same leverage is still a risk.

Those markets may be recovering now, but cascading liquidations could trigger quickly across several asset classes simultaneously.

So much for diversifying away risk, right?

But get this–

70,819 everyday investors have allocated $1.3 billion fractionally across 500+ exclusive investments. 

Not real estate or PE… Blue-chip art. Sounds crazy, right?

Now it’s easy to invest in art featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso, thanks to Masterworks.

They do the heavy lifting from acquisition to sale, so you can diversify with the strategy typically limited to the ultra-wealthy.

(Past sales delivered net returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8% on works held longer than a year.)*

Our subscribers skip the waitlist

_{*Investing involves risk.  Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd}

I recently attended the 1% Better Conference, which I think will fast become one of my favorite events of the year. The kind of gathering where you walk in thinking you know what you’re about, and walk out realizing you’ve been sleepwalking through some part of your life. But one session hit differently. Dr. DérNecia Phillips took the stage and dropped something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

She titled her talk “The Art of Disruption” and right out of the gate, she explained exactly why she put those two words together. Disruption, on its own, sounds negative. Disruptive kid in class. Disruptive employee. Something that causes problems. But art? Art is beautiful. Creative. It makes you feel something. And when you combine those two words, you’re already being challenged before Dr. Phillips even gets to her first point. That oxymoron is the whole lesson. I’ve always liked the word “disruption” I like pushing the envelope and seeing how disruption can change an entire industry or the world!

Disruption Is Not a Dirty Word

Here’s the thing nobody tells you, the people who changed the world weren’t really trying to burn it down. They were trying to build something better in its place. Dr. Phillips made this crystal clear. You’re not a disruptor just because you’re unhappy with the way things are. Complaining isn’t disruption. Criticizing from the sidelines isn’t disruption. Disruption requires something more. She laid out a three-part framework she calls the ART of Disruption, and it’s elegant in its simplicity.

First comes the Awakening. Something has to shake you out of your default thinking. It could be a moment, a conversation, a pattern you’ve been normalizing for years that suddenly makes you go “wait, why do we do it this way?” Dr. Phillips was clear that disruption has to start within yourself. Not outside. Within. You have to first change what you’re believing before you can change anything else. You have to interrupt your own assumptions.

Then comes the Response. Knowing something is wrong isn’t enough. You have to speak up about it, act on it, push toward it. Dr. Phillips called this responding “with strategic clarity.” It’s not about being unruly or creating chaos for chaos’s sake. Disruption done well is intentional. You have to be able to communicate your vision to other people. You have to be willing to say the unpopular thing, to stand up before it’s cool, buck the trends and go with your own flow. To wear that new band tee just because you like it. You can be the one person everyone else is watching while they decide whether to join in.

Then comes the Transformation. This is what separates a disruptor from a critic. You’re not just tearing something apart, you’re truly building a new alternative. Maybe it’s a new process or workflow. Maybe it’s a new company or new heavy metal musical sound! Or, maybe it’s a new school. Dr. Phillips shared her own story here, working to found what is set to become the first Black-founded school approved in the state of Nebraska, Identity Preparatory Academy, opening in fall 2026 for 4th and 5th grade girls in North Omaha. She saw a problem, a staggering 11% literacy rate for Black students in Nebraska by 8th grade, and instead of just talking about it, she started building.

Awaken. Respond. Transform. That’s the ART.

Metal Has Been Doing This Since 1970

Look, I’m a guy who’s into finance stuff. But I also have a deep love for heavy music and technology. I cannot hear a framework like this and not immediately start mapping it to the historic events in tech and metal. You may already know much of this but let’s look at it from a disruptive lens, because the genre of music I like most is, quite literally, a 50-plus-year story of disruption. And every chapter of it follows the ART model almost perfectly.

Black Sabbath: The Original Disruptors

In 1970, four guys from Birmingham, England, walked into a tiny recording studio and spent eight hours recording an album that the critics absolutely hated. Back then music and more of a psychedelic blues-rock sound. But on one Friday the 13th in February, Black Sabbath’s first album hit shelves in the U.K. and everything shifted. The rock music world was disrupted.

Rolling Stone dismissed it as just noise. Critics were scathing. And yet the public embraced it immediately. Black Sabbath is credited with creating heavy metal. The success of their first two albums marked a paradigm shift in the world of rock. Not until Black Sabbath upended the music scene did the term “heavy metal” enter the popular vocabulary to describe the denser, more thunderous offshoot of rock!

What was their awakening? They looked around at the psychedelic blues-rock dominating at the time and thought, this isn’t what we feel. They grew up in a world that felt dark and heavy and sometimes downright scary. Tony Iommi, who had lost the tips of two fingers in a factory accident, literally had to rethink how to play guitar. He tuned down, invented new techniques, and in doing so helped create a sound the world had never encountered. Their response was to put it all on record and release it regardless of what anyone thought. Their transformation? An entirely new genre of music that has spawned thousands of bands and tens of millions of fans over the past five and a half decades.

Metallica: Disrupting Disruption

If Black Sabbath created the blueprint. Metallica took it and set it on fire.

Kill ‘Em All has since been regarded as a groundbreaking album for thrash metal, because of its precise musicianship, which fused new wave of British heavy metal riffs with hardcore punk tempos. When Metallica dropped that record back in 1983, they weren’t just playing heavy music. They were playing it faster, with passion, more technically demanding than almost anyone thought was even possible! They were barely out of their teens, and they sounded like a freight train with a grudge. They disrupted the metal scene.

But their disruption didn’t stop there. Three years later, they totally leveled up in a way that shocked even their most devoted fans. On March 3, 1986, Metallica’s third album, Master of Puppets, arrived and changed heavy music at a moment when thrash metal was still dismissed by critics as noise. Metallica altered the course of thrash by channeling raw aggression through technical discipline and clear deliberate musical composition.

This is what the ART framework looks like in practice. The awakening was recognizing that speed alone wasn’t the point. The response was raising the bar with complex musical arrangements, acoustic passages, and themes about addiction, control, and manipulation that thrash metal had never touched. The transformation was when In 2015, Master of Puppets became the first metal recording to be selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” So, the United States government deemed it important enough to preserve for future generations. That is not nothing.

Read to the Full Article Here

Other Posts

Thanks again for following along! Keep those Horns Up, my friend 🤘 🤘 And please share this newsletter with those you think would find value!