Lulu Cheng Meservey: Meet Silicon Valley’s Top PR Master | How I Write
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The old communications playbook, it's dead. Political and company narratives, they used to be controlled by publicists and journalists. But now things are different. Founders and politicians, they can go direct. So the question is how? Like how do you spread a message in this new world?

Well, Lulu Cheng Masurvey, she's worked with companies like Substack and Anderle and Activision Blizzard. And this is her tell-all about how to build your own audience, how to create your own content, and how to shape your own narrative. Let's rock.

What I want to do is basically treat this conversation like a giant onboarding session that you would have. And we're going to take all your knowledge about PR and communications, and we're just going to bring it into one conversation. And the thing I want to start with is two words. Go direct. What does that mean? Why is it important? I'll tell you what it does not mean. It

It does not mean do every single thing yourself in perpetuity. The same way that being a technical founder doesn't mean write every line of code forever or being a product-focused founder means doing every single aspect of product for the rest of your life. It also doesn't mean alienating the press and boycotting media and refusing to talk to them and just like only tweeting. The crux of what it means is perpetuity.

for the founder and the originator of the project, so usually the founder of the company, to speak directly to the audience without middlemen, without screens, without filtering it through all this kind of PR corpo talk and actually revealing their true personality and their true motivations. You can do other things too. You can also sometimes talk through the press and you can have people helping you. But if you are

absent and you are not ever speaking directly to the audience, then in this environment, people don't know whether to trust you. They don't know what you stand for. Why would they be excited to go work for you? And everything about your company is just flatter. Go direct, I assume, doesn't just mean posting on Twitter, right? It's got to mean something more than that. So what's the difference there?

So, okay, people think about posting on Twitter, that can be part of it, or just posting on any social media platforms. Part of it is if you're releasing a blog post, you have to have input in the post, it has to be your ideas. It can't be a post that's completely detached from you that if you didn't exist, that exact same post could have gone out. Right. So sometimes I see companies posting

just release things that have no voice or vision of the founder in there. Just random collection of generic people could have cobbled together some words, run it through chat GPT and then hit publish. And that's what it sounds like. Or,

Or going direct with events is you are hosting the events. I know some founders who will host dinners at their house. If you are going direct to government and regulators, you are not just handing it off to lobbyists and say, make it happen, but you need to own your own relationships, form your own relationships. You want to be on a texting basis with these people as opposed to hoping that the lobbyist will deliver the message effectively.

and faithfully every single time. So no matter what you're doing, that's representing your company to the outside world or to the inside world, like to your own employees, some of it has to come from you. The crux of it has to come directly from you speaking in the first person. And I think it has to be the founder because the founder is the only person in this world that can talk about the vision in the first person. So wasn't that always true though? Like what changed about the world to make this so important?

The biggest thing that changed is that opinions became decentralized. We no longer have these curators of information, the six TV channels and then the 12 TV channels and then the 15 news outlets. Now information can come from a random anonymous account from some random corner of the Internet, become a meme and then spread with more ferocity and momentum and speed than if it had come from CNN. Actually, probably now that.

the sources of memes and opinions and perceptions are so decentralized, you have to go out and directly speak to your public as opposed to going to the centralized sources and thinking that people are just going to get all of their opinions from the same places. Yeah. The other thing about going direct is there's an energy, there's a fortitude, like there's a certain vibration that

In the kind of writing that you get with going direct, like you can actually feel like the heart and soul like burns. There's like a fire in it. Whereas a lot of the kind of more corporate speak is very watered down and diluted. It's very careful and polished to the point where it loses its soul. Yeah. If the writing is bad, it's better for it to be bad and honest. Right.

Do you ever feel like when you're having a conversation with someone and you're laying yourself bare and the person isn't articulating themselves well or you're not articulating yourself well, but you're trying and the emotion is coming through and the intention is coming through and the person is left with the feeling of something. As opposed to if you were to try to have it over text message with the perfect words, it's just completely different feeling. And I would rather see writing that is suboptimal.

that has personality, that has intent and has conviction than writing that is like textbook correct. You know, the Orwell rule for writing that's like better to break all the rules than to do something barbaric. Better also to break all the rules than to release something that is dead and boring and stale and stiff because that is just not going to break through. Well, it's funny because I was a broadcasting major in college.

And I was trained in doing that. And over the past few years, I've had to unlearn so many of the ways that I was trained because we'd always get feedback. Yeah. And the word that

I was being trained for on camera was perfect. And now perfect is not what people want at all. I think now people want to feel like the Delta between who you actually are when you're at the bar with your friends and who you are on camera is, is basically zilch or zero. And it speaks to a deep and fundamental change that's happened because of the internet that applies not just to speaking, but also to writing. Yeah. So think about three things here. One is, uh, one,

when Michelle Obama would give speeches or actually when Barack Obama would give speeches, there would be this, uh, uh, like, do you actually think that they're coming up with the words on the spot? Like, no, this is a speech that they've rehearsed many times. They know it. There's a teleprompter. They know exactly what the next word is going to be, but actually inserting these, uh,

filler words and vocal tics that most people try to get rid of makes it feel like it's more off the cuff and more natural. Even when you literally see the teleprompter and it's right there, hearing the um makes it feel like they're just speaking from the heart on the spot. Second thing is with TikToks, a lot of TikToks will be

In the car. Hey, I was driving today and I had this thought. Yeah. So the person is looking into the camera and they're all so like getting ready in the morning as if this is just a natural part of their day. And they're not talking about here's how I do my hair. They're talking about something totally unrelated. But it just feels like you just caught them in this unguarded moment. And the thing in the car is like.

There are more TikToks of people in the car than in probably any other setting. It's like, yeah, I was just heading home from work. And then the third thing is when you see people press, I'll pretend this is the camera, when the video starts and they've just like pushed the button and their arm is in this, there's no reason for that.

to be in the shot of them pushing the button because you know they edited the video and you know they put all these filters on it, but they leave the button press in because it made it feel so spontaneous. And so people are even engineering these moments of spontaneity because they are so effective for having the viewer put their card down. How crazy is that? What you just said, engineering moments of spontaneity. Like if that doesn't speak to how our culture has changed, I don't know what does. Yeah. Because my college experience was

deliberately removing any spontaneity. It was all planned. It was all written out.

And it was all polished like, hey, don't be saying ums like that. And now we're engineering spontaneity. You're talking about the Obamas. They're actually inserting that humanity back into the piece. It's like inauthentically trying to be authentic. Yeah. And some people are not good at it. And some people you can tell. So the best thing is obviously just to actually try to be yourself. But how do you do that? You see a lot of Congress people now doing the vertical video TikTok style with a mini mic that they hold in their hand looking like a...

21 year old creator from two years ago because DC is a little bit slow to catch on. But you see you see Congress people now making all these TikTok style videos to try to appeal to younger voters. I mean, look at Elon. Elon's presentation style versus Steve Jobs.

Yeah. People ask about Elon with go direct all the time, actually, like, uh, look at Elon, so many missteps. There's all these times when he puts his foot in his mouth or it causes trouble for the company and he has to walk it back. Um,

Maybe, but even if you agree that there are tweets that shouldn't have happened or things that shouldn't have been said, if you look at the entirety of the picture of the size of the platform that he has and the amount of leverage that he has against people who are hostile to him, who are trying to spread information against him, and his ability to

do his own fact checking, weighed against the relatively small number of mistakes it took to build to that, anyone would take that deal. When you're advising founders to go direct, how do you think about working with them in the time that they spend? And here's why I ask.

Going direct, a founder who's vocal, who's visible, who's clearly putting their heart and soul on the line for the sake of the mission and the company, I love. And at the same time, there's no sure short signal for me for a company than a founder who spends all day on Twitter. Yes. So how do you think of the juxtaposition between those two things? Yes. There has to be a ship to yap ratio. Yeah.

You have to look at the ship-yap ratio. And for someone like Elon, he tweets like 100 times an hour, but no one thinks that the companies are being neglected like the companies are shipping. And the companies overall have just experienced insane growth. Palmer tweets a lot.

But then you see Andral just like ship, ship, ship, ship, ship. And then there are some founders where nothing substantive seems to be coming out of the company other than words. And that's where you get this meme of they're shipping blogs, they're shipping tweets, but where's the product? And meanwhile, the founder is just like tweet, tweet, tweet. And so if the ratio is off, it's a huge red flag. I love that. The ship.

Yeah. So what should we learn from Palmer? You know, in the three body problem, especially in the dark forest, in the second book where the trisolar ends look at humans and determine which humans, which wall facers have what level of deterrence.

And there's one guy who has very high deterrence because they just observe his behavior and he's like borderline crazy. But everything that he threatens to do, he will do. And if he threatens to push the button that is going to ensure the trisolar and alien colony, alien races annihilation, it's like 90 something percent that he'll do it.

And then there's another person whose deterrent effect is actually quite low. All of this is a buildup to say that Palmer has like one of the top deterrent scores of any human.

And he needs it, by the way, because there are a lot of people who come after him. But he is somebody that if he decides that he's going to get this thing done or if he decides he's going to hold a grudge, he will hold it to the ends of the earth. He will pursue it to the ends of the earth, whether it is something he wants to achieve or whether it's a person that he's going to get back at. Like whatever it is, like once he's decided he is locked in, he's going to get it done. It's almost like the movie Oldboy where it takes –

Yeah, I'll spoil it a little bit. Sorry, you're not going to watch it. So good. It's a revenge arc that takes like decades. Someone gets wronged as a child and they spend decades planning their eventual revenge. Palmer is one of these people where like eventually he will get there. And I think for for founders, there is a lot of utility in people knowing that if you say it's going to happen, it will happen.

whether they agree with it or not. The other thing that I've taken from, from Andrel is being very explicit, not just about who you want to work with you, but also who you don't want to work with you. And there's a certain comfort in just turning people off, basically an FU mentality for saying, I don't care. You're not part of our mission. This is what I believe. Either get on the bus or get the heck out of here. I don't want to talk to you. And that sort of conviction, that sort of sharp sword of a, of,

I really see with Palmer. I really see with Substack when you were there. Yeah. And it's all the way down, by the way. So the guy who ran that campaign, Jeff Miller, he took this concept and just and actually way more work goes into something like that than people understand. This was the don't work at Anduril campaign.

It was a video, but then there was a comms campaign led by their head of comms, Shannon. They have this head of design, Jen, who is incredibly talented. So it's just like S tier people in every role coordinating on a massive campaign over a long period of time. A lot of startups would have cranked out a video like this in a few days and just hit press and it would have gotten attention for a few hours and then that's it. These guys spent months and months just like

honing this, not just the video, but a website and a recruiting drive. And then once the recruits go to the website, what happens with them and how do they go into the funnel? Because the thing that people don't understand about attention or don't do with attention is turn it into something. They get the attention. It feels good. It dissipates. It was an evanescent moment. Remember yesterday when we went viral, like high five, that felt great.

people move on. But the people who really know what to do with attention, turn it into something. They turn it into recruits and hires. They turn it into money. They turn into sales, turn into investor interest. And in that case, there was a clear strategic decision to turn that into recruiting inbound. And that's what happened. It seems to me like part of the way the internet's changing is there's more viral moments that are sort of one time and your biggest pieces of content can be so much bigger.

But the consistency that used to be part and parcel of the internet just isn't as big of a thing anymore. So it used to be like when I was teaching writing and I started off, the whole strategy is publish consistently, send an email newsletter every single week and just like stay on the same beat. But now it's not really like that. Now you can kind of go silent for a while and then you just come out with a

And what I'm hearing from you there is like, yes, you can create that bang. Yes, you can get a lot of attention, but you need a good strategy for how to harvest that attention and send that attention somewhere that actually helps you. It's a little bit like turning potential energy into kinetic energy. Like if you convert it to something that you can actually use, otherwise it just becomes useless.

feel good ego trip. Like if you're getting attention just for the sake of attention, it's kind of this empty cycle and then you're on the rat race and then your dopamine goes away and you need another dopamine hit. But what do you actually turn it into that's of substance? So let's get practical here. Tell me about the medium, the message and the messenger. So this is I learned

Recently, so Dworkesh has this great series with Sarah Payne, the historian, and she talked about Mao's propaganda strategy. And somehow I never knew that this was the strategy that Mao had for propaganda. Like literally the message, the medium, the messenger, I think it was almost exactly the same. So if we're onboarding you and we're going to lay out your comms strategy,

The first thing to talk about is what do you actually want to achieve for your business? What does this turn into that is not just ego points for you and something to hang on your mom's fridge? Like, how does this actually help the business? Because otherwise, it just becomes a sugar high for the founder to go off pursuing dopamine while everybody else is left to like,

build enterprise value by themselves. So first is what are you trying to accomplish for the business? Are you trying to recruit and get the best hires, which for most companies, I would suggest making that the priority because the war for talent is what's going to determine your success as a company. So

Getting the best hires is mission critical, but maybe it's you're gearing up for a fundraise. Maybe it's you need to convince regulators to let you cook. Maybe it is sales. You want to close some enterprise clients or something. So what is it that actually matters for the business? Once you've established that, then there are things that are in your direct control and things that are outside of your direct control that you need other people to do for you. So let's say that, um,

Your goal is recruiting. The things in your direct control are whether you offer a competitive salary, whether you make it a good place to work, etc. But outside of your control is whether people know you exist, whether they want to work here, whether they'll eventually accept your job offer, even if they could get more money somewhere else. And you want them to make the decision to, yes, come to your company, join a company.

In order for them to make that decision, they have to hold certain beliefs and have certain information that triggers their decision-making heuristic to go do the thing that you're hoping they'll do. So the entire job of a calm strategy, the entire job is to make those people believe those things that are going to make them happy.

Make those decisions. And the way you make people believe things, this is actually unsurprising that it's so similar to propaganda because it's all about how to make certain people believe certain things. Right. And that takes us to the message, the medium, and the messenger. So the message is the highest leverage thing to get right.

A lot of founders and companies will spend a lot of time trying to get on a podcast or trying to get a press hit or formatting a tweet or making a video or something. But if the message isn't good, you've just wasted all of that effort. It's like you have planned your route on selling encyclopedias and you don't realize that these are not good encyclopedias or people don't want them, right? It's like finding product market fit with a message where the message is the product. You have to have a good product.

One of the things I've noticed about Peter Thiel and a lot of other founders is that they spend a lot of time hosting dinners and they're constantly working through their messaging. And you can just feel it as they're working through it. They're paying attention to what other people are saying. And it's the exact same way that comedians develop jokes. They're sitting there, they're talking, they're getting feedback. And I'm amazed at how often it is that

Even the best founder I know in Austin, I can basically complete probably 80% of his sentences because we've spent so much time together. But I've noticed from knowing him three or four years, the message is dialed in, the message is dialed in. And it's all down to certain words, certain words. You just got to get that right. And then once you find it,

Off to the races. A lot of the message doesn't have to be totally novel or groundbreaking. It just has to be taking the thing that people wish they could articulate themselves. And it's been brewing and it's been sitting there and they want to get it out. And then you give them the words and they'll latch onto those words and the words become their release. So founder mode is an example of this. And it went viral so quickly for a bunch of reasons. But one is just giving people

this feeling that founders have a name and calling it founder mode and giving them permission to feel it and saying that this is something inherent and endemic to the path that you have chosen in life. And there's not something wrong with you because the thesis around founder mode is you're doing these things that other people find annoying or weird or wrong, but you are being gaslit.

People call it micromanaging, but it's actually just managing. People say you're overdoing it. You're actually just doing it. And that with the name founder mode gave so many founders a feeling of like catharsis of it's legitimate and it has a name and there's a way to talk about it.

And so the message doesn't have to be something that people have never heard of before. In fact, it shouldn't be completely unfamiliar. It should have familiarity, but you're giving it shape. Yeah, you're giving it shape and you're giving it a name and a form. And maybe there's a novel way to describe it so that people can latch onto something with at least a kernel of what they already feel. I mean, look at Go Direct, right? What that is, is

Yeah, you know, it seems like founders are sort of changing their approach. We're sort of in a new media paradigm. And you're like, go direct. The old PR playbook is dead, right? You're just super concise saying exactly what's happening right now. And you're giving it shape. And now there's language. And then that becomes the message. Yeah. And you know who gets credit for that is Brian Armstrong. Yeah.

Because Go Direct had been used here and there, and Balaji had talked about it, Brian had talked about it. People had described it as just a thing that you do. But when I was starting Rostra and thinking about how to describe this, I was thinking about, should we try to coin a new term? Should we come up with a new kind of founder mode and make Fetch happen? And Brian's advice was,

It's like just use going direct. You know, it already exists. Just reshape it in your image or, you know, attach your ideas to the term and then just use the term. You don't need a new term. Nice. So we have the message. Yeah, message first. Then? Medium, then messengers. The medium is how your message gets delivered to the recipient. I talk a lot about...

intellectual erogenous zones or cultural erogenous zones. And these are the hot button issues or topics that people are already thinking about and interested in and obsessed with. And rather than trying to get them to have a new obsession or a new interest, just know where their interests already are

and take your message and shape it in a way that it can be received by someone with those interests. So what I mean is this, if you're a founder and you're trying to recruit and you have a company, let's make up a company. Let's just come up with one. I want to actually just get to this later and I'm just going to do it now. So I'm thinking of doing a spinoff of the show, which is

just about the intersection of writing and AI, which maybe we can use as an example here. And the reason why I'm thinking about that is there's already interest there. And I am just trying to

You're doing it. You're doing the thing. Think about something there. So that's what I was thinking about as you were saying that. I was like, how do I apply this to something I'm already thinking? Yeah. Okay. Can we just pull that up and start working through it? That'd be great. Free consulting. Here we go. So let's say that you are super interested in writing and you're the writing guy and people are thinking about AI quite a lot and they're thinking about how do I use AI for writing? One of the top questions I get is like, should I use AI for writing? How and what's it good for? And that

is the equivalent of their cultural origin. So that's the thing that they're thinking about and they want to talk about and how do you bring it back to writing? And let me add a few things. So the first thing is people are freaking out about this. And the second thing is we have just witnessed over the last 18 months, and this would be my message.

We have just witnessed the fastest change in written communication in human history. So we've just written that. Now, you might be scared. This major thing is happening. So that's sort of the premise of where I'm at. And now I'm like, all right, how do we...

Finish off this strategy. So the message already is something that is pretty resonant with people. The hook there is you're thinking about AI and you're wondering how to use it in your life. Writing is one of the most important things that you do in any context.

And so let's talk about how you use AI for writing. I'm making some of this up. This is great. If you want them to actually get that idea, there's two parts here. One is it has to attach to a receptor. Like it has to be something they're already thinking about. So we've just addressed that. Two is it has to show up in the places where they actually get their information. So for example, a lot of founders in tech are trying to recruit and they want machine learning engineers and they want technical talent.

And they try to get on the New York Times or Joe Rogan because everybody is – these are just really big audiences –

Whereas if you showed up on Dworkesh's podcast, which is actually, I think, harder to get onto than Joe Rogan's podcast, honestly, but that's the right audience. But I was going to say if you showed up in like a Scott Alexander post, you would or a Tyler Cowen post or a podcast or if you somehow showed up in a Goren post or like in Hacker News, like this would be probably a smaller number of people.

people, but it would be a higher number of the right people. So number one is, is the message being shaped in a way and has such a hook that people will actually want to pay attention and hear the rest of it? And number two is the message showing up in a place where people actually get their information. And so that's the medium. Yeah. An example of this that came to mind is in the early days of Stripe, they made a very deliberate decision to go after developers on Hacker News.

Super specific. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Sometimes I describe it as you want to get your message across, but not everybody is wanting to hear your message. They're not waiting around. You know, I wonder what the latest podcast on writing and AI is going to be or what are they thinking about other stuff? And so think of the message that you want to deliver as almost the medicine that you want people to have.

you have to give it a candy coating in order for people to want to take that medicine. And so the color of the candy coating and the flavor of the candy coating, you get to choose that to wrap the medicine in so that people will be interested in taking it. And the people who take to it will want to hear more. And that's your way in. But you need some way in that is not just here's some abrupt transition to my thing. Do you want to hear about that? Because the answer is usually no.

Tell me more about this candy coating thing. I like that. Several years ago, someone who owns a dog told me about this analogy of like when you're trying to give a pill to a dog, you can't just give the dog medicine. You have to put it in a piece of cheese. Apparently some people put it in peanut butter. And I was thinking it's really the same with human beings too. Like we don't always want to hear the thing that we need to be listening to, or we don't always want to do the thing that's best for us. But if there's

some hook or some incentive, like a gateway drug for us to get interested, we might actually stay interested. So tell me about your sixth sense for the cultural erogenous zones. Like, is that just from like reading Twitter and having conversations with people and just like getting this sense for like, what is in the zeitgeist right now that isn't being named? Or what are you doing to pick up on what's going on there? So one factor is,

who's talking about it. Not just are people talking about it, how many people, but like, who's talking about it? And what zone of status do those people occupy? And which intellectual family tree do they belong to? Like, people are in pockets, you know, and the pockets overlap. But if you can saturate one pocket, then you're probably in the group chat and you're being discussed. But that doesn't mean that you're necessarily in another pocket. So, yeah,

who are the people that are talking about this? What is the valence of their feel? Like, what do they think of it?

Do they like it? How passionately do they like it? Do they hate it? And why do they do they hate it? Because they're resentful? Do they hate it because it disgusts them? So like resentment and jealousy is okay. Cringe and embarrassment, not okay. But the resentment and jealousy hate will show up very publicly and loudly. Whereas the cringe and embarrassment hate is usually very quiet. So do you ever see someone post something that is actually really cringy and bad?

And all the comments are like, you crushed it. Congratulations. This is amazing. Right. And you're just like, is nobody going to say that the emperor has no clothes? And no, because when we're embarrassed for someone, we actually don't. When we hate it, we'll say, and that actually is fine. But the worst kind of bad, when like everyone's embarrassed for you, you actually won't see it. And you sort of have to look in the mirror.

internecine spaces of who's not commenting are like, oh, wait a second. These people who usually support me are like less vocal right now. You kind of have to read the what's not in the room.

So there's the who, there's the what do they think, there's the how strongly, and then there's the trajectory. So we talked about founder mode before and the term founder mode went from cool to cringe in I think under 36 hours. I've never seen something blow up so fast. It burned fast and bright and then like, I don't mean fizzled like the term went away, but it just wasn't cool anymore. Like now people use it ironically. I was talking to somebody about like,

deal sent a spy inside rippling and then the spy got caught and so he locked himself in the bathroom and then evaded law authority is like founder mode you know i'm actually using a real setting now anymore i never hear it used earnestly so just like what's the trajectory how quickly is it burning out do you want is it like a slow sustained burn or is it like a fizzle and sizzle sizzle and fizzle wait so

When you're actually beginning to work on the idea, is this just like, boom, we're just going to get going here? It seems like then a huge part of your job is just really being in simpatico with the zeitgeist. There's two ways to do it. One is you watch the zeitgeist really closely. You see the direction it's headed. It's a little bit like trying to predict the stock market. You can make an informed prediction on where stocks are going to head and predict.

sometimes you'll be right. Some people are just better at timing it than others. Right. Um,

And so this is like timing the market. You form a thesis on what's going to happen and you always want to play to where it's going, not where it is today. So where it's going is here, where we are today is here. So if we say something along this trajectory, we will be early, but not so early as to be irrelevant. So let's take a lot of time to prepare and double down. And here's the thing that people are thinking and not saying, we're going to commit that arbitrage, right?

And we're going to get here and own this so that by the time everybody catches up, we own it. That is one way to like high conviction, double down, high preparation, claim a piece of intellectual territory. The other way is you're not timing the market. You're just like dollar cost averaging in.

And you are just putting things out constantly. And a lot of them don't hit and that's okay. You didn't put that much effort. But when things do hit, you see the direction you're going, you're taking the feedback and you're refining and refining. So this is like when people say that Steve Jobs didn't just...

come out with the iPhone springing from his forehead like Athena, like there were so many iterations and we forget about the iterations because the final like banger is what we remember. And this is the same with the second type of approach, which is you actually do a ton of iterations and

And the things that don't get traction, like by definition, people haven't seen them and people haven't engaged and they're forgettable. And by definition, the things that hit are the things that get a lot of traction and people see them and people remember. So it's lower risk than people think. You know, it feels risky because you feel like, oh, my post that flopped, everybody saw that it flopped. But by definition, nobody saw it. That's why it flopped. Yeah. The question that I just...

Sort of the rhetorical question to really think on is what is the thing in your field that everyone's thinking, but nobody's saying?

And it doesn't need to be a controversial thing. It can be something like Go Direct. It is just about putting shape, putting form to a kind of energy that doesn't have a place to go. It's sort of fluid and you make it a solid. The debate over Go Direct is like shadowboxing. It's tilting at windmills. Go Direct is...

Right. It is here. It has arrived. It's not evenly distributed, but it's already happened.

happened. And so to try to debate it is a little bit like we can debate the moon landing. Well, I like that. William Gibson has a quote where he says, the future's here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. And that's another way to sort of look for this is try to say, what are the little pockets of truth where something is happening that other people aren't seeing? So where I'm going to put my neck out on the line in terms of my career over the next few years is like the writing is on the wall. We're about to just get a huge change in communication. And you just see all these writers who are scared of AI and they're like,

I'm scared of that. I don't want to go close to it. Actually, no, it's not that good. I've used GPT-4 one time. It's Cope. It wasn't very good. And I'm like, you didn't try to use it well. You're not using the latest models. And that, for me, is a place where I'm talking to my friends who are fiction writers and nonfiction writers, and they're using it here, here, here, here, here. And I'm talking to all these people who are...

less committed writers or very scared and I'm like hold on the future is already here yeah I'm seeing it I'm using it every single day it's not evenly distributed yet and that gets me back to why I'm thinking of doing the spin-off of how I write because it's like call it the writing on the wall

Yeah. Yeah. I really like that. That's a great, that's a great idea. What were you going to call it? Not that. Yeah. Writing on the wall. I like that. Yeah. I mean, the writing's on the wall. Yeah. There's no, there's no, there's no point in, in,

indulging in cope. It might feel better to tell yourself that AI can't replace me and it can replace maybe other people, but not me. Or going direct is not really a thing. Like I'm as relevant as ever, depending on who you are, but...

No, it's happening. It's like you're not deciding that AI is going to become a great writer. It just is. It's a fact. I'm not deciding that Go Direct is a thing that should happen. I mean, I think it should happen, but it already just like is happening. There's a secular change and we're not going to reverse it. So, yeah.

My hot take on something that is happening in communication or I think relevant to writing too is going direct has already just happened. Like even I'm not focused on that anymore as like a new thing. It's just already, it's part of the playbook. And if you want to be one of the people who doesn't realize the Vietnam war is over because you've been living in the jungle, like that's fine. There are people who still want to litigate the moon landing. Like that's fine. Whatever makes you happy. I'm more thinking about what is happening

What is the next thing? One of the next things is that humans need to figure out how to stand out in a world of AI content. And there are things that AI actually can't do.

And one thing is feel emotions. It can simulate emotion, but it can't actually feel emotion. And emotion comes through in ways that are maybe surprising and not logical. Emotions make us write things that are actually not grammatical and not sublime and not beautiful and unnoticeable.

They break a lot of writing rules. So like I've taken manifestos that I've worked on with founders and with other people. And for things like that, the recommendations actually make it worse because it makes the writing better at the expense of the emotion and the conviction. And sometimes you don't want to make that tradeoff.

Sometimes you do. And I think these models are great. But today, sometimes it actually takes away some of the wrongness that is the point. And the other thing that emotion produces conviction and AI cannot have conviction. To have conviction when the world is telling you that you're wrong, when even the models are telling you that you're wrong and you're like, screw it, this is what I believe.

That is what makes a piece of writing sharp so it can pierce through the cold. Yeah. Like imagine running James Joyce through chat GBT and asking it to clean up the writing. I mean, it would, it would break. Right. Um, imagine E E Cummings, you know, just running that through. There are things that, um,

AI, at least at this point, can't emulate. And I think people need to lean into that. So emotion is one. Speaking from experience is one. Empathy is one. The other thing is there's an interesting psychological effect where things resonate with us or we resonate with them more if we relate to the speaker. So, for example, with children's shows, sometimes children's TV shows will try to instruct children in life lessons.

And here's Daniel Tiger, and he learns to share. But it actually doesn't stick as well as we'd like because...

in the kids' minds, okay, he's going to share, but he's a tiger and I'm a boy. So maybe tigers have to share. Maybe boys don't. Like for some reason, it just doesn't break through. Same with Bluey. Bluey has some great lessons, but still there's like, Bluey is a dog. I am a kid. And maybe Bluey is a girl and I'm a boy. And if you show a boy a video of a kid, the lesson will stick better. And if you show a boy a video of a boy, it'll stick even better. And if you show them a boy who's their age...

It's even better. And so where I'm coming to with this is if I am reading about a human experience from a human and I know it's a human somehow, it'll actually stick with me and sink in in a way that just a beautiful piece of writing from different provenance wouldn't. I don't want to let you go on writing from experience that there's a lot there.

What makes that such a good thing to do in your writing? It gives you a monopoly over something. It makes you the number one expert in the world on something really small and specific.

So you know how Peter Thiel says competition is for losers. And that goes for writing and for speaking. And if you are saying something that a lot of other people could be saying, there's no reason why people should buy that message from you. They're buying with their attention and you're selling a story or a message. There's no reason why they should buy that from you. Whereas if you can find something where you have a complete monopoly of

then maybe the overall audience is smaller and the denominator is smaller, but 100% of those people who are interested in that thing have to come to you. And so speaking from experience is super powerful because it's very rare that someone else has had the exact experience as you and the same reactions and the same take is recounting it in the same voice. And so when you talk about something from your personal experience, you are creating a monopoly. Whereas if you are weighing in with an opinion on something,

There might be millions of other people with the same opinion. Yeah. It also leads to so much credibility. They've done, I saw a study one time of what gets popular on Hacker News. And one of the most common formulas is basically goes like this. I spent 487 hours learning to do this. And this is what I discovered. People know that if you're paying with your time,

You're just going to know things that other people don't know. And to the extent that that's true, there's a level of built-in credibility. Well, the one thing there is it's become a form of content mill-like engagement farming slop that I super hate. Because once these formats go viral, there are people who want engagement just for the sake of engagement.

And it disgusts me on a really visceral level. Like I feel exploited and taken advantage of. And I feel like they're like farming my engagement, which they actually are. I feel like they're treating us like the people in the pods in the matrix, just like sucking engagement out of us so that they can get the expat or something. It like disgusts me so much. And what happens is like these templates go viral and then people write templates about how to do the templates and then people emulate the templates. And then people write templates about how to do the templates.

And there's nothing worse. And those templates, the whatever, I spent 100 hours learning this that you don't have to. Here's seven hacks with chat GPT. I can't even like,

I need mouthwash for saying these words out loud. Like that's how much this format disgusts me. And when you see it, that's when you see in the comments, everyone being like, great thread. Thank you. I learned so much. And I think 90% of those people are bots, but that's when you see nobody's telling them that this sucks. Let's close the loop. So we talked about the message, the medium. Now talk to me about the messenger. The messenger is the person who has authority to say the thing.

Like words in a vacuum don't mean a lot, but we just talked about why it's so powerful to speak from experience. The messenger is someone speaking from experience and placing their authority and their credibility to give weight to that message. And different messages require different messengers.

So if your message is, here's what we plan to do in the world and here's our vision, it's pretty clear and obvious that the founder should be the messenger for that because they are the only person alive who can say it in the first person. And that's

deliver and carry through. If the message is this is a great place to work and you'll have really good bosses, then for the boss to say that is actually incredibly either counterproductive, it just doesn't hit the same to have the boss say, come work here because the boss is great. Whereas if

Even the like lowest ranking person in that company would have more moral authority to say the boss is great than the boss. Do you ever see profiles of some big CEO and it's like the janitor or the security guard saying this CEO always took the time of day to greet me and ask about my children? Like it's actually so much better coming from that person.

than for the CEO to say, well, you know, I'm the kind of boss that I say hi to everybody in the company. Right. We're like, yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, write a thread about it. Yeah. And a message like the size of the market and this company is going to make so much money, like,

It would make total sense for your investors to talk about that or make total sense for some commentator to talk about that. Whereas if it's you talking about how huge the market is and how much money you're going to make, it's almost a little bit distasteful or how well the product works. Like get someone who's used the product to talk about how well it works. Right. So different messages require different messengers for it to get.

carry the right weight and have the right authority behind it. And what's the mistake that companies make? Having a messenger whose opinion nobody cares about, like a paid spokesperson, right? Like a generic paid spokesperson who is being paid to say those words, their opinion just straight up doesn't matter. And if they're pitching a journalist or

Journalists hate getting PR pitches. Like they'll tweet about bad PR pitches that they get and dunk on PR people. And sometimes I'm like, well, people are trying their best. They're just trying to do their job. But I can understand if you're a journalist and your job includes like every day just getting hundreds of the worst emails you could imagine from people who are sending those emails because they were paid to do so.

So a mistake is letting people whose opinions are discounted to nearly zero do your speaking for you because you have just neutralized them.

every possible, like all possible impact because they have no authority. They have no credibility. Nobody cares what their opinion is. Everyone knows that they're being paid to say it. And probably the message is not as effective because they're not actually excited and passionate. They're just like reciting the words. They're putting the fries in the bag of the email. And it's just not landing. Well, this also feels like how the world has changed. Paid

25 spokespeople, celebrities 25 years ago didn't seem like it worked. And now it's like, who cares? We know that you're just, we're like, oh, you're just being a shill for this company now. We're like, whatever. Matthew McConaughey is cool, but I don't care that he's in a Lincoln commercial. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, you didn't go buy a Lincoln when you saw the commercial? Hate to break it to you. I don't look like that. But actually, what's a really good example about that

is Matthew McConaughey in the front seat of a Lincoln. I literally don't care about. I live in Austin, Texas. He is the ultimate UT fan boy. And he's on the sidelines of every single football game. He's like hitting the drum at big games. And I'm like, Matthew McConaughey. Cause he's there. Cause he loves it. Yes. So same person, two different contexts. And one I'm like, whatever, completely indifferent. And the other one I'm like, yo, I want to go see days and confused for the seven time. You know what I mean?

Maybe you edit that part out for the sake of your own reputation. But you know what? There's this trend of brands creating like fake user generated content, which you maybe have seen, like they'll pay people or they'll try to use avatars or something to have it be like fake organic content from fake fans. And

The problem with doing something like that is as soon as people realize that's what's happening, which maybe will happen as they listen to this podcast or probably is already happening, it completely works. Like there are some things where you get one bullet and you get one shot. And something like this is, okay, you can fool people, but you get to do it

one time and they'll never let you do it again. Or we were talking about why does nobody write like an expose of like how things really work in Washington. That's you get one bullet, you get one shot, your career is over. You're not going to those parties anymore. And I think nobody's willing to shoot that particular shot. And the other big takeaway is that

What's not obvious about the messenger is the messenger is not at all the most powerful person all the time. Sometimes. Yes. Go direct. Sometimes you need the founder to basically go and beat the drum on the mission. But sometimes it's the janitor.

who is going to be the best person to talk about the CEO, or you see this on the news all the time. Somehow there's a way that we just trust Jane who lives down the street, who's talking about, oh yeah, you know, the streets never used to be like this 44 years ago, but now they got, they got plastic covers over the Walgreens aisles and,

there's just something weird going on now. Like there's something about that where, you know, we just, we just trust her. You know, we just trust her. She's just like a normal human being. And sometimes. Yeah. It sounded super normal. Yeah.

Well, one of the tactics with election campaigning is if you want people to vote for you, you get their neighbors to take some step that indicates that they vote for you. Or you just imply to those people that their neighbors are going to vote for you. And then they are much more likely to they feel like that's what people are doing. Say that we're working on something and we got the big launch tomorrow. All right, Lulu, I need your help. I give you the call. Yeah.

Writing on the wall is about to drop. So writing on the wall is about to drop. Now, the intuitive thing would be, hey, can you share this for me tomorrow? Yeah. But that seems like people are going to be shills and you're clearly getting the ick from that. So how do I change my requests? Yes. So that they'll help me out. This is crazy.

Huge. Okay. I'm so glad that we're covering this because I get asked like 10 times a day, can you amplify this? Can you tweak? Can you reply? And you can tell when someone is doing it because they're like, the energy of an Al Qaeda hostage video is coming through in their post. You see people do the just joyless LFG reply and you can just sit there. They're like,

let's fucking go send. Yeah, exactly. I did it. Look at it as you press enter. Yeah. And if you make the request, couple of things are happening. One is favors are not a renewable resource. So you've just tapped a pretty significant favorite. Like it feels like a small favor, but people hate doing it so much that you've actually asked a lot. Like you've burned through more relationship capital than you might think. Right. Second is, okay, you've put this request in front of them. Now here's their options. Okay.

One, pretend they didn't see it and they feel guilty and they hate feeling guilty. So they resent you for making them feel guilty. Two, they didn't really want to, but they do it anyway because you asked them to. And now they're like icky and you made them do something they don't want to do. And is that something you actually want? Like, I wouldn't want that. If you had told me those options, I would rather they just didn't.

Three, they wanted to and you've given them an opportunity and so now they've happily done it. There are some people who want to help you and they're excited about this and like, yes, let's do it. Of course, that would be me with writing on the wall, obviously. But the only time that you want it happening is in that third category. Number one and two, you actually don't want. Right. Right.

So how do you frame a request that will only happen if it fits that third category? And just work backwards. You are letting them know what you're doing. You're letting them know because it matches something that they're already excited in or it plays into something that they've already been saying and that's why you thought of them. And this is not a request to share. It's not obligation. I just thought it'd be interesting for you or if you have feedback for me, I'll take that.

But like now it's in front of them if they wanted to share. And if they fall into category three, they'll just do it of their own volition. You don't have to ask. If they fall into category two, they have an excuse not to do it. So they won't do it resentfully. And if they fall into category one, if they were going to ignore it, they can still ignore it. But now they don't feel bad because they're not ignoring a request. You were just like an FYI and they saw it.

There's two good comms tests. Could you say whatever you're about to say without the CTA of asking people to give you money in the next sentence? Yes. What does that mean? What it means is could you say something that isn't just purely in your self-interest? Most of the time, companies and founders will only speak if there's like direct self-interest involved. And that's when you see like shilling the company or buy our thing or whatever it is.

But the thing that's interesting to people and what the candy coating consists of is a statement about the world that is novel or helpful or educational. And then if they're interested and they follow you and they want to learn more, like they'll come to your company eventually, but you don't just, it's actually back to the medicine and the candy coating. The candy coating is something that would be interesting to them regardless. What I'm getting from you is so, so far,

There's a few words that have stuck out. So the image that has been like replaying in my mind is like this giant poster of the word fake. And you're just like scratching it out with red ink, like get this out. And then at the bottom, it just says, be real. So that's the first thing. The second thing is like useful or pragmatic. And then the third thing that actually has really surprised me is what I would call leveraged beta.

And this comes back to what you're saying with cultural erogenous zones. A lot of people think, oh, if I'm going to have a mission for my company, it's got to be completely different. I got to make something up out of nowhere. And what you're saying is there's already these like Gulf Stream vectors of energy. And it's like, how do you harness one, coin a term for it, make it concrete and then shout

that thing into the world in a way that has more shape to it than it's ever had before yes because people will want to say the thing they already wanted to say and if you give them the words and the concepts they might use your words and concepts to express it but they're not going to want to say something that they didn't already want to say and so it's like if there's a current

And the current is going this way and you're stuck here. They say it's a mistake to try to swim against the current or to swim perpendicular. What you want is to have like the current go this way and then you swim kind of this way. And then you end up going half with the current and half in the direction that you want to go. Something like this. Don't take, this is not survival advice. I'm not a registered swim advisor. Please speak to your advisor. This is calm advice.

And let's say that the current of opinion is here.

And you want to go here. You don't just sort of like swim against it and force your way to it. You kind of have to go with it and you'll end up on a diagonal. And so take something that people already care about, that they're already interested in, give shape, give words to it. And then they'll use that to speak from themselves with genuine passion and interest as opposed to like obligingly repeating your corporate PR that you ask them for a favor to go and say. Because that is virality. Like you are...

killing virality when you try to force people to say something they didn't already want to say. And that's why asking for a favor doesn't really work. You can do it one time and it'll give you the illusion of working because people might oblige, but you don't even know how much you've tapped that reserve of relationship capital. And it's anti-

viral, anti-mimetic, because by definition, you made them say something they didn't want to, they'll never want to say it again. In fact, they'll be allergic to saying it again because they don't want to relive the trauma of the cringe. So if you can give them something that they already wanted to say, now you are leaning in the direction of virality and you are giving that a boost,

and giving it like a delivery mechanism for spray. It's like, it's like a virus. Like the virus has to have something to latch onto and it has to have people who will spread the virus. And so you want to design the, this is like, I'm glad we're not doing this podcast two years ago. This would be like censored from YouTube, but you want to create a virus.

lab made virus with gain of function virality that is designed to maximally spread as opposed to something that can't spread. That's it. Yeah, it's perfect. Thank you. That's what I want. That's the title of the show. All right. Tell me this. Another good comms test. Let's say our company doesn't exist.

What's something we could say that would make our target audience feel understood? And it's a version of the first test, which is putting aside your immediate commercial self-interest.

What do you have in common with that audience? What is a pain that they have that you understand? What is a struggle they're going through that you can articulate? What is a hope and dream that they have that you share? And so like the theme here is put aside your desire to sell stuff to them and pitch them and make money.

for a second and just start by relating to them and figuring out what they care about, what they're scared of, what they want, and what of that can you speak to with some degree of authority, and then figure out how to link it back to the company later. You can segue into that. But if you start with that, you just lose people immediately. Apple is getting criticized a lot now for kind of losing the plot a little bit.

And the golden era of Apple, a lot of people think of as like the think different. You're the underdog. You're part of this cult almost and part of this like subculture. And that was when people felt like Apple really understood them and understood that they wanted to create something that hadn't been made before and was outside of the mainstream. And they're going to actually think different. And yeah, that's me.

Now it feels like Apple is kind of pushing onto us things that they want us to buy or things that they want us to use. So like this magic photo generator, Genmoji thing. I don't I have it. I haven't used it. I feel like they're trying to get me to use it so that they can make more money and say that more people use it. There's nothing that it does for me. And I haven't seen anything that explains why it would make my life better.

And so I literally can't remember what it's called, but I remember a few days ago people were irritated because they had turned one of the settings screens into basically an ad for this thing. Yeah.

And settings is sacred. Like, come on. Settings is sacred. You don't go there. You don't mess with settings. Settings is for settings. And so they have put something on the sidebar where you click and then the entire thing is just an ad like, use this feature that we want you to use.

And it feels really icky and it feels like they are using us to get more usage for their feature as opposed to rewind, rewind. They understand us and they understand what we're trying to do and what we're trying to build and who we aspire to be. And they have created the tool for us to be able to do that. It went from they are serving us to they are asking us to serve them to oversimplify, of course. But that is part of the shift in how people feel about Apple, at least happening right now.

It didn't feel like they alienated people. It felt like they stood for something. And you were, you know, if you had a PC, that's fine. Like, hey, I'm just not an Apple person. But now it feels like we live in this culture where to stand for something means to be politically divisive and alienating. And you're either on our team or you're not. You're either red or you're blue. You're either with us or you're against us.

So how can you stand for something without alienating your opposition? Or is that even worth striving for? It is absolutely worth striving for because I think companies should be opinionated. First of all, I think companies should just take risks, but I think companies should be opinionated and stand for something.

What you don't want is to split your user base in half or to split your employees in half. So a very obvious example is if you were to choose a political party to support, now you have created civil war among your employees. Right. You can draw a line in the sand and you should.

But that line should be gerrymandered to fit around your people. There will be people outside of that line. And if it's people that you don't need, then it's very low cost. So for example, if you are a crypto company and your audience is regulators and people who hold crypto.

then if you were to take a side between different coins or different exchanges, what you don't want is to then divide your community. But if you were to pick crypto versus non-crypto, or if you were like economic freedom versus suppression and oppression, you will still have other people outside of that line. It's not a

a made up tension, but you have taken all of your people and put them behind you and put them inside of the line. So there are different ways to draw a line. If you were to just draw a line of like Republican versus Democrat, yeah, you might be, uh,

splitting your base, which you don't want to do. But if you were to say us, the people who believe in what we're doing versus them, the people who don't, that's nearly costless to you. So for example, if you're Palantir or Anduril or one of these companies that is

pro-American greatness, like unapologetically, you can draw the line of we believe that the West has superior values and should be dominant, period. And if you don't believe that, that comes at literally no cost to us because you were no good to us anyway. You weren't going to help us. You weren't going to work for us. You weren't going to do anything. And so why do we care about you getting mad? In fact, you getting mad only convinces our people that

that this is real and that we're willing to stand for our principles. Whereas if they had said we're choosing whatever Coca-Cola versus Pepsi or Chick-fil-A versus Taco Bell, now you've just created an unnecessary debate among your own base, which is distracting. When I asked that question, you had like a visceral reaction to it. What makes this so important? Because if you don't stand for anything, then there's no you're offering a fungible commodity.

And people can get different types of software for pretty much anything, or they can make their own. Anything you can name, people pretty much have options. With the exception right now of being like,

ASML advanced lithography machines or something like almost everything else in the world. And that's, you know, who knows, right? But everything else in the world, practically, people have so many options. And the option that they choose represents the person they want to be.

And the person they want to be seen as. They want to tell themselves and they want to tell other people, this is the type of person that I am. And so what you stand for is a direct reflection of that. It seems like launches are a kind of free lunch. They're like, you have one chance. You can kind of play this Uno card one time. And you're really good at launches. You nailed it with Rostra. I've just seen you have this understanding of launches.

And what makes for a good launch? Because it also feels like I'm now seeing so many launches every single day that now the idea of a launch, I'm like,

I'm kind of getting lodge fatigue now. So what do we need to know when, what does a founder need to know when they launch something? Okay. A couple of things. One is, let's do three things. One is launches are happening constantly. As you've said, it used to be every few months and then it was every few weeks. Now it's like multiple times a day and sometimes huge launches are going on top of each other. And so there's so much noise and breaking through is incredibly hard. So it's just hard to break

breakthrough period. Two, launches are not the be all end all. And some people have made the point like you don't remember the day that Facebook launched or the precise day that Airbnb launched. You know, they grew over time. It's OK. At the same time, in an environment where it's so hard to get attention, here is a moment when you have an outsized opportunity to get attention. You want to make the most of it.

Three is you want to turn that attention into something. And we were talking about this earlier. Don't just have attention and then it evaporates and evanesces and then the next day people are into the next thing. You can't get it back. You can't go back a week later and I want to turn that attention into something that's gone. While you have it, you have to turn it into something that can evolve.

And you want to turn it into a recruiting pipeline or a sales pipeline or you want to get investor interest. You want to turn it into something that will stay and continue to benefit the company after the attention is fleeted. And so has fleeted?

Is, is befleaten. I think we should keep just is befleaten. And so those are the three things to keep in mind. It's, it's, it's really noisy. You have to work hard to break through. It's not the end of the world if you don't, but think of it as like one of the opportunities you have to do this. And three is just try to turn it into something and not just have it be attention because you can't do anything with attention. The mistake that people make

is jumping onto trends. So I remember for a while, like I was doing a bunch of manifestos and then it was like manifestos everywhere. And I was, I was manifestoed out. So now like, I think companies should still write about what they're doing, but the whole like, here's our manifesto and here's our secret master plan. And just,

That has gotten a little tiresome. And for a while, I was doing a lot of like sizzle reels and montages and sort of like accelerationist feel. And now it's like every launch is one of these and just feel it feels really fungible. And so I think you got to find the next thing. What's the difference between a trend and a cultural erogenous zone?

They can be the same. Okay. A cultural origin zone is just something that people really care about and think a lot about. And maybe it's because they care right now and they won't six months later, but you need their attention right now. Maybe it's like something that they'll care about for the next year. Maybe it's something that's becoming more salient over the next six months. But it's just like the thing that really zaps their attention. What's that game? It's like Operation and you...

It's a game called Operation. There's a little guy on a board and he has like little red lights and you try to put the bones or pieces in. And if you trigger a red light, it goes and the light goes off. The hospital game. Yes. The hospital game for the less sophisticated. Yes. For lay people, it's the hospital game.

Yes. So so that's that's what cultural origin is. It's like try to avoid things are being overdone and you have to constantly come up with new things, which can be tiring because you're trying to outrun the thing that works. Like once something works, everybody starts doing it after the cognition launch with the with Devin.

There were some launches that were like tweet for tweet, almost word for word following the template. And then you can't just like keep using. Now you have to go do something else. I said this a while back with like Tolkien inspired names. There was just like a glut of people naming their companies after Tolkien. I'm not saying they're bad companies. Some of them seem really promising, but it's just like a bunch of Tolkien names all at once.

It's like that one year when everyone named their daughter Ava. And there's like a class of Avas like these are sweet, beautiful little girls. They're children of God. It's nothing against them. But these things tend to happen all at once. There was like when I was in school, there were a lot of Sarahs. And I remember you had to be like Sarah S, Sarah T, Sarah Y, whatever. These things come and like downpours. Yeah.

Tell me about this method for writing. Start with a brief summary of the news. Explain what the company does. Talk about the problem. Share your solution, emphasizing why it matters and why the company is the right team to deliver a solution. And then end with a call to action and information about how to reach out. Solid outline. Can't go wrong. I think where you go wrong is like navel gazing too much about...

here's how great we are and we're all so smart. And then you forget to tell people what's the problem, what's the solution that you bring and why does any of this matter to them? Like a lot of announcements, especially, are really solipsistic and narcissistic. And it's like the talk about your personal experience program.

gone wild. And the whole thing is, I've always wanted to do this. And now here it is. And I'm excited to announce because I've done this and it was hard and congratulations to me. And you kind of forget to tell people why any of it should matter to them. You have to think about that. The reader. Yeah. To increase your pressure, reduce your surface area. Yes. The equation in physics is pressure equals force over area.

And you can picture it, right? Like if you're trying to puncture a board and you have the same amount of force, but you slap down on it with both hands versus you drive into it with a nail, the nail is going to puncture the board. And it's the same with our attention and breaking through. Or I used this example earlier today with ramp, which is like if you're trying to tear a piece of fabric and you're just tearing, it's

It's very hard. But then you see wrestlers like, and the whole like wife beater comes apart. And all you need is like one small nick and the whole thing opens up, right? So if you can just concentrate force...

in a really specific area, you can create a ton of pressure. And what this means for communication is if you want to talk to these five people, don't talk to 5,000 people and hope that these five also happen to catch it. Just target these five. And if there's one thing that they care about above everything else, don't talk about 10 different things. Just talk about one thing. Like Steve Jobs, his famous commencement speech at Stanford where he says, stay hungry, stay foolish.

How many people remember anything else from that speech? Like most people remember one thing. And if Steve Jobs can give the best speech of his life and have us remember one thing, what makes us mortals think that we can give an average speech or blog post or video and have people remember 10 things from it? It just doesn't happen. So you get to choose. Do you want people to remember one thing or do you want them to remember zero things? And you should choose the one. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So with that, how important do you think slogans are? Extremely important. Every great movement has had a slogan. And the thing that slogans do is they make something feel ubiquitous and inevitable and like just echoing all around you all the time. Because if you hear the same kind of message online,

Right.

Whereas if you see something dissipated where it's like first it's like this and then it's over here and it's these words and this words, it just like fades away into the background. So are founders very intentional about just we're going to say the same word, we're going to say the same words, we're going to say the same words, and that's written out? They should be intentional about saying a few words over and over, but you don't want to say everything over and over because then you're robotic. Yeah.

Like if you say the entire paragraph over and over, now you're scripted and now you're just like reading off of the talking points. But it's fine to say focus on the customer over and over again. Yes, yes. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's always day one. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Day one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Day one. There's like a far side cartoon where the dog, let's say his name was Rex or something. And it's like how dogs hear humans speak. And it's like blah, blah, blah, Rex, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Rex, blah, blah. Right. And...

That's kind of how it is. Like you choose the thing that you want to have cut through and then you just drive that. But it can't be entire paragraphs of text at a time. You got to choose what. So maybe it's think different. Maybe it's move fast and break things. Maybe it's time to build. But the words around it and the context around it and the stories and the examples should change. In comms, why is it so important to start with the actual business goal? What is the thing that people end up getting wrong?

What people get wrong is attention feels good and it could become this sugar high and it becomes this distraction and you get on the dopamine treadmill. And what it is, it's a sinkhole for your effort and money and time.

where you just invest. It's like people at the slot machine who are just doing this and nothing is coming up, but it feels like something is happening. So that's when you get it wrong. It's like you're feeding off of the feeling of having intention and engagement, but it's not turning into anything real.

Knowing what the business goals are is your way to turn it into something real. You need to turn that attention into recruits. You need to turn the attention into revenue. You need to turn the attention into fundraising. Whatever it is, like the attention is a means to an end and you need to convert the attention into motion. It's like if you were to just sit on a can of gasoline and hope that you'll end up at your office.

You need to convert it into motion and actually know where you're going. Right. It needs to become fuel. So another thing I've taken from this is that good comms

It's not just about how many eyeballs you're getting, but how you're converting those eyeballs. And so as you're drafting a calm strategy, how are you thinking about the post people find us funnel to then get them to do what they want? It has to line up with something that they already want to do. So it's which eyeballs, like which hearts and minds.

And then it's what do we want to convert that into? And so if it's a job application, we want to convert it into recruiting. Then we want to recruit these people and here's the things that they want. We're going to offer them those things when we can. And for the rest that we can't give to them on the spot, like, for example, they want to restore Western military dominance. We can't just like hand that to them as part of the contract.

We have to convince them that by working here, they're going to get that done. And we'll convince them through the personal authority of the founder. We're going to convince them through evidence of other things that we've done, third parties vouching for us. We're going to convince them through a mission statement that resonates with them and that they hear everywhere so that they feel it's inevitable. And we're going to convince them by taking something that they feel and worry about or frustrates them about, like America falling behind.

and say it to them in words that they recognize that it feels like we're totally on the same page. So you just have to convert the attention into something that matters for the business. Can we talk about the CrowdStrike rewrite that you did? Sure. Okay. So...

This was the original message. CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. What is going on with the voice here that makes this suboptimal, to say the least? It's funny that actively is the third word and the voice is as passive as possible.

impacted by customers impacted by a defect found. You know, it's like that meme with the goose, like, whose defect? What defect? Who put it there? Why did the customers get impacted? And it's the voice that companies use when they don't want to

take responsibility for something. It doesn't mean that they're trying to evade responsibility, but it sure seems like they're trying to. And so when I said earlier that it can be really powerful when a founder speaks in the first person, passive third person is like as far away as you can get from that. And usually it's because they don't want to deal with the smoke.

So then what's going on here? You rewrote it and you said, I'm the CEO of CrowdStrike. I'm devastated to see the scale of today's outage and will be personally working on it together with our team until it's fully fixed for every single user. But I wanted to take a moment to come here and tell you that I am sorry. People around the world rely on us and incidents like this can't happen. This came from an error that ultimately is my responsibility. And then you say, here's what we know. Yeah.

Tell me about the difference. I think this is what people want to see from leaders. And to their credit, eventually, like a few hours after that rewrite, they did their own rewrite and it was a lot better. And they did apologize. They actually ended up doing some of these things. But I think what people want to see is you're on it and you actually care and it actually bothers you because you're

I'm bothered. My electricity just went out. My server just went down. My computer isn't working. Whatever it is that happened. If you seem less bothered than me, then I am going to have to try to make you as upset and disrupted as you have made me like that. I need to bring you down to how I feel right now.

Whereas if you show that you also feel really, really bad, now we're on the same level. We can't talk when I'm here and you're up here unbothered. I have to drag you down here first in order for you to see what's going on. So this is the writing equivalent of a story I once heard where there was a shop and I think they sold coats. And basically there would all the time there'd be angry customers. So there would be a clerk, a

on the floor and a customer would come in. They said, hey, there was a hole in my coat. I'm super upset. And this customer was pissed. So what would always happen, this was just, they just ran the playbook left and right, is the person who was on the floor who was working with the customer was like, I'm so sorry. Let me go get my boss.

And then the boss would come back and say, there was a hole in the coat. You've got to be kidding me. That is absolutely unacceptable. We will not have that. Give me the coat. Give me the coat. And now all of a sudden the emotions change. Yeah. The customer's like, it's not that bad. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's not that bad. Exactly. Okay. Like I understand, but please, please, please don't get this mad at this person. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's not that bad. And I think that that's what's going on. Yes. Where if you can come out with that energy and that fire and that intensity, all of a sudden, like...

I think what I'm hearing you say and what I got from this story is that a customer, they're upset and they want to feel that the company gets that they're upset. And there's nothing worse than a company that's just like saying there's no need to be upset. But if you can actually come in hard, then sometimes the customer will just be fine. I think the visual to remember is here's happy, here's upset. If...

the the let's say just a customer and business owner if the customer is here and you're here they have to drag you down until you are at their level so that they until they feel that you get it whereas if you immediately take yourself to here and you're just like sackcloth and ashes

Then they still want to be at your level. So they actually might bring you back up to here. So the person coming out saying, I can't believe there's a hole in the coat and they are making an even bigger deal and they're even more upset about it are here. And then the customer, what they're doing is it's OK. It's not it's not that bad. It's just a little. Don't worry about it. They're pulling you up.

Or if you're at their level, they'll stay at the level. Whereas if you had come in and said, what's the big deal? It's just a hole in the coat. They now have to explain to you why having a hole in the coat is unacceptable and they have to take you down here. So this is where you'll always end up and you get to choose the path. I find the message, the medium and the messenger to be just be fascinating. And the big thing that was a surprise for me is to really get sensitive to what people are.

aren't able to say that is sort of in the cultural consciousness and put form and shape to it. That has been super surprising to me. And then the other thing is, as you think about taking a stand, taking a stand that aligns with your customer base, the people who you're trying to reach and not dividing the

Your in-group seems to be an own goal that a lot of companies score on themselves. Yes. You should draw a line in the sand, but you should gerrymander the line in the sand so that it fits your people and doesn't divide them. Sweet. Thank you, Lulu. Thank you.