Meet Silicon Valley’s #1 PR Expert — Lulu Cheng Meservey

So

why in the world does corporate speak exist? It drives me crazy, and you have all these

companies. Without personality, people don't talk like that. What is going on behind corporate

speak? It's risk minimization. If you are not putting

too much personality, if you're not saying anything spiky, if everything is just really

well-rounded and kind of milk toast, it's hard to get in trouble for it.

So I think a lot of companies optimize for the wrong thing. They're optimizing for getting

in as little trouble as possible. The trade off of which is that you miss opportunities.

We can talk about that later, but that's one thing. I think another thing is it's existed

for so long, it's been with us, so aliens could have brought it at the time of the pyramids.

It's, it's just been with us forever and I think people who enter new jobs enter the,

this sort of corporate world where they're almost cosplaying. They're corporate ancestors.

So I think it's this sort of atavistic urge that flows through you when you assume a role

that you think you have to talk that way. Um, so I think it's really just collective

force of habit. So as a writer, how do you avoid it?

I do it by reading it out loud, and you can feel the cringe like surge through your body.

If something, if it's something that you would never say, then you, you won't be able to

say it out loud like your body prevents you from doing it, or you could say it to someone

in your family. Just try to say it normally and you'll feel

that it doesn't actually come out of your mouth. Right. It also helps, by the way, with

just writing better in general because you can get a feel for the cadence, for just the,

the rhythm of the sentences. So I always recommend trying to say something out loud.

One thing that I feel like would be difficult is on the very days when you do need to write

a statement, those are also the most stressful days. And so as a writer for a corporation,

how do you make sure that you're being smart and diligent when anxiety, tension, emotions

are high? As much as possible, do it in advance when

you're not in the fog of war. So, uh, there are some things that you won't

know until the day of, like, let's say it's a crisis or an announcement. There are some

things that you might not know until the moment that thing is happening, but there are some

things that you do know. You know who your audience is, you know your priorities.

You know what you care about and what they care about. And so you've got the weight-bearing

pillars of your statement in place. And then when the day comes, it's basically like mad

libs. You're filling in details, information, a few verbs and nouns here and there, but

the contours of that should be ready well in advance of when you need it.

Walk me through what happens when there's a statement. I'd just love to hear the step-by-step

and really focusing on the writing process. Who was in the room? How did it come together?

How did you review it? How did you know when to publish it? Then how did you share it on

social and sort of respond to what people said. Just walk me through that process.

I think you wanna establish in advance who has what authority so that you can move quickly.

So it's like in battle, if you are on a battlefield and you're thinking, should I shoot this guy?

You don't call back to headquarters and wake up the general and ask, right? You know that

you have, uh, authority within a certain sphere and in any fast moving organization.

So let's take a comms org. If you know that within this sphere you just have discretion,

then you can move quickly. And then if you know that if it rises to this other level

of importance or high stakes, then these are the three people you need to talk to. Um,

you just know the process. So that's something you can establish in advance.

And the other thing you can do is have a sort of doctrine where, It takes out the need for,

um, some approvals and micromanaging because people know what you're trying to do. They

know directionally what you're getting at. They know the goals, they know the audiences,

and therefore you pick people you trust and then they can just make that call.

So I try to minimize who needs to be in the room and in the approval loop as much as possible.

And then for the high stakes things, we try to know exactly who it is in advance so that

it's just boom, boom, boom, go to those people and then ship it.

Do you have ways of thinking about emotions that you try to convey once talk to a friend

as I was embarking on a design project, and he said give them three emotions.

I think three is the absolute maximum. I think we're simple animals and if we can focus on

one emotion or two, that's pretty good. So three, I would consider really the upper end.

If someone reads something that you write and they come away with a dominant emotion,

dominant feeling, a dominant message of something you want them to know.

Then maybe a dominant urge of something that they would like to do that you have called

them to do, that's a win. When you think of the companies you work for,

do you think of giving them a personality? Yeah. Try to, yeah. How does that work? Try

to give them some personality. You want the company to feel like it's an extension of

its customers. The company has to be of the people, by the

people, and so you wanna hire from the community that it serves, have people inside the company

that come from the customer base, and it should feel familiar. It should feel like you're

interacting with a company that culturally has a lot in common with you, and that makes

you feel like you're on the same side. It makes you feel affinity, familiarity, liking,

all of which are things that cons functions are tasked with building. And so if you can

give the company a feeling of a familiar personality that culturally matches what the customer

feels that they identify with, then you're halfway

there by the people. For the people of the people. It's a very

internet notion though, right? That's not something that you would hear PR people in

the seventies, the eighties say. Yeah. It is sort of a, an artifact of

the modern, modern age that we think a lot about community, and we think a lot of. Bottom

up where things happen organically from a community that then become important as opposed

to before where we had three TV channels and then someone said them, you know, someone

said something on those TV channels and then everybody received the idea.

I asked about personality earlier. Do companies

have a soul? In one sense, there's a, there's a thought

experiment. It goes something like this. If you took a billion people and you gave each

of them a flashlight that they could shine on and off to communicate with other people

the same way that you would have synapses, could they collectively function as a brain?

Could they collectively have a soul? Would there be a ghost in the machine that sort

of arises So spiritually, no. I think the human soul is a sacred thing, but I think

a company can function like it has a soul because there becomes something ineffable

in the atmosphere that once you enter into it, you understand.

Uh, that these are things that the company would do or wouldn't do, and it's not written

down anywhere. It's just in, in the air. And I think a lot of that gets communicated

through the writing, which is why the corporate speak just drives me crazy. It's it's this

soulless, soulless and it's robotic. Yeah, exactly.

And it's easier to copy those formulas than to do something entirely new, both from a

risk perspective and from an effort perspective. There are phrases that we've heard in corporate

settings a million times and they regret to inform you that

Yeah, exactly. These individuals, like, why don't we just say people?

Right? They're people. And it's a cognitive shortcut where we can cut and paste an entire

phrase. It's almost like if you're coding, you don't have to code everything from scratch.

There are chunks of other messages that we just piece together and it'll get us most

of the way. There is how it feels like. Whereas if we were to start from entirely

from scratch, it would be more risky and take more

work. This what I find to be particularly interesting about you. Is that there is the

Lulu personality and then there's the corporate personality, and then there's the intersection

of both of those. And I think this is something very unique about the tack that you've taken

for your career and your approach. I try to expose my personality a little bit

more because there are times when you have to grab the lapels of the people you're talking

to and just beg them to trust you. There are so many times when you just have to look at

them and say, take my word for it. And they're not gonna do that if it's an L L C or a C

corp. Uh, they might do it if it's a person. Not

always, you know, it's not that I'm successful every time, um, and it's not always pleasant,

but I think it's the only shot, literally the only way to build trust is to have as

much vulnerability and personality and honestly honesty. I. Possible because people don't

trust corporations and there's data about this.

There's surveys. People don't trust institutions. Yeah, but like you just throw down, I'll throw

down. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. It's a very distinct thing about you. You'll stand up for yourself

in a way that I think a lot of other people are afraid to, and maybe that's a risk thing.

I don't know what's behind that. In

nuclear parlance, I would say I have second strike capability. If someone is giving me,

or my people or my company a hard time, sometimes I will address that. And the reason is there's

a, there's a concept in game theory that if you are playing a game repeatedly, your behavior

changes. If you're playing it once, you might have prisoner's dilemma.

You tell on everybody and then you go your separate ways or go to jail. If you're going

to be doing it repeatedly, then the optimal behavior is something called tit for two tatts.

It's not tit for tat. But if someone crosses you and keeps crossing you, then you do something

and it changes their incentives for the future. I try to do that where people shouldn't be

allowed to take cheap shots and be cruel or be dishonest or be unfair and get away with

it indefinitely. So I don't have the time, patience, or emotional wherewithal to address

every single instance. But every once in a while when it's particularly egregious, and

if it's recurring, then I feel like addressing it helps to better shape the incentives of

people behaving that way. So

by two tit for Tatts. So that means a lot of times you're, you're sort of turning the

other cheek, turning the other cheek, and then you're sort of waiting and then once

it's time to roll, it's, it's, Hey, I'm gonna expose this and, and kind of don't

mess with us. Yeah. And that also ensures that you're not doing it from a place of emotion.

I mean, tit for tat is emotion. You punch me, I punch you back before I even think about

it. Tit for two tatts is more. You know, you could be doing this, you know, you could be

responding and you don't, and then you find the right time and then you respond in the

right way. Again, I'm fallible. I don't always do it exactly the way I'd hoped, but what

I aim for is when someone has really clearly egregiously crossed the line or done it repeatedly,

then I get to come at it from a place of calm and dispassionate analysis as opposed to,

you hit me, I'll hit you.

One of the things I'm getting from this conversation so far is the difference between feeling and

emotion, and I was sort of conflating both of those as I was thinking about your work

and your writing that you, I get the sense that you want to create feelings in the readers,

but also be in a low emotional state. I think that this is a lot of the art of good

writing is being in a sober state yourself, but still creating a feeling on the page and

not having the sobriety of your, you know, how you are in the moment, come across as

dry writing, or you bottle it, store it up, take a step

back, and then mix it into something that is appropriate for public consumption as opposed

to just letting it gush out what's behind the way that the media's become

so vicious. I mean, this is something that I know that

you face at ck, whereas CK became more successful. There were a lot of publications about, oh,

cks ruining this, sub's ruining that when really was such a threat to these. To these

incumbents. So of course they had an incentive to go

after ck I started seeing some of that happening. It's part of the reason that I joined ck.

I felt really compelled to help with that mission. It's a wonderful team, and so at

the time that I joined, there were some of these unfair attacks. It was starting to accelerate.

Um, in that case, I think there was some feeling of being threatened. I think to people it

was like a rar shock thing. It represented something that threatened them

in some way. Tell me about how your study of

insurgency influenced the way that you see these

dynamics. Yeah. This is what I studied in grad school. In an alternate life, I would've

gone into this field instead. I think about counterinsurgency a lot in this work because

there's a lot in common. If you are. Trying to spread a message. And

if you're, especially if you're coming from behind in some way, you're not the incumbent

or it's not the dominant message, and you're trying to take this and win over hearts and

minds, and you do it very grassroots and you, you might not have the support of the powerful

institutions. And so the way you would need to operate is

finding these centers of gravity in communities. So the equivalent for counterinsurgency might

be village leaders, tribal elders, religious leaders. You want them to believe. So Christianity

was sort of an original, uh, insurgent movement in a way. They were the underdogs.

It spread from a tiny idea and a tiny place to really global movement and is the same.

Sort of the same laws of physics of something spreading. You find the centers of influence.

You get them to buy in, they spread it outwards. From there, you create your own distribution

networks. You create your own ways of speaking directly to your audience.

You don't rely on the existing centers of power to carry your message because you are

a direct threat to them and an opposition to what they want, whether that's the government,

whether that's the media. And so I think there's a lot in common, especially for startups.

Wow, that's really interesting. Okay, so that's really good.

Okay. So let's talk about Christianity. Let's go through that and then we'll work our way

through that answer and just sort of fold it open like a flower. So talk to about Christianity

and its role as a counterinsurgency. Yeah. Well, there's two

elements of Christianity that I think are really fascinating.

First of all, this is one of the most. Successful message spreading successes in all of human

history. Of course, if not the most successful, every company

needs 12 disciples. You need disciples. Yeah. Yeah. So I think

there, there's two parts of it. One is the actual story that you're telling, and I think

that this is the, you know, the, the saying of every person's heart has a God-shaped hole.

Yeah, of course. I think that every person's mind has a hole shaped in the story of the

story of Christianity. That that is the story that we resonate the best with, which is things

were supposed to be a certain way. This is the ideal. Something went horribly wrong.

Now we're in this other state instead, but there's a solution.

In order to achieve the solution, you have to do this thing. And once you do it, the

solution is here and the solution brings you back to where you were supposed to have been.

And I think that arc of story, there's, there's different archetypes for this, but. A of story,

the story of Christianity is one that just cannot be beat.

It's the most powerful story of all time. And I think that if you were able as a company

or as a person to frame the stakes in that way, it becomes so clear and people resonate

with it. Um, people just have receptors in the shape of that specific story. And then

the second thing is the way that the story was spread, I touched on it before, finding

centers of influence, not relying on existing power structures and speaking directly to

people in ways that they understand, in mediums that they like to use, through people that

they trust. And with very clear actions that they need

to take with these distribution carriers for ideas. Um,

one thing I've been thinking a lot about is sort of like the legibility of those. Mm-hmm.

And like when someone comes out with a book, they'll go on C N B C or they'll be on C B

Ss this morning. If you talk to those writers, they're like, yeah, it wasn't super impactful,

but it still did something. And maybe that's creating a common knowledge.

Oh wow, you're on C B Ss. But then there's other people like Joe Rogan who giant audience

sort of underestimated by a lot of the mainstream media, and I feel like a lot of the marketing

distribution advantages are in these illegible, more underestimated distribution channels.

Yeah, there's a matrix of quantity versus depth of how many people you're reaching versus

how deeply you're reaching those people and how deeply you're resonating. I think in general,

if you're reaching more and more people and more of a mass audience, you're watering down

your message so that you're appealing moderately to a bunch of people versus so on.

On one end of the spectrum is something that appeals to every person on earth where breathing

air is good, but has very, very, very low. Uh, resonance or meaning the other is something

that appeals to one person and it's absolutely tailored for them. You're seeing into their

soul, you're, you're, you're gonna marry them. Yeah. Uh, and it's incredibly deep and meaningful,

but it's only one person. I think people have to choose, and companies need to choose where

you're going to be along the spectrum. There are times when you're going to consciously

say, I will appeal in a less meaningful way to a lot of people because the thing I need

them to do or know is so simple or small that it doesn't take a lot of depth.

It's almost like a mathematical formula. You know the thing that you need people to do

and you know how many people need to do it for you to be successful, and then you think

about how big is that thing I need them to do? How do I get to that number? So then you

have your matrix and you decide, so if you need to go mass market, because the ask isn't

very big, you go on a Good Morning America or something.

Or if you need them to do something really big, you need them to invest a million dollars

in your company, then you call like three people personally and you invest six months

in that relationship for each of them. Right? So it's It's a scale.

Yeah. The other thing is driving slogans and then even like the layers of depth within

a slogan. So the example that's coming to mind for me

is Bezos, focus on the customer. Focus on the customer. Focus on the customer. Just

saying that over and over again. But then there is, there are all the different ways

of interpreting that in his shareholder letters and his speeches. See the same thing with

day one. Day one is just a slogan. Day two is stasis

followed by irrelevance, followed by slow decline, all that sort of stuff. He says it

in the same way all the time, exactly how he writes it. I was watching him give this

talk yesterday. And then the building that he worked in on Amazon, guess what it was

called? Day one. And then he has the link to the very

first day, one shareholder letter from like 1997 or something at the bottom of every letter.

And so how do you think about driving slogans? 'cause I think slogans are this really interesting

blend of the two where it can start mass market, but it can sort of expand over time.

Yeah. This relates to Christianity too. The 10 Commandments,

uh, the Bible verses that everybody knows there are these certain shibolet that they

do two things. One is they get, they get repeated over and over and over, over until they take

on this sort of outsize, almost religious meaning. And they're easy to remember.

And the more you remember them, the more meaning they take. And also a bonus fun fact is if

they rhyme, people are more convinced, of course, right? Uh, but that the second thing

that they do is that they, knowing them marks you as a member of a tribe, which. Takes this

company or idea and embeds it into your identity in a way, and that makes it obviously much

more sticky. Yeah. It's not only do they rhyme, but also

like a A, B B A structure. So ask not what you can do for your country, but what your

country can do for you. There's a, there's like a brain orgasm that comes from a sentence

like that where you're like, wow. And then in that emotion of oh my goodness, there's,

I don't know, somehow truth is encoded in that or something.

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what the actual mechanism is, but it is very interesting. The, a fun

fact they asked, um, J F K speech writer after J F K had died, uh, if he had written that

line and he said, ask, not really. Yeah. I'm not surprised. Tell me about behavioral

psychology. Like I see there's insurgency, behavioral psychology in both of those two

things coming together in your writing.

Yeah. I think that there's a way to hack communications where it's not just. Words. But what you're

trying to do is you're trying to interact with human psychology, um, in a benign, you

know, use this for good, not for evil, but in a, in a benign way. So I worked, uh, for

a pretty short period of time in a behavioral psychology lab where we would do experiments

and, uh, studies and it interacts with, with game theory quite a bit actually.

So recently I was thinking about, I should write

about this. This is David's law. I should write about. This means I have to force you

to write about it, and I'll follow up with you in three weeks. Oh, do, this is David's

law. I measure my life by how many times people say that around me. I should, or by how often

I say it to others.

Oh, okay. That's one. Yes. Uh, there's probably gonna be more. Um, but recently I was revisiting

the, this ultimatum game, which is you make me an offer. If I accept it, it happens. If

I reject it, both of us get nothing. So let's say you have a hundred dollars, you're gonna

offer me 70 and you 30. I get to say yes or no.

In different cultures, people behave differently. So in different cultures, if you were to give

me 30, 70, I might respond differently. I might be offended versus grateful. Uh, but

what has a very, very big impact is how you frame your offer. If you frame it as you are

giving me something that's different from, if you frame it as you are taking something

from the pot. So let's say you have a hundred gold coins,

you're gonna give me 60. If you say, I'm giving this to you, versus I'm keeping 40, versus

we're going to split it 50, 60, 40. Uh, that has a huge impact on whether I accept and

how I feel about you. Then if you frame this as, we found this pot of gold, it's fortuitous,

we're gonna split it, versus we've earned it, versus you earned it.

You know, all of that framing. All of which can be factually true, has a huge impact,

uh, including flipping my decision on what I choose to do and how I feel about you. And

so in a, in a commercial sense, or in a very pragmatic sense, if you're trying to get someone

to buy your course, buy your book, buy reading your blog post, by paying with 10 minutes

of their attention, you're making them an offer.

And how you frame that offer and how they perceive it, it influences not only their

decision, but how they actually think of you. I've always liked the line, an ounce

of emotion is worth a pound of facts. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that that's

so much of the art of, of even this sort of evangelism that I think you're working on,

which is, you know, what are the right slogans? What are the right lines? And I love what

you said about do I craft the message so that it just like I. Fits into the hole that people

have in their heads. I think that's a beautiful way of articulating what you're trying to

do. I'm evangelizing for this approach, so I call

it cultural erogenous zones. It's that people have cultural erogenous zones

and you're not gonna change what they are. They just are what they are. And so you are

gonna have to take the thing you wanna say and either form it into that shape, or if

you can't get it into that shape, you're gonna need an a p i. You're gonna need, uh, some

sort of bridge between where you are and where they are because your job is to go to them.

It's not building, and they will come when it comes to messages.

Well, I think this, the art of writing is knowing where to accept the world as it is

and where to push on the world in order to change it. And it's a subtle art, but I think

that's a lot of what you're trying to do from a company to an individual in terms of how

to spark something in the culture. Yeah. And so this is really important. I'm

not trying to say that you should only write and say things that people already resonate

with because then what's the point? I strongly advocate for putting out new ideas, bold ideas.

If it's controversial, then so be it. If you believe in it, and if it's something that

people have never heard of before, never thought of before, great.

But in order to get it to stick, you still have to get it to attach to the, to the receptor.

And that's where, uh, that's where I'm saying build an a p i. That's where I'm saying give

them a bridge. You have to give them the gateway drug. You have to give them the transition

so that they can receive and understand and make time and make space for this new idea

that you're trying to spread. Here's an example. It's one of my favorite

examples, and it actually comes from Kamala Harris. I don't care if people have different

political opinions about her or her communication, that's that's all valid. But here's one specific

example of when she was running for Senate. She said that if you. Care about national

defense, and a lot of people care about national defense, but you don't care about middle school

education and maybe not enough people care about K through 12 education.

The right message would be, did you know that people in this country can't join the army

unless they can read at a 10th grade level? Because a 10th grade reading level is required

to understand the field manual. And so if you want there to be a pipeline for a standing

army in the future, you need to make sure that we're educating 10th graders how to read

and not graduating people from high school who can't.

Uh, so that's an example of the receptor where they're thinking about national defense. They're

not thinking about education, and you are creating the bridge or the gateway drug for

them to think about the thing that you wanna want them to think about. So like the last

of us, I've, I've used this example before, but people are interested in the TV show and

now they're buying the games. The games are back on, on at the top of the

charts. It's because the TV show got you interested and now that you're interested, you're interested

in this adjacent thing, you just continue on the journey.

Let's transition into your writing process. So I guess you write before bed brain's a

little looser. What's going on there?

I write when I'm about to fall asleep. By that, do you mean like the Salvador Dali thing

where you're like on the couch, you have an apple to Apple falls, it's like, whoa, my

subconscious is going, I'm gonna paint all that. Or is it like I'm getting tired, I'm

sitting in bed and there's something about that state of being tired that I'm really

good at writing.

Then it might be a cope because it's the only time I have time to sit down and be quiet.

I have three kids. I have a busy day job, and so at night when it's quiet, I'm the last

to go to bed always. Then I actually am able to get still and think. Um, but I also think

that for me there's a positive effect of being a little drowsy and kind of letting your thoughts

wander. Mm-hmm. Um, I do think that my brain is looser

as I described, so I This is a terrible habit. This is not supposed to be part of your, your,

like your repertoire sleep stack. Yeah. Uh, but I, I have my phone, it's on airplane mode

and I'm there like in the dark putting down my ideas and then I'll evaluate them in daylight.

So apparently what I've read is that the ancient Greeks used to debate everything twice. They

would do it drunk and they would do it sober. And if it made sense both times it's a decent

idea. So I I, I do that. Um, before I go to sleep in my half awake fugue state, I jot

down ideas that come to mind. I jot down words that might not make sense.

It's a very easy way to think outside the box because half of it is gibberish. But then

the next day you look at it in the harsh light of day, and then you filter out what doesn't

make sense anymore. And you're writing on your phone a lot. What's going

on there? I've tried to do it in, um, longhand because it

makes you feel like hemmingway. It makes you feel like a real writer. Oh,

yeah. It does. It doesn't work as well for me because one, my handwriting is so ugly,

I sometimes can't read it later on. But two, I do a lot of cutting and pasting and moving

things around, and it just gets messy. Why is cutting pasting, moving things around,

why is that something that you uniquely do?

I care very much about the arc of the story with everything. Again, I don't always succeed,

but what I'm always going for with every tweet, with every long email, with every blog post

that we do with every statement is, what is the arc of the story? Where's it beginning?

Where's it ending? And if you flip the order of some things, you completely change the

kind of story it is. Walk me through something you've written and

what that actually looks like. Make that concrete for me.

I wrote a piece about why communicators should take more risks and it's, it was one of these

things where the thought came to me and then I felt very strongly about it in the moment.

And it's what I said earlier. I didn't wanna just jot it down and hit publish.

I wanted to capture it along with the emotion and then look at it again in the sober lighter

day. And so I wrote this very. M messy little rant about, uh, encouraging communicators

to, to take more risks because the most dangerous thing is not taking risks.

You start making mistakes of omission instead of omission, which, especially if you're working

at a startup, especially if you're trying to, um, advance some new idea, is much, much

worse. And so I had this all written out, uh, in very just ugly form. The prose was

bad, there was too much emotion at parts. And then I look at it again over the next

few days, um, reorder some things. And one trap that I fall into is I get very

precious with some wording or some ideas, like I might get really attached to a sentence.

The temptation is to form an entire essay around that sentence. Oh, I've never done

that. I've never done that. Like, rather than sacrifice this one beautiful sentence, I'll

change the whole meaning. But it's so hard of everything. But it's so

hard. It's so hard. What I do is I have a scrap, a scrap

heap at the bottom where I keep those sentences and somehow not pressing, delete, just moving

it to the bottom. I never look at it again, but somehow it saves my

heart. And then maybe they can be pressed into service for some other piece.

Yeah. You know, maybe they'll live again, uh, elsewhere. But that, that's really hard

to do. And so it takes me a few days to get enough removal from that sentence that, uh,

I'm able to eradicate it less painfully. I somehow exaggerate the importance of how,

of the sentence and how unique it is. And I'll, I'll never do a sentence like this again.

And if I don't craft the whole essay around it, this one beautiful, unique sentence will

get lost to history. And you give yourself a few days distance and look at it again and

you're like, yeah, it's an okay sentence. Talk about how

you sort of avoid that. For me, I need to take a few days and let the

thing percolate because otherwise I'll do anything to save that one sentence.

And there's a quote, and I don't remember who now, but. Uh, the quote says that love

is the gross exaggeration between one person and everybody else. And when I fall in love

with a sentence, that's how I feel. Like another sentence like this could never come into being,

no other sentence could be like this. And so it's worth the world for me to even

reshape my whole argument to salvage the sentence or, or headline or title, right? Um, so if

I wait a few days and get some distance, come back to it, you look at it and it's like a

decent sentence, but it's not worth shifting your whole essay over. And then I'm able to

look at it more rationally and see through fresh eyes.

There are some things also that only make sense to you. It's like an inside joke with

yourself because you, it's called the illusion of transparency When you assume that people

know the thing that you know. Um, and if you look at it with fresh eyes and you almost

let yourself forget a little bit and come back, you'll start to see gaps where the logic

doesn't make sense anymore, and the reader wouldn't be able to follow along because it

was just in your head. So it. Intuitively seems like the cure to

the illusion of transparency is a good editor. So how do you work with editors, both with

your personal writing and with your more professional stuff?

My editor's, my husband and he writes policy papers, so he's very clinical in a good way

where he, uh, forces me to make the argument and go from A to B to C as opposed to jumping

around. Sometimes I get a little two story and I get

a little too excited by some clever wording and he'll tell me, just write it. Like, just

say the thing and uh, he'll tell me a lot. Stop throat clearing. You're doing like three

paragraphs of throat clearing that you're going to say something, just say it. So that's

exactly the kind of editing that I need. So I find that really helpful. What do you

think is behind that? It might be stage fright Whenever you write something and you have

to actually make the argument and you put it out into this sea of other ideas and so

many brilliant people. And when it's in public it feels like hungry, hungry hippo. So just

like ideas and noise. And, uh, it can be really intimidating, at

least for me. I find it sometimes intimidating to get into the ring, and so it's easy to

talk around the thing and describe the thing than to actually have to put the thing out

there. And so it might be like procrastination in the essay itself.

Talk about Twitter as a medium. You're so good at using it. Like you just,

your writing just like can pierce through the waves of

Twitter. Going back to game theory, I started using it because I realized it can change

the incentives and behavior of reporters. They take you more seriously if you have more

of a presence and more of a following. They, um, understand that you are willing

to make your case publicly and rebut something that might be wrong. And once you establish

that, it's not that no one will ever say anything negative about your company ever again, but

you do have a better position, uh, for being able to make the case. And in fact, there's

a New York Times reporter that. Is well-respected, and that I respect that

told me once on the phone, all right, I'll take this thing out, just don't tweet at me.

And it was sort of in jest. We were joking about it, but I think there's something to

that where people understand that you have a microphone too. And so before I went to

CK, I had a sleepy Twitter account of a couple hundred followers occasionally saying something

and mostly just lurking. Then I realized that if I'm gonna be in the

ring and then I have to be out there fighting the fight, there were, there are a lot of

reasons that it wouldn't have made sense for our founders to be out there doing that. They

had a company to run. Um, I wanted to defend them. It's easier to defend someone else than

then doing it themselves. Easier to defend others than defend yourself.

That's really interesting. I think it's just a, a, a basic truth that

if you are defending yourself, you, you're, everyone assumes you're gonna be defensive.

You have your self-interest, but if somebody else defends you, it's always more effective

and you are able to defend somebody else more with your chest because you don't feel sheepish

about being defensive. So if you were to be. Insulted by somebody

at this pub that we're at, um, and they were to say, I don't like your podcast for you

to say, no, it's a great podcast. It wouldn't be as effective. You would feel a little cheesy

saying it, so you, you probably wouldn't say it. But for me to come in and say, what are

you talking about? That's a great podcast. I could say it more

strongly, I could say it. More assertively and it would be more convincing to the bystanders

at our pub fight. Talk to me about

writing for your five-year-old. Okay. I write for my five-year-old, uh, the same way, the

same reason that I try to read things out loud.

Uh, a five-year-old is good if you have a four to 14 year old, that'll do. But it's

basically someone who is curious, clever, but doesn't have any background on what you're

talking about. So you have to actually fill in the blanks for them. You can't, you don't

have the luxury of the illusion of transparency where you and I both know 80% and I'm just

gonna use a bunch of lingo and shorthand, which turns into jargon.

So if you're talking to a five-year-old, you can't use jargon. You can't assume prior knowledge.

You can't assume that they're on your side. You have to really start from nothing and

make the case using simple sentences and short words

when you're writing from a brand standpoint, is that simple sentence and short word is

that? Similar or do you feel like with a brand you

want to be different? Like how do you think about the division between personal and corporate?

Because I think that that's one of the really interesting lines that you're straddling

here. Yeah. I think brands also should use simple phrasing, clear writing, short words,

wherever possible. If you're gonna use a long word, it should

be for impact. It should be to make a statement. I'm gonna drop this word on you. I want you

to pay attention to this word. Yeah. Arrows pointing to the word listen out. Yeah. But

if you're just writing to be, uh, noticed and remembered and to get the message across,

I. You don't want the writing itself to be a

distraction. You want the facts and the message to come out and carry the day. What do you

feel like you're working on in your writing?

In my writing, I get wordy. I, I can over explain. Um, and the temptation is to try

to get clever. Like I try to write like I'm Hunter SS Thompson or Matt Taibbi or something.

I don't have that talent. I wish that I did, and I try to project it. And that's when it

comes out as labored and the writing is distracting. So that's the, that's the trap that I fall

into is like, I try to have style. And what I should really aim for is, here's another

quote that I like a lot is, unless you're a genius, just aim for being intelligible.

Huh. And I need to do that more. 'cause I'm not a genius at writing and I just need to

aim for being understood. That's good. Twitter is actually good forcing mechanism because

nobody has patience. Uh, people will willfully misunderstand what you're saying. And there's

the character limit. I, I have refused to pay to get the longer limit, so I'm limited

to the 280. What will you do with your 280 characters

and you can't waste it on Bloviating. So it's a, it is a good forcing mechanism. Sometimes

I actually draft it in Twitter. Even I, I have no intention of tweeting. I just drafted

in Twitter so that my mind gets focused on shortening as much as possible, and then I

paste it into the email. I do

that all the time, so if I'm writing something and it just feels wordy, fire up the little

blue bird and I'll just play around with it and get it right. And then it'll always get

better. Yeah. Makes you more crisp from tweeting. What are some of the growth tactics that have

been really good and then we'll get in the sub stack and some of the lessons that you

learned there. The

tried and true is just a tweet a lot. 'cause you get a lot of shots on goal. You become

more active. And if you can build momentum where if you have one hit tweet, it's more

likely that your next tweet will be a a hit. But the best practice is to do it several

times a day and be regular. Yeah. I think this is a very deep

topic and I think one of the things that's really easy to forget as an online creator,

because you see how many followers do you have, how many people are opening up my email

and you don't actually see the other person there.

And I think that this is why it's important to even meet your readers. Many years ago

I'd just gotten started and, and I was trying to get a big audience, all this sort of nonsense.

And I hosted a meetup and I was at the meetup and I was like, I. These aren't my people.

I don't wanna hang out with these people. This is not the audience I'm going for. And

I took a good cold, hard look in the mirror and I said, what am I doing? I am taking some

number on the computer and I'm valuing that higher than the actual quality of people who

are following my stuff. And then I've looked back at the arc of my writing career and it's

actually been the smaller percentage of people who've really been able to move mountains.

And I've had amazing things happen. And it hasn't been from scale, it's been from the

quality of people that, that you can reach. Jesus could have had 12,000 disciples if he

wanted to. He could have had 12,000, 1200. But sometimes you decide this is your core

audience, and I want them to be deeply passionate, true believers that will stick by me no matter

what, and that will spend the hundred dollars that will spend the dozens of hours that will

go to bat for me. And I would prefer that over the ladder. Not

every time, you know, there are people for whom maybe the numbers just make more sense,

but I think that's a trade off that you should make consciously and know that you're doing

it as opposed to just automatically chasing the numbers.

Tell me about Sub Stack, some of the growth tactics that you saw there and and, and what

you learned about how to grow on the platform. I

learned so much when I was there. Um, I. It was an amazing experience. I got to meet some

of these writers that were just heroes to me, and I got to try to help them. It was

really, it's like if you are a Red Sox band and you get to work for the Red Sox, you know,

it felt like that. Um, some of the things that worked really well for growing an email

list are the basic hygiene of being a writer. Consistency. Just doing it often so that people

feel like they're getting value for their time and for their money. Having a very clear

proposition about what you're doing. So I, there's a sometimes a, a question over, do

you choose a niche and go narrow or do you go wide? And it's that question that we come

back to many times now is, do you wanna appeal a little bit to a ton of people or, or the

opposite. I think appealing a little bit to a ton of

people is not effective for email newsletters because it actually takes. Uh, you are asking

them for something that's not nothing. You're asking them to make space in their inbox,

which is always super crowded. You're asking them for time. If you have people on your

list that are never opening your emails, that's worse than them not being on your list.

There are writers that actively call their list to make them smaller, to get rid of people

who are never reading the emails. And so, um, I strongly recommend choosing your niche

of the people who specifically want the specific thing that you are offering, and then you

deliberate for them. And if that's a smaller list that feels strongly about you, then good

because those people will forward the emails, they'll tell others about you, as opposed

to, it's a bigger list, but nobody actually reads this stuff.

The point is to be read. What did you notice about writing style? Did you notice

anything about the kinds of people who did well? Yeah. If you can have a unique beat

or topic or you can have a unique perspective or you can have a unique style. So if you

have more than one of those uniques. Then wonderful.

But it is possible to write on something that a lot of people are writing on, but your style

is better and more entertaining or more lovable or whatever it is. Like Ryan Broderick who

writes Garbage Day, which I love, that was one of the first cks that I subscribed to

as an employee. We paid for even employees pay to subscribe because we're, you know,

that's still contributing to, um, writers making money.

And it was recommended to me personally by our c uh, Ryan writes about internet culture.

There's 14 people in this building right now writing about internet culture. Uh, but he

just does it with a wonderful style that is hard to replicate. And so he's got his, his

fandom. One thing that is just wild to me is that you've done all this and English isn't

even your first language. How did you learn to speak English, let alone

write professionally? I had a bit of an advantage

because I grew up, I grew up moving around, but from eight to 12 I lived in Norway and

I was in the public school system there. And Norwegians speak amazing English. The TV is

in English, it's not subtitles, it's actually dubbed.

So you are absorbing all of your entertainment, um, in English. And I think about an English

word through the lens of how someone who doesn't speak English might interpret it. One example

would be like in English, we say black car to mean fancy car. But if you went to Asian

and said black car, it would be like a hearse. So I'm very sensitive to those things. And

then I also try to think about how something could be misinterpreted with just a slight,

uh, misplacement of one word, or if someone doesn't read closely. So in college I was

in a job interview and this is bad. This is the first time that I'm reliving this trauma,

actually. So this is gonna become like an Oprah thing.

Brace yourselves. Really? I'm gonna start trying. Yeah. I was in a job interview and

I said the sentence, even though I'm young, I do have some experience below the belt,

and there's no substantive difference between below the belt versus under the belt, which

is the correct and proper phrasing, but things like that, if you're not an English speaker,

uh, you could see this and either misunderstand or it's gonna fall flat. And so I try to write

without, um, too many of the englishs that only a native speaker would know.

It's, it's like a different kind of jargon almost.

What kinds of things do you read in order to improve your craft? I

try to read things that are as far away from communications as possible. One, because it's

my day job and I'm already immersed in it, so I try to liberate myself intellectually.

Two pragmatically. If I want to be inspired by new ideas, then

the more heterogeneous my reading diet, the better. And so I go towards things that are

like, uh, historical fiction. Um, I go towards classics and then I go towards, this is gonna

sound maybe silly, but uh, I go through the Marine Commandant's reading list because the

Commandant or the Marine Corps releases a reading list and it's beautifully organized

by what level you're at. So if you're a senior officer versus if you're

enlisted, there's a different recommended list for you based on the skills and ideas

that they encourage you to develop. And it's a wonderfully curated list. There are some

books that are always on there, like Gates of Fire, which is about the Battle of Thermoy,

which is a wonderful, wonderful book. Uh, Evergreen on that list, but it's a combination

of fiction. It's a combination of, uh, that like leadership books, political books. Um,

and so I go off of that quite a bit. And then recently a friend of mine who retired last

year is a colonel in the Marine Corps, sent me their, uh, doctrinal publications, which

is just their doctrine. So they have different doctrines for how to

do things. So, War fighting doctrine, uh, communications is a, a section in, in another

doctrine, um, logistics. And so the war fighting doctrine has actually informed the doctrine

that I've set for our team for, for my team, and how we operate. 'cause it's a lot of the

same concepts. You just translate it into a different world.

But agility, uh, taking responsibility, taking risks, it even talks about how to manage risks,

which is you wanna take risk, but how to do it responsibly. And if you're gonna encourage

your people to take risk, then it's incumbent on their leader or commander to not penalize

them for if the risk goes wrong. But you can't encourage them to take risks

and then punish them if they fail. That's funny. I had a conversation yesterday where

there were certain people on the team who weren't taking risks, and I was talking to

this, you know, this person's manager, and I said, here's the thing, they made a mistake.

They're not taking risks. Acknowledge the mistake. Do not punish them for making mistakes.

Do not lash out at them for making mistakes. Say, that's okay to make mistakes. I want

you to take risks, but you only can do one or two of those. And I think it shows up in

writing where I think as a writer, you need to ask yourself, am I willing to take risks

and often fall flat on my face? Or am I gonna live in this zone of comfort?

And that means that I'm gonna be at a plateau of my own growth as a creator.

Yeah. And I've likened that to sitting in cash. Like if you're just sitting in cash

over time, you will not lose your money. But you'll lose in the sense that the world moves

on and the economy grows and everybody else is getting richer and you are not.

So you lose in real terms. Whereas if you invest, you will have ups and downs, but over

time, in the long run, you'll always be better if you've taken some risks and taken the dips,

but you'll be on a secular trajectory upwards. Talk to me about Gates of Fire by

Stephen Pressfield. It's so good. Yeah. Have you read it?

No. It's about the Battle of Thermoy, the 300 Spartans, but it talks about what happens

behind the battle. So the culture of Sparta, it talks about the, uh, leadership of Leonis.

It talks about his, for example, when he's asking his men to build a wall and they start

bickering about who's gonna do what, and then he just throws down his weapons and goes,

and he just gets a rock and starts building wall, and then the wall gets built, people

join him. You know, basic things like that about leadership.

And then it's a really touching story. How's it written? It's written really beautifully.

There's a phrase, there are phrases that just stick with you, um, that make the battles

so visceral. There's this one phrase towards the beginning, um, where in this fierce battle,

solid dirt ground has been churned to knee deep mud from the blood and terror piss.

You know, these phrases stick with you forever. The last time I read this book, I've read

it two or three times. The last time I read it was more than a couple years ago. But these

sentences, you don't forget. When I talk to my writing students,

like one thing that they just so struggle with is, especially the older ones, it's just

like they lose their sense of humanity. And I feel like, I don't know what it is,

but like, you'll be talking to somebody, you'll be at the bar with them, you'll be out on

a walk with them, get a coffee with them. They're funny, they're goofy, they're playful.

They got chutzpah personality, you know, ruach, the Hebrew word for spirit, and then all of

a sudden they sit down to the page and all of a sudden, They're trying to write in this

weird robotic fashion that is full of risk aversion.

And so how do you shatter that frame? It's the same thing that happens when the

cameras go on somebody. Yeah. Like even now, as you're, as we're recording, you're very

engaging and we're chatting, I'm enjoying it, but at the very start, when the cameras

turn on, there's the urge of having to perform. You know, there's a moment in my mind where

I'm thinking, what would a great podcast guest say instead of, what's my answer?

They wanna say. Yeah, exactly. And I think this happens to people when they feel in the

spotlight and perfect communications is very public, and you feel like you have to now

perform and what are you gonna perform? You're going to perform the act of corporate communications,

which follows a certain template and you wanna do it right.

I had a friend who was a speech writer for Barack Obama, and he said that he could not

allow himself to think that this was. The state of the Union or that millions of people

were gonna be listening because it, it wouldn't work. It would completely alter his writing

or he wouldn't be able to get anything on the page.

So, to your question about how to break that, I like pulling people from different backgrounds

who haven't worked in comms. There are people who, uh, there are people who are veterans

of the industry who don't struggle with that. So I don't mean to paint with a broad brush,

but if you can get someone who worked, um, Who was a designer or a programmer or did,

did something entirely different that they can now come and, um, start fresh without

knowing what they're supposed to be doing. That's good. 'cause sometimes experience can

be a shackle. Sometimes experience can burden you with expectations of what you think you're

supposed to say. Whereas if you take someone who doesn't know any better, that's actually

really liberating for them to go and do creative work. I think one of the big assets that I've

enjoyed in my career in communications is not coming from comms.

Uh, before we started the company, I had zero experience in communications whatsoever. I

learned everything from my co-founder who trained me and molded me. Um, but it gave

me the benefit of being able to be more creative. And then also I like to think of, uh, what

I call writer brain and friend brain. So writer brain is this, this mode that you're in, where

you're trying to perform and you're trying to almost.

Present to a discerning audience, but when you're with your friends and your feet are

up, you can't be in that state. And so a lot of the way that I get myself out of the stockage

is I'll just talk to people. That's why if you have a five-year-old daughter,

or your spouse or your parent, or if you have somebody that already knows you as a person

and not just as a professional, reading it to them is really useful because they will

call you out on not sounding like yourself and you'll, you'll feel embarrassed.

There have been times when I've sent something to my husband and I actually feel embarrassed

looking at it because I wait. This so clearly isn't me. And if you were to send it to just

a professional editor or coworker, they might look at it through the lens of not, what would

a person who has your personality say, but what is the thing that should be said in this

context? And you might not. Always get the sort of

humanity that you need. Tell me about dc You have this DC background

and then you sort of move into tech a little bit more. And how did DC shape your, your

writing and how you, how you communicate? I was in DC because I was working

in the field of geopolitics risk management policy.

And uh, it's a useful, I think it's a useful sensibility to, to bring to writing. 'cause

you start to think about things, at least for me, the, the background that I gained

from working in DC it sort of makes me zoom out and think what are the, all the ways that

this could be misunderstood or misinterpreted? What are all the ways that this would not

translate across a cultural barrier or a language barrier? Um, so I think it's useful to have

that extra layer. And it doesn't have to be that, I mean, some people have a layer that

I don't have. Some people think of it through an engineering. Um, lens, or some people look

at it through a design lens. Some people might look at it through a poetry

or a literary lens, and that could be just as good or better. There's, there's different

ways. This just happens to be mine. Wait, that's really interesting.

Let's go through these different lenses of writing and I want to see where we end up.

The lens that I wish I had would be a more literary

storytelling lens. So I'm reading a book now about how to write

a screenplay. I have no intention of writing a screenplay, but I wanted to study what the

elements are of a story and how to build a compelling character. Like how to build a

protagonist that you wanna root for, and then how to create for momentum and how to feel

like there are stakes and get people invested. Yeah. Um, so I'm meeting that to study, but

if, if I had that background or if I had that lens of screenwriting or literature, I think

that would be such an asset. And I envy people who do. Why do you want that? Because I think

it makes you a natural storyteller. I think the word storytelling. You're

cliche right now, super cliche and it's overused.

People don't really define it. It's just like a buzzword at this point. But if you define

storytelling as creating stakes, as giving people something to root for or to fear and

making people want an outcome, every good story makes you hope for an outcome. You're

rooting for something to happen, and so how to instill that feeling in people.

There's actually, I think, a formula to it, and I don't know that formula, but I'm trying

to get to know it. I'm studying it now, and I think if you did come from a literary background,

then that's the frame that you've always written through.

I mean, I would give you another definition, which is the definition that you gave earlier,

that we all have these holes in our minds and stories are the things that.

Match up most with the holes so that information slots in into memory. Yeah.

Our receptors are in the shape of stories. They're not in in the shape of facts or talking

points or statistics. And that's why, by the way, a lot of times when you see companies

trying to defend themselves, they're already losing because an accusation is usually a

story, whereas the defense is usually a statistic. So when you think, so look back at, here's

a, here's a story from my DC geopolitics background, NATO and free trade. The data says that the

passage of NATO and free trade is good, just good, better on a ton of different scores.

It lifted productivity by this much lifted G D P by this much created this many jobs,

et cetera. The detractors of free trade don't have that,

but they do have stories. And so the detractors will say, well, look at David. He's a father

of seven. He lost his job because it got outsourced. He's a corn farmer, and now he's not farming

corn. He's at home depressed. And that doesn't, and shouldn't outweigh the many people whose

lives are so much better, including yours if you have access to an iPhone now and you

wouldn't have before. But the accusation will be a story, and then

the defense will be, oh, but productivity went up by 4%. And it's the, you know, one

death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths a statistic. If you're fighting a story with a statistic,

you're always losing. How much do you think about framing in terms

of the narratives? Because that's the other thing, right? Once

the accuser has the frame, so once you're responding, you've lost the frame.

I think that's right. Yeah. The accuser chooses the frame. I mean, the world of negotiations,

like an international negotiation. If you are trying to hammer out the treaty, whoever

has the pen to write the first draft of the treaty is in an incredibly powerful position,

and that's the position you jockey over. And so here too, if someone else is putting

that story out there and you're reacting to it, you are automatically in the losing position

because you have to react to their frame and they've set, um, they've set the criteria,

I need your help. So how I write, how, how should we think about using communications

and writing to grow the show? So I think we have a few challenges, which

first is we want how I write to help us grow, write a passage, my writing school. Uh, we

want to use clips on YouTube and Twitter to promote the show. And then also really want

to explain what this podcast is about in a way that when people are talking to their

friends about it, they're like, oh, this is exactly what this podcast is, this is why

you should listen to it. There's no other show like it. So. If I'm

the entrepreneur, you're coming in for day one of, of, of work. How, what does this conversation

go like? We start with a blank Google Doc and we create

four headings. First heading is what are your business objectives? And you, you've laid

them out. So related to that, who are the people who need to take what action?

So you want someone who is already interested in writing or who cares about writing. The

action is that they should sign up for the course or listen to the podcast. And in order

for those people to take those actions, uh, they need to believe something which is, they

need to believe that this is going to make them a better writer in a way that's going

to help them have a better career or make more money in a way that's going to bring

them more prestige. Or they're gonna do the thing that's worked

for their friends. Some version of that. So then you have your audience, you have the

business goals, you have your audience, you have the beginnings of the message of how

you wanna frame it. And here, just pause per a second. The temptation for. Startups especially,

is to get really excited about what you're doing and wanna tell everybody about what

you're doing. Nobody cares, nobody caress about your new

hobby that is so meaningful to you and you found your passion. And ever since you were

at your grandfather's knee, you've been interested in, they don't care. They might care a little

bit if it proves a credential, uh, that you're actually legitimate. But all they care about

is how is this gonna make my life better? And this is the problem that crypto has had.

Um, a lot of crypto companies not all have had the problem of, isn't this cool? We built

this on the blockchain. And most people are like, I don't care if it's on the blockchain.

I don't care if it's web three. Is it gonna make my banking easier? How do I use this

thing? And I'm a little worried about some. Parts

of AI falling into this trap too. Like, oh, it's built on ai, okay, but what is it doing

for me? So that's one thing to remember as you're going through this part of the exercise,

the messaging has to be targeted to their receptors and their cultural erogenous zones,

the things that they're worried about, the things that they want for themselves.

You have to explain how it does that. And if there's a gap between what you're offering

and what that thing is, you have to, you have to build that bridge. And then once you have

the goal, the audience and the crux of the message, then you need your distribution.

You have to meet them where they are intellectually, like what podcasts are they already listening

to? What uh websites are they reading? Are they

going to conferences or are they are hanging out with friends in some other setting? Like

find where their thoughts are hanging out. Then show up there with the message and if

needed, with the messenger. So to zoom in on that, the mediums of distribution for you,

for example, there are going to be other podcasts that your audience listen to where you can

just show up to that audience that's already there, and then give them the gateway drug.

Hey, if you like a, you'll probably like B. So identify the podcast that they're listening

to. Podcast advertising is really good, r o i. So I would spend some money on just advertising

on those podcasts. And then even better get yourself as a guest on their podcast to talk

about what you are building and why it makes sense.

So that's, you know, free advertising. You put everything in the show notes. Um, people

who are interested in writing are probably following a lot of cks. They're probably following

a lot of blogs. They might be following, um, uh, people who, other people who write about

writing. And so forging partnerships, you always wanna go approach somebody, um, in

a, in a. In a way that you're offering something as

opposed to asking for something. Sure. If you need to ask for something, you can, but

ideally you go and offer them something. So what I would do is find who posts the podcast,

whose listeners you want to be your listeners, and invite them on so that they'll promote

that they were on this podcast to their audience, and then they might invite you back.

One of the things that I see with Write of Passage

students all the time where they get stuck, it's very hard. To explain who you are to

other people, and I bet that you're doing this with companies. I bet you do this in

your own writing. Like how do you think about that? The more you know something,

the harder it is to describe it, right? Because the more burdened you are by excess

knowledge, that's irrelevant to people. Yeah. So you have to actually, you have the challenge

of cutting through 99% of things that they don't care about at all to identify the thing

that they do. And, and, you know, you know too much about yourself. If you only knew

four things about yourself, you could pick the one out four.

But, you know, 10,000 things and picking out the one outta 10,000 is really hard. And so

instead of thinking about who am I? Like, I'm imagining the Zoolander scene, who am

I, you're thinking about who am I to this person and what is this person looking for?

You know, you, you might be, uh, a brother, a son, a friend, a, you know, war hammer,

hobbyist, anything but this person. Has a set of things that they're looking for.

They might be looking for friendship that's not you. They might be looking for a, you

know, fitness coach. That's not you. But if one of the things they're looking for is a

writing coach and a motivator and a teacher, then bingo, there's a match that is you. And

then once you're there, it's like, what kind of teacher, what kind of coach?

And obviously it has to be real. It can't just be, here's what they want, so I'm gonna

become that thing. It has to be, here's what they want, here's what I am. And then find

the overlap in the Venn diagram as somebody who's using the internet

to grow myself, our listeners, like what can we learn from Bitcoin?

It seems like Bitcoin is this really interesting project where you have a pseudonymous founder,

you have a religious cult, and you have all these disciples. It has a lot of the ingredients

that you've spoken about for the last hour or so. Yeah, three things. So one is,

Bitcoin has no head of communications. Yeah. It is not only decentralizing the technology,

but decentralized in its messaging. Um, there is a source, you know, you could read the

white paper. There is a source of truth, but what people perceive Bitcoin to be is sort

of the average of the people and the messages that they see spread around. And so what's

powerful about that is that people identify as a Bitcoin evangelist and believing in this

thing is part of who they are and therefore you don't need to pay them.

There's no bitcoin comms department paying them for like advertising. What they get is

the reward of publicizing this part of their identity. So what you would wanna, so the

lesson from that, what you would wanna latch onto is people who wanna publicize that they're

a writer. They're proud of being a writer. They're proud of being on a writing journey.

They're proud of being someone who is learning their entire life and wanna be part of that

community. And that gives them the incentive to bring people into the community and to

do that outreach. Because the reward is not you paying them. The reward is, it feeds into

the thing they're aspiring to be in a sense of identity.

Yeah. Uh, and community too. Yeah. And two, and, and community makes identity more sticky.

This is the one thing I learned from K-Pop fandoms, which is that you become more of

a fan if you wanna fit in with other fans. Because being a fan is actually fun on like

a meta level. And so there's how much you like the band, and then there's like how much

you enjoy being part of the fandom. And if you wanna be a higher ranking part

of the fandom, you have to increase how much you're a fan of the band. Two is the people

who like a thing can make you like the thing more or less. Yes, of course. So veganism

is fine, but if you meet a bunch of annoying vegans, You're gonna, there's like nothing

inherently wrong with veganism, but if you meet a bunch of annoying vegans, or if you

find them annoying, you're gonna not like veganism as much.

Um, so you wanna choose who you want your evangelists to be. You want to have people

who are going to be aspirational for the next circle of people because they will make you

look better or worse by how funny, cool, accomplished or annoying

they are, right? It's like at the end of the day, people devolve into ad hominem attacks

or praises. Yeah. But your brand, you know, that you're

trying to build is actually you, David, as a person, plus the company and the organization

write a passage plus the other person who's telling their friend about it. It's the average

of those three things that becomes the impression that the receiving person has of rite of passage.

And some people don't like Bitcoin or don't like crypto because they've seen some of these

scammy people who do and they're like, well, it must be scammy 'cause that guy seems scammy.

Of course, the third thing is a cautionary tale, and I alluded to this earlier, but a

lot of people into Bitcoin and crypto and I'm, I'm a fan of Bitcoin and crypto, but

a lot of people who are get so excited about the technology that they focus on the technology

and the fact that it's crypto as opposed to the actual benefit that it would bring to

people. And that's why you end up with the trope of

crypto has no use case block. Blockchain has no use case. I don't believe that's true,

but it's easy to say that because all these companies launch and their banner on the website

is, we're a web three company. Nobody caress. You might as well be like, this blog is on

WordPress. Nobody caress what it's hosted on. Just what

is the thing it's gonna do for me. And so that would be a cautionary tale, I think for

anybody. Um, the way it would look for you is to make sure that you're, you're less like,

here's the next step in my entrepreneurial journey. I'm excited that I've gotten to launch

this thing because I've always wanted to do this.

No. Right. And I don't think you're in danger of falling into this 'cause you have these

instincts, but it is, you have been looking for this and here's your existing stack of

resources and here's the gap in it, and here's the thing that fits into that gap. Last

question, what about writing has compelled you to spend your career doing it?

I mean, you're not just a writer, but it seems like writing is the foundational aspect of

your job in terms of how you communicate, in terms of how you. Even show up in the world.

I never thought I would be doing this. But it is compelling. I think the reason it's

compelling is that you take these very prosaic building blocks and you can build structures

with them that become palaces over time. It becomes something that is an artifact that

lives on forever. I'm, I'm not doing anything this grandiose, but that's the potential,

uh, is the potential of it. And it is a challenge because you have to think about strategy.

You have to think about, in my case, business and finance, you have to think about how are

these words gonna translate to revenue? And you have to think about human psychology

too. So you have a discipline that combines like five other disciplines and it feels like

a puzzle to solve. Like sometimes I even think of it like a math equation. And if you can

solve that puzzle, then you can spark something really magical or it can go really wrong.

And that's part of the thrill too, right? And if you mess up there, there are stakes.

It, it can go wrong. You can make mistakes. And I have made mistakes, but I think that's

why it is so interesting and exciting. You're profoundly changing corporate communications

and I never thought I'd be inspired by somebody in your position, which is sort of the ultimate

compliment to what you do. Thank you.

Thanks for having me.