Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of Rostra

27:09I've told you a story before. You had to call a friend. So, no, we just happened to be with, it was a weird circumstance. I can't even tell you details, but just there happened to be other podcasters. And I was just like, dude, after three hours, it's like, you got to start asking questions. Because I can't, it was so wildly entertaining. And it's similar to like, I would say, Toby Luque in a different way. It's like, you can't predict what his response to your statement is going to be. And that makes it very fascinating. But in this case, it was like, holy shit, I got to like tap out on this.

27:36But he's also one of the most charismatic people on the planet. So does going direct only work with that kind of founder? No. It works better with that kind of founder. But you don't have to have traditional personal charisma. You can be more quiet, more introverted. You can have a whole range of personality types. But you have to have intensity of belief in the idea. So the idea has to be fleshed out and coherent. And then your belief in it needs to be unassailable. So how much of your work is working with the founder to make their thinking clear enough? Because there's that idea that Steve Jobs would say, the simpler the idea, the more they'll spread.

28:22Right? And so he would spend on, there's actually a book on this, entire book on this. There's two books called, one's called Insanely Simple. The other one's called The Presentation Seekers to Steve Jobs. I've read both of them. And, you know, it was like he's such a clear thinker. And look at the way he describes his products and the way he does in interviews. Like there's so much work behind the scenes that you're not seeing for him to distill his thinking down to that. Is that a lot of the work that you're doing with these founders? Yeah. So I'll give you an example of a founder that I met at an event.

28:47I actually don't remember his company. We don't work together, but that's what makes him a good example. We spoke for maybe seven minutes. and for six of the minutes, he's saying, okay, I have a business where anybody can become their own cloud kitchen. You know, there's all these people at home who know how to cook really good food and there's people who want more variety than the stuff they get on DoorDash and I'm connecting them and there's a network and there's a lot there. And we had to distill it down and I'm listening to this and I thought, okay, so you're turning a cook into a chef. And he said, that's it and he ran with it.

29:24Sometimes it's just having somebody who's not necessarily smarter than you, and I don't know more about the topic, especially some of these AI founders who are just like technical geniuses. But sometimes someone sitting across from you can take your word cloud of thoughts and ideas and suggest for you a synthesis. And for you to see that coming from someone else makes you recognize that that actually is the core of your idea. And now you have the compressed, simple thing that you can share and spread. Okay, so you have a simple idea that can spread. You have to be, you're starting a movement. Therefore, you have to have some kind of like passion or very like, it's almost like you're mission driven.

30:03How many clients do you have at this moment? Over a dozen. Okay, so now we're expanding. Okay, so I know you're expanding your company. So let's say you have a dozen. How many of them are not mission driven? None. Okay, so you need to be mission driven. What other characteristics? It doesn't work. Like how are you going to get somebody else to believe it if you don't believe it? Okay, so perfect. Perfect. So what I'm trying to get to is like, what are the things that the founders listening to this need to do before they can go direct for it to actually work? They need to convince themselves. You know, you have to go out in concentric circles and the dot inside all the circles is just you, the sovereign individual who believes that you're going to lead this movement.

30:44If you haven't convinced yourself of what it is and why it's worth doing that you're going to dedicate your life to it, you know, it's like if Napoleon's your general, if he's not going to die for it, why would you die for it? If he's not going to charge the bridge, why am I some schmuck running across the bridge? Same with Julius Caesar, right? At the battle against Virgin Gatorix where he came out and was the easiest target out of anybody because of the way he was dressed. People saw him and they rallied back up. He's going to fight. We have to fight. You know, Joan of Arc, everything. You see the leader or you see a leader doing the thing that you now feel ashamed to not be doing.

31:19The person in the middle has to be the most convicted, the most passionate, and have the clearest idea of the promised land. You know what just hit me while I'm listening to you speak? I think this is a perfect opportunity. Articulate why you're doing this. Like, why even start the company? Why you work like a dog, like, seven days a week. I call you like 11 o 'clock at night on the East Coast and you pick up like, and you have a bunch of kids and like you have this crazy life. Yeah. So why are you like, what is your mission? Like, why even do this? I think the world is better when we allow new technologies to take root and flourish.

31:57And in my opinion, building the technology is often not as hard as getting people to use the technology. It is not if you build it, they will come. which, by the way, originated from Field of Dreams. Did you know this? No. That's the origin of that quote. I thought it was from like the Bible or something. It was from Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come. They're talking about a stadium. It is not if you build it, they will come. It's you might build it. Maybe nobody uses it. Maybe it gets regulated out of existence. And maybe nobody wants to come work on this thing. You get overtaken.

32:32So in my opinion, the greatest and most underestimated barrier between technology existing and actually having an impact is people understanding it, welcoming it into their lives and wanting to go work on it. And so there are a lot of really brilliant people working on the engineering and in the building. I don't think there's a commensurate amount of effort and thought being put into the second part, the human part of the equation of convincing people to want it and use it and work on it. You see that with AI today, right? We can build the AI. Is the government going to allow it to be released?

33:15Are people going to use it? We can build data centers. We know how to build a data center. What are you going to do when there's a moratorium? Because people don't want it. This is a perfect example. AI right now has the worst reputation. It's like the worst favorable rating of almost anything. You've seen people talk about AI commencement addresses and they're getting booed out of the room. What would you do differently? Explain the problem they have right now, what they're doing, and then how you would approach it differently. A lot of CEOs are describing that AI will cause massive job loss.

33:46Most people will look at that and say, don't say that it causes massive job loss. I look at it a little bit differently. If you believe that it'll cause massive job loss and you're in that rare position, I think you do have an obligation to warn people and to try to get us to prepare for it. But the really small but really important thing is don't look happy when you're saying it. Don't be smiling when you say there's going to be a 50 percent unemployment rate in a year. Eric Schmidt doing that commencement speech. Explain the context of that in case people haven't seen it and then what he did and what you would do differently.

34:24Because I like your response to this. Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address. And among other things that were totally fine, he said that AI will change the world. And the question is whether you will help to build it. And that it's going to disrupt all of these jobs. And it will change the landscape. I forget his exact words. But the vibe of it was, it is taking away jobs, deal with it, and get on the train or you're on the tracks. Two things. One is, at the center of his story, the protagonist wasn't the human and it wasn't the person he was speaking to. He wasn't saying, you can go change the world and you have the world's most miraculous technology to use.

35:08Think of what you could do with this. Instead, he said, the technology, the protagonist, is coming whether you like it or not. You are potentially in its way or you can get on the bandwagon with me, which is just like the wrong framing. And then the second is when he was talking about the possibility of AI essentially taking half the jobs of these anxious graduates in the audience, he didn't seem upset. He didn't share what fear or anxiety or didn't recognize what it would be. He dismissed any potential anxiety that would arise from that. He sounded completely secure and blasé about this happening.

35:49And so a lot of people have a pined on the messaging of how you're going to talk about job displacement. Are you feeling, are you doomer? Are you over optimistic? And all of this aside, a human talking to another human should recognize the other human's reaction to that news. And if I'm telling you that you are potentially going to lose status, purpose, income, and security, and I seem just fine, and I'm smiling as I say it, automatically, there's no trust between us. You don't even think of me as barely as like the same species, but you don't think of me as being on your side. And you don't assume that other things I say are things that you would agree with or relate to.

36:41So the same way that like if you and I are disagreeing and we're fighting and we don't know if we can ever get on the same page. The best tactic for me is to find something that you and I agree on and to lay that as the foundation. It can be some anodyne thing like you and I both really like that hot chocolate. You didn't completely unrelatable to me. So it would be something else. She has hot chocolate in that cup. Every time I see you. It's what fuels me. It's inappropriate as an adult. It's what fuels me. You are a grown adult. It's what fuels me. And that's why there's alpha in the fact that others don't recognize the potential of this as a performance beverage.

37:17You're a grown up. See, this is why. You should not be having hot chocolate every dinner. This is why I don't have to spray my nose with the zinc stuff. It's not my nose. It's my throat because I talk a lot. The hot chocolate is helping me. I speak for a living. If we were arguing and I wanted to get a smoke on the same page. This was an argument. I would say something. Yeah, well, now we have to reconcile. So now we have to be like, this is a really beautiful place. I'm glad we're here. Thank you for the Amman, New York, for letting us shoot here, by the way. Shout out Amman, New York. Now that we're back on the same page, you can assume that things I say in the future are things that you will probably agree with because you believe that I'm someone with whom you have things in common.

37:52So a lot of the senior people in AI that the general public sees get introduced to them in a way where they automatically believe this person has nothing in common with me and anything else they say. I cannot assume that I would assess the situation the same way. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, Eleven Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal.

38:30Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, we built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers.

39:00With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40 ,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. Something that I've heard you say a few times is that humans crave a story. One of my favorite all-time quotes is from Steve Jobs. He says the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world. And something that I think is important because I just, I was sitting here listening to you when I asked you like, oh, what's your mission behind?

39:36Like, why even do this? And you're talking about the importance of creating new technology. I think you and I, what you're doing on the PR side and what I'm trying to do with the podcast is like this new podcast, this show, essentially started out. I was like, we should have a love letter to capitalism, right? It's like, I'm the son of a Cuban immigrant. My grandfather's born in Cuba. Castro takes over. He's like, this is fucked. We need to get out of here. That one decision by a man I don't ever remember meeting changed the trajectory of my life. And what's weird to me is capitalism seems like one of the greatest inventions humanity ever had, a huge force of good, one of the reasons that America is the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet.

40:11It should be celebrated. I remember sitting across from Jeff Bezos one time. I got to talk to him for several hours, which was incredible. and I told him I was like the idea that they protested outside of your house and they put a fucking guillotine in front of your house is insane to me and I told him and I told him I go you made a magic button that I can press and anything comes to my house used to be two days now it comes like three hours later yeah and I was like that's what it's like you deserve all the money he just laughed and laughed and laughed yeah but I think like the the other story you don't displace you can't just like say oh communism sucks look at all the people have died look what happened in Cuba, look what happened in all these countries.

40:48You have to tell a better story. You have to give them a better alternative. I feel the people in AI, I use AI every day. It seems miraculous to me. We use it for the podcast. They use it for learning. They use it for entertainment, all these other things. They're not putting forth like a better story. They're not doing it in the right way. Also, there are people who have painted really wonderful optimistic visions of what AI could create in the future, but it feels like PR and people write it off and it feels heavy handed. The last time there was a really effective techno optimist message was the Jetsons.

41:23And it's because they weren't beating you over the head with technology is going to make your life great. The show was about other stuff. I don't know. They go around. They go about their day. The family dynamic. But you have a robot in your house doing all your work. You have a flying car. It was in the background. It was ambient. It was ambient and assumed. Everything techno-pessimist, the tech is in the foreground and it's about the tech. So Terminator or Blade Runner, anything where there's a future that you potentially don't want. Dystopian. The dystopian stories about the tech, the tech is the thing people focus on.

42:05but the utopian stories about tech, when you make tech the thing people focus on, they write it off as PR. And so I think what we want is for the utopian stories about tech or the optimistic stories about tech to have it in the background, just be ambient. A lot of people have read sci-fi novels and sci-fi novels are usually not about the technology itself. It's about a story. Like Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age is about Nell and her family and 70s is about the people being sent to space. And the fact that they have technology to preserve the human race is in the background as an enabler. And these are the types of stories that make people so inspired that they have now started companies.

42:52You and I have talked to many founders who have started companies based on being inspired by sci-fi. Palmer is obviously one of them. And it's not because they're bludgeoning you over the head with one specific invention. It's because they're showing the better world and the human stories within it with technology in the ambiance. I feel like if people went back and studied like David Ogilvie, Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker, some of the greatest copywriters and some of the greatest founders of these, the heyday, like the Madison Avenue of these advertising agencies. They just all say the same shit over and over again.

43:25They're just like, show the benefit. Show what you're, don't show your product, show the change it enables. I think one of the best examples of this is if you heard the story when Steve Jobs was really young. I think he was like in his 20s. And he's like the – he tells the story of the most efficient like locomotion for any, you know, any creature on earth. And it's like, you know, a man is really like low on that compared to other animals. But you put a man on a bike and he's way more efficient. See, I'm not because I drink chocolate milk. but he's way more efficient than even like the condor I think is the what he the animal that um he just compared to but he's like but if you put him on like the bicycle he goes so what I'm creating is the bicycle for the mind and then you're like oh I want a computer because this is now makes me more efficient it makes me takes me from the slow-footed human to the fastest animal and the most efficient animal on the planet that is a perfect illustration of like I'm not selling you bits and bytes and RAM.

44:23I'm saying what is going to occur after you use my product. So let's go through some examples because I think some of your clients, you're on the board of Shopify, for example. I think Toby does this perfectly. Like the way he conveys what Shopify is, is like trying to create more entrepreneurs in the world. So one thing I want to point out is talking about the change in you with the product is exactly the right way. And what we were talking about earlier with showing technology in the background of a human story and not just bludgeoning you with the technology is more effective. The second thing that's really effective about bicycles of the mind is the analogy, because he just saved himself two paragraphs of explaining by saying the word bicycle, because we know what a bicycle is.

45:04So I was talking to a founder a few weeks ago where he said, we take a system that ingests the data and then finds the inefficiencies and identifies. And I thought about it and I said, oh, it's Ozempic for companies. Okay. And if you know what Ozempic is, then you've just saved yourself two paragraphs of explaining where you get two birds, one stone, you get the complexity, but you also get the simplicity. And it's the best of both worlds. So give me some more examples from some of your, like the way they described their mission, they distill it down to like the existence of their company. What is their company doing for the people, their customers and the people that use their products?

45:41You asked about Shopify and Toby is very good at this, where he talks about, There's kind of two levels of Shopify. One is the level of this wondrous technology and what it means for the world. And in some ways, it is the technology backing entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship is going to be the last bastion of human economic value. If they take everything from us, we will always have entrepreneurship. So Shopify is sort of like a hedge against every job being taken because they can't take from us our agency and our ability to start new things. Shopify creates the technology to make that happen.

46:16Shopify is infrastructure for entrepreneurship. That's one level for it. Another level is the merchants. Toby and Harley do a wonderful job of telling the Shopify story through what it has done for the merchants. Skims, successful company, probably going to IPO, was possible because Kim and Jens and the team didn't have to sit down and say like, okay, we want to start this store. But first, we have to figure out how to individually do a web portal and payments and design and all of these things patched together. How many people have that as an insurmountable obstacle before they're able to actually bring their business online?

46:57So the story of one merchant going from someone's dream, and it might be somebody in a small town who is retiring and has always wanted to open a marmalade shop or whatever, or maybe it's one of the biggest celebrities on earth launching skims. Turning that into what is now a thriving business is the best way to talk about Shopify, even though they're not the hero of the story. So again, we're seeing a theme. Same thing as what I said previously with the Jetsons. The Jetsons are the hero of the story. It is not called show about robots. You know, the robot made series. And then the Jetsons are side characters.

47:35They're the heroes. The human story is the hero. And then the technology is ambient. It's the same thing with Shopify. In the Skimm story, Kim and Jens and their team, they're the entrepreneurs. They're the hero. Shopify is ambient because without them, none of this would be possible in its current form. But you are not bludgeoning people with this is about Shopify. All right. You wrote this essay called Standing Out in 2026 that I absolutely loved. You talked about the difference in strategy that founders should take moving forward. Can you like lay out the thesis and like the main idea behind what you're writing?

48:07This is my Philippiad for the year, which is this tirade I've been going on, which is that everything seems fake now. Everything is fake. Everything is fake. You go to some of these launches. First of all, every launch uses the same like slop cinematic video, same template. It was original a few times. And now it's just like they're all doing it. And then half of them, you go to the engagements, completely fake. Like you saw one from today, I think you said that it had like. It has like 100 likes, but 4 ,700 retreats. Yeah. It's like, why are you paying for retreats? Yeah. There was another one from a couple of weeks ago and then another one from the week after that.

48:50And the reason we know is because you and I have the eye to look for it. And also I know who some of these agencies are. I get the messages, you know, pitching the paid promotions. I know the people who get the messages. and you can just start to tell after a while that number one, the amount of engagement this thing has is completely disproportionate to how interesting it actually is. And then number two, when you look through the people who are engaging with it, it's all like some random account in a developing country that has no other tweets than shilling products like this. When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake.

49:28I don't think this was a fake video or fake engagement. I think to myself, it's a fake company with a fake founder. I will never buy their product, do business with them. I would never recommend somebody go work with them. The whole thing is fake. What is the advice that you have in the essay to do? Like, what would you do today? You can do things that can't be faked. So first of all, it's better to put out something that truly represents the best version of what you are doing that might get lower engagement, but the people who are engaging are actually real people and they care. So it's better to get 50 people who feel like this is speaking to them than to get the 4 ,700 retweets or whatever that you saw that seems obviously fake.

50:13Two is there are things that the fakes can't replicate. And these things are relationships with other humans. You should make sure to be telling your friends about it, telling your contacts and partnering with the people that you've known and trusted for a long time, that can't be faked by one of these fake companies. Another is doing things in the real world where you might just bring people over to your house and talk about it. Fake company can't do that. There's a sense of taste and discernment and beauty that I don't see in these fake things. They're not made with love. You keep saying this is going to be like a return to beauty.

50:57What does that mean? There is a return to beauty. What does that mean? People are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things again. We had probably a decade or the better part of a decade where we had to take this aesthetic relativistic view of everything is beautiful in someone's eyes. and this piece of art that is like clearly trash is just as beautiful as one of the great masters or somebody who is clearly unhealthy and unhappy is just as beautiful as someone who takes really good care of themselves. You're talking about putting obese women on like the front of a magazine? Yes, like the Victoria's Secret had this phase of like obese women and men, men.

51:42Victor's Secret.

51:47This isn't Victor's Secret, but it was for a while. Like, why are we all pretending? It was like the emperor's new clothes, the emperor's new lingerie. Like, we're all pretending that this is still sexy and we're pretending that this still looks good. Anyway, going off of the back of that, people are allowed now to say this is more beautiful than this. And a beautiful building is more beautiful than an ugly building. and a beautiful website is worth creating. This is what Joe Jebbia and the National Design Studio team are doing is saying, we believe that more beautiful experiences on the internet reflect the dignity of being an American citizen and that is what we want.

52:25So we're going to put in effort from the best talent in the private sector to go make that for you because it's worth something. We're not going to pretend that a website has to be ugly and anything big or small or glamorous or very pedestrian like a simple government website can be made more beautiful. And when it is, people appreciate it so much more because we do have this inherent yearning for beauty. And going back to real versus fake things, the fake things don't have beauty. They're orphans in a way. Nobody loves them. So you think an appreciation for beauty is universal? Yes. It's interesting.

53:01I just read this book. It's the memoir of this guy named Kelly Johnson, who's the one that started Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin. and he talked about that like he um he worked so much and worked so like his work was so stressful and difficult he wound up having like have part of his he got ulcerated part of his stomach cut out just under unbelievable pressure he put himself and he had to find a way to to literally take him out of his work so he'd like to spend time outdoors and he became a rancher and he said you know one of the most important things that ever happened in his life is just the fact that he liked watching the sunset every night and he's just like there's nothing more beautiful on the planet than a sunset.

53:37And he's writing those words 40 years ago. He's been dead for, you know, 30 years, 35 years. And it's just like, that's still true today. It was still true in time of Julius Caesar. Explain to me the connection because you talk about everything's fake, which I agree with. And at the same time, you talk about taste and beauty. So explain how those things connect, like almost like taste and beauty. I think the way you described taste was taste is the recognition of beauty. So explain how taste and beauty is an anecdote to everything being fake. Well, first of all, just on the thing about sunsets, the one thing more beautiful than a sunset is a sunset with friends.

54:18Sunset with the homies. To paraphrase Cicero, he would say something akin to, it's a great joy to be looking at the beautiful stars tonight, but even better to be looking at them with you. Cicero in 50 BC wrote the last great treatise on friendship, and we've been underestimating the importance of it ever since. And so one of the other things on the list of things that are real that can't be faked is friendship and having your friends come along for the journey and support you. Now, as to the question of why taste, beauty, discernment, elegance are antithetical to fake things. It's because fake things are not beautiful.

55:02It sounds like something that isn't necessarily true. You're like, well, in theory, someone could create something that's fake and it could be beautiful. In theory, yes, but it hasn't been done. In practice, I have not seen a company or a project that wasn't real that was also beautiful. So I can't explain the mechanism, but empirically, it is the case that fake things do not turn out beautiful. And I think it's because no one has put that love and care into them because why would you put the love and care if you are just going to buy the engagement anyway? On the flip side, it's that beautiful things can't be faked.

55:46You know, beauty is a scoreboard. It's a very obvious scoreboard. Someone who is healthy, who takes care of themselves, You see it right there. You can't pretend. And so I think beauty is sort of like a stamp of authenticity. What's the business version of that? What is beautiful? Use an example of one of your clients, like the effort they put into making their product more beautiful. What would be something we can point to? I would suggest go to General Matters website. We and they and a talented team that slaved over this website for a long time. You know, some slaved more than others. I'm not saying I was in the minds making the website, but we all put so much thought and so much care into it and argued back and forth probably longer than we should have.

56:32And you see it and it's so simple. And then you go into the mission and the manifesto and it's so short. and it took a lot of people. I mean, the billable hours and cumulative IQ points that were spent on this are unfathomable. And it ends up with something that is so simple, so elegant in my opinion, but you wouldn't have gotten there without going through that journey. Now, if somebody had just thrown up some kind of slop site and vibe coded the thing and put a bunch of random words that Claude wrote up there, I don't think you would get the same. or even worse, use a template. You're anti-template.

57:14I've heard - I'm anti-template. This is one of the most interesting ideas. Explain this. I do not use templates. Okay, but people come to you and they're like, okay, well, I'm a company. You work with other companies. They had this problem. I'm sure you have some kind of template for this problem. You're like, no, we're going to start from a blank sheet of paper. Explain your thinking on this. Two reasons. One is, yeah, I do get asked for templates a lot. And I always say I don't have templates. I actually have to resist the temptation. I have to pass the marshmallow test to save myself time by using templates.

57:42I can make my life easier and have 20 more minutes at night to read by using more templates. And the reason I resist it is, number one, no two situations are the same. And by pretending that they are, we miss that texture. At the beginning of this conversation, we talked about context and texture and respecting that. And I think that alpha comes from the little cracks in reality that only you can see and that you can exploit. And if you are just plastering over that with a templated version of something else, you are sacrificing the opportunity to be better. And I am sacrificing the opportunity to be better than my own work of six months ago.

58:18Why do I want to settle for the schlubby nonsense of the thing that I did when I was six months dumber than I am now? I'm not going to do that. So I don't use templates. The second reason is we've talked about things that are inherently valuable. What inherently valuable to me is the idea that everything deserves originality and that there's a shortage of it in the world. Anything worth doing deserves originality. Now, if there's like a founder that I literally didn't care about, by definition I would never work with, maybe I would toss them a template. But anybody that I care about, I would be insulting them by taking the shortcut and discounting their originality.

59:11And I would be insulting my own ability to continue generating new ideas. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what Applovin has done with their advertising platform. Applovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Applovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Applovin ads are full screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds.

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1:00:27I don't know if you're going to remember this, but hearing you speak right now, there's actually templates and communication too, which you see this with like, there can be autocomplete because we just say the same stuff over and over again. So you and I were at, we were doing this event. Cognition is a customer of yours. I'm friends with two of the founders. They asked me to come to this actually by pure chance, this same hotel we're today. Was this the thing where I sent that email? I'm going to get to there. Exactly. Good. You do remember this. So they're like, hey, will you come do this event and like interview two founders for us?

1:00:59I'm like, yeah, I love you guys. That's fine. And I don't check my email. Like I push everything to text. And my email is just like I literally just don't read it. And I just happened to see like one pop up and it says Lulu. And I'm like, oh, I'll read Lulu's email. I'm like, I'm not reading this other stuff. And in this email, this had gone back and forth for like, I missed the thread. And I guess this other founder's normal PR person had sent over like a list of questions. Like, this is the questions that David, we want David to ask the founder, which is like, first of all, you're fucking crazy if you think like you can put like control what's going to come out of my mouth.

1:01:34And you, I jump in this, you're like, these questions suck. And David would never ask these questions. These aren't good enough. But I realized, and then you read them, which is like the most bland, boring. They were terrible. Templated shit that you've ever seen. I think there is something. Why are we attracted to people like a Palmer Lucky? We had Mark Andreessen on this podcast, and I was like, I think the two best podcast guests, at least in business-wise, in terms of, like, what comes out of their mouth and how they're able to speak is, like, I told Mark, it's like, you and Palmer Lucky. Because, like, they're so fascinating and entertaining to, like, hear or speak.

1:02:08And part of it is because they're not, it's impossible to say that either of them or any of the good communicators, even Elon or anything else like that, is like speaking in template form. They are truly unique and kind of leaning into what makes them unique. When you use a template, you are giving up on the possibility that you could be better. And I say this sometimes about AI writing. Your AI is a wonderful tool. I use it all the time. But if you are relying on AI to write for you and to generate ideas for you, you are putting yourself at sea level or you're putting yourself at the level of anyone else in the population who wants to pay fractions of a cent for a token to get the same, you know, similar output from the same shared brain.

1:02:53So if you are far below average, you should do that because average is better than you. But if you believe that you can be even a little bit better than average, you would be robbing yourself to do that. And actually, Ralph Waldo Emerson calls it a form of suicide. Because in imitating others, which is what a template is, you are killing your own ideas. You know, what are we? What are we, if not a unique combination of beliefs, ideas, feelings? Like if you were really to unpack the soul that we have, it's these things. I believe that there's a more special spark of life too. But if you take that and you mute it, you are killing a really sacred part of yourself.

1:03:49So I can understand why he would say imitation is suicide. And using templates is robbing yourself of the possibility that you could ever be better than the last thing. And that's a shame. Okay. So you are the world's leading expert in terms of founder, CEO, comms, right? You also do crisis comms for the same companies as well. So I need to make sure I understand the way you think about this based on not only the work you've done in the past and the clients that I know of, but also this essay that you wrote where is the proper reading of that essay that everything is fake is that you need to lean into the more distinct parts of yourself?

1:04:30Is that what you're doing with your customers or your clients rather? Yeah. I am leaning into things that only I can do. And there are people, many of them, who are smarter than me or more sophisticated or better connected or more experienced or whatever it is. But the combination of things that together I feel uniquely suited to do, I need to do as much of that as possible. And it has to be me. There's a million ways you could get something else from not me. But if you want to build a movement around a technology that has civilizational importance, this is what I'm here to do. This is what I live to do.

1:05:11You know, it's sort of like your thing. You've got the one thing. I'm not trying to compete with other people doing other things. It's like this specific thing. And any of the founders that we're talking about, they have been put on Earth to do a thing that needs doing. They're the ones. why would you ever put yourself on the same level as something that can be faked? And now that we are inundated with all of this fake bullshit, it is really important to stand out so that you can attract your people. You kind of have to fight your way through the fray and through the noise to even get their attention.

1:05:47And that's another part of it, too. Do you know who Dana White is? Yeah, I think he's a perfect example of this. Like, I would tell a lot of founders, like, you should just go watch his press conferences. I don't care if you don't like fighting. That's fine. Just watch the press conferences he does after the fights. And, like, that's how you should communicate. There's two things that came to mind when you were just speaking. One, he has this idea where, like, the most important thing is, like, you have to know who you are. That's step one. He's like, don't do anything else until you figure out who you truly are.

1:06:13And two, figure out what you truly want to do in life. And he goes, once you make those two decisions, he's got, like, this simple genius. He's like, then you just wake up every day and get after it. Like, you already know who you are and what you want to do. So you just do that every day and you never stop. And I think those two things, like knowing exactly who you are, what you want to do, and then finding that opportunity that only you can do. That is the most important thing if you're trying to do great things and distinct things in the world. You have to do that first. Yeah. And sometimes when you see repeat entrepreneurs who are successful, it is a version of that company.

1:06:42So William Hockey, who did Plaid, now doing Column, feels like a natural evolution of one big mission for his life. I think that it's possible to have multiple companies, but one meta company, if you will. I always ask these kind of founders, like, what's the last company? Because, yeah, there's all, like, you can see it in a lot of these examples. Like, you had to go through these experiences, but there's, like, one company that's just, like, you wouldn't sell. There's just not, this is the last thing I work on. And I think that's when you've truly found your mission. What you said about Dana White reminds me of something, which is I actually use Dana White, shout out Dana, as an example of what we talked about earlier, where you're not hitting people over the head with the overt PR messaging that they're going to write off.

1:07:28You have the human story, and then the thing that you're trying to sell is sort of in the background. So maybe we call this like the Jetsons rule. He did this with MMA. That was the reality show. Before watching MMA was mainstream, humans being interested in the lives and striving of other humans was mainstream, It always has been. And so the reality show gave us a way to follow along on the human journey of people training for these fights. And MMA was ambiently in the background. And if you watch the season of this, you got to know MMA. It's like people who watch, I guess, F1. They just get to know the show.

1:08:11The Netflix. Yeah, whatever it's called. The series. Driving to whatever. Yeah. I watched it and I can't remember. But you learn. That got me in F1. Yeah, I didn't care about it. Yeah, this is why I learned drug dealing from the wire. It's in the background. Yeah. I'm kidding. I'm not a drug dealer. No. Many examples of this where you actually become interested in a thing and absorb it because it's around the other stuff that you're interested in. The thing with Dana was interesting. We talked about this off camera, I think, after we recorded. But you and I just had lunch when we talked about the fact that learning from history is a form of leverage and that time is really the only filter you can trust.

1:08:46and that if you wanted to know about persuasion or starting a movement, go read Cicero. These ideas, everything has been kind of solved. You just have to go find them. One thing that Dana told me that was interesting is everybody told him, this isn't going to work. No one's going to watch these people fighting. And he's just like, it's going to go everywhere. Because for all of human history, We love watching people fighting. Go back thousands of years. It's like, if you have two men, usually two men, they're going to come to some kind of combat. And the great thing about his sport, which he realized that he could be global from day one, And it's like, you don't have to speak the same language.

1:09:18It's like, I could watch it as American. You could watch it as Brazilian. You could watch it as Chinese. We're watching the same thing. And we still understand what's going on. And he's just like, no, of course this is going to work. Yeah. With my first company, the one where I was learning comms on the fly, for a company retreat, we actually went to go train with UFC fighters. And we trained with the team of Uriah Faber, who's now in the Hall of Fame, and created, pioneered the bantamweight category. And he and his team spent the day training with us, you know, physically, but also just talking about their mindset.

1:09:47And one of the things that stuck with me the most is nobody owes you anything. There are guys who show up at their gym with a backpack coming from Brazil because this is the only thing that they wanna do or know how to do and they're gonna do this and they don't need a lot of infrastructure around them. They don't need for something to tell them that they're ready, they're just gonna go do it now. And then the other thing that they talked about was sometimes your big break is being called up for a fight on last notice, on last minute notice, because you're not the person in the big letters, but you're hoping to be.

1:10:24And if the person is hurt or drops out or whatever it is, which sometimes happens, you might get a call on short notice, and that is your moment, and you have to be ready for that moment. And so their mantra was, don't get ready, stay ready, and your big fight could happen anytime, which I think is a good just guiding principle for life. Okay, so I have these conversations selfishly because I get to sit across from like world-class experts and essentially just pepper them with questions. And I'm looking for ideas that I can then just apply to my business. And then the people listening hopefully do the same.

1:10:53So usually people are building, great founders build their careers off a handful of ideas. It's not fucking 20. It's five or four or three. So when I think about you and thinking about, okay, let me summarize your handful of ideas and you tell me if I'm missing something or if I'm wrong. Number one, lean into what makes you distinctive. Two, go direct and not in any particular order. Three, you have to simplify your message so it spreads, right? And then four, you have to have some kind of mission. What am I missing? Trust yourself. This sounds very self-help kind of cheesy, but this is the message that you need to believe in yourself versus a hundred other people, a thousand other people, millions of other people.

1:11:38You need to have the actually insane confidence in your idea that you're willing to trust one person over everybody else. That is very hard to do, right? If you're looking at any kind of scenario and there's one guy saying this and a million people saying it can't be done, you might want to side with a million people. But like we said, one man plus the truth is a majority. And you have to believe that you're that person and that what you're seeing is the truth and you have to pursue it. and then you have to stay with it because you can't compound something that changes. The way compounding works is that it has to be a set principle that then compounds and if you change what that thing is, you start the clock again, you start the compounding over again.

1:12:19It's not compounding. Compounding is incompatible with changing the thing that you're compounding. So I would say that that's the fifth point. And then one other, I'll tell you what the takeaway is, but I'll actually illustrate it for you. I'm going to tell you about a sequence of events, and then you're going to react to it. There's a man and a woman, sort of older, and they're immigrants from Europe. They're living in the U.S. I forget where, but they don't have a lot of money. Their son is in an insane asylum, and it's his birthday. He's been put in this asylum because he's suicidal. He has this mental illness, a form of schizophrenia or something adjacent.

1:13:07It's called referential mania. And so he's like super paranoid. It means that he thinks that everything that happens has something to do with him. And he sees conspiracies everywhere. And so he is tortured by this. It's his birthday. And so they go and they buy him a birthday gift. And they're trying to figure out what to get him. So they get these like jellies and they go to take it to him. And the asylum won't let them come in. They say, I'm sorry, he's had another attempt recently. He doesn't want to see you. So they go home. And that night, they're thinking about their memories. And the father says, we have to get him out of there.

1:13:46So they're at the kitchen table. It's really late. It's like midnight or something. And the phone rings. And they're surprised. The woman picks it up. And there's a little girl. A little girl says, Charlie? I'm looking for Charlie. And the woman says, no, sorry, you must have dialed the wrong number. And she hangs it up. And she and the man continue their conversation. And she says, in the morning, we'll go get him out. And then the phone rings again. And it's the end of the story. What do you want me to do with this? Tell me your reactions to the story. I don't have one. What are your questions?

1:14:25It's incomplete. Like, who's the little girl? Who's the person that called back? Was this the same little girl? What happens to their son? It's not incomplete. It's a complete story. It's a story called Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov. And I think the message from that story is if we don't have a coherent story, we desperately try to fill it in. If we're not given a story, we try to make a story out of it. What I told you was a bunch of facts, each of which could have stood alone. You know, wrong numbers happen all the time. Who do we care who's the little girl? It's just wrong number. What happens to the son?

1:15:06I mean, either he lives or he dies. Or I just told you like a bunch of information. Just take that information and go. But we can't. I read that story before bed. And I stayed up thinking about all of the possible things it could mean. And in the story, there's way more detail. You can pick at things like the color of the jellies. And he forgot the keys and all of this. And what it says to me is that we all have a form of referential mania. You know, we actually have what in this young man was a severe mental illness, but we have a version of it, which is we need to believe that things around us are pointing to something.

1:15:43And if we're not told what that is, we will try to fill it in ourselves because our brains crave a story. So if you're a founder and you're giving people a bunch of information, this is what we do. I hired this person. We're opening an office here. Here's some current events we fundraised. People will weave that into a narrative whether you want them to or not. So that's not in your control. The thing in your control is whether you get to decide what that story is and fill it in for them and give them a sense of satisfaction and completion and feeling like, okay. I understand it. Here's where this is going.

1:16:23Therefore, here's what likely comes next. You know, if I told you this story in a slightly different form, you would have maybe assumed I could have told you the same facts in a different way that would make you assume that the sun was going to meet a bad end or that there would be a happy ending or whatever. I could have made you believe any of those things with the same set of facts. And this is what the founders often are not paying enough attention to. it's the space in between the facts that ties them into a story that is our responsibility to fill in because if you let people fill it in haphazardly they might end up with any conclusion that you don't control i think it's a perfect place then lulu thanks for doing this thank you i hope you enjoyed this episode please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade i've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work.

1:17:22Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.