How to Start a Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey

24:28Do not pursue temporary pain avoidance. It's not a legitimate goal. set your sight on the finished pizza and do what it takes to get there and sometimes it'll look nonsensical to others and that's okay you'll just swallow that sometimes it'll be painful for you and that's okay you'll just deal with it but at the end of the thing you'll have your delicious hot pizza the way that you wanted it as opposed to somebody who gets who gets blocked by basically their own psychology. They get blocked by fear. They get blocked by wanting to please or wanting to fit in. These things are all fake. They're in our heads.

25:12But these people who are blocked by the things in their own heads will just stay back at stage one while you're enjoying your pizza.

25:19Lulu Cheng Meservey:What do you think the best examples are of people or situations that you've seen where you could tell that there was this temporary pain avoidance that led to some massive blow up? I think Google had this. Google for a long time let activists run rampant in the company. And each individual instance was not severe enough to take dramatic action. And so in diplomacy, there's a concept of sausage slicing or salami slicing. And so let's say I want this piece of territory that you have. and I ask you for it, you would say no. But if I were to encroach a couple inches and you let me, and then I encroach a couple inches more, or I just start to have my people just kind of walk through there.

26:13It's very hard for you to identify one moment in time when it doesn't feel like you're overreacting to something small. And so I can salami slice my way to a bigger piece of salami. Right. This is this is why the U.S. does like freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea, because if you don't, then others in the region or China can sort of salami slice their way to more control regional hegemony. Yeah. So it is really important to resist being salami sliced by your own employees above all but anybody. So in the Google example, there were just these signs. I mean, James Damore was probably one of the larger signs, but daily things of people saying things at work that just have nothing to do with making the best technology.

27:00And then eventually it comes to a head where you have to base major business decisions on having an overwhelmingly ideological monolithic workforce. And now you're in a very, very painful position of do you piss off like 60 % of your employees or do you handcuff yourself and not participate in government or military programs where you could actually do a lot of good? Now your decisions are much harder because you avoided the temporary pain of just cutting it off when it would have seemed like you're overreacting. I think the essential lesson is don't be afraid to be seen as if you're massively overreacting.

27:42This is something that Elon is quite good at. Again, it looks like chaos to someone who doesn't know what you're doing. That's their default word for it. So if it's like one person does one small thing and then you react with like overwhelming force, it can look like a massive overreaction. But what you're doing is actually you're reacting to the hundred things that would have happened. You're not reacting to the one thing. You're reacting to the hundred things that would have happened that now won't. And so the guy who went on your podcast, and I think he immediately got fired for it.

28:16Lulu Cheng Meservey:Oh, yeah. There were people who thought that that was maybe an over - Can't fire me. Let's go. Forgot about that. Oh, yeah. I was thinking about it. I was waiting to bring it up. That, I think some people saw that as an overreaction. I did not see it as an overreaction. You know, blessings and best wishes to that guy. But he kind of took one for the team because what happened to him was deterrence for everybody else. Like once you have a very leaky culture, what do you even do? You fire everybody? Like at that point, it becomes very, very hard to manage. But if you are willing to do what looks like overreacting along the way, then you can manage that a lot better.

29:04And today, XAI has one of the much, much less leaky cultures than most other companies of that size and scale.

29:12Lulu Cheng Meservey:How do you actually stop that? So if you do, you know, taking back from that example, if you do ever end up finding yourself in a situation where you have a very leaky culture. I remember when another thing from the Walter Isaacs biography is Elon said, things keep on leaking to the press. We've got to have that stop. How do you actually stop that? Like if it's happening at your company? Stopping it is hard and brutal. And you have to be willing to go into tyrant mode a little bit. Like you can try to weed people out. You can hire like investigators. You can try to monitor people, you know. But at that point, it's like trying to weed out Al-Qaeda from the village population.

29:55It's just very difficult because they look the same. You know, they look the same. They're sitting at the same desk. Who is it? And then you have to do things that feel bad to you and to them in order to get to that point. So I think that it can be improved, but prevention is better.

30:17Lulu Cheng Meservey:An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure sort of situation? Yes. Prevention is better. And what prevention looks like is actually a lot of it comes down to personal loyalty to the founder. It's not about installing the software on the laptop or having policies or signing NDAs. The biggest fake LARPy thing in the world is signing NDAs. Never, never has that had an impact on anyone or anything. And the most sensitive situations I've ever been brought into, I don't think I've signed NDAs. Yeah, it's almost like you have to have trust built in your, you know, small cadre. You either trust or you don't.

31:00If it's at the point where like you think the piece of paper is protecting you, something has already gone wrong. So this is where it goes back to the founder as the cult leader. Personal loyalty is what will make people do the thing. It's what makes people understand commander's intent and internalize it and follow the spirit, not the letter. And that's what you want. It's not like this doesn't technically violate my NDA that I read closely or I won't be caught. It's like, I don't want to because I signed up to this to work for him and do this thing. And I want to work for him because I like him.

31:40And I want to do this thing because I think it's important. So why would I do something that damages the company? Why would you have someone working at the company that wants to damage the company or who is trying to help the company but doesn't have the judgment to know what helps the company? Both of those are really messed up and something has gone really wrong. So personal loyalty, founder connection to their people, that is the best and only way to prevent having a leaky culture.

32:11Lulu Cheng Meservey:I have a general philosophy that if I will like default assume good in people when I meet someone until I see something, unless it's like a high trusted person that I know that has told me otherwise for a specific individual. But I think loyalty is like vastly undervalued. Super undervalued. Yeah. How should you actually approach loyalty and like who you surround yourself with and who you don't? I think the right approach is to offer acts of loyalty and then see what gets reciprocated. So I appreciate the way that you move through life, basically, is to just offer acts of goodwill and then see what comes back.

32:52And then it's like the opposite of Nigerian prince phishing. Nigerian prince phishing is like you blast out these shitty phishing emails that are like poorly executed and badly written. and then you see who's dumb enough to click and then you engage with them further. The loyalty building version of that is you are putting acts of goodwill out into the world and they don't have to be expensive or elaborate every time, but they can be small things. They have to be meaningful.

33:19Lulu Cheng Meservey:They have to be meaningful. Even if they're not expensive or elaborate, they have to mean something to the person. Yeah, I agree with that. And then you see which ones reciprocate and then you engage with those. And so it's like the Nigerian prince fishing scheme for goodwill, but good. The other thing on founders building loyalty, you know the book Leaders Eat Last? And I agree with the concept, which is one of like putting your people first. But in practice, the best leaders are the leaders that eat at the same time, in the same place. Literally eating with people is such a symbolic act that forms connections.

33:58Like the best founders that I think of today just have lunch with their teams out in the lunchroom. You know, I saw Scott Wu doing that yesterday. You are just one of the people. Napoleon did that. Julius Caesar did it. There's no new innovation on how to relate to people. It's do the job at a level that they can respect. So like the reason that Cognition is able to recruit these like incredibly elite coders is because they respect Scott as a leader. Two is be among them as a peer and not somebody that. So like at PepsiCo, I remember when Inja Nui was CEO, she actually put in efforts. One of my old colleagues, a mentor of mine helped her do this and put in efforts to just go out onto the floors and to just be among the people.

34:54So just live how they live, eat what they eat at the same time so they see you. And then lastly, if you ask them to do something, you do it.

35:05Lulu Cheng Meservey:Yeah, I remember there was the prototypical example is basically Elon on the production line in 2018. And there was a hotel across the street that he could have stayed at and it would have been a comfortable bed. but instead he was like no just give me you know i'll just sleep on the floor right outside not even in the conference room the conference room had a couch but the fact like if people were walking by the conference room they wouldn't know that he was in there whereas if he's on the line just sleeping there and there's all these machines and stamping presses going in the background and very high decibels all this stuff they can tell that he's like in it yeah so they will work harder yeah ernest shackleton when he was with his men and they were taking turns rowing and everybody was like frostbitten and miserable and they tried to give him easier shifts.

35:44He actually demanded that he not be given different treatment. And that is what makes people go above the letter and follow the spirit is if they feel that from you. So it sounds very like touchy feely, Oprah, but the way you communicate is through what you say, what you do, and then also visuals. We can talk about that. Like the visuals of something stay with people for a long time. And that can be an act of leadership or inspiration. So like when the German chancellor, Billy Brandt, went to visit Warsaw and he went to see the monument honoring the Jewish people who had risen up. He stood there and then he just silently dropped to his knees and then he just kneeled there.

36:30And it is called the genuflection. And that statement said so much about him representing the German people and how they viewed the Nazis' actions then, and I think really helped to reshape relationships between Germany and Poland. It did so much, and it was just the visual of this man on his knees saying nothing. You can combine these things. So you can use words to paint visuals. so there's like visuals visuals i gave you the billy bront example which is like a very um extreme and lofty example there's also steve jobs and the macbook air and this was when he was on stage i think it was 2008 and he just had the envelope and it was like it was like a secret manila envelope

37:23Lulu Cheng Meservey:and he takes it out same thing that he did with the original ipod where he's like this is you know This is your pocket for like a pen or a phone. And then he's like, what the fuck is this pocket for? And he just pulls out this little device and he's like, this is what goes in there. The visuals stay with you.

37:41Sometimes it's not a visual of an image, but sometimes it is imagining a thing that feels so vivid. So like when Jensen was unveiling the DGX1, there were a lot of technical specs that they did share eventually. But what really stood out for me is that he talked about time to train AlexNet. This is a made up metric. Like time to train AlexNet is not a standard metric used anywhere. But it's the thing that I remember. And he said that if you were using Intel equipment, that training AlexNet would take 150 hours, whereas using his gear, it would take two hours. Now, I think he could have actually dramated it up a little bit more.

38:35I think he could have said, like, with Intel, it would take over six days. And with us, it takes two hours. and then just leave people with just the perception that this is a completely different category. Oh, the same launch announcing the DGX one. And he called it a data center in a box. Now, there are all of these technical specs that he could have gone into, and they did. But data center in a box just shortcut through all of that. It became the thing that people remember, the thing that I remembered. That is so much more powerful than saying we are faster, we're better. All of these subjective things that people just discount, again, because it's you saying it about yourself.

39:22Now, somebody else saying that about you might carry more weight. But if you're going to say it about yourself, people assume that you are hyping yourself up and you are going to make yourself look good. And so you have to use these images and analogies and be really concrete to give people the thing to imagine.

39:36Lulu Cheng Meservey:How do you make yourself someone that people want to root for? in the sense of, you know, that you shouldn't be congratulating yourself. No one likes that, but having other people that are like trusted tweet, you know, I really like Ty or I really like Lulu is very powerful. So how do you actually design yourself to be someone that people want to celebrate and help? People have no reason to root for Ty per Ty. You know, um, you as a person represent things that people like, and that is why they root for you. I'll speak about me because I root for you. And here are the reasons. Thank you, Lulu.

40:13Yes, you're welcome. Here are the reasons. You do things that I would like to see more of in the world. So you are a vector for something that I want. And it's a normative good, but it also comes back to self-interest in the sense that I like when people are not transactional and form long-term relationships and put positive things out into the world and are willing to take to make the first move of putting something positive into the world and not waiting until someone does it for them first. And you do that and you become a symbol of this happening. And I like that. Also, I root for you because when you succeed at turning this podcast into something that people care deeply about, it tells me that they care about something that I also care about, which is I want people to be thinking about the power of stories and being inspired by the stories of others and having that actually alter their own energy and morale and behavior.

41:22Everything I think is inherently selfish in that way, but it's because I relate to you and I see elements of what I would like to be in you. And because what you do represents something that I want to see more of. It's not like I see you sitting there as a guy and I'm like, I'm just going to root for this guy. So I think at the end of the day, people root for things that they want, things that they like, and things that remind them of them. And if you are that, they'll root for you. You know, the probably apocryphal story of President Kennedy visiting NASA, and he had announced we're going to go to the moon and he goes to pay a visit.

42:05And it's after hours and there's a janitor just cleaning and he greets him and says, what do you do here? And he says, Mr. President, I'm helping us get to the moon. So if people understand, this also goes back to you want people to understand the spirit and not the letter. And you want people to sign up for the spirit and not the letter. And so if you're recruiting someone for a job at a startup, that job is objectively worse than being a janitor in every way. Being an early employee at a startup is incredibly grueling and hopefully it pays off, but you have no guarantee that it will. And the only way to make someone be genuinely super excited about that and not be doing tiny things to cut corners in ways that you'll never see and performing tiny acts of disloyalty that you'll never find out about is for them to be fully bought in that they are helping to get to the moon and that their work is needed in that.

43:03Lulu Cheng Meservey:It's the same situation, I think, at Boeing versus SpaceX, where Boeing, you know, you ask some random engineer, you're like, what are you working on? And it's like, I'm working on some space capsule. And you ask someone random at SpaceX, and it's like, what are you working on? What are you about? And they're like, we are making life multi-planetary. There are three levels to a story for a company. The first level, and these are like an ascending order of difficulty as well, but the first level is just literally, what are you even doing? Half of startups and half of startup founders probably can't even articulate just that.

43:37What is this thing? Level two is, what does that represent? What is the upshot of you doing this successfully? And then level three is, what is the shape of the dent in the universe and in society if this works, like if this actually works. And so for SpaceX, level one might be we're building a rocket. Pretty cool, not maximum cool. Level two is we're building a rocket to restore American spaceflight from the private sector to revive an industry that's been stagnant for decades. More inspiring, not final form. Level three would be, we're restoring space flight from America, humanity's last best hope, because we need to make mankind an interplanetary species.

44:27And so the levels of this, they're all true. They're all as realistic. You know, if one happens, then two will probably happen, then three might happen. You know, like, um, these three levels correspond to the quality of talent you can get and how hard they'll work for you. So like a minus talent will work a minus hard for the first thing, but a plus plus talent will dedicate their lives and sacrifice sleep and food and hobbies for the third thing. So a lot of founders, and when you talk about starting a cult, what do you need? You need the vision for the cult. That first level is not cult level.

45:07The second level on the edge, but the third level, that's the cult level. So you need to have going more like assembling the ingredients for a cult as we go along. One is you need the cult leader. You need to be willing, ready and able, and you need to be able to build the relationships and the personal trust and loyalty to do it. Two is you need that big mission. and the mission is that level three of story of what people are trying to achieve. Something that I've been thinking about is right now, today, everybody is so worried about distribution. Everyone is obsessed with distribution. And in a way I'm happy because part of that is what going direct was meant to do is build your own distribution.

45:57but distribution raises the question of what are you distributing what are you distributing

46:03Lulu Cheng Meservey:is it like clavicular where i mean you you know he may get like two billion views last month but then you ask like what what is the thing the impact that you want in the world and i can't tell you what comes of it and now now for him if his goal is exposure and to get people to think about look matt and looks maxing maybe he actually did achieve his goal um whether that's our goal or not is indifferent. He achieved, let's say his goal, but think of it like a complete story, like a dish. And first you've got the ingredients. You have to pick what you're cooking and you have to get the ingredients.

46:40Then you have the preparation and then you have the plating. Distribution is the plating. And so if it's plated crappy, people are not going to want it. that can undermine a really good dish. But if the dish is good enough, it can overcome good plating and good plating can't save a bad dish. So like the first part on ingredients is what actually is the story and do you have the facts to back it up? Do the facts match the story that you're trying to tell? So today, a couple hours before I came here, I attempted to design my own sushi roll i went i don't recommend it i went to a restaurant and it was super well reviewed and i saw the sushi chef and he seemed like he was really good and i was like i'm just gonna how hard can it be i'm gonna just do things i'm gonna be high agency and design my own sushi roll and the waitress is like okay i'm like here i go and i listed like stuff i like and I just made a list of things that I like and she was like okay we will put this together highly inadvisable it was like that pizza that has like the M &M's and the like the rotisserie chicken that was my sushi roll I ate like half of it the plating was beautiful the preparation was very skillful but no amount of skill like no pair of skilled hands could have saved the list that I gave to that waitress and and could have overcome like my judgment and and so um you know the um you know the the cartoon of Waldo from where's Waldo sitting at a bar and he's like nobody ever asked how's Waldo people are always asking what podcast can we go on how do we get our message out how do we make our tweet go viral?

48:36And very rarely do people ask, what are we trying to say? And if your message sucks, if the ingredients are bad and the dish is inherently not good, if your message sucks, you could have a two-minute Super Bowl commercial. You could go on Joe Rogan. You can have a billboard in Times Square and nobody is going to care because it's not about the distribution if your message is not good. Yeah.

49:01Lulu Cheng Meservey:There's also this amazing, um did you ever watch the Simon Scenic talk where he was talking about the why how and then what yeah yeah it's just this amazing so basically like these there's these concentric circles and at the center it's the why and like why do you do what you do and then it's how how do you do it and then what are you actually doing and he said the best storytellers like Steve Jobs he's like he starts with the why and he's saying you know this is what you're like this is why we do what we do at Apple. What is why we wake up in the morning? We are, you know, for Elon, it's like, we are making life multi-planetary.

49:34Lulu Cheng Meservey:That is our mission. That is why we wake up in the morning. And then it's like, how do we make life multi-planetary? And that might be, we build rockets that are reusable and all this stuff. And then it's like, what do we do? And it's like, I'm, you know, soldering something. And I think most, you know, when I have most interactions with people at like a party, I will say like, you know, who are you? And they will basically start with the what? They will be like, I am building AI spreadsheets. And I'm like, oh i don't really care if you start with and then the best storytellers like they don't do that they start with here's why like i am not doing a podcast i am trying to help you know if i look at like my mission it's like i want to help the highest leverage people in society are founders and so how do you get more founders to start companies in the right companies and it's like okay uh we need you know for me it's i want more people to even realize they can start companies is the first thing and then two i want the people that do start companies to work on more important missions and so then it's like okay well if that's our why then we're going to probably do a bunch of interviews that are not like directionally they won't get a million views but they do kind of show like okay go work on nuclear reactors or go do cloud seeding or all these other things because that is like directionally correct and over time you'll just build this brand of you know there's all these other podcasters and then there's like relentless and they're like celebrating, you know, great founders and great companies.

50:52Lulu Cheng Meservey:And like, if I'm directionally, you know, associated with that, and I believe in the idea that we want great companies and more great founders, then I like I'm aligned with relentless. A lot of people have within them a really special secret truth that only they know, right? It's like something that should be done, something that is actually possible, and people haven't realized it yet. And it's a secret truth within. I think what sadly happens is that the vast majority of people assassinate that within themselves because they look around and it doesn't seem like others have it. And they gaslight themselves into believing that it must be fake.

51:34Sometimes people will trust themselves over the world, which is very hard to do. to trust yourself over millions of others and people who are smarter and taller and richer and more important, you know, to say like, I'm right over them. It's, it's, it's kind of messed up.

51:48Lulu Cheng Meservey:If you're in the village with 200 other people and you go on your, you know, go off on your own, um, and you don't listen to the rest and you're like, I'm going to go pave my own way. You die really quickly. So this is kind of designed. This is true. This is true. And we have to sometimes be able to overcome that people are on autopilot most of the time here's the thing that i did i i was working for jp morgan in new york and one day for no real reason i made these signs and i got them laminated and the signs i put them in the bathrooms go on I made these signs, I laminated them, and I put them in the bathrooms.

52:34And the signs said, times are tight. Everyone has to do their part. We ask that you participate in the cost of maintaining this bathroom. Every square of toilet paper. So stupid. Every square of toilet paper costs 10 cents. Every pump of soap costs 15 cents. Every paper towel. His house goes woke. Gone. A quarter. What's that?

53:00Lulu Cheng Meservey:It almost feels woke. Well, and then I put these like collection boxes. I didn't want, you know, I wasn't trying to get 45 cents or whatever. I just wanted to see what would happen. And I went back the next day. I waited until after hours and I put these up everywhere. I went back the next day and there was like real money inside. Like a few hundred bucks or something? Or like a few tens of dollars? A few tens. And it's like this completely nonsensical request. And are we Americans? Or what? Like, what do you mean you're going to look at this sign that requests you to pay for your toilet paper?

53:38This like absurd on its face, undignified and completely unnecessary request from JP Morgan, the corporation. Like nothing about it made sense. And yet people put money into the box, which makes me feel like people have an overwhelming biased to just do the thing they feel like they're supposed to do. And that is actually a pro-social instinct. Like we shouldn't be trying to decide our own BART fairs or something. But then when the moment calls for it, and you as a founder or as a cult leader see that there is just a quarter turn to be made that leads us to a more glorious future, but everybody has to get on board.

54:24It is your job to look inside your mental dictionary of language and identify 500 to 1 ,000. It's not that many words in the right order that is going to jailbreak people and reprogram them to come and join you off the path. And it's very doable and it has been done again and again in big ways and in small ways. It's been done to convince an entire nation to continue fighting a war. It's been done to convince racists to consider the possibility of allowing civil rights. It's been done to inspire a nation to go to the moon. I mean, these things, we've seen them. We just don't really recognize them for what they are, which is packaging a thousand words in the right order in combination with the right curation and delivering them such that they jailbreak people at scale.

55:23It's so doable.

55:25Lulu Cheng Meservey:So like the Napoleon situation where if you give the facts, you are going to go guard this place and these cannons are going to shoot at you. And every single person that has previously gone here has gotten shot. And if you give those facts, probably not very many people are like, yes, I want to be suicidal. But then suddenly you give it in slightly different order and people are lining up, you know, voluntarily joining. What other examples are there in situations that you've seen where people rephrase a set of facts and like not even facts, but almost feelings and reasons for doing things in order to get people to take a rational action?

56:05Cicero. Cicero's political career should have ended before it began. He was a new man, didn't have a lot of money. He was not liked by the patricians and by the most powerful men of his time. He had the gift of oratory. He was considered the second best orator after this other senator called Hortensius, who was like the man. And Cicero was like second banana. And Cicero took on this case that seemed absolutely impossible. Not impossible because of the facts, but impossible because of whom he needed to convince. Cicero's job was to get a jury to find guilty the governor of Sicily, who had abused his power blatantly and engaged in corruption, theft, violence, or just a total thug.

56:56The reason that this would be very difficult is that the jury who would decide would be made up of people who hated Cicero, loved the guy, or were friends with him, the governor of Ares, and had also been bribed. So he had to get these people to find him guilty. Now, everything's about incentives, right? So all the incentives have gone in the other direction. What can Cicero do or say to break those incentives? What he did was he used his speeches to turn it into a trial of the jury. He said, this is not about trying this man. Everyone knows he's guilty. Who's on trial is you. And it's whether you can be bought.

57:46And it's whether you will let innocents suffer so that you can protect your friends. That's what's on trial. And he completely flipped the incentives for them. Now they're voting for themselves, right? So I think that's a really good example, maybe from a long time ago, but things don't change that much. Humans haven't changed that much. We have answers to a lot of our questions if we're willing to look back more than like 10 minutes ago.

58:11Lulu Cheng Meservey:So you brought up this idea of if you are on the attack, you always want to focus the point of attack as small as you possibly can. And instead of saying, you know, I'm attacking like Anduril, you want to say like, I am attacking Palmer Lucky. And it's this one character that people can kind of get behind in a narrative that they can believe in. If you are on the defense, then you want to, you know, if you're a journalist and you're getting attacked, you don't want to say, oh man, I'm getting attacked. You want to be like, you are attacking journalism itself. And so suddenly you have this like army of people that are like, I agree that journalism, you know, should be free and open and people should be able to share whatever they want to do, share and do research.

58:48Lulu Cheng Meservey:And so suddenly it's like a greater cause than yourself. Tell me about the difference between those two things and how they marry together. Yeah, it's like the concept of pressure in physics, which is when you want to apply pressure, so when you're on offense, pressure is force over surface area, right? P equals F over A. So if you want to apply maximum pressure, let's say that the amount of force that you have to bring to bear is constant. You are going to decrease the surface area. So if I wanted to attack you, I'll recap a little bit what you already described here, but I'm not going to attack like podcasters.

59:28I wouldn't even attack you, the person, because you've got friends, you have a good reputation. I would attack one really specific thing that you have done that, if that's true, unravels so much else about you. So for example, let's say, right, Ty pretends to be a nice guy who cares about others. But I have discovered that last month he received a Bitcoin payment from the Saudis. And now, like, I don't have to say he's corrupt, he's a liar, he's not actually nice. I don't have to get people to believe all of those things. But if they believe that you got a Bitcoin payment from the Saudis, then they will ask themselves, why is that?

1:00:18Is it a bribe? Can I trust what he's saying? Which of those interviews is actually fake? Is he lying when he says he wasn't a smart? Is he a liar? Does he have a political agenda? Are his interviews fake? All these things they're now asking themselves. Whereas if I had said that, if I said, hey, everybody, all his interviews are fake and he's a liar, wouldn't land. Okay. If you're on defense, you want to diffuse the pressure so that there's less on you. The amount of force that they're applying, you don't get to change. But what you can do is you can spread the surface area. And that does a couple things.

1:00:53One is you diffuse it so that not as much of it is about you and it's sort of like distracting. But two is, remember we said earlier what makes someone root for you is that you represent something they like, something they want, or something they see in themselves. So in that moment, if you morph yourself into the thing people like or the thing people are rooting for, like if you break into your constituent parts the reasons that people would root for you and remind people about that, if I'm attacking you, you would say she is attacking young entrepreneurs who are trying to make a run at creating something new in the media.

1:01:37because she's on the side of the gatekeepers and she doesn't want us to succeed. If you can convince people of that, now you have other podcasters and other young entrepreneurs being on your side, not necessarily because they care about you and your Saudi Bitcoin payment, but because you've reminded them about the thing you represent that is now under threat, that if you get hurt, all of them get hurt. It's a little bit human shield. It's a little bit, hey, if they get me, they're going to get all of you too. So you better fight for me. But subtly. And so that can be wildly effective.

1:02:17Lulu Cheng Meservey:It almost seems like the best example that I can think of where there's a specific thing that someone has done, and thus you can believe all the terrible things that you've heard about them. It's like, you went to Jeffrey Epstein's Island. Thus, all the terrible things that I've ever heard about you align with that. Like, if you would do this one thing then you must have be willing to do all those other like you're a creep and you're although that list is now so long that it sort of lost its potency and like the optimal amount of being connected to epstein is not zero you want to be two connections yeah yeah yeah um you were in the know but not directly yeah you want to be uh like who is it was it jim simons you want to be like he tried to get you and you said no that's like you have extreme moral character or lying on the ground.

1:03:05I think there's a quote from the Soviet Union, maybe during political upheaval that was like, we saw power just lying on the ground and we picked it up. Or lying on the ground just for free. If you get invited and you don't go. So I don't know if that is the best example, but picture, I don't want to give people a roadmap to ruining somebody's reputation, but if you have to fight, picture a piece of cloth. And it is very difficult to tear piece of cloth with your bare hands. But if there's a nick in it, then the whole thing can tear open, right? Like when you see pro wrestlers, target that nick and you just tear apart.

1:03:38Lulu Cheng Meservey:Yeah. So, uh, you know, tip for anyone who ever needs to rip their shirt off on camera, that's make sure you have the nick. When you think about building an aura, I think building an aura is similar to you've done all these kinds of steps that you talked about in this interview successfully over the course of many months or maybe even multiple years and suddenly people will just default you know have this vision of who you are in their mind and they will like auto support you or auto not want to support you how do you actually build an aura for yourself i think that we do talk a little bit too much about aura and there's a concept that i would like to bring back that i would like to advocate for which is the roman concept of auctoritas.

1:04:21It is a combination of authority and aura and influence and presence. It's more durable than just aura. Aura to me is connected to something evanescent and current that is happening right now. You know, aura today doesn't translate to aura tomorrow. It's sometimes tied to an event, but it's pretty fleeting. Whereas auctoritas is you becoming the authority on something, you know, domain or knowledge or something moral, where people look to you for something that is enduring. You also have a personal magnetism and presence, but that's not the real core of it. The core of it is what you stand for and the delivery of it and your presence and your charisma, all of that is the plating or the preparation, but there has to be an iron core of what you stand for that is enduring and important.

1:05:16So I think we should reframe the quest for aura to a quest for auctoritas.