Anduril、Shopify 与 Cognition 背后的传播策略师｜Lulu Cheng Meservey

So you were born in China, yet you speak Norwegian. Can you explain what occurred in your life between these two points?

Yes. I was born in rural China, in a little village where I think my mom didn't even know whether I would come out a boy or a girl, or in 6 months or 12 months. There was very little knowledge.

And so I emerged, and we were able to leave China because my father was sent to Germany to get his PhD in astrophysics. I think at that time, the number of people who wanted to leave China far exceeded the number of people who were allowed to. So technically, we were supposed to stay behind as a kind of collateral to make sure that he came back. However, we ended up settling in Germany.

My mom and I actually did go to join my father at the University of Heidelberg, where he was getting his PhD. We started moving around to different universities where he would study, like University of X [?], and work at the observatory. The University of Oslo was one of the places where he was sent to work on astrophysics, and that's where I did a lot of my growing up. I went to public school, and I just became a little bit Norwegian.

How many different countries did you live in, then?

I grew up in China, then Germany, Norway, and Canada, at which point we were able to become Canadian citizens, which was very exciting and welcoming for us. And then, grand slam, big dream: the United States. So I came to the U.S. for college, I've been here ever since, and a few years ago I naturalized during the first Trump administration, which was very exciting for me.

How long did you know that you wanted to come to America? Was it just for school, or did you think, “No, I'm going to live here after”?

No, I just wanted to live and be here and be American. It was a dream that was sort of inherited from my father. If he hadn't gone to Germany, he would have tried to go to the U.S. In fact, the only reason he couldn't was because it was oversubscribed as a destination at the time. So we've had this kind of multigenerational dream to come to the U.S. And what I'm doing now feels like the culmination of multiple generations of work.

I consider you a very singular player on the board. I don't know anybody else that has a business like yours. You do the comms for some of the greatest tech founders in the world. You have anywhere from, let's say, 10 to 12 clients at a time, but you have a waitlist of, you know, 1,000 companies that want to work with you.

A little less.

Yeah, a little less than that want to work with you. But it's always the elite of the elite. A few of these people have been on the show, for example, and I've talked to them in private about you. So it's an unlikely story. I happen to know this because we spent a bunch of time together the last year and a half, but can you explain? Okay, you go to college. What do you think you were going to do when you were in school?

I did not know what to do. You and I have talked about friends of ours who've known, maybe from an early age, that they wanted to go in a certain direction. I did not know. And I think that's because the thing that I'm doing actually had not existed until I started doing it. There are many other things like this out there that don't exist until someone starts doing them. So I think there's a lesson there.

But what I really was forced to do, and then enjoyed doing, was some version of super-duper reading the room and then figuring out how to become and speak as someone that the room would accept. As a kid, moving around and always being the weird kid with the weird accent and the weird clothes, it was a forced, almost survival mechanism. I'll tell you a story about this in Norway in a second.

When I got to Canada, I actually learned English from a book called English. [laughter] It literally was a green-and-blue book. I could picture it. It looked like a Greyhound bus seat-type of design, and it was called English. I read it, and I was like Neo waking up from The Matrix. I was like, “I know English.”

I thought I knew English. I actually did not.

Because there's book English, and then there's the English that people actually use.

So, while I was in college, I did an interview with BCG or something that the career office funnels you toward. And thank goodness I did not get this role. But part of the reason I didn't get the role was that they asked me if I had any experience doing something, and I said, “Yeah, I have quite a bit of experience below the belt.” [laughter]

The difference between “below the belt” and “under my belt” is, in some ways, almost nothing, and in other ways, like in that interview, everything.

And so even now, I feel like I'm still learning to speak English, adapt, and think about the fine textures of words and meanings in every different setting.

So wait, explain the connection between what you do in comms now and jumping around from culture to culture. You said you have a story about this.

I'll tell you the story. I'm in Norway, and I'm just desperately trying to fit in and be a normal kid. When you get to the public schools in Oslo, they have something called mottaksklasse, which is like a welcome class. So it's a transition halfway house for immigrants who can't speak Norwegian. And once they think you're ready enough, they transition you out.

So I'm in this classroom, and it's October, and I'm trying to fit in. We had talked about Halloween. Halloween was coming up, and in the U.S. you wear your costume to school, you have a little parade, and it's awesome. In Norway, they knew what this was.

So I show up to school in a full-body rabbit costume, and I mean, it's got the gloves, it's got a tail—everything—and nobody else is wearing any costume whatsoever. It's like the only thing worse than my normal clothes was a full-body rabbit costume. I sat there; I had to hold my pencils like this the whole day in class. And it just turned out that it was not customary to wear these things to school.

So how would I have known that from any of the conversations that I had had where people knew the date? I thought we were all on the same page, guys. It's October 31. We talked about this. It just wasn't a thing you did at school.

The takeaway is that there's a lot that is unspoken. There's a lot of context that people just assume that you might have. And if you think you do and you actually don't, it will be exposed in sometimes very dramatic ways.

Okay. So let's jump into what exactly you do today and why you think it is needed more than ever. If I walk up to you, not knowing you at all, and I say, “Hey, nice to meet you, Lulu. What do you do?” How do you describe what you do?

What I describe is: I help founders build a movement to help their companies succeed.

If you are building the seventh B2B SaaS in a pretty crowded category, I'm not sure that's the most relevant thing for you, and it's not necessarily the thing that brings me joy. But if you are building something like the companies we've talked about—and it's sort of easy to talk about because they're such perfect case studies from the past, like Ramp or General Matter—you need to build a movement of people to believe something counterintuitive.

You are essentially creating something new. If it were obvious, it would have been done. By virtue of it not being done, you now have to break through all of the existing biases and rally people to you. These are people who have lots of great options that they have to say no to in order to come join you on this quest. That is building a movement.

So explain the context of what was going on at the time in the country when you started working with Anduril.

I had accidentally become the co-founder of a communications firm, and I didn't know what comms was and I didn't know what PR was.

Okay, you've got to say more about that. If you don't know what comms and PR are, how do you accidentally become the co-founder of this?

For grad school, I studied diplomacy, within which I studied international security, within which I studied counterinsurgency. So I really wanted to work in and for the government, and on security issues, and I could not because I was not a citizen at the time. So it was difficult.

I ended up in Washington, D.C., doing what felt like a pretty close thing, which was political risk. If Google is entering into Egypt and there's a coup, what do you do? It's not a normal business situation. Or if Alibaba is having its biggest IPO in the U.S., the things that they have to overcome are not just normal business things. There are fears about China, which to this day continue, and many are warranted, as well as concerns about data privacy and all these things.

Anyway, I was working on political risk and ended up partnering with the man who was helping Jack Ma run their IPO. He was born and bred Texan, had worked in government, and had now become the head of corporate affairs for Alibaba. After the successful IPO, he decided to start a firm, and he asked me to go and do it with him.

Jim Wilkinson, someone I consider a great mentor and teacher, took a bet on me—someone who had never done this before—and he said, “I think you can figure this out.” I didn't know if I agreed, but I went with him. And so here I was, the co-founder and COO of a comms firm, and I was Googling, “What is PR? What is communications? What is this?” [laughter]

I would learn essentially by embarrassing myself. We would go into meetings with leaders of Citadel and other major, serious operations. At S&P Global, I would say things. Sometimes they landed; other times somebody would pull me aside at the end of the meeting and be like, “Maybe fewer Power Rangers references next time.”

Maybe we had a meeting with Gap Inc. where it was very clear that I didn't know what corporate communications was. I thought it was like putting on a sale—summer sale—and just learned the hard way by doing.

Your clients in this case wanted traditional PR. Correct?

Yes.

Which is not what you do at all today.

Currently, it's not what I do. When I was learning traditional comms, it was very much wax on, wax off. What am I doing here? I didn't have any credentials. I was nobody. Nobody would answer my emails. People didn't want to deal with me, and reporters didn't take me seriously, as they probably should not have. So, all understandable.

But then I got to know Matt Steckman, now president of Anduril, and Trae Stephens, chairman of Anduril. We were all in D.C. at the time, and Trae recommended me to the team to handle their comms. They had talked to a bunch of people.

What was the state of their business when this was happening?

It was pretty early. It was in the first year of the company. Our company was founded around the same time as theirs. Of course, our PR firm didn't become Anduril, but it was around the same age at that point.

They were in the process of defining what the company was. They had actually been in semistealth the whole time. There was a website, and the website provided just enough fodder for all these conspiracy theories about, “What is Palmer doing?” but not enough information. It wasn't like today, where you do your launch moment and have your cinematic launch video. It was just like the company existed, and there were rumors and gossip about it, but it wasn't fully defined. To their credit, they recognized that it was time to really define it.

You would compare their idea at this time in history to a counterinsurgency. Correct?

I believe that they were very much like an insurgent. They had a smaller team than the people they were up against. Imagine Boeing or Raytheon. They were going against the grain of their community.

Especially in Silicon Valley, it was super-duper not cool to work with the government. That's when Google had employees walking out, protesting any involvement in Project Maven with the DoD. They didn't have access to mainstream information-propagation networks.

For example, the media just hated Palmer. This was when he was persona non grata in tech and the mainstream for supporting Trump and not supporting Hillary while he was at Facebook. It was pretty soon after he was pushed out—fired for political beliefs at Facebook—which is kind of mind-blowing to think about today. But at the time, it was like, “Of course he should be. Of course he should be a pariah. This is unacceptable for someone to hold these political beliefs.”

That was the situation they were in. They rightfully decided that they were going to take matters into their own hands, create their own stories, and create their own ways to get them out there. They took a massive bet on me. It really changed my life because Palmer sometimes very kindly says, “You helped us with comms,” or, actually, “He helped me with comms.” I learned how to do comms by working with Palmer, Trae, Brian, and Matt.

I have a question for you. The way Palmer is now, where he takes the fight to them and goes direct—I know that's part of your manifesto—was he like that back then?

He still had that same fighting spirit. The environment was different, and so it would land differently, and his audience was a little bit different. It would have looked different on the surface, but I think the fighting spirit and the instinct were there.

That's why I had this wonderful opportunity to work with these great guys at a time when I was objectively really underqualified. They could have gotten the best of the best. They could have gotten anybody, and I will always be so grateful.

This is why I talk all the time about being so grateful to these guys. People don't understand. They enabled me to learn how to do comms. I would not be in this position. I would be at a regular PR agency doing regular PR agency things if it hadn't been—

I don't believe that, though. I definitely believe in their influence and your appreciation for them, but I've known you too long. Your personality type would not allow you to be a normal person working in a normal company. Even the structure of your company is incredibly rare. I actually don't believe that you believe that.

Yeah. I don't know what I would be doing. Maybe I would have ended up here by some other means, but it doesn't mean I would have found this path.

You would have. You're too singular of an individual.

I could have ended up somewhere else. I don't know where.

I don't know where. But that's where the lessons of counterinsurgency came into play: accepting that you don't have the mainstream information networks, that you don't have a lot of people already on your side, not relying on those, and building your own.

So we—

So this is very much like—I think this is the playbook for startups, right? So explain—

Block and pose. There you go. Let's go. So explain—I love this idea of yours—the similarities between somebody who has an idea to start a company or a movement, which I love, the phrase you use, and a counterinsurgent, and what they have in common.

When I was studying counterinsurgency, they made us pretend to be a terrorist group because the best way to study the thing that you're fighting is to understand the thing that you're fighting. They had us create these mock terrorist groups, and you had to come up with your mission and vision. You had to create your manifesto.

We can talk about the importance of a good manifesto. This is when I got really manifesto-pilled. I think we're maybe overdoing it now. Maybe part of that is my fault, but the value of a good manifesto cannot be overstated.

What makes a good manifesto?

A good manifesto looks at the world and says, “The people that we're fighting or trying to replace have more numbers than us. They have more money than us. They have more force than us. Today, they have more legitimacy than us. But we are going to beat all of that with more intensity.”

There's a quote that's maybe apocryphal that says, “One man plus the truth is a majority.” I think that applies to insurgent movements, where a small number of people who are willing to die for the cause—in this case, literally—and have that intensity can overcome everything. There's no amount of money or incumbency that can overcome somebody who wants it so much more.

The purpose of a manifesto is to make concrete that intensity and paint for people a vision of what the world could be, such that when they see it, they are willing to leave their jobs, families, security—everything—to go and make that happen. A good manifesto is something that, once you see it, you can't get out of your head. You have to go do it.

The manifesto is the magnet. If you don't have that, you have no right to go up to someone and say, “Leave your comfortable job and leave your beautiful family and come with me on what is probably a death mission.” Who do you think you are? You have no right unless you have articulated that.

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So you've written a great manifesto. It's called “Go Direct: The Manifesto.”

Yes.

Okay. Can you explain the ideas contained in your manifesto and why you think it's so important for founders today to do this?

I remember trying to name the manifesto. I spent days and days on it, and then we ended up with “Go Direct: The Manifesto.”

It was one of these things that you toil over for weeks, maybe months, and then end up writing in 2 hours.

The key idea in the manifesto is that traditional PR as we know it is dead. Maybe you can see the body, but it doesn't have a pulse. And it's a good thing, because traditional PR meant that you would have to filter your message through somebody else's prism. You would have to be dependent on somebody else to have the goodwill, alignment, and means to faithfully portray to the world what you want to say.

That actually very rarely happens. If you're doing something pretty uncontroversial and well understood, it can go fairly smoothly because it won't be distorted that much. But if you're doing something unconventional, far outside the mainstream, or unpopular, then you do not want this to be filtered through somebody else's prism.

The second thing is that I believe there's a lot of virtue in being self-reliant for its own sake.

For its own sake, even if nothing is on the line, we are sovereign human beings. We should be in control of our destinies. We should be in control of our narrative destinies and the stories that help us achieve that destiny. This is narrative sovereignty. You never want to depend on someone else.

The manifesto was a way of giving founders permission and exhortation: nobody’s going to do this for you. That’s good. It is, in some way, scary, but it is, in some way, liberating because you’re the guy. There’s no other guy who’s going to go do this for you.

The same amount of seriousness that you apply to the product, the code, or the hiring, you have to apply to your story. You’re the only person who can say it. You’re the only person who can do it that effectively because, especially at the beginning, you don’t have a lot of evidence to back you up. You have your word, and you’re going to back it up with your personal reputation, right?

The greatest founders we know go to the people they know and say, “I know this sounds crazy. Hear me out. I’m going to do this. We’re going to do this together.” The other person is like, “All right. Okay, David Senra, this seems okay because you’re doing it, and I trust you.”

So, when I read your manifesto, one thing I love about you—and this is the idea that it’s a very old idea. You take these ideas from history and from the past.

When I’m reading your manifesto on your website, I’m like, “Oh, this is Julius Caesar. This is Napoleon. This is Churchill. This is Abraham Lincoln.” You’re just applying it, in many cases, to the legendary tech founders of today.

Yeah. The reason the company is called Rostra is because the Rostra was the speaker’s platform in Rome, from which history was changed. There were many times when the mood in the city was one thing, somebody hauled themselves up there and stood to face the crowd, and then they stepped down and the mood was another.

This happened after Caesar’s murder. The city completely turned in its perception of what had just happened, who was the good guy, who was the bad guy, and who had legitimacy because of words spoken from the Rostra.

I think that we figured out how to relate to, move, rally, and gather other people a long time ago. Some of that art has been lost in recent times because we’re distracted and our attention spans are shot. But these are all things that we figured out a long time ago.

Okay, so let’s go back to where we were earlier. You started working with Anduril. This idea of going direct comes after your experience with them, correct?

Mm-hmm.

Okay. How did the work you were doing with Anduril and Palmer shape this manifesto that was going to come a few years later?

Necessity is the mother of invention.

A lot of companies now consider going direct the default. I believe they have Anduril, Palmer, Matt, Brian, and Trae to thank for this because not going direct was actually just not an option. You’re going to call some mainstream reporter and say, “Hey, the guy who got fired from Facebook for supporting Trump, who you hate, is doing a thing, and you should hear him out.” That’s just very hard to do.

There were a really small number of reporters who were fair during that time, that I remember, but it just wasn’t the way. We were not going down the traditional path of TechCrunch or what Palmer calls trying to get the coolest startup award at one of these conferences. We were going directly to Quantico, speaking to the Marines there. Palmer went to Camp Pendleton. We went to speak at National Defense University and to speak to the CIA—just going to the people directly, literally walking into their building, speaking to them, and then showing them the thing.

And then the same for recruiting.

Yeah. You said this before: you go to, whatever—I’m just going to make it up—the New York Times to get a message out and reach the actual 200 people you want to reach. You’re assuming that maybe 500,000 people read the story, and hopefully the 200 people you want to reach—the people who actually matter to the impact you’re trying to have in the world—get to that.

It’s like, well, let’s just cut that. Just go directly to them.

Just tell them.

Yeah.

You and I both care about a really shockingly small number of people’s opinions, and these are people who, in our case, are a text message away. Why would you go to somebody else as a supplicant, asking them to carry the message for you so that they can filter it through their worldview, then their editor, then put it into their publication, and then hope that that spray-and-pray reaches some of the people you care about?

Also, by the way, you lose—we were talking earlier about intensity and the power of intensity to overcome a lot of other things—you lose the intensity along the way because it becomes watered down.

The founder relays the message to their PR person, who then puts it into their words or tries to remember it and relays it to a reporter, who then pitches their editor. Then they write it, the editor weighs in, it goes out, and whoever it’s reaching is trying to interpret it.

This is why, in AI right now, it’s so stark. You’ve got some AI companies that do not need a mainstream audience because all they care about is recruiting 5 top ML engineers. They actually know who they are, and they’re going to go to—

Good Morning America.

Good Morning America. The Kelly Ripa Show.

Yeah. Like, what are you doing?

Oprah? What? And blast out to some big number of who knows who these people are, as opposed to a podcast with a lot fewer listeners.

Brian Armstrong went to a podcast called Pod of Jake. It was a guy called Jake, and he had—I don’t know—100 listeners. Afterwards, he had 115 or something. Reach people like Brian. There are a few Substacks, a few people on X—you know where they’re getting their information. Just go there and work backwards.

Does this require—because I can’t tell the conditions in which this occurred—but I had the craziest experience where I wound up spending 8 straight hours with Palmer. I’ve never met a mind like his. He was unbelievably charismatic, with crazy storytelling, but he’s an inexhaustible mind, in my opinion. I couldn’t reach the bottom of him saying interesting things.

Time out. Wait, is this when you had to call emergency backup podcasters to come help? [Laughter]

I’ve told you this story.

Had to call a friend.

So, no, we just happened to be with—it was a weird circumstance. I can’t even tell any details, but there just happened to be other podcasters, and I was just like, “Dude, after 3 hours, you’ve got to start asking questions because I can’t.” I had to tap out. It was so wildly entertaining.

It’s similar to Toby Lütke in a different way. You can’t predict what his response to your statement is going to be, and that makes it very fascinating. But in this case, I was like, “Holy, I’ve got to tap out on this.”

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 quieter and more introverted. You can have a whole range of personality types, but you have to have intensity of belief in the idea. 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? There’s that idea that Steve Jobs would say, “The simpler the idea, the more it’ll spread,” right?

There are actually 2 books on this: Insanely Simple and The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Read both of them, and you know he was such a clear thinker. Look at the way he describes his products and the way he does an interview. 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. I’ll give you an example of a founder that I met at an event. I actually don’t remember his company. We don’t work together, but that makes him a good example.

We spoke for maybe 7 minutes, and for 6 of those minutes he was saying, “Okay, I have a business where anybody can become their own cloud kitchen. There are all these people at home who know how to cook really good food, and there are people who want more variety than the stuff they get on DoorDash. I’m connecting them, and there’s a network of—”

There’s a lot there, and we had to distill it down. I was listening to this, and I thought, “Okay, so you’re turning a cook into a chef.” He said, “That’s it,” and he ran with it.

Sometimes it’s just having somebody who’s not necessarily smarter than you—and I don’t know more about the topic, especially with some of these AI founders who are just technical geniuses. Sometimes someone sitting across from you can take your word cloud of thoughts and ideas and suggest a synthesis.

For you to see that coming from someone else makes you recognize that that actually is the core of your idea. Now you have the compressed, simple thing that you can share and spread.

Okay, so you have a simple idea—

That can spread.

You're starting a movement. Therefore, you have to have some kind of passion.

It's almost like you're mission-driven. How many clients do you have at this moment?

Over a dozen.

Okay. So—oh, now we're expanding. I know you're expanding your company. 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. How are you going to get somebody else to believe it if you don't believe it?

Okay, perfect. What I'm trying to get to is: What are the things that founders listening to this need to do before they can go direct for it to actually work?

They need to convince themselves. 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. If you haven't convinced yourself of what it is and why it's worth doing, and that you're going to dedicate your life to it, then why would anybody else believe in it?

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 Vercingetorix, he came out and was the easiest target of anybody because of the way he was dressed. People saw him and rallied back up: "He's going to fight. We have to fight."

Joan of Arc—everything. You see the leader, or you see a leader, doing the thing that you now feel ashamed not to be doing. The 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 to articulate why you're doing this. What is your mission? Why even start the company? Why work like a dog 7 days a week? I call you at 11:00 at night on the East Coast, and you pick up. You have a bunch of kids, and you have this crazy life. Why are you doing this?

I think the world is better when we allow new technologies to take root and flourish. 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? That's the origin of that quote. I thought it was from the Bible or something. It's 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." You might build it; maybe nobody uses it. Maybe it gets regulated out of existence, and maybe nobody wants to come work on it and you get overtaken. 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.

There are a lot of really brilliant people working on the engineering and on 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, 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? Are 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 has one of the worst favorable ratings of almost anything. You've seen people talk about AI at 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, because I'd like your response to this.

A lot of CEOs are describing that AI will cause massive job loss. Most 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 will 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% unemployment rate in a year. Eric Schmidt did 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, because I'd 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; that it's going to disrupt all of these jobs; and that it will change the landscape. I forget his exact words, but the vibe was, "It is taking away jobs. Deal with it and get on the train, or you're on the tracks."

2 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. Think 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 could get on the bandwagon with me." That's just the wrong framing.

Second, 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 their fear or anxiety, or recognize what it would be. He dismissed any potential anxiety that would arise from that. He sounded completely secure and blasé about this happening.

A lot of people have opined on the messaging of how you're going to talk about job displacement. Are you a doomer? Are you overoptimistic? All of this aside, a human talking to another human should recognize the other human's reaction to that news.

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 being 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.

The same way that, 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 lay that as the foundation. It can be some anodyne thing, like, "You and I both really like that hot chocolate." You did? That's completely unrelatable to me. So it would be something else.

People don't understand that she has hot chocolate in that cup. Every time I see you, it feels inappropriate as an adult. It fuels me—a grown adult. What fuels me, and that's every restaurant I'm at with you—

I revel in the fact that others don't recognize—

The potential of this as a performance beverage.

You're a grown-up.

You should not be having hot chocolate every dinner.

This is why I don't have to spray my nose with the Zicam stuff, because—

My nose, my throat—I talk for a living—

The hot chocolate is helping me speak—

For a living.

If we were arguing and I wanted to get us back on the same page, I would say, "So, yeah, well, now we have to reconcile. Now we have to be like, 'This is a really beautiful place.'"

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. A lot of the senior people in AI that the general public sees are 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."

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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.

The storyteller is the most powerful person in the world. Something important, which I was thinking about while listening to you, is that I asked you, “What’s your mission? Why do you even do this?” You were talking about the importance of creating new technology, and I think you and I—what you’re doing on the PR side and what I’m trying to do with the podcast—are both pursuing something similar.

This new podcast, this show, essentially started out as, “We should have a love letter to capitalism,” right? I’m the son of a Cuban immigrant. My grandfather was born in Cuba, and when Castro took over, he said, “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.

What’s weird to me is that capitalism seems like one of the greatest inventions humanity has ever had. It’s a huge force for good and one of the reasons America is the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet. It 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, “The idea that they protested outside your house and put a guillotine in front of your house is insane to me.” I said, “You made a magic button that I can press, and anything comes to my house. It used to take 2 days; now it comes 3 hours later.”

I was like, “That’s what it’s like. You deserve all the money.” He just laughed and laughed and laughed.

But I think you don’t displace the other story. You can’t just say, “Communism sucks. Look at all the people who have died. Look at what happened in Cuba. Look at what happened to all these countries.” You have to tell a better story. You have to give people a better alternative.

I use AI every day. It seems miraculous to me. We use it for the podcast, for learning, for entertainment, and for all these other things. The people in AI aren’t putting forth a better story.

They’re not doing it in the right way. There are people who have painted really wonderful, optimistic visions of what AI could create in the future, but it feels like PR. People write it off because it feels heavy-handed.

The last time there was a really effective techno-optimist message was The Jetsons. It worked because they weren’t beating you over the head with, “Technology is going to make your life great.” The show was about other things. It was about the family dynamic: a family where you have a robot in your house doing all your work and a flying car in the background.

It was ambient. It was assumed. By contrast, in techno-pessimist stories, the tech is in the foreground, and the story is about the tech. Terminator, Blade Runner—anything where there’s a future you potentially don’t want—the dystopian stories are about the technology. The tech is the thing people focus on.

But in utopian stories about technology, when you make the technology the thing people focus on, they write it off as PR. What we want is for the utopian or optimistic stories about technology to have the technology in the background, just ambient.

A lot of people have read science-fiction novels, and science-fiction novels are usually not about the technology itself. They’re about a story. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is about Nell and her family, and Seveneves is about people being sent into space. The fact that they have technology to preserve the human race is in the background as an enabler.

These are the types of stories that inspire people so much that they start companies. You and I have talked to many founders who started companies because they were inspired by science fiction. Palmer Luckey is obviously one of them. It’s not because those stories are bludgeoning you over the head with one specific invention. It’s because they’re showing a better world and the human stories within it, with technology as ambiance.

I feel like if people went back and studied David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker, and some of the greatest copywriters and founders from the heyday of Madison Avenue and the advertising agencies, they’d find that they all say the same thing over and over again: “Show the benefit. Show what it does. Don’t show your product; show the change it enables.”

One of the best examples of this is a story Steve Jobs told when he was really young. I think he was in his 20s. He talked about the most efficient form of locomotion for any creature on Earth. A human being is really low on that compared with other animals, but you put a human on a bicycle, and he’s way more efficient than even a condor, I think—the animal Jobs compared him to.

Jobs said, “If you put him on a bicycle…” And then you’re like, “Oh, I want a computer, because this now makes me more efficient. It takes me from a slow-footed human to the fastest and most efficient animal on the planet.” What I’m creating is the bicycle for the mind.

That’s a perfect illustration of, “I’m not selling you bits and bytes and RAM. I’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 Tobi Lütke does this perfectly. The way he conveys what Shopify is all about is that it’s trying to create more entrepreneurs in the world.

One thing I want to point out is that talking about the change the product creates in you is exactly the right way to do it. What we were talking about earlier—showing technology in the background of a human story, rather than bludgeoning people with the technology—is more effective.

The second thing that’s really effective about the bicycle for the mind is the analogy. He saved himself 2 paragraphs of explanation by saying the word “bicycle,” because we know what a bicycle is.

I was talking to a founder a few weeks ago who said, “We take a system that ingests the data, finds the inefficiencies, and identifies…” I thought about it and said, “Oh, it’s Ozempic for companies.” If you know what Ozempic is, you’ve just saved yourself 2 paragraphs of explanation. You get the complexity and the simplicity. It’s the best of both worlds.

Give me some more examples of the way your clients describe their missions. How do they distill it down to the existence of their company? What is their company doing for their customers and the people who use their products?

You asked about Shopify, and Tobi is very good at this. He talks about 2 levels of Shopify. One is the level of this wondrous technology and what it means for the world. 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.

Shopify is a hedge against every job being taken, because they can’t take away our agency or our ability to start new things. Shopify creates the technology to make that happen. Shopify is the infrastructure for entrepreneurship. That’s one level of it.

Another level is the merchants. Tobi and Harley Finkelstein do a wonderful job of telling the Shopify story through what it has done for the merchants.

SKIMS is a successful company, and its IPO was possible because Kim Kardashian, Jens Grede, and the team didn’t have to sit down and say, “We want to start this store, but first we have to figure out how to individually do a web portal, payments, design, and all of these other things, and then patch it together.” How many people face that as an insurmountable obstacle before they’re able to bring their business online?

The story of one merchant going from someone’s dream—it might be somebody in a small town who is retiring and has always wanted to open a marmalade shop—to one of the biggest celebrities on Earth launching SKIMS and turning it into a thriving business is the best way to talk about Shopify, even though they’re not the hero of the story.

Again, we’re seeing a theme. It’s the same thing I said previously about The Jetsons. The Jetsons are the heroes of the story. It’s not a show about robots where the robot maid is the hero and the Jetsons are side characters. The human story is the hero, and then the technology is ambient.

It’s the same thing with Shopify. In the SKIMS story, Kim, Jens, and their team are the entrepreneurs. They’re the heroes. Shopify is ambient, because without Shopify, none of this would be possible in its current form. But you’re not bludgeoning people with the fact that this is about Shopify.

All right. You wrote this essay called “Standing on 2026,” which I absolutely loved. You talked about the difference in strategy that founders should take moving forward. Can you lay out the thesis and the main idea behind what you’re writing?

This is my philippic for the year, this tirade I’ve been going on about: everything seems fake now. Everything is fake. Everything is fake.

You go to some of these launches, and first of all, every launch uses the same slop cinematic video, the same template. It was original a few times, and now they’re all doing it. Then half of them have completely fake engagement.

You saw one from today—I think you said it had 100 likes but 4,700 retweets. Why are you paying for retweets?

Yeah. There was another one from a couple of weeks ago, and then another one the week after that.

And the reason we know is because you and I have the eye to look for it. Also, I know who some of these agencies are. I get the messages pitching the paid promotions, and I know the people who get the messages. You can just start to tell after a while that, number 1, the amount of engagement this thing has is completely disproportionate to how interesting it actually is.

And number 2, when you look through the people who are engaging with it, it's all some random account in a developing country [laughter] that has no other tweets other than shilling products like this. When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake. I 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 or 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? What would you do today?

You can do things that can't be faked. 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.

Second, there are things that the fakes can't replicate. 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. A fake company can't do that. There's a sense of taste, discernment, and beauty.

That I don't see in these fake things. They're not made with love. You keep saying there's going to be 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: Everything is beautiful in someone's eyes, and this piece of art that is 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 the front of a magazine.

Yes. Victoria's Secret had this phase of obese women and men. Men's Victoria's Secret. It became [laughter]—this isn't Victoria's Secret.

But it was for a while. Why are we all pretending it was like the emperor's new clothes, the emperor's new lingerie? We're all pretending that this is still sexy, and we're pretending that this still looks good.

Anyway, coming off the back of that, people are allowed now to say, "This is more beautiful than this." A beautiful building is more beautiful than an ugly building, and a beautiful website is worth creating. This is what Joe Gebbia and the National Design Studio team are doing: saying, "We believe that more beautiful experiences on the internet reflect the dignity of being an American citizen, and that is what we want. So 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. Anything, big or small, glamorous or very pedestrian, like a simple government website, can be made more beautiful. When it is, people appreciate it so much more because we do have this inherent yearning for beauty. 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. I just read this book, the memoir of a guy named Kelly Johnson, who's the one that started Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin. He worked so much, and his work was so stressful and difficult, that he wound up having to have part of his stomach cut out. He got ulcers from the unbelievable pressure he put on himself.

He had to find a way to literally take himself out of his work, so he liked to spend time outdoors and became a rancher. He said one of the most important things that ever happened in his life was simply the fact that he liked watching the sunset every night. He said, "There's nothing more beautiful on the planet than a sunset." He's writing those words 40 years ago. He's been dead for 30 or 35 years, and it's still true today. It was still true in the time of Julius Caesar.

Explain the connection, because you talk about everything being fake, which I agree with, and at the same time you talk about taste and beauty. Explain how those things connect. It's almost like taste and beauty—I think the way you describe taste is that taste is the recognition of beauty. So explain how taste and beauty are an antidote to everything being fake.

Well, first of all, on the thing about sunsets, the one thing more beautiful than a sunset is a sunset with friends. Sunset with the homies.

Yeah. 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.

One of the other things on the list of things that are real and 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, and elegance are antithetical to fake things, it's because fake things are not beautiful.

It 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. I think it's because no one has put that love and care into them, because why would you put the love and care into something if you are just going to buy the engagement anyway? On the flip side, beautiful things can't be faked.

Beauty is a scoreboard. It's a very obvious scoreboard. Someone who is healthy and takes care of themselves—you see it right there. You can't pretend. 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—the effort they put into making their product more beautiful. What would be something we can point to?

I would suggest going to General Matter's website. We, they, and a talented team slaved over this website for a long time. Some slaved more than others. I'm not saying I was in the mines 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.

You see it, and it's so simple. Then you go into the mission and the manifesto, and it's so short. 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 and so elegant, in my opinion. But you wouldn't have gotten there without going through that journey.

If somebody had just thrown up some kind of slop site, violated the thing, and put a bunch of random words that Claude wrote up there, I don't think you would get the same thing. Or, even worse, use a template.

You're anti-template. I'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, 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. I can make my life easier and have 20 more minutes at night to read by using more templates.

The reason I resist it is, number 1, no 2 situations are the same. By pretending that they are, we miss that texture. At the beginning of this conversation, we talked about context and texture and respecting that. I think that alpha comes from the little cracks in reality that only you can see and that you can exploit.

If you are just plastering over that with a templated version of something else, you are sacrificing the opportunity to be better. I am sacrificing the opportunity to be better than my own work of 6 months ago. Why do I want to settle for the schlubby nonsense of the thing that I did when I was 6 months dumber than I am now? I'm not going to do that. So, I don't use templates.

The second reason is that we've talked about things that are inherently valuable. 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 a founder that I literally didn’t care about, they would, by definition, be someone 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. And 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. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

I don’t know if you’re going to remember this, but hearing you speak right now, there are actually templates in communication, too. You see this with autocomplete because we just say the same stuff over and over again. You and I were at an event. Cognition is a customer of yours, and I’m friends with 2 of the founders. They asked me to come to this, actually, by pure chance, at the same hotel we’re at today.

Was this the thing where I sent that email?

I’m going to get to that. Exactly. This is good. You do remember this.

They were like, “Hey, will you come do this event and interview 2 founders for us?” I’m like, “Yeah, I love you guys. That’s fine.” I don’t check my email. I push everything to text, and my email is something I literally just don’t read. I happened to see one pop up, and it said, “Lulu.” I’m like, “Oh, I’ll read Lulu’s email. I’m not reading this other stuff.”

In this email, there had been a back-and-forth, and I had missed the thread. I guess the other founder’s normal PR person had sent over a list of questions: “These are the questions that we want David to ask the founder.” First of all, you’re crazy if you think you can control what’s going to come out of my mouth. You jumped in, and you were like, “These questions suck. David would never ask these questions. These aren’t good enough.”

Then you read them, and they’re just the most bland, boring, templated questions you’ve ever seen. I think there’s something to this. Why are we attracted to people like Palmer Luckey? We had Marc Andreessen on this podcast, and I told Marc that the 2 best podcast guests, at least business-wise, in terms of what comes out of their mouths and how they’re able to speak, are him and Palmer Luckey. They’re so fascinating and entertaining to hear speak.

Part of it is because it’s impossible to say that either of them—or any of the good communicators, even Elon or anybody else like that—is speaking in template form. They are truly unique and leaning into what makes them unique.

When you use a template, you are giving up on the possibility that you could be better. I say this sometimes about AI writing: 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 similar output from the same shared brain.

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. 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.

What are we, if not a unique combination of beliefs, ideas, and feelings? 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 mute it, you are killing a really sacred part of yourself. So I can understand why he would say, “Imitation is suicide.”

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 founder-CEO comms, right? You also do crisis comms for the same companies. I need to make sure I understand the way you think about this based not only on the work you’ve done in the past and the clients that I know of, but also on this essay that you wrote, “Everything Is Fake.” What is the proper reading of that essay? Is it that you need to lean into the more distinct parts of yourself? Is that what you’re doing with your customers—or your clients, rather?

Yeah. I am leaning into things that only I can do. There are people, many of them, who are smarter than me, more sophisticated, better connected, 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 are a million ways you could get something else from someone who’s 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. 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 this specific thing.

Any of the founders that we’re talking about 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? Now that we are inundated with all of this fake, 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. That’s another part of it, too.

Do you know who Dana White is?

Mhm. Okay.

Yeah, I saw your—

Yeah. I think he’s a perfect example of this. I would tell a lot of founders, “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. That’s how you should communicate.

There are 2 things that came to mind when you were just speaking. One, he has this idea that the most important thing is that you have to know who you are. That’s step 1. He’s like, “Don’t do anything else until you figure out who the hell you truly are.” And 2, figure out what you truly want to do in life.

Once you make those 2 decisions, he’s got this simple genius: You just wake up every day and get after it. You already know who you are and what you want to do, so you just do that every day and never stop.

And I think those 2 things—knowing exactly who you are, what you want to do, and then finding that opportunity that only you can do. Mhm.

That is the most important thing. If you’re trying to do great and distinct things in the world, you have to do those first.

Yeah. And sometimes when you see repeat entrepreneurs who are successful, it is a version of that company. William Hockey, who did Plaid and is now doing Column, feels like a natural evolution of 1 big mission for his life. I think it’s possible to have multiple companies but 1 meta-company, if you will. I always ask these kinds of founders, “What’s the last company?”

Because, yeah, you can see it in a lot of these examples. You had to go through these experiences, but there’s 1 company that you just wouldn’t sell. There’s just—this is the last thing I work on. I think that’s when you’ve truly found your mission.

What you said about Dana White reminds me of something. 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. You have the human story, and then the thing that you’re trying to sell is sort of in the background. Maybe we call this the Jetsons rule.

Mhm.

He did this with MMA. There was a reality show before watching MMA was mainstream. Humans being interested in the lives and striving of other humans was mainstream. It always has been. 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.

If you watched a season of this, you got to know MMA. It’s like people who watch F1. They just get to know the show.

Netflix. Yeah. Whatever it’s called. “Drive to Survive.”

I watched it. I can’t remember.

That got me into F1. I didn’t care about F1 until that. This is why I learned drug dealing from The Wire in the background.

I’m kidding. I’m not a drug dealer.

Many examples of this exist, 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. If you wanted to know about persuasion or starting a movement, go read Cicero. These ideas have all been solved. You just have to go find them.

One thing that Dana told me was interesting. 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—

I love watching people fight.

Go back thousands of years: if you have 2 men, usually 2 men, they're going to come to some kind of combat. The great thing about his sport, which he realized could be global from day 1, is that you don't have to speak the same language. I could watch it as an American, you could watch it as a Brazilian, you could watch it as a Chinese person. We're watching the same thing, and we still understand what's going on. 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, we actually went to train with UFC fighters. We trained with the team of Urijah Faber, who's now in the Hall of Fame and created and pioneered the bantamweight category. He and his team spent the day training with us physically, but also just talking about their mindset.

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 want to do or know how to do. They're going to do this, and they don't need a lot of infrastructure around them. They don't need anyone to tell them that they're ready. They're just going to go do it.

The other thing that they talked about was that sometimes your big break is being called up for a fight on short notice, because you're not the person in the big letters, but you're hoping to be. If that 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. You have to be ready for that moment.

Their mantra was, “Don't get ready; stay ready.” Your big fight could happen at any time, which I think is a good guiding principle for—

Okay, so I have these conversations selfishly because I get to sit across from world-class experts and essentially just pepper them with questions. I'm looking for ideas I can then apply to my business, and hopefully the people listening do the same.

Usually, great founders build their careers off a handful of ideas. It's not 20; it's 5, 4, or 3. So when I think about you, I think, “Okay, let me summarize your handful of ideas, and you tell me if I'm missing some or if I'm wrong in any.”

Number 1: lean into what makes you distinctive.

Mhm.

Number 2: go direct—not in any particular order. Number 3: you have to simplify your message so it spreads, right? And number 4: you have to have some kind of mission.

Mhm.

What am I missing?

Trust yourself. This sounds very self-help, kind of cheesy, but this is the message: you need to believe in yourself versus 100 other people, 1,000 other people, or millions of other people. You need to have the actually insane confidence in your idea that you're willing to trust 1 person over everybody else.

That is very hard to do, right? If you're looking at any kind of scenario and there's 1 guy saying this and 1 million people saying it can't be done, you might want to side with 1 million people. But as we've said, 1 man plus the truth is a majority. You have to believe that you're that person, that what you're seeing is the truth, and you have to pursue it.

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. If you change what that thing is, you start the clock again and start the compounding over again. It's not compounding. Compounding is incompatible with changing the thing that you're compounding.

I would say that's the 5th point. And 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, both older, who are immigrants from Europe. They're living in the US—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 a mental illness, a form of schizophrenia or something adjacent. It's called referential mania.

He's super paranoid. It means that he thinks that everything that happens has something to do with him, and he sees conspiracies everywhere. He's tortured by this.

It's his birthday, and they go buy him a birthday gift. They're trying to figure out what to get him, so they get these jellies and go to take them to him. 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.”

They go home, and that night they're thinking about their memories. The father says, “We have to get him out of there.” They're at the kitchen table. It's really late, around midnight or something, and the phone rings. They're surprised. The woman picks it up, and there's a little girl.

The little girl says, “Charlie. I'm looking for Charlie.” The woman says, “No, sorry. You must have dialed the wrong number.” She hangs up, and she and the man continue their conversation. She says, “In the morning, we'll go get him out.”

Then the phone rings again, and that'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?

It's incomplete. Who was the little girl? Who was 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.

I think the message from that story is that 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. Wrong numbers happen all the time. Why do we care? Who's the little girl? It's just a wrong number.

Mhm. What happens to the son? Either he lives or he dies. I just told you a bunch of information. 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. In the story, there's way more detail. You can pick at things like the color of the jellies, the fact that he forgot the keys, and all of this.

What it says to me is that we all have a form of referential mania. We actually have what, in this young man, was a severe mental illness, but we have a version of it, which is that we need to believe that things around us are pointing to something. If we're not told what that is, we will try to fill it in ourselves, because our brains crave a story.

If you're a founder and you're giving people a bunch of information—“I hired this person. We're opening an office here. Here are some current events. We fundraised.”—people will weave that into a narrative whether you want them to or not. That's not in your control.

The thing in your control is whether you get to decide what that story is, fill it in for them, and give them a sense of satisfaction and completion—a feeling like, “Okay, I understand it. Here's where this is going. Therefore, here's what likely comes next.”

If I had told you this story in a slightly different form, you might have assumed that the son 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. This is what founders often aren't paying enough attention to.

It's the space in between the facts that ties them into a story, and it's our responsibility to fill that in. 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 to end. Lulu, thanks for joining us.

Thank you.