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Masterclass for founders in what way is the right way to deal with communications, both internal and external.
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The basic steps are get your story right, then put your story out about the company and then about the founders, and then the people who are representing you day to day, your influencer network.
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It's this idea of be a human being, talk to other human beings.
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The founder story is so important because you are a human mascot for the company.
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You're never gonna reason somebody out of the position that they didn't reason themselves into.
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But here's the thing, the person that's attacking you is not your audience.
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If you're for everybody, you're for nobody.
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Your first product before your actual product is the story about your product. Strategy is pretty easy.
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Execution is a really hard thing.
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You have to find product market fit for that (story) before people will be receptive to your actual product.
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The best meme in the world is a meme that the author of that meme loses control of.
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It's your personal reputation, it's your ability to ever start another company.
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It's your ability to hire.
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You cannot outsource this because it's gonna come back to you.
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If you can't communicate with other people.
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It doesn't matter how smart you are.
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Put your story in the template of the eternal story that has worked for all of the history of mankind.
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Tell it through yourself, your executives and your team and your influencers, and then tie it to something that people already care about. And it's that simple,.
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Don't let things happen to you.
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Go, go and happen to things.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
2:00
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops.
2:00
Today, I have been looking forward, Lulu, to this chat with you, because we had to change it and things got fucked up, and then I got COVID at the Stability launch party, and you have been very charming in your willingness to say, "No problem, no problem."
2:19
My guest today is Lulu Cheng Meservey, who is the EVP of Corporate Affairs and the head honcho of Communications at Activision Blizzard.
2:32
She used to be on the board there, but now you joined the team. Lulu, welcome.
2:37
Also, by the way, just like Yale, BA, my daughter graduated from there.
2:44
And the one thing I love about Yale's as opposed to Harvard is Yalies don't drop the Y bomb.
2:49
Harvard, like there's the old joke, right, about Texan that went to Harvard, doesn't know which one to mention first.
2:54
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, or if you're vegan and adopted a pet.
2:56
No, I think the etiquette for having gone to Yale is to say you went to school in New Haven, and then leave the expected pause while you fluff your cravat.
3:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, exactly.
3:07
Well, so for those who don't know Lulu, she is possibly my favorite version of what the communications director head honcho should be doing today, especially for founders.
3:16
We want to make this podcast very, very useful for founders who, like a lot of this is brand new, and having... Not my first rodeo.
3:31
When I came upon Lulu, it was because of her incredibly kick-ass response to the people at the New York Times who decided to write a hit piece about Substack.
3:42
And I'm looking, I'm reading it and I'm loving it.
3:50
I'm loving every minute of it, and I'm like, "Who the fuck is this? I want to meet her." Welcome.
3:56
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Thank you.
4:00
The "who the fuck is this?"
4:00
is what I go for when I introduce myself to people.
4:00
So that happened while I was on maternity leave, by the way.
4:04
So I was coming in with very little context.
4:09
I was back the first weekend and this thing dropped.
4:09
So to be fair to many people who worked on this when I was missing context, I don't know a lot of the backstory.
4:14
I just saw the story and saw that there was no reflection of reality in that story.
4:18
Virtually no reflection of reality in that story.
4:23
And what they did was something that founders probably are familiar with, which is the facts that are buried in paragraph 12 tell the real story for about seven words, and that the headline is something that is just in the fiction section next to Tolkien.
4:33
And so I felt like maybe we should say something about that, so we did.
4:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love the way you downplay that now.
4:40
What I loved about it...
4:40
And also, there was another hit piece, I think it was in Wired- Lulu Cheng Meservey: If you're going to list our hit pieces, this is going to be like a 10-hour podcast.
4:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm not going to.
4:51
Lulu Cheng Meservey: We got one every other day, I think.
4:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The headline was, "Substack doubles down on uncensored free speech," and my first thought was whoever wrote this headline got voted most despised douchebag at [inaudible], right?
5:01
How have they so lost touch with reality?
5:08
Lulu Cheng Meservey: The answer to how people have lost touch with reality is a long one.
5:11
I like to assume that most people are trying to do a good job, and I like to assume that most people are trying to make the world better in their own way.
5:21
But sometimes you get a clash of worldviews, and I think the person who wrote that article was not saying to herself, "I'm going to go out today and be dishonest and slam a bunch of people who don't deserve it."
5:33
I think she was saying to herself, "Here's what makes the world better in my opinion, and they're not doing that and I'm going to go and call them out so that I can shift the world in this direction."
5:46
I think a couple of things are going on.
5:46
One is there's a lot more activism by all writers than there used to be, and two is that things become contentious that weren't before, so having a platform that lets people say the things that they want to say didn't used to be as controversial as it seems today.
6:05
So I will say that founders probably run up against this a lot of the time, where they get attacked.
6:11
The intent was maybe not an attack.
6:11
The intent was to make the world better in some way, but with a totally different worldview, and something that maybe founders think is outdated, and the end result is an attack on the company.
6:28
And then you end up with one side, this is what we're seeing now in tech, one side is saying, "The media keeps attacking us," and the other side in the media, because I deal with a lot of these people, who are good people trying to do their jobs for the most part, are saying, "We are trying to cover you and be fair, and you don't accept criticism."
6:42
So I think that's where we are today. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
6:48
I, of course, tend to be...
6:48
One of my old compliance guys at one of my first firms in asset management told me that I wrote like [inaudible]. Bam.
6:58
And so I actually owe a great deal of my career to some great journalists, and they weren't always kind to me, but when they weren't kind to me, it was fair. And so I am not...
7:08
Listeners, please, I'm kind of joking around when I say that.
7:13
But this adversarial nature, where there's, and it seems to be an agenda behind the pieces that are being written that is transparent in some cases, like the New York Times doesn't want all of their best writers going to Substack. I get that.
7:30
If I ran the New York Times, I wouldn't want my best writers going there either.
7:34
But I thought what would be great, and you and I chatted about it before we hit record, is both of us thought that this would be a great opportunity for you to give what I would call a masterclass for founders in what they might be hearing is the right way to try to deal with communications, both internal and external, and with the old comms handbook, which I think should be in the trash because it doesn't work anymore.
8:04
And you, thankfully, and I just got done rereading, have written extensively about this.
8:13
So if you wouldn't mind, if we could just start out, like we've hired you as an advisor. We have a new startup.
8:20
We don't have a lot of previous things to point to.
8:20
Like, I started a new company, but people know who I am, so I have to do things a little differently.
8:31
But let's just say you got a great idea, you got a great team, but this is your first time, your first rodeo, and we hire you as our consultant.
8:39
Give us some pointers for founders.
8:45
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Okay.
8:45
So I would start with the basis of a new framework, a new playbook.
8:47
The old playbook is based on something that probably worked really well for GE in the 1980s or whatever.
8:52
It's based on having really good, cozy relationships with institutional gatekeepers, where the gatekeepers of information are friends with you.
9:03
You're in their good graces.
9:03
Another thing it's based on is spending a shit ton of money.
9:08
Just spread money around.
9:08
And then another thing that it's based on is sheer volume, and then another thing it's based on is not being in the cross hairs of someone really powerful.
9:21
And so if you're a startup trying to do something different, all of those are the opposite of what you're working with.
9:27
You're probably threatening to a lot of people.
9:27
You're upending both powerful institutions and these sacred cow beliefs, because by the nature of putting something new out into the world, you're introducing people to something for the first time, and there will be people who are threatened.
9:40
And then the last thing is people will have ways of thinking about the world that aren't necessarily receptive to what you're building, because it's new.
9:49
And so what you're working with instead should be what I think of as the insurgency framework.
9:56
So I studied counterinsurgency in my past, and I think about things through that lens, which is if you're an insurgent, which is to say you're not the incumbent, you're not the state, you're not working with the money and the military might, what you need to do is look for asymmetric advantages.
10:08
And the asymmetric advantages that an insurgent has, there's a long list, but some of the top ones are you're native to the internet.
10:15
That is your home territory.
10:15
So insurgents in the real world will choose their territory to fight on, right?
10:20
It might be the forest, it might be the jungle, the beaches, whatever.
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Here, you know your networks on the internet.
10:27
You also probably have a network of other founders and investors who are of similar belief.
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You also probably have more courage, backbone, and conviction than the other side.
10:41
So this is when you think of 300 Spartans at Thermopylae holding off 10,000 Persians for three days.
10:46
How are they able to do that?
10:46
It's because they're fighting for different things.
10:50
It's because they're full-time warriors.
10:50
It wasn't they were sent out to do a task.
10:53
This is how startup founders carry their message into the world against incumbents, and I think it's a huge underrated advantage, asset to use.
10:59
So how do you use these assets? There's three ways.
11:05
Okay, I'll lay it out and then we can go into detail for each of them, but there's three modes of getting your message out there.
11:08
First, you have to craft the message, and we should probably talk about what that looks like, then the three modes of getting your message out are the story of the company, the narrative of the company and the mission, what this corporate entity is doing, and then the story of you, the founder or the CEO.
11:20
If there's co-founders, you're going to have to do all the co-founders, but the individuals who run the company.
11:30
Why are these human beings the right people at the right time to do this?
11:34
And then thirdly, it's your accolades, your ambassadors, your network, because the way that a startup gets its message out today is not one centralized bullhorn hoping that people will listen.
11:48
It's just too noisy and chaotic.
11:48
What you're doing is you're building a network of nodes.
11:52
I liken it almost to Bitcoin.
11:52
Bitcoin has no chief communications officer.
11:58
No one is running comms for Bitcoin, and if they had that person, they would probably be winning a ton of awards, because it's been incredible what Bitcoin has achieved.
12:06
But they've done this through influencers spread across the globe who are each sort of a chief communications officer.
12:16
And so what you're doing as a startup is you're building out this network of nodes, which, one, makes the message more believable, because it's coming from other human beings as opposed to from faceless corporate entities.
12:25
Two, it's making it more resilient when you get attacked, because it's the same reason why a Bitcoin is very resilient to attack.
12:32
It's hard for someone to attack all of the nodes.
12:36
So I think the basic steps are get your story right, then put your story out about the company and then about the founders, and then the people who are representing you day to day, your influencer network. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
12:50
And some of it is devilishly hard, because- Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, it's hard. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... you really have...
12:56
You know, like Mark Twain.
12:56
Everything gets attributed to him, so I'm not sure it was actually him, but it's attributed to him, anyway.
13:04
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Four score and...
13:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, right.
13:04
But he said, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug."
13:14
And that always stuck with me because I think it's really true, and I'm fascinated by what I call human OS, human operating system, and how people need to understand that neural real estate, i. e.
13:26
brain share, is so much more important than they understand.
13:35
And I want to pick up on your idea there of getting, like how would you sit with a founder and hone that message?
13:43
You have a formula that I was going to ask you about later.
13:43
Now might be the better time to talk about the formula.
13:50
But if you were, again, now you're consulting, you're doing this pro bono. Thank you. But you're consulting.
13:54
So you believe in the founder, you've done all your homework, you believe in the company, and then he or she gives you word vomit.
14:07
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, I got you.
14:07
And by the way, all my consulting would be pro bono, just for, I don't know, putting that out into the ether to eradicate any conflicts of interest.
14:15
I help companies that I like, and then companies that I don't like cannot pay me enough to do it.
14:20
So I'm in a very fortunate and fun position to be able to work with companies that I like, and a lot of them are in this position that you're describing, which is they're doing something entirely new that people don't even know how to think about yet, and they're forming that from scratch.
14:32
So okay, here's how I would start.
14:32
You get, this is very tactical, you get out your Google Sheet.
14:40
You fill in your what are we doing, why does it matter, how are we going to get it done, who are the people doing this, and then along the way, what are the principles we're going to adhere to?
14:50
Just one-page Google Doc, with some ad-libs, fill that out.
14:55
But then you're going to realize that you take this Google Doc and people do not care.
14:55
If you take this and just go around and shop it around to people, they're thinking about other stuff.
15:06
Their mental real estate, it's not like, you know how people say you have a dessert shelf?
15:06
You can get full on dinner, but you'll have room for dessert?
15:10
People don't have a mental dessert shelf waiting for your narrative.
15:14
Their brain is 100% full of just stuff from the world all the time.
15:19
So you need to get in there, and I think about putting your message out as finding product-market fit, where your first product before your actual product is the story about your product, right?
15:31
So your story about the product is your first product.
15:31
You have to find product-market fit for that before people will be receptive to your actual product, and the way you do that is the mother of all, read the room.
15:40
It's who are we trying to reach?
15:40
And the answer there is almost always potential employees, potential investors, potential customers.
15:47
For some startups, it's regulators.
15:55
For most other companies, regulators is later on.
15:55
Who are we going to reach, and what are those people thinking about today?
16:00
Because it's not my startup.
16:00
What are those people already thinking about today, and then how do we draw the line from that to this?
16:11
Now, there's a few ways to draw that line.
16:11
One is, I've been advised to think of a better analogy, and I haven't thought of one yet.
16:17
So I've been using gateway drugs, which is they're thinking about X thing and you want them to care about Y thing, and so you have to build that bridge for them, because they're not going to build it themselves.
16:29
People don't give Kamala Harris enough credit for doing this when she was a senator, where she did this really well when it came to education.
16:34
She would say, if you care about national defense and you are just focused on America's military strength, and I want you to focus on middle school education, then my message to you is going to be, "Did you know that people can't enlist in the army without a 10th-grade reading level?" Okay?
16:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's right.
16:56
Lulu Cheng Meservey: So that's building the bridge for them.
16:57
And so you as a startup have to figure out the thing they care about, where you are, and then what that bridge is, and then that bridge is your message.
17:05
Your message is not, "Hey, here's me, someone you don't care about who may or may not make money from this thing that you don't give a shit about, it doesn't affect your life." It's the bridge.
17:12
That's the message that you go out with.
17:12
And then secondly, so I don't...
17:18
Actually, I do have a dog.
17:18
My parents have a dog and I help take care of him.
17:22
I was going to say I don't have a dog, but I don't typically give him medicine.
17:22
People who give their dogs medicine will say, if you want to give a pill to a dog, the dog's not going to want to take the pill, whether the pill is good for him or not.
17:30
You need to put the pill inside a piece of cheese or something.
17:34
Don't go around handing out pills to people, whether it's good for them or not.
17:40
People don't want to eat pills.
17:40
Put the pill in some cheese.
17:45
And so the cheese is the thing that they're interested in, they find entertaining.
17:45
It's a current meme, it's a person they're fascinated by, and then the pill is whatever your corporate messaging is about your values, that they don't care about day to day, but you're going to slip in there and then it's going to be infused into their mind along with something that actually brings them value or entertainment or joy.
18:06
And so that's the high-level principle of how I would go about crafting the story with the basic facts, and then shaping it and filing it into a form factor that people are actually going to be attracted by. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
18:22
What do you think about the classic elevator pitches and things like that?
18:22
I get pitched a lot, and some of them, and I won't mention firms or people, but some of them just sound so rehearsed to me.
18:37
And is there a way to break that up?
18:37
I have my own way of doing that, but I want to hear what you would think would be a good way to break that up and make it seem more spontaneous and real.
18:48
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah.
18:48
Your elevator pitch needs two things, actually, three things, okay?
18:51
Your elevator pitch needs three things.
18:51
One is it can't be tightly scripted where you're trying to remember it word for word. It has to be concepts.
18:58
And so I actually try not to even write it down.
19:02
Unless it's for a purpose of just iterating on drafts, I try not to have a written version of this.
19:08
I try to have it come out in conversation.
19:08
So if I'm coaching you and you're a founder, we would do this verbally, where you just say it 40 times and each time is different.
19:17
But at the end, you sort of had a weighted average of the ones that felt good, and that's the ones you're going to say.
19:21
And here's the thing to remember.
19:21
It is better to mess up a word and say the wrong word than it is to come across as an automaton.
19:26
It is better to not have the exact right words than it is to sound mechanical, because if you mess up a word, your message might be 80% received instead of a 100% received.
19:39
If you mess up sounding like a human being, it'll be 0% received, because the words aren't what matters.
19:45
You're the thing that matters.
19:50
The medium is the message, and the person delivering it and the delivery, that's the message.
19:54
And so do not sacrifice sounding human for the sake of getting the words right, ever, and that goes to TV interviews, podcast interviews.
20:00
That's the first principle.
20:04
And if you as a startup founder are a technical genius who is not a Barack Obama-level orator, who is able to put on that performative sense of being natural, then don't try.
20:12
Just make it so that you don't have a script to remember and that you actually have to ad lib every time.
20:19
So something that I noticed with Michelle Obama was a couple years into the White House, she started, I think, she started introducing this kind of speech pattern when she was talking, even though- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I noticed that too.
20:35
Yes, Lulu Cheng Meservey: ...
20:37
even though there's a teleprompter, and we know it's scripted word for word.
20:39
It's a thing that makes it sound like she's coming up with it on the spot, because that's how people believe it more.
20:44
So that's the first principle.
20:47
Second principle is your elevator pitch and your whole narrative should center around benefits to human beings.
20:52
Crypto should be careful about this.
20:52
AI should be very careful about this.
20:52
Do not come across as a technology fetishist.
20:58
It is not about how cool it is that this thing is built on the blockchain.
21:05
It is about did it make the end user's life easier?
21:05
Was it faster than before?
21:05
And AI needs to do that now, because the applications on AI are really being built.
21:12
We're in the AI sort of application renaissance, beginning now. It's so important.
21:18
Do not make it about technology fetishism.
21:22
Make it about the benefits to human beings, because otherwise it turns into tech bros are just playing around with the zeros and the ones, and it's really fun for them and they're making money, but what is it doing for the rest of us?
21:35
And when there's a void, there's a vacuum around what's it doing for the rest of us, you never get people to err on the side of the positive.
21:41
It'll always be filled with FUD.
21:41
It'll never get filled with optimism. That's just the default.
21:46
And then the third principle is, whenever possible, do the gateway drug, dog pill in the cheese thing where you link it to current events.
21:58
You give people an example of why this thing is relevant, because you're not building something in a vacuum.
22:02
You're building something against the backdrop of where we are at this moment in history, and you have to paint that picture for people, because you can't expect them to do that work for you.
22:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, I love you, and if I could hire you away, I would hire you away, and we can talk about that later.
22:15
I mean, you just outlined the way that I do everything. I never am scripted.
22:21
If I try- Lulu Cheng Meservey: Oh, you're very unscripted. I appreciate that.
22:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Even if I try to script myself, I fuck it up.
22:22
I just hate scripts so badly that even if I wrote the script, I'd screw it up.
22:35
And I have three scripts that I'm actually very proud of, but they were for each of my children's wedding, because they wanted a copy of the remarks.
22:42
And all of them knew my attitude about it, and so for them it was like, "Wow, you actually wrote this out."
22:57
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, so it's special. But you're right.
23:00
Day to day, I think many people should do what you're doing, which is just not have a script.
23:03
And I don't do podcasts and interviews very often.
23:03
I'm more often the person behind the person.
23:03
So as I was thinking about today, well, I want to give Jim a good podcast.
23:10
I don't want to look dumb. What do I want to say?
23:14
And I knew coming into this I want to talk about going direct.
23:14
I want to talk about insurgency comms, and I had no script.
23:18
When you're asking me about these things, I was like, well, there's maybe two points, three points.
23:22
I'm kind of making it up on the spot, and it's better for me to hang up with you afterwards and feel like, oh, I should have said that other thing. Why didn't I? I feel so stupid.
23:31
And then I'll email you and be like, "Hey, [inaudible] make me sound smarter."
23:35
But that's better than me coming off here as if I'm reading from a script.
23:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
23:39
And I also agree profoundly on the “weave what's going on that day”.
23:44
So I used to be the primary portfolio salesperson for the company I'm leaving, O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
23:52
I literally have given thousands of speeches to groups of 20 to groups of nearly 20,000.
23:59
One of the things that I rebel at, and this is a problem of mine and I realize that, but I hate saying the same thing over and over and over and over again.
24:13
So one of the things that I figured out was, "Well, I don't have to."
24:19
So what I would do is I would read the local newspaper wherever I happen to be.
24:19
We have a big business in Canada so I know a lot about Canadian news.
24:25
But the point is, you can literally watch the faces in the audience change when you bring up something that is obviously near and dear to their heart.
24:39
I'm not a big sports guy, but boy, sports works really, really well in certain audiences.
24:46
But you've got, and you used the term earlier, read the room.
24:46
I work with a lot of younger people also pro bono and one of the things that's hard to teach is how to read a room.
24:54
Do you have some tricks for founders on how to better read a room?
25:02
Lulu Cheng Meservey: To make it more tactical, I'll talk about a literal room.
25:06
When you're going in to pitch or when you're going in to give a presentation or you're talking at a conference with something, talk to a bunch of people before.
25:16
Get there early and talk to a bunch of people before and you can ask them what's on their mind.
25:22
You can tell them, "I'm about to give this talk."
25:22
They'll probably say, "Oh cool, can you talk about this subject?"
25:26
It gives you a default intro where you can say, "I was talking to someone out in the hall who said they wanted to hear about this," and you can even imagine them in the audience looking at you.
25:37
It's good for calming nerves.
25:42
It's also good for making it relevant to at least one person and assuming that person isn't a total freakish outlier, probably a lot of people.
25:46
The other thing that's super tactical, by the way, about talking in front of crowds, I mean, there's a whole other thing we could go into about body language and all that.
25:57
But a breathing technique that, I think, Andrew Huberman has talked about is to not take the deep breaths that you're usually told to take.
26:03
If you have nerves before talking they say, "Take deep breaths."
26:08
And if you actually do this, what it does is it has the effect of raising your stress levels.
26:12
And what you're supposed to do is breathe in and then take another breath in and then let it out.
26:18
And what I've noticed as a mom is that this is actually the same method they teach you for birthing class.
26:29
It's the thing that is supposed to help your body calm down.
26:29
It's the like in-and-out.
26:29
So that's the thing to do for 30 seconds before you go on, have someone that you're talking to beforehand so that you're already warm, and then get a sense of what's on that person's mind so that when you go out there, you know you're speaking to at least one individual, but probably more.
26:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that's another one of my bugaboos. It's like Stalin.
26:49
One death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic though.
26:55
So one of the other things that I try to convey to people is, remember if you're nervous, just talk to one person, just talk to one person in your mind.
27:09
Just like focus on a face, shrink the room for yourself.
27:09
There's all sorts of these techniques that work really, really well.
27:16
But the one that I find people like...
27:16
The other thing I hate, and I'm very happy to say Stability AI is hoping to put the PowerPoint in the graveyard where it belongs.
27:27
I hate PowerPoints, but because of my industry asset management, heavily regulated, got to have all the disclaimers, all of that stuff.
27:37
And yet I can still remember the 10 times that the PowerPoint was broken or whatever.
27:45
Those were the 10 best speeches, from the point of view of people coming up to me, saying, "Oh my God, that was amazing," because what you're doing with the other thing, in my opinion, I'm probably wrong, but I think with things like PowerPoint, it's like they're crutches.
28:03
They're crutches, right?
28:03
And if somebody gives you a crutch, you're going to start to use it.
28:08
Another thing that you point out, and this is on the individual. This drives me crazy.
28:15
It's like when I just launched or it's...
28:15
Well, it's the worst-kept secret in any company that was meant to be in stealth mode, because of my investment in Stability AI kind of got known that O'Shaughnessy Ventures was next, but I would want to kill myself if I said in a passive voice, "It was decided by O'Shaughnessy Ventures' executive."
28:38
I mean, I can't even say it, right?
28:45
And it's this idea of, be a human being, talk to other human beings, and you make a big point of that, if you could elaborate a little bit more on that.
28:56
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah.
28:56
People who watch what I'm doing will notice that I often act as sort of a heat shield. I get attacked a lot.
29:00
Sometimes I make wonderful friends and I got to meet you.
29:08
And at the same time, there's a lot of people who want nothing to do with me, don't want to hear from me again because I represent an idea that is offensive to them.
29:18
And the reason I've done that, even though it's not pleasant to get attacked on the internet, it's not fun to get piled up on.
29:25
It's not enjoyable to get dumped on.
29:30
But the reason I do that is a couple reasons.
29:30
Over the long term, I think it's the only way to build trust.
29:35
It's like the kid song, "If we're going on a bear hunt, we can't go under it, we can't go over it, we have to go through it."
29:40
You have to go through it.
29:40
There is no under, over, getting around, speaking as an individual, in order to build trust, because nobody believes what they hear from a C-corp as much as they believe what they hear from a human being.
29:54
Obviously, the execution is tricky.
29:54
Now you've introduced all this risk, this execution risk that I'm going to come across as an a-hole or whatever, or that I just fail in my execution by saying the wrong thing.
30:05
But I think over the long term you have to put yourself out there as a human being and speak directly.
30:09
And there's a lot of times when I've said I or we, and it's not a position that I decided, it's a company position that was told to me by the people who did decide in legal or leadership or whatever.
30:19
And somebody has to own it.
30:19
And sometimes that has to be the founder or sometimes it has to be the head of policy or whatever.
30:29
But a lot of times the person who's speaking for the company just has to own it and take the hits.
30:36
And so I think over time you do these things where you win or you lose, but in the long term you'll be much better off than if you hadn't done it.
30:42
And so I'll just emphasize again, this approach has risks.
30:46
It doesn't feel good, it also risks going wrong, but over time you will be so much better off.
30:51
It's like the US stock market.
30:51
It goes up, it goes down.
30:51
Over the long term, you want to be in that stock market, over the long term it's gone up.
30:56
As opposed to if you're sitting in cash, that's the risk averse way of not losing, but over time you actually are losing cause everybody else is making money.
31:06
So that's how I think about that.
31:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that's an actually incredibly accurate assessment.
31:09
What appears to be the less risky in investing, treasury bills for example, actually in the long run are the most risky investment you can make.
31:21
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Exactly.
31:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: A buck back in 1927 and inflation is taken out, it's got it's worth $1. 60 Now.
31:22
Whereas the same buck in the market was worth like $20.
31:30
And- Lulu Cheng Meservey: Because the world doesn't stand still, right, there's no default position where you opt out and the world stands still.
31:38
It's you opt out and that's a conscious choice to let everybody else keep doing their thing.
31:43
And then you are now behind on a relative basis.
31:43
And that's true of money, it's true of business decisions and it's also true of storytelling in comms.
31:47
Every power vacuum gets filled and every narrative vacuum will get filled.
31:52
And the times when you don't lean in, even at cost to your own sanity that day when you're being piled out on Twitter, you have to do it because over time you are going to be losing out much more than you're going to be avoiding risks.
32:06
So I think Brian Armstrong has said something along the lines of not taking a risk is the biggest risk.
32:13
I think that's so true, but people don't think of it in comms.
32:17
I think that comms is a relatively risk-averse industry and it's as true for us as it is anywhere else.
32:22
I recently wrote a post called ‘The Danger of Playing It Safe’ and it truly is, it's the biggest risk you could take is trying to play it safe because you're actually screwing yourself and you're doing it in slow motion so that you don't even realize.
32:36
It's much more insidious than just making a mistake once and it's acute and you see it.
32:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, and I'm glad we're here because that's where I wanted to go next.
32:43
Strategy is pretty easy.
32:43
Execution is a really hard thing.
32:51
And so actually, I mentioned it earlier, but I'm, I'm going to read it over because, again, I want to stick with...
32:56
I want this to be a great hour, hour-and-a-half for founders to listen to, so that they can go, "Oh, I was doing that all wrong."
33:02
And so the formula, as you outline it, is you got to have a plan, right?
33:09
Plan X, you want to instill a Belief A in Audience B to make them want to take some action or help you achieve your business objective.
33:22
I like the formula, by the way, but then you go down and you break it down, which I'm going to ask you to do.
33:28
I'm just going to start the first one, you got to be ruthlessly honest with yourself.
33:28
Is this business objective a good business objective?
33:35
So for example, you have good equals winning over investors or customers.
33:41
I agree, that's a good objective.
33:41
Bad, I want this to go viral, or did you see the number of new followers I got because of that post, or look, they say I'm so smart, those are all really bad business objectives.
33:55
So is there some handy...
33:55
Could we Google, "Don't do this as your business objective," or is that more of a you've got to brainstorm it yourself as a founder and with your team.
34:09
Lulu Cheng Meservey: I think every company has one business objective.
34:12
And I hate to sound just like a total knuckle dragging capitalist, but I am, and it's make money.
34:20
The thing that helps you make money is your business objective.
34:25
If you're a company, if you're UNICEF, it might be different.
34:25
If you're a government, it might be slightly different.
34:30
But if you're a company, even if you have a mission, you're not going to achieve the mission if you fail as a business.
34:33
And if you don't succeed and grow and have a lot of users and make a lot of money, you're not going to be able to make that difference in the world that you wanted to make.
34:43
So the things that are closest to that are usually being able to hire people to help you make the thing, getting people to buy the thing, getting people to give you money to hire the people to make the thing.
34:56
And then sometimes there's secondary or tertiary things that support that, which is maybe you do want to gain a large following in order to tell the story that gets the people to buy the thing.
35:06
But you have to recognize that that's a secondary or tertiary thing and you have to prioritize it accordingly.
35:10
And so founders don't have a lot of time and teams that run lean don't have a lot of time.
35:14
When you're a startup, you're not going to have the 200-person comms team of one of these huge corporations.
35:20
And time and credibility and energy are so finite that even if one of these auxiliary goals is worth doing, you might recognize that it's not in the top three things that are worth doing and you just got to keep your eye on the top three.
35:36
So what I try to do is I have the top three business goals in...
35:39
It used to be a physical post-it, now it's a virtual post-it on my little desktop app.
35:43
And everything that I do every day and everything that anyone on my team does every day should meet those things.
35:48
And if it doesn't, I'm not saying it's a bad or a stupid thing to do, but I'm saying, wouldn't you rather get another hour of sleep and rest up than to pursue this thing that is not even one of our top three or top five business objectives? So I would start there.
36:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, it's a good grounding in what you want to do.
36:08
Also, in my opinion, involves identifying who your actual audience is.
36:16
I've seen so many people who want everything and the kitchen sink, our TAM, our total addressable market, what's the population of the world right now?
36:31
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, exactly.
36:31
If you just got 1% of that. Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
36:34
And the tragedy is the number of decks that I have seen that actually have that in the deck is disheartening because you make the point super well on the one you did about K-pop, which I thought was great.
36:45
I reposted it on Twitter.
36:51
And by the way, I run a lot of experiments on Twitter.
36:51
You know, you can take the quant out of quant investing, but you can't take the quant out of the quant.
36:58
And so I just love to test everything.
37:03
And when I was putting up that one, I put a clock, I actually set my timer and I said...
37:11
My wife was sitting there with me and she goes, "What are you doing?"
37:11
I said, "I'm going to time the amount...
37:16
I've written down what I think will be the first response saying K-pop, they suck."
37:21
And it came in under five minutes.
37:21
Lulu Cheng Meservey: You know what?
37:25
People don't give enough credit to other industries.
37:25
And so I think there's a lot to learn from K-pop.
37:32
I think there's a lot to learn from the makeup industry.
37:32
The makeup industry is the opposite of some of these hard tech companies that are trying to spread their message.
37:36
But one thing that the makeup industry does really right, that I think we should all learn from, is they speak through human beings.
37:47
They speak through influencers, they speak through exposed people.
37:51
My sister worked for a makeup company, a pretty significant one that had a $0 marketing budget.
37:57
They had a big budget, but it all went toward influencers.
37:57
And so in the tech world, I think of it as you're no longer speaking from the centralized bullhorn.
38:03
Information has become fragmented and decentralized, and so your strategy has to be as well.
38:09
And so run your strategy, like Bitcoin, create your network, have your nodes, it makes you more resilient, like I said.
38:20
It's also harder to move things.
38:20
Instead of you just making an announcement, you have to go and work the crowd.
38:24
And when I've done this in the past, I can tell you it's much more labor intensive because I'm calling people individually and messaging them, and each message is totally tailored and sometimes it's an hour phone call instead of one press release.
38:37
But then what you're doing is you're creating this network of information carriers, each of whom is an influencer with different-sized spheres of different sets of people and they're carrying that message for you.
38:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We are investors in Hu, the chocolate makers, Jason Karp.
38:48
And I was going somewhere with Jason and we were talking about the success of the chocolate bar.
38:55
He was like, "The craziest thing about that." And I went, "What?"
39:02
And he goes, "Zero dollars spent on marketing."
39:09
And I'm like, "Get the fuck out of here."
39:09
And he's like, "Jim, I swear to God.
39:09
We noticed all of these celebs on their Instagram holding up the Hu and saying, 'This is great.'"
39:16
And I said, "So what did you do?"
39:24
He goes, "Well, we're not stupid.
39:24
We did send them a box of the chocolate bars."
39:30
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah.
39:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: "To thank them, but we never offered to put them on retainer.
39:33
We never offered to pay them for their endorsement."
39:38
And he mentioned something I thought was really interesting, I will leave the name of the influencer out because he is very, very well known, but Jason knows him and he was talking to him and he is like, "Yeah, I would've been a little offended if you had like said, 'Let me pay you for that.'"
39:53
He goes, "Because I really like this."
39:55
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah.
39:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right?
39:55
And the whole notion of the power of the network, part of my thesis that's driving the new models that we're using in O'Shaughnessy Ventures is that all the old models are collapsing and in their place are new, in my opinion, much better models, but they're new.
40:11
And there's always a cultural lag in between when the first people get tuned in to when other people get tuned in much later.
40:19
And the thing that was interesting from the point of view of the whole influencer and network thing, my thesis is networks are going to become exponentially more important because time, space, geography have all collapsed.
40:39
So networks used to be Yale or Minnesota or what school you went to.
40:39
If you were religious, what congregation did you belong to?
40:47
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Now you have infinitely more axes and there's Balaji’s ‘Network State’ in action.
40:49
Even people who haven't read the book and are not formally part of this movement are doing the things that he's describing.
40:59
And so I would say a couple things, can we go back one second on what you said earlier about Stalin's supposed quote on- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure.
41:09
Lulu Cheng Meservey: One death is a- Jim O'Shaughnessy: It was probably Mark Twain who said that.
41:09
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Tragedy versus a million. I think so.
41:10
Yeah, it sounds like Twain, very clever, must be.
41:10
When you are on the receiving end of attacks and hit pieces, something tends to happen.
41:14
The attack, if it's an unfair attack...
41:21
Let's assume the company is a good, solid, ethical company and then the attack is unfair. In that scenario.
41:26
usually what is happening is the attack is using the anecdote as a tragedy and the company's trying to fight back with statistics.
41:32
And automatically, you're losing.
41:37
If you notice, if you watch these things unfold, it's almost always the attack is in the form of one story or three case studies.
41:43
And then the rebuttal is in the form of, well 90% think it's okay.
41:48
So look at NAFTA, for example.
41:48
The storytelling around NAFTA.
41:55
I'm pro free trade, and so I look at the numbers and these data points have come out showing that NAFTA has lifted up economies and created all these jobs.
42:00
People who attack NAFTA are not going to say, "Oh, you say it's 10% better, it's actually only 6% better."
42:10
Their attack is poor Jim O'Shaughnessy, who has three children, and he has a wife and he has 40 grandchildren and he lost his job and now he's just desolate.
42:19
And look at poor Lulu over here, she can't use her skills and...
42:26
They never actually rebut the true premise, because they can't.
42:32
The true data of most people are better off.
42:32
They're saying, "Well, look at these three and don't you think that everybody's probably like this?"
42:36
And then the rebuttal comes in the form of, "Oh, but the economy has been lifted by 0.
42:40
5% here and this," it doesn't work.
42:46
You're automatically losing if you're fighting the story with the data points.
42:51
So tactically, what this means is you need to go on offense with your own stories.
42:51
So you put out your stories first about the real human beings, the real sympathetic carbon-based human beings whose lives have been changed by your product.
43:06
And that way you're a little bit inoculated in the sense that if someone wants to attack you, they have to then call your people a liar in some way.
43:16
The implication is that they're going to come bring people who are going to accuse your people of being untruthful, which is harder to do than to accuse a company of being a liar, as we've talked about, people versus companies.
43:24
And then secondly is you've got people who have put themselves out there as representatives of the company who now have skin in the game.
43:34
They've put down a psychological marker and a reputational marker that they now have an interest in defending even if you don't ask them to.
43:40
So now the next time you are attacked, you don't have to respond with some percentage that people aren't going to believe.
43:46
You already have these influencers out there who have already been activated because the first time they went out on your behalf, proactively, you briefed them, they know all about the company, you formed a personal relationship that's trusting.
44:00
Now they are already fully armed to do that.
44:00
And then the last benefit is you don't have to now go to them in a time of crisis to exploit them as PR vehicles for your company.
44:11
Because even if they agree, they're going to do it nervously, resentfully, or feel like they've been used in the future.
44:17
And you can only do it once, and you're calling in a favor.
44:21
So by going out there proactively with your stories before the attack comes to you in the form of stories, you are inoculating yourself and you're making it easier in the future for the influencers to do it on your behalf without you having to ask them at all.
44:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I mean, these are just such great wisdom points and...
44:40
Gang, listeners, viewers, it took me a long time to learn a lot of these lessons that Lulu is giving you here.
44:49
So pay attention, read this transcript, because I learned most of this stuff the hard way by totally fucking it up.
44:56
And it got to the point where in public markets, we're quantitative investors, right? Algorithmic everything.
45:05
But literally my best presentation was always, I'm going to tell you some stories about why you shouldn't pay attention to stories when making investment decisions.
45:17
No numbers, no nothing, just like it was all stories.
45:25
And why we love stories, because it's in our base code of our DNA, right?
45:25
A child anywhere, you could have a child born here in Greenwich, Connecticut and ship him or her off to Shanghai.
45:39
And even if they are Irish as the day is long, they're going to speak perfect Mandarin when they grow up with their new family in China.
45:44
So language is wired into our brains.
45:53
Reading hasn't been wired in yet.
45:53
That's why it takes so long to teach people how to read.
45:58
And one of the interesting things, though, is the other thing that I experienced is that...
46:05
Thank God I got over it, but when you first get attacked, it depends on your personality type, I tend to be a bit combative and- Lulu Cheng Meservey: It's deeply personal, especially with startups and founders.
46:17
If someone is attacking some huge corporation where like Honeywell is on its X-number CEO who's running it right now as their latest job.
46:29
That's different from you are the founder of this company, it is your baby, it is your mark on the world, the thing you're going to tell your kids and grandkids about.
46:39
And when they attack that vision, they have to do it by attacking the integrity of you, the founder.
46:44
And it's always deeply personal.
46:44
You don't even have to take it personal. It is personal.
46:49
And so I totally understand how that would feel.
46:49
And it goes back to you have to respond personally.
46:54
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Back to, you have to respond personally.
46:55
You as the founder now have to say something in defense of yourself because it's no longer just our company, this and that.
46:59
It's am I an honest person, who tells you the truth or am I not?
47:04
And that's why when I said earlier at the top of the podcast, and I think we probably should dig into this, you tell your story through the company story, through the founder story, and then through your network of influencers.
47:12
The founder story is so important because you are a human mascot for the company.
47:17
You're usually doing something.
47:21
So if you look at Stability AI, or any of these really emerging tech companies, most people are not technologically sophisticated enough to trust but verify when it comes to the technology.
47:34
They can't check it out for themselves and tell you if it does what, and tell themselves if it does what you claim.
47:40
And the technology is supposed to be esoteric.
47:44
You're putting out something that most of the tech world doesn't even understand because you invented it.
47:49
And so they are going to base their trust on whether they believe the thing that you're telling them.
47:55
And so there's no path to getting them to trust the company and the product and to trust their personal information or to let it into their home, without them trusting the human being that is telling them that it's okay.
48:06
And that's why these attacks are so important.
48:06
It's not just an attack on the company, it's an attack on you, the individual, as a human being on whether you're truthful and ethical and also influences your ability to ever start another company.
48:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally.
48:21
Lulu Cheng Meservey: So I would not knock you or anyone for taking it very personally. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
48:25
I ultimately learned to become much more dispassionate about it.
48:25
Listen, they have a completely different worldview than my worldview.
48:38
Robert Anton Wilson calls them reality tunnels and understanding that everyone's reality tunnel is different, makes you more open to the idea that maybe they really weren't trying to hurt you.
48:51
Now, obviously some of them were, but maybe some of them were just like they felt passionate about X and they misunderstood what Y was, right?
48:59
And so when I started putting it into that framework, it just became a lot easier for me to respond.
49:13
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, yeah.
49:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I completely agree with your idea about you're never going to reason somebody out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into.
49:25
Lulu Cheng Meservey: But here's the thing, the person that's attacking you is not your audience.
49:26
So we were talking about why you or your spokesperson, and maybe another thing to bookmark is when should a founder have a spokesperson?
49:38
Not all of them need it, but sometimes they really need it.
49:41
And when do you need one?
49:41
But you or your spokesperson are going to speak directly and confront any allegation that rises to the occasion.
49:45
You can't be battling it out with everybody.
49:50
You have to choose who's actually worthy of it.
49:50
But one reason to do it is, you the human being, are speaking.
49:54
Another reason to do it is, the person who's attacking you, they're not your audience.
50:02
Every once in a while there's someone influential who actually does change their mind about you.
50:06
I've had this happen in the DMs on Twitter, it's really gratifying.
50:06
I've had people say to me, "You're not the caricature that I envision.
50:11
I'm sorry that I said this thing."
50:15
And they actually come around. That's not typical.
50:15
Normally your audience is the quiet moderates who are open minded, who are looking on, and what you want them to see is the opponent being unfair, mean, cruel, petty, hysterical, and you being reasonable, calm, kind when you can.
50:29
Again, all of us screw this up from time to time.
50:37
It's hard to pull off, especially if they really got at you with something.
50:41
But on balance, you want them to see these two sides and say, "Who do I trust more?"
50:46
And the next time each of them says something, whom am I giving the benefit or the doubt to?
50:51
And that's your real audience.
50:51
And I think that's really important for people to remember.
50:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I completely agree with you, and that's been my strategy for a really long period of time, is that for the most part, when people say either inaccurate or hateful things, I simply don't respond.
51:09
And what I find is if it's real, it won't be just a single person saying that.
51:16
If it's real, a lot of people are going to start saying it, and then you absolutely have to address it.
51:21
But the way you address it, as you just pointed out, is calmly, open-mindedly.
51:27
You mentioned Stability AI, and I'm the chairman of Stability AI, and one of the things that I have found working really, really well, is you're absolutely right about people not understanding the tech part of it.
51:41
So what I've been doing is showing and not telling, and so I understand this seems a little weird, but hey, check this out and we'll show them a tablet that has 3D without glasses, mind blowing, by the way.
51:54
I've collected art since I was for 30 years, and my wife and I have a belief in trying to buy as much as we can from living artists because it's really cool to be able to affect somebody's life.
52:09
And so I have a lot of artist friends, and when I got involved in Stability, a lot of them, I got calls and they're like, "Jim, are you turning on us?"
52:22
And that was just coming from a place that they knew nothing.
52:22
They just knew nothing about it.
52:29
And so what I would do is, depending on what their art happened to be, I would kind of walk them through, "Well, hey, why don't we check this thing out and tell me what you think?"
52:39
And a lot of say generative art, when a artist puts their own work in, and then the AI does its own version, right?
52:45
What's really happening is a conversation with yourself.
52:51
The AI is very complicated and everything else, but once I get, even people who were really, really deeply suspicious, just get them using it, and they're like, "Oh, I had no idea that this is the way that this worked."
53:03
I find that the worst thing you can do from my perspective is to say, "Oh, you're such an idiot”, or “You don't get it”, or “The world's going to pass you by”.
53:15
What were the initials everyone?
53:15
Never going to make it that they put up on Twitter? No, but that fits me.
53:20
I much prefer to root for things as opposed to against them.
53:20
And yet I find that that's your normal human too.
53:29
Lulu Cheng Meservey: So there's a couple ways to overcome resistance to the unknown.
53:33
Sometimes it's resistance because they believe some belief that you think is outdated and you're challenging that belief.
53:43
They believe in public education, and you think that private education is the way to go, and you're advancing a new model of schooling or whatever.
53:48
Then there actually is a challenge, and you're going to engage with them in this contest for hearts and minds.
53:53
But a lot of times it's because it's simply unfamiliar and they're trying to, we think through analogies based on what we do know and understand, and they're using the wrong analogy.
54:05
They're comparing when they think of nuclear, they're thinking Chernobyl, instead of think like they're using the wrong analogy or the wrong mental shortcut that leads them to a place that is intimidating or scary.
54:23
I use a lot of analogies to early Christianity and to missionaries, because this is a craft honed over thousands and thousands of years that has been wildly successful, worldwide, using influencers, circumventing and bypassing, established powerful institutions that wanted to crush them on a scale that no none of us has ever been seen elsewhere.
54:41
So one of the things that the early missionaries did when they wanted to bring Christianity to China, is the Portuguese missionaries in the 1400s came and started trying to proselytize, and it was not working, because the Chinese culture did not have a means of being able to integrate that into things they already understood.
55:01
So the most successful early missionaries had to live there for years and decades and learn fluent mandarin and then create a new vocabulary where the words represented the analogies.
55:13
The analogies were baked into the words.
55:19
For example, heaven became sky kingdom, and God became the one who was above the earth.
55:19
And these words were actually created by the missionaries so that they could go proselytize through the words, but they had to go through that before being able to spread the message.
55:31
And I think that's the same for emerging tech companies where, "Remember there is that meme of this is the Uber before X."
55:41
That's exactly what I'm talking about is, "Do you want to be represented as this is the Uber for X?
55:47
And if not, give people something better because they're not going to be able to understand you in a vacuum."
55:51
And especially if you are in a really new space of emerging technology that people don't even know how the tech itself works.
55:57
You have to find something that they do understand.
56:01
It all goes back to gateways again.
56:01
Find something that they do understand and with which they have positive associations.
56:06
And you tie yourself to that thing before someone else ties you to some other thing.
56:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I mean, we are so simpatico because...
56:17
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Is it okay if I'm eating Halloween candy?
56:20
I just realized I'm chewing away and we're actually recording video. Is that all right?
56:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Listen.
56:25
Lulu Cheng Meservey: It's just sitting here.
56:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: This is a anything goes podcast Lulu.
56:27
You can say fuck, you can say shit.
56:27
You can eat Halloween candy.
56:36
This is like anything goes.
56:36
Lulu Cheng Meservey: I saw myself on the screen like," Oh God. Well right." Thank you.
56:40
It's just sitting here in front.
56:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I don't have any around here, I would join you.
56:45
I love your idea about religions, because you're right, I'm not a religious person, let's get that out of the way.
56:52
But oh man, do they offer just this deep vein of if you want to convince or convert somebody, but you've got the playbooks right there, like Saul who became Paul, right?
57:06
Literally the world's first Beamer.
57:12
Because what he did was he came up with, I can't remember the number, like 130 precepts that were like one-liners, right?
57:20
So they were memes that people identified with.
57:20
And the thing that was really cool about Paul's message was, he was the first, when he was out talking to say, "You know what?
57:34
The gods of your village, where you were born, they don't matter.
57:34
They won't care, because there's actually a big God who those other gods roll up to."
57:45
And so he was the first to basically say, "Doesn't matter where you were born.
57:45
Doesn't matter what religion you are now, doesn't matter who your family is, doesn't matter what color or sex you are, Christianity is for everybody."
57:56
And so what happened was, memes in the Dawkin sense of memes, the ideas that go viral, that's what happened.
58:12
He was literally the first example of a guy who created this network that just went exponential.
58:20
And the message like, a really good meme, the best meme in the world, is a meme that the author of that meme loses control of. And why is that true?
58:28
Because it's being repeated so many times in so many different places and ways and for reasons that are different, that the author can't control the meme anymore.
58:43
But that's a good thing if your objective is to try to get the pews filled up with the people to put money into the [inaudible] Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, I would say that there's a lesson to take from, there's the story and building the story, then there's getting the story out.
58:57
So I think in terms of getting the story out, Christianity has that down to a science.
59:03
Actually other religions have done this as well.
59:03
But there's also how do you actually shape the story?
59:09
I think there's a lesson to take and a lesson not to take.
59:12
The lesson to take is the story at the center of Christianity, and the story in the Bible, is the archetypal template for a story that resonates with human beings.
59:19
It is like the platonic ideal of a story where there's an enemy, there's a challenge, there's a fall, there's redemption, there's the bright future that lays ahead, I mean, it's got those elements.
59:42
And if you look at all the successful religions, they all have a similar template.
59:47
If you look at Narnia, if you look at Lord of the Rings, if you look at all of the big blockbuster movies, they follow that same thing because those are the elements of a story that resonates with us.
59:56
And so when a startup is putting together their story, in that narrative that we talked about front, which is what are we doing? Why are we doing it?
1:00:03
How are we going to get it done?
1:00:03
Who are the people you want to be weaving in?
1:00:03
What is the thing that you are offering?
1:00:07
Where did we go wrong as a society and the thing that we're missing?
1:00:07
How are you going to fill that gap?
1:00:13
What is the bright future ahead?
1:00:13
Who is the opponent here that you're up against?
1:00:18
What is the thing that you're disrupting?
1:00:18
When you fill in that template, you have now created the ideal form of a story that is going to emotionally resonate with people.
1:00:28
So that's one thing to do to emulate when it comes to religions.
1:00:28
The thing not to emulate is you, unlike Christianity and other religions, you are not for everyone.
1:00:39
You are for the people that you're for.
1:00:39
And maybe if you are for a specific demographic, or it's for people who believe this thing, or maybe people in Ohio matter to you much more than people who live in Florida, but people who live in Sweden matter even more.
1:00:52
When you know who those people are, then you can prioritize getting to them.
1:00:58
And I think one of the great original sins of comms is trying to be everything to everyone and trying to measure impressions on a quantitative level.
1:01:08
And instead what you want to do is get to the 50 people that matter, I mean 50 discreet human beings where you actually know who they are.
1:01:13
You pull out your Google sheets, you put their names, you put where they reside physically, and then you put where they reside intellectually, which is what are the podcasts, newsletters, who are the people they follow, what are the events they go to?
1:01:27
And then you go through the 50, you either go to the cities and you meet them like, 'Oh, half of them are in Virginia.
1:01:33
I'm going to go to Virginia', or 'three quarters of them listen to this podcast or that radio show, and I'm going to show up there'.
1:01:44
That's your roadmap as opposed to trying to spread yourself too thin right away.
1:01:47
And you also have to know when there are people who will never like you no matter what, and you can't spend energy there.
1:01:53
You have to go for the swing voter, because that's where your marginal gains are going to come from.
1:01:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
1:01:59
I call those people psychic vampires and maybe that's mean of me and maybe I'm not being open enough to their message, but I've just seen the type of behavior.
1:02:08
You get a saturated intuition when you see the same patterns over and over and over again.
1:02:16
And then you realize, I love your message.
1:02:22
You're not for everybody. Nobody's for everybody.
1:02:22
If you're for everybody, you're for nobody. In my opinion.
1:02:27
And, what you're talking about earlier of course, is Campbell's hero's journey and I am fascinated by it because your remark about earlier religions, these are every religion.
1:02:43
Every religion follows the same template.
1:02:43
If you go all the way back to the first religions where by the way, all of the gods were female, not male, and yet they're all the same, they all have the enemy she overcomes, she has to go to hell or the underworld to reclaim Persephone, her daughter.
1:03:03
They're all the same story.
1:03:08
And it's also interesting how that fits in back to AI for a minute.
1:03:08
So, the reason I find Stable Diffusion and Stability AI so interesting is they've really figured out a great compression algorithm, which takes a massive amount of data and compresses it to a much smaller amount.
1:03:29
Over the weekend, I'm sitting reading some Joseph Campbell and what is Campbell saying?
1:03:35
Campbell says the greatest stories that everybody knows are stories that have been told and retold and retold and retold.
1:03:43
And then he actually uses the word," They have compressed all of the good information from that story through their multiple re-tellings.
1:03:50
And that's why they resonate with humans so much."
1:03:57
Lulu Cheng Meservey: They use emotional shortcuts too.
1:04:02
So the saying that every person has a God shape hold in their heart.
1:04:07
I think there's a lot of... It's a poignant idea.
1:04:07
There's a lot of ways to read it.
1:04:07
I think one of the ways to read it, that relates to what we're talking about here, is every person has a hole in their heart that is the shape of that story.
1:04:18
It could be a different God.
1:04:18
There are people with different religions, but they all follow the same shape of story.
1:04:23
And that is the shape that has resonated with billions of people over the history of mankind.
1:04:28
And that's the thing that's going to continue to resonate. And it's not very hard.
1:04:35
It's very easy for startups to put their story into that template because that is the shape of the human emotional receptor that you're targeting.
1:04:46
And so when we talk about create your story and then file it into the shape that is going to be best received, something that I also talk about a lot is cultural erogenous zones.
1:04:58
Everybody has, every type of group has cultural erogenous zones.
1:04:58
And you know immediately what I mean by that and your job as the storyteller is to fit it into that.
1:05:05
It's not to try to tell a story in a vacuum that is so compelling that people can't help but come to you.
1:05:12
That is so hard to do and I can't even think of someone who's done it.
1:05:18
It's probably been done, but the much easier thing to do, and again, you're running lean, you don't have a lot of time, you need to be efficient.
1:05:27
And the easier thing to do is to figure out what shaped those cultural receptors are and then just put your story in that shape.
1:05:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally.
1:05:34
The more you read, the more you experience, the more you confront these things, the more those things start coming second nature to you.
1:05:45
But they're not a natural way for many people to think or act or do whatever.
1:05:52
I want to get to another one of my little bugaboos, because I know it's one of yours too.
1:05:57
How do we cure people from jargon and corporate speak and passive voices?
1:06:06
And I want to be, like if I was a zen masterman, I would be hitting those people with the stick so hard.
1:06:12
Is there a way that you've effectively been able to do that with your colleagues?
1:06:18
Lulu Cheng Meservey: I've become radicalized on this issue.
1:06:19
I feel like people who are irredeemably stuck with jargon and corporate speak almost don't deserve to be in discourse with the rest of us. Let them keep doing it.
1:06:31
Self-identify as someone who lacks a connection to the rest of the human race and speak into the void, waste your own time because the really good, exciting, successful startups are not the ones doing this.
1:06:46
And so if the boring, still incumbents are doing this, fine, we'll take it.
1:06:53
Tactically, I will say if you're stuck in this mode because of how things have been, or you've inherited some sort of messaging, or you're trying to turn a corner, whatever it is, say it in conversation to a family member and then later on write down the bullet points of the things that resonated the most and then keep going with that. Say it out loud.
1:07:11
Even if you're in a room by yourself, and it sounds completely stupid, but physically say it out loud so you can hear it and you'll cringe when you hear yourself saying these things, they're unspeakable.
1:07:27
Some of these sentences of, "We will disrupt the future of cloud connected solutions by offering [inaudible] value to our..."
1:07:32
You can't say them out loud, it's actually embarrassing.
1:07:38
So if you say it out loud, it will become very apparent to you when the language is not natural.
1:07:44
So that would be my advice there.
1:07:44
Also, in terms of getting a story out, we've talked a lot about speaking through people instead of speaking through sort of vague corporatism.
1:07:55
Do it in concentric circles, outwards. You can't skip a step.
1:07:55
So there is a quote, it's by general Bruce Clark and I'm going to botch it, but the quote is, "Whenever something is going wrong in my command, I trace it in concentric circles, going back to my own desk" and putting a message out is the opposite way.
1:08:17
So first you have to know, you the founder have to get your story straight, really clear, such that you could say to a six year old, a 45 year old, a 60 year old.
1:08:23
And it's different words, but the core of the message is consistent.
1:08:28
Then you have to make sure all of the co-founders and executive team are on the same page.
1:08:34
They can use their own diction, they can use their own style, but the core of the meaning has to stay.
1:08:39
And this is, you were saying earlier, you can lose control of a meme over time in these stages of a company before it's really meme status, you have to have control of what the message is, but not the words.
1:08:53
So lose control of the words, keep the core of the message. Starts with you.
1:08:53
Next circle out is your executives and company leadership.
1:09:00
Next circle out is the rest of the company.
1:09:00
I'm assuming it's a startup.
1:09:06
So the rest of the company is not going to be very big.
1:09:06
If it's a big company, then the next circle out is managers, right?
1:09:09
But let's say you, your executives, the rest of the company, then your investors, then your power users, then your other users, then everybody else.
1:09:21
And you have to do it in the sequence because that's the order of credibility.
1:09:26
That's the order of the people who are closest to it and are deemed most knowledgeable.
1:09:31
And if you skip a step and one of the others was not on board, a couple things could happen.
1:09:36
One is they feel like they've lost control of the thing that they signed up to be part of.
1:09:40
People have quit their jobs to come be on this journey with you and they feel like the journey's proceeding without them.
1:09:44
And your bandwagon has taken a sharp turn and they've fallen off of it, disastrous.
1:09:49
The other thing that could happen is if you are not going through them, they see the story in the wild. They might disagree.
1:09:57
Either accidentally because they didn't know that came from you or on purpose.
1:10:01
And that is the most corrosive thing that could happen to a narrative, is to have someone who's in the know, who's in a more inner circle than you, tell you that that's not really true.
1:10:11
And so there's no shortcuts there. You can't skip a step.
1:10:11
You have to go in concentric circles outwards from the founder. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:10:18
And I want to emphasize your point about...
1:10:18
I'm talking to all the founders out there now, you've got to really emphasize with your colleagues that they have to put it in their words.
1:10:31
I had this happen to me actually, and I sent a salesperson in my place to give several speeches and stuff, and I got a call from the sponsors which was not a very happy call.
1:10:45
They were like, "Jim, so and so sucks ass. He's horrible.
1:10:45
Don't ever send him up here again."
1:10:53
And I'm like- Lulu Cheng Meservey: [inaudible]. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
1:10:57
but it was inconsistent with what I knew about this person, and so I asked him to come and give me the presentation, and I immediately saw what the problem was.
1:11:03
He was trying to copy me.
1:11:10
He was using words that he would never use.
1:11:10
So I use the term pedestrian to mean ordinary, he wouldn't do that.
1:11:18
He's a huge sports guy, and so what I said to him was, "You've got the narrative completely right.
1:11:24
You've got the words completely wrong.
1:11:24
You've got to use your own words.
1:11:24
What I want you to do is just go and talk to your wife about it, talk to your friends about it, and then come back and do it for me." Lulu, he came back.
1:11:35
It was like a different human being.
1:11:41
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah, exactly.
1:11:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: He owned those words and they resonated with him, and now back to one of your great messages here, he was distinctive and authentic, and you can't fake that.
1:11:52
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah.
1:11:55
We've mentioned sports a couple of times, so I do have a favorite sports analogy when it comes to running a comm strategy, and it's the difference between football and rugby.
1:12:08
So in college, I've played rugby, and I know rugby a little bit better than football, but one of the key differences is rugby is a continuous game.
1:12:11
It doesn't tend to stop and you keep going, and as a result, the strategy for advancing the ball in rugby is that, when you're about to get tackled, you run into the tackle and your goal is not to avoid the tackle.
1:12:28
Your goal is if you get to a tackle, you want to use it to gain yards or [inaudible]- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that's the scrum, right? Lulu Cheng Meservey: ... right. Well, a ruck.
1:12:36
And you would want your team to come out with the ball, so it's inevitable you're going to get tackled, but you can run into it and use your own force to have gains while you're being tackled, and then have your team come out with the ball.
1:12:49
Whereas with football, the game stops a lot and managing the clock is a part of the game, and because it stops every time someone is down, the play is different, the strategy for advancing is different.
1:12:58
And you see people running behind the line of scrimmage and they'll get tackled or a quarterback will get sacked, and you'll actually end up losing yards.
1:13:07
And I would say that advancing a comm strategy is like rugby because it's a continuous game and the tackles are coming for you, and it doesn't stop and pause for you to reset.
1:13:18
And so what you need to be doing is, if a tackle's really going to come, you need to run into the tackle with your force and then have your team come out of it with the ball, and what that looks like is, there's a number of ways to play out.
1:13:28
One is, you know that there's something that people are going to attack you for when they find out, so you announce it on your own terms, you explain it, they'll be mad, but it'll be a totally different scenario versus someone else finding out and then exposing you, and then you losing that trust.
1:13:49
Because people being mad at you is different from people losing trust that you'll tell them the truth, and one is damaging, inconvenient, unpleasant, temporarily harmful.
1:14:01
The other one again, is existential.
1:14:01
There's a few things in any business that are existential, and most of them go back to whether the individual behind the company is a trusted human being, so that's one example.
1:14:11
Another example would be if someone does land the first blow, do you respond or not?
1:14:18
And so there are times when it doesn't rise to the occasion of you even giving it time of day.
1:14:24
There are other times when you cannot hide and wait for it to blow over because what'll happen is, it'll ossify into the annals of the internet, and become perceived wisdom, and then two years later when you're trying to get away from it is nearly impossible.
1:14:40
It's like if your nose is broken, so my nose as you can see tilts this way because I broke my nose two maybe three times, I don't know, because of rugby it tilts this way.
1:14:52
If you're going to try to fix a nose that didn't set properly, you're going to have to rebreak it and set it again, and it sucks way worse.
1:14:56
And so if you don't want to be in the position three years later of re-breaking the nose to set it, then you want to do it right away, and that's the equivalent of running into the tackle.
1:15:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
1:15:07
Just for shits and giggles, so when I was doing all of this traveling, I really don't know much about sports.
1:15:11
My son still is mad at me about it, anyway, because he's a big sports fan.
1:15:16
And so when I was the principal portfolio manager selling our portfolios, I traveled a ton and everything was always the same.
1:15:24
Get into the car and the first thing the guy asks you about is, what do you think about fielding in the local sports team?
1:15:32
And so I literally used my lack of knowledge to have my own little pitter-patter, and always I would answer, "Well, man, it really depends on what team shows up on the field court," whatever they're talking about, and then all I did was agree with his assessments.
1:15:54
So by the end of every ride, I had one guy get out the driver's seat, come around and say, "I just want to shake your hand because I've never driven somebody who knows so much about sports as you."
1:16:10
Lulu Cheng Meservey: That's perfect.
1:16:12
No, we're talking a lot about things that founders can do for their communications, and I do want to emphasize, even though… founders own comms.
1:16:29
Sometimes you are a brilliant software engineer and you don't have the time of day for this fluffy, nebulous thing of comms and you outsource it.
1:16:35
It's your personal reputation, it's your ability to ever start another company.
1:16:42
It's your ability to hire.
1:16:42
You cannot outsource this because it's going to come back to you.
1:16:47
A lot of times the person you have running your comms isn't an owner of the company, isn't treating themselves as an owner of the company.
1:16:55
You can have employees that act like owners, but you can also have employees that act like employees, and I don't fault anyone for this, but if someone is here because they see it as just a job and they're not a true believer, you might need that person for their skills temporarily, but don't assume that, that's the same thing as you being accountable for your company's reputation. It's a precious thing.
1:17:19
It's like wearing a white shirt when you stain it, it's stained.
1:17:23
It's hard to keep white and you are the person, it's your shirt, and so founders have to look after this, but they don't have to do it all by themselves.
1:17:27
So sometimes people feel like going direct means, you are your best spokesperson. You should just do it.
1:17:38
Yeah, you should do it, but one, you're not going to have time.
1:17:42
The things that I have done in a comms role are a more than full-time job and I still haven't gotten to all the things that I've wanted to do.
1:17:49
There are things at Substack that, and the person who's running comms at Substack now is excellent.
1:17:53
She's doing a lot of these things, but there's stuff that I left behind that I didn't get across the finish line, and I was there full time.
1:18:02
I was working 15, 16 hours a day, I don't know, very long days, and the founders wouldn't have time to do that.
1:18:06
Secondly, you want someone who's not you to talk about you.
1:18:11
It's totally different for you to go out and say what a genius you are versus somebody else who behind closed doors is telling people with conviction from themselves what a genius you are or how much integrity you have.
1:18:22
And then thirdly, there are actual skills involved with comms.
1:18:22
It feels like such a fuzzy field, and I lack a lot of those skills.
1:18:30
I'll be clear, my background is in studying Counter-Terrorism, is working in finance, we're working in geopolitics and I bring in those strands, I think it's great.
1:18:40
In actual comms, I'm kind of a newbie and I'm missing some of those disciplines, and so I've hired people who have that experience and I found it incredibly useful.
1:18:49
And so I think that founders should not conflate going direct with necessarily not having a comms person or a spokesperson or a team.
1:18:55
You could do it, but I wouldn't say necessarily that, that's the way to go. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:19:01
And it also connects nicely to one of your things in your piece on the dangers of playing it safe.
1:19:08
You can't become great if you're risk averse, and of course, this is motivated reasoning on my part because I am a naturally risk seeking person, so it's so much easier for me to say, "Yeah, you've got to take the risk."
1:19:24
The thing that you just said is important though because the founder, and this is again for the founders listening or watching, you may think you're all in on the risk and everything, but if you say, have someone as your comms said because you don't want to do it, and they're much more worried about their job, about how they come off about their future employability...
1:19:48
By the way, all of those are completely legitimate concerns, and so if you don't understand as the founder whether that person who's speaking on your behalf is thinking like an owner mentality or like an employee, you're going to get into some shit that you could've avoided like the plague because you- Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah.
1:20:12
Because this person is going to be speaking on your behalf and on behalf of the company behind closed doors with conversations you will never find out about.
1:20:17
You will never find out if they were the source or what they said on the phone that you weren't on, and so there are so many talented, principled, awesome comms people.
1:20:29
There are also people who are talented but don't really care about the mission, and then there are people who might not be a fit entirely for other reasons, and so making that distinction up front will save you a world of headaches later on.
1:20:42
And again, I don't fault anyone for looking out for their careers, but you don't want to hire someone who just wants a job.
1:20:53
And if you are Pepsi and they're also interviewing with Coke, read that as a data point.
1:21:01
Or if you are, I'm having such trouble coming, I thought I had a good analogy, but now I don't want to use it because it's a company that I work with.
1:21:12
But if you are in industry A and they're in industry B, that is naturally oppositional, if you're in nuclear and they're also applying for jobs in oil, you just need to know what you're getting, and is that the thing you need at the time?
1:21:22
So I just encourage founders, consider that even if you want to go direct, you might want to have someone helping you, but get someone who doesn't just want a job for the sake of having a job.
1:21:31
Get someone who's willing to take a pay cut to go do your thing specifically or who's coming because they want to work with you, and they don't care what the title is or have some indicator that they're in it to win it with you.
1:21:42
I think that's important to think about.
1:21:46
There's one other thing that I wanted to mention too about the comms industry and the playbook being outdated. It's sounds dumb. It's no one's fault.
1:21:58
It's not that comms people suck.
1:21:58
It's not that all journalists are bad and the media's broken.
1:21:58
It's not that founders are intransigent and untrainable and have big egos.
1:22:05
All these people pass blame around, but when you look at the industry, the system is broken because everyone's frustrated.
1:22:16
Founders are seeing that they're not getting results, and they're seeing that their comms function maybe isn't working like they want it to or they have an agency that's not representing them the way that they want it to.
1:22:26
Then media feel like they're getting stonewalled, and people are not giving them access and are treating them like the enemy.
1:22:32
Then comms people are feeling like they have unrealistic expectations from the founder, and that what they're being asked to do is underappreciated.
1:22:41
Everyone is frustrated, and so the whole thing is broken.
1:22:41
It's not like there's one part of it where you just fix that part.
1:22:46
So I think if we're able to move the industry to this new model of getting away from one centralized bullhorn to a network of getting away from relying on information gatekeepers to get your message out for you and you doing it yourself.
1:23:03
Getting away from the passive corporate voice to the active direct human voice, and then going through the steps of putting the message out in concentric circles as opposed to just blasting it out to the public in the first place.
1:23:14
The stuff that we're talking about here, founders will feel better about the ROI that they're getting on their efforts and on their money.
1:23:23
Comms people will feel better about the results they're able to deliver compared to the expectations on them for their jobs.
1:23:27
And honestly, journalists will feel better, and reporters will get to feel better because they don't want these crappy stories.
1:23:32
They don't want boring stories pitched to them that clog up their inbox.
1:23:37
They complain about it all the time.
1:23:37
They want to do their work, and the last thing is, the people who are advocates and influencers will feel respected. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... wow.
1:23:47
I know my team, and that is going to be one of the big clips from this episode because you just encapsulated. Well done.
1:23:53
You just encapsulated much of our conversation in maybe 60 seconds, and that's another one of mine.
1:24:01
Say it again, then repeat it to make sure that everyone heard the same thing because the number of times people don't hear the same thing is much greater than the number of times that they actually do hear the same thing. Wow. This has been amazing.
1:24:20
You outperformed, you outkicked your distance or whatever the sports term is.
1:24:30
Lulu Cheng Meservey: That's a good try [inaudible].
1:24:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Do you see how horrible I'm at it?
1:24:32
I just- Lulu Cheng Meservey: Points for effort. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
1:24:37
but you are an amazing human and an amazing comms person.
1:24:37
When I first came into contact with you through your piece with the New York Times, I was just...
1:24:45
Literally, I read it twice.
1:24:45
I was smiling, I was laughing.
1:24:49
I was saying, this woman gets it.
1:24:49
She understands because I've got this whole theme about the Great Reshuffle and how all the old models are collapsing, and nobody seems to- Lulu Cheng Meservey: Yeah. This one of them. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... this is one of them.
1:25:02
Lulu Cheng Meservey: Let me say though, what you're seeing is the product of a lot of trial and error.
1:25:04
You're not seeing the error.
1:25:11
You're seeing some of the trial.
1:25:11
You're seeing a version of building in public where you've probably seen other things from me that have flopped as well.
1:25:15
And so I encourage any comms people who are listening to this, who are hearing Jim shower me with accolades...
1:25:23
Thank you very much, Jim.
1:25:23
You're like my publicist right now.
1:25:23
This is the upshot of taking risks and failing a bunch of times, and then having your wins outpace the losses over time because what we haven't talked about here is the long list of times I've tried something and has totally failed, and I felt embarrassed.
1:25:40
And so at the end of the day, that's not the stuff that matters.
1:25:46
It's the one in 10 times when it really works out is the stuff that matters.
1:25:46
And I want to put a plug here, that if you are a comms person listening to this and this is how you want to operate, join me, come work with me.
1:25:55
It's going to be awesome.
1:25:55
We'll do this new playbook together.
1:26:01
It's going to be so fun, and so please hit me up if you're listening to this and you want to do this kind of work.
1:26:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I love that.
1:26:06
And I also couldn't agree more on the failure.
1:26:06
Like I mentioned earlier, I work with a lot of younger people from various industries, and I cannot get them to understand that I've never met a very successful person however you want to define success, by the way.
1:26:25
It doesn't have to be money.
1:26:25
It could be they're the best author, they're the best painter, whatever.
1:26:29
I have never met anyone successful who did not have a bunch of failures because that's how you learn.
1:26:38
That's the only way you can learn sometimes.
1:26:38
Now, granted, I love Doug Adams and I think of him more as a philosopher than as a sci-fi author.
1:26:45
And I love his quote about that, “human beings who seem to be unique in our ability to learn from the errors of others seem remarkably disinclined to do so”.
1:26:56
Lulu Cheng Meservey: I have a quote that I think should maybe encapsulate this conversation, and I don't know who it's by but it's, "When there is no wind, row."
1:27:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
1:27:08
Lulu Cheng Meservey: I think that's a good philosophy for comms, and we don't have to be stuck in that paradigm of everyone playing Hungry Hungry Hippos, and creating noise and just desperately trying to go out and get a tiny slice of someone's mind share. Shift the whole thing.
1:27:23
Put your story in the template of the eternal story that has worked for all of the history of mankind.
1:27:29
Tell it through yourself, your executives and your team and your influencers, and then tie it to something that people already care about and it's that simple. That's the rest. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Boom. I love it. All right.
1:27:42
This is of course, when we go off recording here, I'm going to try to convince you to come work for my new company [inaudible].
1:27:48
And you think I'm kidding?
1:27:53
Lulu Cheng Meservey: I'm not sure anymore when you [inaudible].
1:27:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So if you've listened to the podcast in the past you know that I always ask everyone the same question at the end which is, I have a magic microphone and you're a ace communicator.
1:28:03
I'm going to hand you this magic microphone.
1:28:03
The only thing you can do, you can't do anything to put people in reeducation camps or get rid of them, but what you can do is you can take the magic microphone and speak two phrases into it.
1:28:24
Every human being on the planet is going to wake up whenever their next morning is, and the first thing they're going to do is sit up and they're going to think both of those things where their own ideas, and they're going to say, "Those are the best ideas I've ever had.
1:28:37
I'm going to start doing that right now." What do you got for me?
1:28:42
Lulu Cheng Meservey: I really should check out Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II available on Battle.
1:28:49
net in every platform which has grossed 800 million in sales in the first three days surpassing Top Gun and Doctor Strange put together.
1:29:04
There's really something there, and if I haven't played it yet, I really shouldn't.
1:29:09
Secondly- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Glengarry Glen Ross. Lulu Cheng Meservey: ...
1:29:18
secondly, this is- Jim O'Shaughnessy: “Always be closing.
1:29:19
” Lulu Cheng Meservey: ...
1:29:19
this is an almost certainly apocryphal quote from, I think it's apocryphal attributed to da Vinci, but it- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Not Mark Twain? Lulu Cheng Meservey: ... it could be.
1:29:32
It always could be Mark Twain.
1:29:32
It always might be, but this one is- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Or Oscar Wilde. Lulu Cheng Meservey: ... yeah. He was great.
1:29:37
It is, "Don't let things happen to you.
1:29:41
Go and happen to things."
1:29:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh yeah.
1:29:44
Lulu Cheng Meservey: And comms people need to hear this more than most because we're usually the ones mired under 14 layers of approvals.
1:29:49
There's 13 of them who can say, no, only one who could possibly say, yes.
1:29:55
And everything that we do is through the lens of do no harm, and so comms people, don't let things happen to you, happen to things.
1:30:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
1:30:03
And by the way, I think you were the first to use my little whisper to further, I love that about you.
1:30:13
That's yet another thing, I really want you come work- Lulu Cheng Meservey: Everyone in the world's going to hear it, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... oh yeah.
1:30:18
I'm going to leave it in there too because I love it.
1:30:21
Now, I'm really going to have to try to figure out how to get you over here to O'Shaughnessy benches.
1:30:26
Well, listen, Lulu, this has been exactly what I hoped it would be.
1:30:31
This has been a masterclass for the founders out there who a lot of them don't think about these things because they're focused on their thing, their product, their whatever, and they get obsessed by it.
1:30:42
It's a magnificent obsession, but if you can't communicate to with other people, it doesn't matter how smart you are, it just doesn't matter how bright your idea is, it doesn't matter.
1:30:55
And so comms is communication...
1:30:55
By the way, gang, communication and your ability to communicate both in writing and verbally, and in a variety of forms is only going to get more important as we go into this new world, so the more you take this to heart, the less heartache you will go through.
1:31:14
So this has been amazing. Thank you so much.