0:17
So why in the world does corporate speak exist?
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0:32
It drives me crazy, and you have all these companies.
0:37
Without personality, people don't talk like that.
0:37
What is going on behind corporate speak? It's risk minimization.
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If you are not putting too much personality, if you're not saying anything spiky, if everything is just really well-rounded and kind of milk toast, it's hard to get in trouble for it.
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So I think a lot of companies optimize for the wrong thing.
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They're optimizing for getting in as little trouble as possible.
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The trade off of which is that you miss opportunities.
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We can talk about that later, but that's one thing.
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I think another thing is it's existed for so long, it's been with us, so aliens could have brought it at the time of the pyramids.
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It's, it's just been with us forever and I think people who enter new jobs enter the, this sort of corporate world where they're almost cosplaying.
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They're corporate ancestors.
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So I think it's this sort of atavistic urge that flows through you when you assume a role that you think you have to talk that way.
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Um, so I think it's really just collective force of habit.
1:37
So as a writer, how do you avoid it?
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I do it by reading it out loud, and you can feel the cringe like surge through your body.
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If something, if it's something that you would never say, then you, you won't be able to say it out loud like your body prevents you from doing it, or you could say it to someone in your family.
1:57
Just try to say it normally and you'll feel that it doesn't actually come out of your mouth. Right.
1:59
It also helps, by the way, with just writing better in general because you can get a feel for the cadence, for just the, the rhythm of the sentences.
2:09
So I always recommend trying to say something out loud.
2:14
One thing that I feel like would be difficult is on the very days when you do need to write a statement, those are also the most stressful days.
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And so as a writer for a corporation, how do you make sure that you're being smart and diligent when anxiety, tension, emotions are high?
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As much as possible, do it in advance when you're not in the fog of war.
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So, uh, there are some things that you won't know until the day of, like, let's say it's a crisis or an announcement.
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There are some things that you might not know until the moment that thing is happening, but there are some things that you do know.
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You know who your audience is, you know your priorities.
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You know what you care about and what they care about.
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And so you've got the weight-bearing pillars of your statement in place.
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And then when the day comes, it's basically like mad libs.
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You're filling in details, information, a few verbs and nouns here and there, but the contours of that should be ready well in advance of when you need it.
3:10
Walk me through what happens when there's a statement.
3:10
I'd just love to hear the step-by-step and really focusing on the writing process. Who was in the room?
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How did it come together? How did you review it?
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How did you know when to publish it?
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Then how did you share it on social and sort of respond to what people said.
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Just walk me through that process.
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I think you wanna establish in advance who has what authority so that you can move quickly.
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So it's like in battle, if you are on a battlefield and you're thinking, should I shoot this guy?
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You don't call back to headquarters and wake up the general and ask, right?
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You know that you have, uh, authority within a certain sphere and in any fast moving organization.
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So let's take a comms org.
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If you know that within this sphere you just have discretion, then you can move quickly.
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And then if you know that if it rises to this other level of importance or high stakes, then these are the three people you need to talk to.
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Um, you just know the process.
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So that's something you can establish in advance.
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And the other thing you can do is have a sort of doctrine where, It takes out the need for, um, some approvals and micromanaging because people know what you're trying to do.
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They know directionally what you're getting at.
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They know the goals, they know the audiences, and therefore you pick people you trust and then they can just make that call.
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So I try to minimize who needs to be in the room and in the approval loop as much as possible.
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And then for the high stakes things, we try to know exactly who it is in advance so that it's just boom, boom, boom, go to those people and then ship it.
4:33
Do you have ways of thinking about emotions that you try to convey once talk to a friend as I was embarking on a design project, and he said give them three emotions.
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I think three is the absolute maximum.
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I think we're simple animals and if we can focus on one emotion or two, that's pretty good.
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So three, I would consider really the upper end.
4:52
If someone reads something that you write and they come away with a dominant emotion, dominant feeling, a dominant message of something you want them to know.
5:02
Then maybe a dominant urge of something that they would like to do that you have called them to do, that's a win.
5:06
When you think of the companies you work for, do you think of giving them a personality? Yeah. Try to, yeah. How does that work?
5:11
Try to give them some personality.
5:16
You want the company to feel like it's an extension of its customers.
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The company has to be of the people, by the people, and so you wanna hire from the community that it serves, have people inside the company that come from the customer base, and it should feel familiar.
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It should feel like you're interacting with a company that culturally has a lot in common with you, and that makes you feel like you're on the same side.
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It makes you feel affinity, familiarity, liking, all of which are things that cons functions are tasked with building.
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And so if you can give the company a feeling of a familiar personality that culturally matches what the customer feels that they identify with, then you're halfway there by the people.
6:09
For the people of the people.
6:09
It's a very internet notion though, right?
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That's not something that you would hear PR people in the seventies, the eighties say. Yeah.
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It is sort of a, an artifact of the modern, modern age that we think a lot about community, and we think a lot of.
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Bottom up where things happen organically from a community that then become important as opposed to before where we had three TV channels and then someone said them, you know, someone said something on those TV channels and then everybody received the idea.
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I asked about personality earlier.
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Do companies have a soul?
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In one sense, there's a, there's a thought experiment.
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It goes something like this.
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If you took a billion people and you gave each of them a flashlight that they could shine on and off to communicate with other people the same way that you would have synapses, could they collectively function as a brain?
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Could they collectively have a soul?
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Would there be a ghost in the machine that sort of arises So spiritually, no.
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I think the human soul is a sacred thing, but I think a company can function like it has a soul because there becomes something ineffable in the atmosphere that once you enter into it, you understand.
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Uh, that these are things that the company would do or wouldn't do, and it's not written down anywhere.
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It's just in, in the air.
7:23
And I think a lot of that gets communicated through the writing, which is why the corporate speak just drives me crazy.
7:27
It's it's this soulless, soulless and it's robotic. Yeah, exactly.
7:35
And it's easier to copy those formulas than to do something entirely new, both from a risk perspective and from an effort perspective.
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There are phrases that we've heard in corporate settings a million times and they regret to inform you that Yeah, exactly.
7:52
These individuals, like, why don't we just say people? Right? They're people.
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And it's a cognitive shortcut where we can cut and paste an entire phrase.
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It's almost like if you're coding, you don't have to code everything from scratch.
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There are chunks of other messages that we just piece together and it'll get us most of the way.
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There is how it feels like.
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Whereas if we were to start from entirely from scratch, it would be more risky and take more work.
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This what I find to be particularly interesting about you.
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Is that there is the Lulu personality and then there's the corporate personality, and then there's the intersection of both of those.
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And I think this is something very unique about the tack that you've taken for your career and your approach.
8:27
I try to expose my personality a little bit more because there are times when you have to grab the lapels of the people you're talking to and just beg them to trust you.
8:43
There are so many times when you just have to look at them and say, take my word for it.
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And they're not gonna do that if it's an L L C or a C corp.
8:53
Uh, they might do it if it's a person.
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Not always, you know, it's not that I'm successful every time, um, and it's not always pleasant, but I think it's the only shot, literally the only way to build trust is to have as much vulnerability and personality and honestly honesty. I.
9:07
Possible because people don't trust corporations and there's data about this. There's surveys.
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People don't trust institutions.
9:15
Yeah, but like you just throw down, I'll throw down. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool.
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It's a very distinct thing about you.
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You'll stand up for yourself in a way that I think a lot of other people are afraid to, and maybe that's a risk thing.
9:29
I don't know what's behind that.
9:29
In nuclear parlance, I would say I have second strike capability.
9:30
If someone is giving me, or my people or my company a hard time, sometimes I will address that.
9:35
And the reason is there's a, there's a concept in game theory that if you are playing a game repeatedly, your behavior changes.
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If you're playing it once, you might have prisoner's dilemma.
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You tell on everybody and then you go your separate ways or go to jail.
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If you're going to be doing it repeatedly, then the optimal behavior is something called tit for two tatts. It's not tit for tat.
10:05
But if someone crosses you and keeps crossing you, then you do something and it changes their incentives for the future.
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I try to do that where people shouldn't be allowed to take cheap shots and be cruel or be dishonest or be unfair and get away with it indefinitely.
10:25
So I don't have the time, patience, or emotional wherewithal to address every single instance.
10:29
But every once in a while when it's particularly egregious, and if it's recurring, then I feel like addressing it helps to better shape the incentives of people behaving that way. So by two tit for Tatts.
10:42
So that means a lot of times you're, you're sort of turning the other cheek, turning the other cheek, and then you're sort of waiting and then once it's time to roll, it's, it's, Hey, I'm gonna expose this and, and kind of don't mess with us. Yeah.
10:54
And that also ensures that you're not doing it from a place of emotion.
10:57
I mean, tit for tat is emotion.
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You punch me, I punch you back before I even think about it.
11:01
Tit for two tatts is more.
11:01
You know, you could be doing this, you know, you could be responding and you don't, and then you find the right time and then you respond in the right way. Again, I'm fallible.
11:11
I don't always do it exactly the way I'd hoped, but what I aim for is when someone has really clearly egregiously crossed the line or done it repeatedly, then I get to come at it from a place of calm and dispassionate analysis as opposed to, you hit me, I'll hit you.
11:32
One of the things I'm getting from this conversation so far is the difference between feeling and emotion, and I was sort of conflating both of those as I was thinking about your work and your writing that you, I get the sense that you want to create feelings in the readers, but also be in a low emotional state.
11:46
but also be in a low emotional state. I think that this is a lot of the art of good writing is being in a sober state yourself, but still creating a feeling on the page and not having the sobriety of your, you know, how you are in the moment, come across as
12:04
dry writing, or you bottle it, store it up, take a step back, and then mix it into something that is appropriate for public consumption as opposed to just letting it gush out what's behind the way that the media's become so vicious. I mean, this is something that I know that
12:23
I mean, this is something that I know that you face at ck, whereas CK became more successful.
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There were a lot of publications about, oh, cks ruining this, sub's ruining that when really was such a threat to these. To these incumbents.
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So of course they had an incentive to go after ck I started seeing some of that happening.
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It's part of the reason that I joined ck.
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I felt really compelled to help with that mission.
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It's a wonderful team, and so at the time that I joined, there were some of these unfair attacks.
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It was starting to accelerate.
12:57
Um, in that case, I think there was some feeling of being threatened.
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I think to people it was like a rar shock thing.
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It represented something that threatened them in some way.
13:08
Tell me about how your study of insurgency influenced the way that you see these dynamics. Yeah.
13:13
This is what I studied in grad school.
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In an alternate life, I would've gone into this field instead.
13:18
I think about counterinsurgency a lot in this work because there's a lot in common. If you are.
13:25
Trying to spread a message.
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And if you're, especially if you're coming from behind in some way, you're not the incumbent or it's not the dominant message, and you're trying to take this and win over hearts and minds, and you do it very grassroots and you, you might not have the support of the powerful institutions.
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And so the way you would need to operate is finding these centers of gravity in communities.
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So the equivalent for counterinsurgency might be village leaders, tribal elders, religious leaders.
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You want them to believe.
13:55
So Christianity was sort of an original, uh, insurgent movement in a way. They were the underdogs.
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It spread from a tiny idea and a tiny place to really global movement and is the same.
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Sort of the same laws of physics of something spreading.
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You find the centers of influence.
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You get them to buy in, they spread it outwards.
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From there, you create your own distribution networks.
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You create your own ways of speaking directly to your audience.
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You don't rely on the existing centers of power to carry your message because you are a direct threat to them and an opposition to what they want, whether that's the government, whether that's the media.
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And so I think there's a lot in common, especially for startups.
14:39
Wow, that's really interesting.
14:39
Okay, so that's really good. Okay.
14:42
So let's talk about Christianity.
14:42
Let's go through that and then we'll work our way through that answer and just sort of fold it open like a flower.
14:46
So talk to about Christianity and its role as a counterinsurgency. Yeah.
14:50
Well, there's two elements of Christianity that I think are really fascinating.
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First of all, this is one of the most.
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Successful message spreading successes in all of human history.
15:04
Of course, if not the most successful, every company needs 12 disciples. You need disciples. Yeah. Yeah.
15:07
So I think there, there's two parts of it.
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One is the actual story that you're telling, and I think that this is the, you know, the, the saying of every person's heart has a God-shaped hole. Yeah, of course.
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I think that every person's mind has a hole shaped in the story of the story of Christianity.
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That that is the story that we resonate the best with, which is things were supposed to be a certain way. This is the ideal.
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Something went horribly wrong.
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Now we're in this other state instead, but there's a solution.
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In order to achieve the solution, you have to do this thing.
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And once you do it, the solution is here and the solution brings you back to where you were supposed to have been.
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And I think that arc of story, there's, there's different archetypes for this, but.
15:48
A of story, the story of Christianity is one that just cannot be beat.
15:57
It's the most powerful story of all time.
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And I think that if you were able as a company or as a person to frame the stakes in that way, it becomes so clear and people resonate with it.
16:07
Um, people just have receptors in the shape of that specific story.
16:07
And then the second thing is the way that the story was spread, I touched on it before, finding centers of influence, not relying on existing power structures and speaking directly to people in ways that they understand, in mediums that they like to use, through people that they trust.
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And with very clear actions that they need to take with these distribution carriers for ideas.
16:34
Um, one thing I've been thinking a lot about is sort of like the legibility of those. Mm-hmm.
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And like when someone comes out with a book, they'll go on C N B C or they'll be on C B Ss this morning.
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If you talk to those writers, they're like, yeah, it wasn't super impactful, but it still did something.
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And maybe that's creating a common knowledge.
16:53
Oh wow, you're on C B Ss.
16:53
But then there's other people like Joe Rogan who giant audience sort of underestimated by a lot of the mainstream media, and I feel like a lot of the marketing distribution advantages are in these illegible, more underestimated distribution channels.
17:13
Yeah, there's a matrix of quantity versus depth of how many people you're reaching versus how deeply you're reaching those people and how deeply you're resonating.
17:20
I think in general, if you're reaching more and more people and more of a mass audience, you're watering down your message so that you're appealing moderately to a bunch of people versus so on.
17:35
On one end of the spectrum is something that appeals to every person on earth where breathing air is good, but has very, very, very low.
17:40
Uh, resonance or meaning the other is something that appeals to one person and it's absolutely tailored for them.
17:47
You're seeing into their soul, you're, you're, you're gonna marry them. Yeah.
17:53
Uh, and it's incredibly deep and meaningful, but it's only one person.
17:58
I think people have to choose, and companies need to choose where you're going to be along the spectrum.
18:02
There are times when you're going to consciously say, I will appeal in a less meaningful way to a lot of people because the thing I need them to do or know is so simple or small that it doesn't take a lot of depth.
18:18
It's almost like a mathematical formula.
18:18
You know the thing that you need people to do and you know how many people need to do it for you to be successful, and then you think about how big is that thing I need them to do?
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How do I get to that number?
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So then you have your matrix and you decide, so if you need to go mass market, because the ask isn't very big, you go on a Good Morning America or something.
18:40
Or if you need them to do something really big, you need them to invest a million dollars in your company, then you call like three people personally and you invest six months in that relationship for each of them. Right? So it's It's a scale. Yeah.
18:53
The other thing is driving slogans and then even like the layers of depth within a slogan.
18:57
So the example that's coming to mind for me is Bezos, focus on the customer. Focus on the customer. Focus on the customer.
18:59
Just saying that over and over again.
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But then there is, there are all the different ways of interpreting that in his shareholder letters and his speeches.
19:08
See the same thing with day one.
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Day one is just a slogan.
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Day two is stasis followed by irrelevance, followed by slow decline, all that sort of stuff.
19:16
He says it in the same way all the time, exactly how he writes it.
19:20
I was watching him give this talk yesterday.
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And then the building that he worked in on Amazon, guess what it was called? Day one.
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And then he has the link to the very first day, one shareholder letter from like 1997 or something at the bottom of every letter.
19:39
And so how do you think about driving slogans?
19:39
'cause I think slogans are this really interesting blend of the two where it can start mass market, but it can sort of expand over time. Yeah.
19:48
This relates to Christianity too.
19:48
The 10 Commandments, uh, the Bible verses that everybody knows there are these certain shibolet that they do two things.
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One is they get, they get repeated over and over and over, over until they take on this sort of outsize, almost religious meaning.
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And they're easy to remember.
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And the more you remember them, the more meaning they take.
20:10
And also a bonus fun fact is if they rhyme, people are more convinced, of course, right?
20:15
Uh, but that the second thing that they do is that they, knowing them marks you as a member of a tribe, which.
20:20
Takes this company or idea and embeds it into your identity in a way, and that makes it obviously much more sticky. Yeah.
20:34
It's not only do they rhyme, but also like a A, B B A structure.
20:38
So ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.
20:43
There's a, there's like a brain orgasm that comes from a sentence like that where you're like, wow.
20:48
And then in that emotion of oh my goodness, there's, I don't know, somehow truth is encoded in that or something. Yeah. Yeah.
20:55
I wonder what the actual mechanism is, but it is very interesting.
20:55
The, a fun fact they asked, um, J F K speech writer after J F K had died, uh, if he had written that line and he said, ask, not really. Yeah. I'm not surprised.
21:06
Tell me about behavioral psychology.
21:12
Like I see there's insurgency, behavioral psychology in both of those two things coming together in your writing. Yeah.
21:18
I think that there's a way to hack communications where it's not just. Words.
21:18
But what you're trying to do is you're trying to interact with human psychology, um, in a benign, you know, use this for good, not for evil, but in a, in a benign way.
21:33
So I worked, uh, for a pretty short period of time in a behavioral psychology lab where we would do experiments and, uh, studies and it interacts with, with game theory quite a bit actually.
21:52
So recently I was thinking about, I should write about this. This is David's law. I should write about.
21:54
This means I have to force you to write about it, and I'll follow up with you in three weeks.
21:58
Oh, do, this is David's law.
22:02
I measure my life by how many times people say that around me.
22:02
I should, or by how often I say it to others. Oh, okay. That's one. Yes.
22:06
Uh, there's probably gonna be more.
22:06
Um, but recently I was revisiting the, this ultimatum game, which is you make me an offer.
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If I accept it, it happens.
22:13
If I reject it, both of us get nothing.
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So let's say you have a hundred dollars, you're gonna offer me 70 and you 30. I get to say yes or no.
22:25
In different cultures, people behave differently.
22:25
So in different cultures, if you were to give me 30, 70, I might respond differently.
22:29
I might be offended versus grateful.
22:29
Uh, but what has a very, very big impact is how you frame your offer.
22:35
If you frame it as you are giving me something that's different from, if you frame it as you are taking something from the pot.
22:46
So let's say you have a hundred gold coins, you're gonna give me 60.
22:48
If you say, I'm giving this to you, versus I'm keeping 40, versus we're going to split it 50, 60, 40.
22:54
Uh, that has a huge impact on whether I accept and how I feel about you.
23:00
Then if you frame this as, we found this pot of gold, it's fortuitous, we're gonna split it, versus we've earned it, versus you earned it.
23:12
You know, all of that framing.
23:12
All of which can be factually true, has a huge impact, uh, including flipping my decision on what I choose to do and how I feel about you.
23:17
And so in a, in a commercial sense, or in a very pragmatic sense, if you're trying to get someone to buy your course, buy your book, buy reading your blog post, by paying with 10 minutes of their attention, you're making them an offer.
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And how you frame that offer and how they perceive it, it influences not only their decision, but how they actually think of you.
23:43
I've always liked the line, an ounce of emotion is worth a pound of facts. Yeah, I agree with that.
23:47
And I think that that's so much of the art of, of even this sort of evangelism that I think you're working on, which is, you know, what are the right slogans?
23:56
What are the right lines?
23:56
And I love what you said about do I craft the message so that it just like I.
24:01
Fits into the hole that people have in their heads.
24:07
I think that's a beautiful way of articulating what you're trying to do.
24:11
I'm evangelizing for this approach, so I call it cultural erogenous zones.
24:14
It's that people have cultural erogenous zones and you're not gonna change what they are.
24:18
They just are what they are.
24:18
And so you are gonna have to take the thing you wanna say and either form it into that shape, or if you can't get it into that shape, you're gonna need an a p i.
24:29
You're gonna need, uh, some sort of bridge between where you are and where they are because your job is to go to them.
24:38
It's not building, and they will come when it comes to messages.
24:40
Well, I think this, the art of writing is knowing where to accept the world as it is and where to push on the world in order to change it.
24:45
And it's a subtle art, but I think that's a lot of what you're trying to do from a company to an individual in terms of how to spark something in the culture. Yeah.
24:54
And so this is really important.
24:54
I'm not trying to say that you should only write and say things that people already resonate with because then what's the point?
25:06
I strongly advocate for putting out new ideas, bold ideas.
25:14
If it's controversial, then so be it.
25:14
If you believe in it, and if it's something that people have never heard of before, never thought of before, great.
25:21
But in order to get it to stick, you still have to get it to attach to the, to the receptor.
25:27
And that's where, uh, that's where I'm saying build an a p i.
25:27
That's where I'm saying give them a bridge.
25:31
You have to give them the gateway drug.
25:31
You have to give them the transition so that they can receive and understand and make time and make space for this new idea that you're trying to spread. Here's an example.
25:41
It's one of my favorite examples, and it actually comes from Kamala Harris.
25:44
I don't care if people have different political opinions about her or her communication, that's that's all valid.
25:47
But here's one specific example of when she was running for Senate. She said that if you.
25:52
Care about national defense, and a lot of people care about national defense, but you don't care about middle school education and maybe not enough people care about K through 12 education.
26:11
The right message would be, did you know that people in this country can't join the army unless they can read at a 10th grade level?
26:16
Because a 10th grade reading level is required to understand the field manual.
26:21
And so if you want there to be a pipeline for a standing army in the future, you need to make sure that we're educating 10th graders how to read and not graduating people from high school who can't.
26:36
Uh, so that's an example of the receptor where they're thinking about national defense.
26:36
They're not thinking about education, and you are creating the bridge or the gateway drug for them to think about the thing that you wanna want them to think about.
26:47
So like the last of us, I've, I've used this example before, but people are interested in the TV show and now they're buying the games.
26:55
The games are back on, on at the top of the charts.
26:59
It's because the TV show got you interested and now that you're interested, you're interested in this adjacent thing, you just continue on the journey.
27:06
Let's transition into your writing process.
27:06
So I guess you write before bed brain's a little looser. What's going on there?
27:11
I write when I'm about to fall asleep.
27:11
By that, do you mean like the Salvador Dali thing where you're like on the couch, you have an apple to Apple falls, it's like, whoa, my subconscious is going, I'm gonna paint all that.
27:19
Or is it like I'm getting tired, I'm sitting in bed and there's something about that state of being tired that I'm really good at writing.
27:28
Then it might be a cope because it's the only time I have time to sit down and be quiet. I have three kids.
27:32
I have a busy day job, and so at night when it's quiet, I'm the last to go to bed always.
27:37
Then I actually am able to get still and think.
27:37
Um, but I also think that for me there's a positive effect of being a little drowsy and kind of letting your thoughts wander. Mm-hmm.
27:49
Um, I do think that my brain is looser as I described, so I This is a terrible habit.
27:53
This is not supposed to be part of your, your, like your repertoire sleep stack. Yeah.
28:00
Uh, but I, I have my phone, it's on airplane mode and I'm there like in the dark putting down my ideas and then I'll evaluate them in daylight.
28:12
So apparently what I've read is that the ancient Greeks used to debate everything twice.
28:12
They would do it drunk and they would do it sober.
28:16
And if it made sense both times it's a decent idea. So I I, I do that.
28:21
Um, before I go to sleep in my half awake fugue state, I jot down ideas that come to mind.
28:27
I jot down words that might not make sense.
28:33
It's a very easy way to think outside the box because half of it is gibberish.
28:33
But then the next day you look at it in the harsh light of day, and then you filter out what doesn't make sense anymore.
28:43
And you're writing on your phone a lot. What's going on there?
28:46
I've tried to do it in, um, longhand because it makes you feel like hemmingway.
28:50
It makes you feel like a real writer. Oh, yeah. It does.
28:53
It doesn't work as well for me because one, my handwriting is so ugly, I sometimes can't read it later on.
28:57
But two, I do a lot of cutting and pasting and moving things around, and it just gets messy.
29:03
Why is cutting pasting, moving things around, why is that something that you uniquely do?
29:10
I care very much about the arc of the story with everything.
29:10
Again, I don't always succeed, but what I'm always going for with every tweet, with every long email, with every blog post that we do with every statement is, what is the arc of the story? Where's it beginning? Where's it ending?
29:28
And if you flip the order of some things, you completely change the kind of story it is.
29:33
Walk me through something you've written and what that actually looks like.
29:36
Make that concrete for me.
29:38
I wrote a piece about why communicators should take more risks and it's, it was one of these things where the thought came to me and then I felt very strongly about it in the moment.
29:50
And it's what I said earlier.
29:50
I didn't wanna just jot it down and hit publish.
29:53
I wanted to capture it along with the emotion and then look at it again in the sober lighter day.
29:57
And so I wrote this very.
29:57
M messy little rant about, uh, encouraging communicators to, to take more risks because the most dangerous thing is not taking risks.
30:13
You start making mistakes of omission instead of omission, which, especially if you're working at a startup, especially if you're trying to, um, advance some new idea, is much, much worse.
30:22
And so I had this all written out, uh, in very just ugly form.
30:22
The prose was bad, there was too much emotion at parts.
30:29
And then I look at it again over the next few days, um, reorder some things.
30:33
And one trap that I fall into is I get very precious with some wording or some ideas, like I might get really attached to a sentence.
30:46
The temptation is to form an entire essay around that sentence.
30:46
Oh, I've never done that. I've never done that.
30:52
Like, rather than sacrifice this one beautiful sentence, I'll change the whole meaning.
30:57
But it's so hard of everything. But it's so hard. It's so hard.
30:59
What I do is I have a scrap, a scrap heap at the bottom where I keep those sentences and somehow not pressing, delete, just moving it to the bottom.
31:07
I never look at it again, but somehow it saves my heart.
31:11
And then maybe they can be pressed into service for some other piece. Yeah.
31:14
You know, maybe they'll live again, uh, elsewhere.
31:14
But that, that's really hard to do.
31:18
And so it takes me a few days to get enough removal from that sentence that, uh, I'm able to eradicate it less painfully.
31:25
I somehow exaggerate the importance of how, of the sentence and how unique it is.
31:33
And I'll, I'll never do a sentence like this again.
31:36
And if I don't craft the whole essay around it, this one beautiful, unique sentence will get lost to history.
31:40
And you give yourself a few days distance and look at it again and you're like, yeah, it's an okay sentence.
31:45
Talk about how you sort of avoid that.
31:46
For me, I need to take a few days and let the thing percolate because otherwise I'll do anything to save that one sentence.
31:57
And there's a quote, and I don't remember who now, but.
31:57
Uh, the quote says that love is the gross exaggeration between one person and everybody else.
32:03
And when I fall in love with a sentence, that's how I feel.
32:08
Like another sentence like this could never come into being, no other sentence could be like this.
32:13
And so it's worth the world for me to even reshape my whole argument to salvage the sentence or, or headline or title, right?
32:16
Um, so if I wait a few days and get some distance, come back to it, you look at it and it's like a decent sentence, but it's not worth shifting your whole essay over.
32:26
And then I'm able to look at it more rationally and see through fresh eyes.
32:32
There are some things also that only make sense to you.
32:32
It's like an inside joke with yourself because you, it's called the illusion of transparency When you assume that people know the thing that you know.
32:41
Um, and if you look at it with fresh eyes and you almost let yourself forget a little bit and come back, you'll start to see gaps where the logic doesn't make sense anymore, and the reader wouldn't be able to follow along because it was just in your head. So it.
32:54
Intuitively seems like the cure to the illusion of transparency is a good editor.
32:59
So how do you work with editors, both with your personal writing and with your more professional stuff?
33:08
My editor's, my husband and he writes policy papers, so he's very clinical in a good way where he, uh, forces me to make the argument and go from A to B to C as opposed to jumping around.
33:21
Sometimes I get a little two story and I get a little too excited by some clever wording and he'll tell me, just write it.
33:24
Like, just say the thing and uh, he'll tell me a lot. Stop throat clearing.
33:29
You're doing like three paragraphs of throat clearing that you're going to say something, just say it.
33:33
So that's exactly the kind of editing that I need.
33:38
So I find that really helpful.
33:38
What do you think is behind that?
33:41
It might be stage fright Whenever you write something and you have to actually make the argument and you put it out into this sea of other ideas and so many brilliant people.
33:51
And when it's in public it feels like hungry, hungry hippo.
33:51
So just like ideas and noise.
33:55
And, uh, it can be really intimidating, at least for me.
33:58
I find it sometimes intimidating to get into the ring, and so it's easy to talk around the thing and describe the thing than to actually have to put the thing out there.
34:09
And so it might be like procrastination in the essay itself.
34:14
Talk about Twitter as a medium.
34:14
You're so good at using it.
34:14
Like you just, your writing just like can pierce through the waves of Twitter.
34:21
Going back to game theory, I started using it because I realized it can change the incentives and behavior of reporters.
34:25
They take you more seriously if you have more of a presence and more of a following.
34:32
They, um, understand that you are willing to make your case publicly and rebut something that might be wrong.
34:37
And once you establish that, it's not that no one will ever say anything negative about your company ever again, but you do have a better position, uh, for being able to make the case.
34:48
And in fact, there's a New York Times reporter that.
34:53
Is well-respected, and that I respect that told me once on the phone, all right, I'll take this thing out, just don't tweet at me.
35:01
And it was sort of in jest.
35:01
We were joking about it, but I think there's something to that where people understand that you have a microphone too.
35:05
And so before I went to CK, I had a sleepy Twitter account of a couple hundred followers occasionally saying something and mostly just lurking.
35:17
Then I realized that if I'm gonna be in the ring and then I have to be out there fighting the fight, there were, there are a lot of reasons that it wouldn't have made sense for our founders to be out there doing that.
35:24
They had a company to run.
35:29
Um, I wanted to defend them.
35:29
It's easier to defend someone else than then doing it themselves.
35:34
Easier to defend others than defend yourself.
35:38
That's really interesting.
35:38
I think it's just a, a, a basic truth that if you are defending yourself, you, you're, everyone assumes you're gonna be defensive.
35:47
You have your self-interest, but if somebody else defends you, it's always more effective and you are able to defend somebody else more with your chest because you don't feel sheepish about being defensive. So if you were to be.
35:55
Insulted by somebody at this pub that we're at, um, and they were to say, I don't like your podcast for you to say, no, it's a great podcast.
36:06
It wouldn't be as effective.
36:06
You would feel a little cheesy saying it, so you, you probably wouldn't say it.
36:13
But for me to come in and say, what are you talking about? That's a great podcast.
36:18
I could say it more strongly, I could say it.
36:20
More assertively and it would be more convincing to the bystanders at our pub fight.
36:27
Talk to me about writing for your five-year-old. Okay.
36:29
I write for my five-year-old, uh, the same way, the same reason that I try to read things out loud.
36:35
Uh, a five-year-old is good if you have a four to 14 year old, that'll do.
36:35
But it's basically someone who is curious, clever, but doesn't have any background on what you're talking about.
36:48
So you have to actually fill in the blanks for them.
36:48
You can't, you don't have the luxury of the illusion of transparency where you and I both know 80% and I'm just gonna use a bunch of lingo and shorthand, which turns into jargon.
37:01
So if you're talking to a five-year-old, you can't use jargon.
37:01
You can't assume prior knowledge.
37:06
You can't assume that they're on your side.
37:06
You have to really start from nothing and make the case using simple sentences and short words when you're writing from a brand standpoint, is that simple sentence and short word is that?
37:19
Similar or do you feel like with a brand you want to be different?
37:22
Like how do you think about the division between personal and corporate?
37:26
Because I think that that's one of the really interesting lines that you're straddling here. Yeah.
37:29
I think brands also should use simple phrasing, clear writing, short words, wherever possible.
37:36
If you're gonna use a long word, it should be for impact.
37:39
It should be to make a statement.
37:39
I'm gonna drop this word on you.
37:39
I want you to pay attention to this word. Yeah.
37:44
Arrows pointing to the word listen out. Yeah.
37:44
But if you're just writing to be, uh, noticed and remembered and to get the message across, I.
37:55
You don't want the writing itself to be a distraction.
37:58
You want the facts and the message to come out and carry the day.
37:58
What do you feel like you're working on in your writing?
38:04
In my writing, I get wordy. I, I can over explain.
38:04
Um, and the temptation is to try to get clever.
38:13
Like I try to write like I'm Hunter SS Thompson or Matt Taibbi or something.
38:18
I don't have that talent.
38:18
I wish that I did, and I try to project it.
38:18
And that's when it comes out as labored and the writing is distracting.
38:22
So that's the, that's the trap that I fall into is like, I try to have style.
38:31
And what I should really aim for is, here's another quote that I like a lot is, unless you're a genius, just aim for being intelligible. Huh.
38:39
And I need to do that more.
38:39
'cause I'm not a genius at writing and I just need to aim for being understood. That's good.
38:44
Twitter is actually good forcing mechanism because nobody has patience.
38:50
Uh, people will willfully misunderstand what you're saying.
38:50
And there's the character limit.
38:56
I, I have refused to pay to get the longer limit, so I'm limited to the 280.
39:01
What will you do with your 280 characters and you can't waste it on Bloviating.
39:05
So it's a, it is a good forcing mechanism.
39:05
Sometimes I actually draft it in Twitter.
39:09
Even I, I have no intention of tweeting.
39:09
I just drafted in Twitter so that my mind gets focused on shortening as much as possible, and then I paste it into the email.
39:17
I do that all the time, so if I'm writing something and it just feels wordy, fire up the little blue bird and I'll just play around with it and get it right.
39:23
And then it'll always get better. Yeah.
39:28
Makes you more crisp from tweeting.
39:28
What are some of the growth tactics that have been really good and then we'll get in the sub stack and some of the lessons that you learned there.
39:35
The tried and true is just a tweet a lot.
39:37
'cause you get a lot of shots on goal. You become more active.
39:41
And if you can build momentum where if you have one hit tweet, it's more likely that your next tweet will be a a hit.
39:45
But the best practice is to do it several times a day and be regular. Yeah.
39:51
I think this is a very deep topic and I think one of the things that's really easy to forget as an online creator, because you see how many followers do you have, how many people are opening up my email and you don't actually see the other person there.
40:06
And I think that this is why it's important to even meet your readers.
40:06
Many years ago I'd just gotten started and, and I was trying to get a big audience, all this sort of nonsense.
40:15
And I hosted a meetup and I was at the meetup and I was like, I. These aren't my people.
40:21
I don't wanna hang out with these people.
40:21
This is not the audience I'm going for.
40:21
And I took a good cold, hard look in the mirror and I said, what am I doing?
40:24
I am taking some number on the computer and I'm valuing that higher than the actual quality of people who are following my stuff.
40:35
And then I've looked back at the arc of my writing career and it's actually been the smaller percentage of people who've really been able to move mountains.
40:46
And I've had amazing things happen.
40:46
And it hasn't been from scale, it's been from the quality of people that, that you can reach.
40:49
Jesus could have had 12,000 disciples if he wanted to.
40:57
He could have had 12,000, 1200.
40:57
But sometimes you decide this is your core audience, and I want them to be deeply passionate, true believers that will stick by me no matter what, and that will spend the hundred dollars that will spend the dozens of hours that will go to bat for me.
41:12
And I would prefer that over the ladder.
41:12
Not every time, you know, there are people for whom maybe the numbers just make more sense, but I think that's a trade off that you should make consciously and know that you're doing it as opposed to just automatically chasing the numbers.
41:26
Tell me about Sub Stack, some of the growth tactics that you saw there and and, and what you learned about how to grow on the platform.
41:31
I learned so much when I was there. Um, I.
41:33
It was an amazing experience.
41:33
I got to meet some of these writers that were just heroes to me, and I got to try to help them.
41:39
It was really, it's like if you are a Red Sox band and you get to work for the Red Sox, you know, it felt like that.
41:46
Um, some of the things that worked really well for growing an email list are the basic hygiene of being a writer. Consistency.
41:52
Just doing it often so that people feel like they're getting value for their time and for their money.
41:59
Having a very clear proposition about what you're doing.
42:03
So I, there's a sometimes a, a question over, do you choose a niche and go narrow or do you go wide?
42:09
And it's that question that we come back to many times now is, do you wanna appeal a little bit to a ton of people or, or the opposite.
42:17
I think appealing a little bit to a ton of people is not effective for email newsletters because it actually takes.
42:19
Uh, you are asking them for something that's not nothing.
42:26
You're asking them to make space in their inbox, which is always super crowded.
42:31
You're asking them for time.
42:31
If you have people on your list that are never opening your emails, that's worse than them not being on your list.
42:39
There are writers that actively call their list to make them smaller, to get rid of people who are never reading the emails.
42:43
And so, um, I strongly recommend choosing your niche of the people who specifically want the specific thing that you are offering, and then you deliberate for them.
42:54
And if that's a smaller list that feels strongly about you, then good because those people will forward the emails, they'll tell others about you, as opposed to, it's a bigger list, but nobody actually reads this stuff. The point is to be read.
43:06
What did you notice about writing style?
43:06
Did you notice anything about the kinds of people who did well? Yeah.
43:09
If you can have a unique beat or topic or you can have a unique perspective or you can have a unique style.
43:15
So if you have more than one of those uniques. Then wonderful.
43:25
But it is possible to write on something that a lot of people are writing on, but your style is better and more entertaining or more lovable or whatever it is.
43:31
Like Ryan Broderick who writes Garbage Day, which I love, that was one of the first cks that I subscribed to as an employee.
43:41
We paid for even employees pay to subscribe because we're, you know, that's still contributing to, um, writers making money.
43:50
And it was recommended to me personally by our c uh, Ryan writes about internet culture.
43:56
There's 14 people in this building right now writing about internet culture.
43:56
Uh, but he just does it with a wonderful style that is hard to replicate.
44:02
And so he's got his, his fandom.
44:09
One thing that is just wild to me is that you've done all this and English isn't even your first language.
44:16
How did you learn to speak English, let alone write professionally?
44:20
I had a bit of an advantage because I grew up, I grew up moving around, but from eight to 12 I lived in Norway and I was in the public school system there.
44:31
And Norwegians speak amazing English.
44:31
The TV is in English, it's not subtitles, it's actually dubbed.
44:40
So you are absorbing all of your entertainment, um, in English.
44:40
And I think about an English word through the lens of how someone who doesn't speak English might interpret it.
44:47
One example would be like in English, we say black car to mean fancy car.
44:51
But if you went to Asian and said black car, it would be like a hearse.
44:56
So I'm very sensitive to those things.
44:56
And then I also try to think about how something could be misinterpreted with just a slight, uh, misplacement of one word, or if someone doesn't read closely.
45:06
So in college I was in a job interview and this is bad.
45:12
This is the first time that I'm reliving this trauma, actually.
45:18
So this is gonna become like an Oprah thing. Brace yourselves. Really? I'm gonna start trying. Yeah.
45:21
I was in a job interview and I said the sentence, even though I'm young, I do have some experience below the belt, and there's no substantive difference between below the belt versus under the belt, which is the correct and proper phrasing, but things like that, if you're not an English speaker, uh, you could see this and either misunderstand or it's gonna fall flat.
45:47
And so I try to write without, um, too many of the englishs that only a native speaker would know.
45:59
It's, it's like a different kind of jargon almost.
46:01
What kinds of things do you read in order to improve your craft?
46:01
I try to read things that are as far away from communications as possible.
46:05
One, because it's my day job and I'm already immersed in it, so I try to liberate myself intellectually. Two pragmatically.
46:14
If I want to be inspired by new ideas, then the more heterogeneous my reading diet, the better.
46:19
And so I go towards things that are like, uh, historical fiction.
46:26
Um, I go towards classics and then I go towards, this is gonna sound maybe silly, but uh, I go through the Marine Commandant's reading list because the Commandant or the Marine Corps releases a reading list and it's beautifully organized by what level you're at.
46:46
So if you're a senior officer versus if you're enlisted, there's a different recommended list for you based on the skills and ideas that they encourage you to develop.
46:53
And it's a wonderfully curated list.
46:53
There are some books that are always on there, like Gates of Fire, which is about the Battle of Thermoy, which is a wonderful, wonderful book.
47:03
Uh, Evergreen on that list, but it's a combination of fiction.
47:08
It's a combination of, uh, that like leadership books, political books.
47:08
Um, and so I go off of that quite a bit.
47:16
And then recently a friend of mine who retired last year is a colonel in the Marine Corps, sent me their, uh, doctrinal publications, which is just their doctrine.
47:26
So they have different doctrines for how to do things.
47:28
So, War fighting doctrine, uh, communications is a, a section in, in another doctrine, um, logistics.
47:34
And so the war fighting doctrine has actually informed the doctrine that I've set for our team for, for my team, and how we operate.
47:43
'cause it's a lot of the same concepts.
47:47
You just translate it into a different world.
47:49
But agility, uh, taking responsibility, taking risks, it even talks about how to manage risks, which is you wanna take risk, but how to do it responsibly.
47:56
And if you're gonna encourage your people to take risk, then it's incumbent on their leader or commander to not penalize them for if the risk goes wrong.
48:07
But you can't encourage them to take risks and then punish them if they fail. That's funny.
48:10
I had a conversation yesterday where there were certain people on the team who weren't taking risks, and I was talking to this, you know, this person's manager, and I said, here's the thing, they made a mistake.
48:27
They're not taking risks. Acknowledge the mistake.
48:27
Do not punish them for making mistakes.
48:32
Do not lash out at them for making mistakes.
48:32
Say, that's okay to make mistakes.
48:32
I want you to take risks, but you only can do one or two of those.
48:35
And I think it shows up in writing where I think as a writer, you need to ask yourself, am I willing to take risks and often fall flat on my face?
48:46
Or am I gonna live in this zone of comfort?
48:52
And that means that I'm gonna be at a plateau of my own growth as a creator. Yeah.
48:57
And I've likened that to sitting in cash.
48:57
Like if you're just sitting in cash over time, you will not lose your money.
49:01
But you'll lose in the sense that the world moves on and the economy grows and everybody else is getting richer and you are not.
49:11
So you lose in real terms.
49:11
Whereas if you invest, you will have ups and downs, but over time, in the long run, you'll always be better if you've taken some risks and taken the dips, but you'll be on a secular trajectory upwards.
49:20
Talk to me about Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfield. It's so good. Yeah. Have you read it? No.
49:29
It's about the Battle of Thermoy, the 300 Spartans, but it talks about what happens behind the battle.
49:34
So the culture of Sparta, it talks about the, uh, leadership of Leonis.
49:41
It talks about his, for example, when he's asking his men to build a wall and they start bickering about who's gonna do what, and then he just throws down his weapons and goes, and he just gets a rock and starts building wall, and then the wall gets built, people join him.
49:55
You know, basic things like that about leadership.
49:58
And then it's a really touching story. How's it written?
49:58
It's written really beautifully.
50:04
There's a phrase, there are phrases that just stick with you, um, that make the battles so visceral.
50:09
There's this one phrase towards the beginning, um, where in this fierce battle, solid dirt ground has been churned to knee deep mud from the blood and terror piss.
50:23
You know, these phrases stick with you forever.
50:23
The last time I read this book, I've read it two or three times.
50:27
The last time I read it was more than a couple years ago.
50:27
But these sentences, you don't forget.
50:29
When I talk to my writing students, like one thing that they just so struggle with is, especially the older ones, it's just like they lose their sense of humanity.
50:37
And I feel like, I don't know what it is, but like, you'll be talking to somebody, you'll be at the bar with them, you'll be out on a walk with them, get a coffee with them.
50:46
They're funny, they're goofy, they're playful.
50:51
They got chutzpah personality, you know, ruach, the Hebrew word for spirit, and then all of a sudden they sit down to the page and all of a sudden, They're trying to write in this weird robotic fashion that is full of risk aversion.
51:04
And so how do you shatter that frame?
51:04
It's the same thing that happens when the cameras go on somebody. Yeah.
51:09
Like even now, as you're, as we're recording, you're very engaging and we're chatting, I'm enjoying it, but at the very start, when the cameras turn on, there's the urge of having to perform.
51:18
You know, there's a moment in my mind where I'm thinking, what would a great podcast guest say instead of, what's my answer? They wanna say. Yeah, exactly.
51:28
And I think this happens to people when they feel in the spotlight and perfect communications is very public, and you feel like you have to now perform and what are you gonna perform?
51:36
You're going to perform the act of corporate communications, which follows a certain template and you wanna do it right.
51:43
I had a friend who was a speech writer for Barack Obama, and he said that he could not allow himself to think that this was.
51:49
The state of the Union or that millions of people were gonna be listening because it, it wouldn't work.
51:53
It would completely alter his writing or he wouldn't be able to get anything on the page.
51:59
So, to your question about how to break that, I like pulling people from different backgrounds who haven't worked in comms.
52:04
There are people who, uh, there are people who are veterans of the industry who don't struggle with that.
52:08
So I don't mean to paint with a broad brush, but if you can get someone who worked, um, Who was a designer or a programmer or did, did something entirely different that they can now come and, um, start fresh without knowing what they're supposed to be doing. That's good.
52:26
'cause sometimes experience can be a shackle.
52:30
Sometimes experience can burden you with expectations of what you think you're supposed to say.
52:34
Whereas if you take someone who doesn't know any better, that's actually really liberating for them to go and do creative work.
52:38
I think one of the big assets that I've enjoyed in my career in communications is not coming from comms.
52:46
Uh, before we started the company, I had zero experience in communications whatsoever.
52:46
I learned everything from my co-founder who trained me and molded me.
52:51
Um, but it gave me the benefit of being able to be more creative.
52:57
And then also I like to think of, uh, what I call writer brain and friend brain.
53:01
So writer brain is this, this mode that you're in, where you're trying to perform and you're trying to almost.
53:12
Present to a discerning audience, but when you're with your friends and your feet are up, you can't be in that state.
53:16
And so a lot of the way that I get myself out of the stockage is I'll just talk to people.
53:23
That's why if you have a five-year-old daughter, or your spouse or your parent, or if you have somebody that already knows you as a person and not just as a professional, reading it to them is really useful because they will call you out on not sounding like yourself and you'll, you'll feel embarrassed.
53:40
There have been times when I've sent something to my husband and I actually feel embarrassed looking at it because I wait.
53:44
This so clearly isn't me.
53:44
And if you were to send it to just a professional editor or coworker, they might look at it through the lens of not, what would a person who has your personality say, but what is the thing that should be said in this context? And you might not.
54:01
Always get the sort of humanity that you need.
54:04
Tell me about dc You have this DC background and then you sort of move into tech a little bit more.
54:09
And how did DC shape your, your writing and how you, how you communicate?
54:14
I was in DC because I was working in the field of geopolitics risk management policy.
54:24
And uh, it's a useful, I think it's a useful sensibility to, to bring to writing.
54:24
'cause you start to think about things, at least for me, the, the background that I gained from working in DC it sort of makes me zoom out and think what are the, all the ways that this could be misunderstood or misinterpreted?
54:41
What are all the ways that this would not translate across a cultural barrier or a language barrier?
54:45
Um, so I think it's useful to have that extra layer.
54:53
And it doesn't have to be that, I mean, some people have a layer that I don't have.
54:58
Some people think of it through an engineering.
54:58
Um, lens, or some people look at it through a design lens.
55:03
Some people might look at it through a poetry or a literary lens, and that could be just as good or better.
55:06
There's, there's different ways.
55:10
This just happens to be mine.
55:10
Wait, that's really interesting.
55:13
Let's go through these different lenses of writing and I want to see where we end up.
55:17
The lens that I wish I had would be a more literary storytelling lens.
55:20
So I'm reading a book now about how to write a screenplay.
55:23
I have no intention of writing a screenplay, but I wanted to study what the elements are of a story and how to build a compelling character.
55:30
Like how to build a protagonist that you wanna root for, and then how to create for momentum and how to feel like there are stakes and get people invested. Yeah.
55:41
Um, so I'm meeting that to study, but if, if I had that background or if I had that lens of screenwriting or literature, I think that would be such an asset.
55:52
And I envy people who do. Why do you want that?
55:52
Because I think it makes you a natural storyteller.
55:55
I think the word storytelling.
55:55
You're cliche right now, super cliche and it's overused.
56:04
People don't really define it.
56:04
It's just like a buzzword at this point.
56:04
But if you define storytelling as creating stakes, as giving people something to root for or to fear and making people want an outcome, every good story makes you hope for an outcome.
56:19
You're rooting for something to happen, and so how to instill that feeling in people.
56:28
There's actually, I think, a formula to it, and I don't know that formula, but I'm trying to get to know it.
56:33
I'm studying it now, and I think if you did come from a literary background, then that's the frame that you've always written through.
56:41
I mean, I would give you another definition, which is the definition that you gave earlier, that we all have these holes in our minds and stories are the things that.
56:50
Match up most with the holes so that information slots in into memory. Yeah.
56:55
Our receptors are in the shape of stories.
56:55
They're not in in the shape of facts or talking points or statistics.
56:59
And that's why, by the way, a lot of times when you see companies trying to defend themselves, they're already losing because an accusation is usually a story, whereas the defense is usually a statistic.
57:12
So when you think, so look back at, here's a, here's a story from my DC geopolitics background, NATO and free trade.
57:19
The data says that the passage of NATO and free trade is good, just good, better on a ton of different scores.
57:35
It lifted productivity by this much lifted G D P by this much created this many jobs, et cetera.
57:40
The detractors of free trade don't have that, but they do have stories.
57:45
And so the detractors will say, well, look at David. He's a father of seven.
57:51
He lost his job because it got outsourced.
57:51
He's a corn farmer, and now he's not farming corn. He's at home depressed.
57:57
And that doesn't, and shouldn't outweigh the many people whose lives are so much better, including yours if you have access to an iPhone now and you wouldn't have before.
58:07
But the accusation will be a story, and then the defense will be, oh, but productivity went up by 4%.
58:12
And it's the, you know, one death is a tragedy.
58:17
A thousand deaths a statistic.
58:17
If you're fighting a story with a statistic, you're always losing.
58:22
How much do you think about framing in terms of the narratives?
58:26
Because that's the other thing, right?
58:26
Once the accuser has the frame, so once you're responding, you've lost the frame. I think that's right. Yeah.
58:33
The accuser chooses the frame.
58:33
I mean, the world of negotiations, like an international negotiation.
58:37
If you are trying to hammer out the treaty, whoever has the pen to write the first draft of the treaty is in an incredibly powerful position, and that's the position you jockey over.
58:46
And so here too, if someone else is putting that story out there and you're reacting to it, you are automatically in the losing position because you have to react to their frame and they've set, um, they've set the criteria, I need your help.
58:58
So how I write, how, how should we think about using communications and writing to grow the show?
59:05
So I think we have a few challenges, which first is we want how I write to help us grow, write a passage, my writing school.
59:09
Uh, we want to use clips on YouTube and Twitter to promote the show.
59:14
And then also really want to explain what this podcast is about in a way that when people are talking to their friends about it, they're like, oh, this is exactly what this podcast is, this is why you should listen to it.
59:27
There's no other show like it. So.
59:27
If I'm the entrepreneur, you're coming in for day one of, of, of work.
59:31
How, what does this conversation go like?
59:36
We start with a blank Google Doc and we create four headings.
59:40
First heading is what are your business objectives?
59:40
And you, you've laid them out.
59:45
So related to that, who are the people who need to take what action?
59:49
So you want someone who is already interested in writing or who cares about writing.
59:49
The action is that they should sign up for the course or listen to the podcast.
59:54
And in order for those people to take those actions, uh, they need to believe something which is, they need to believe that this is going to make them a better writer in a way that's going to help them have a better career or make more money in a way that's going to bring them more prestige.
1:00:11
Or they're gonna do the thing that's worked for their friends. Some version of that.
1:00:14
So then you have your audience, you have the business goals, you have your audience, you have the beginnings of the message of how you wanna frame it.
1:00:24
And here, just pause per a second. The temptation for.
1:00:24
Startups especially, is to get really excited about what you're doing and wanna tell everybody about what you're doing.
1:00:35
Nobody cares, nobody caress about your new hobby that is so meaningful to you and you found your passion.
1:00:39
And ever since you were at your grandfather's knee, you've been interested in, they don't care.
1:00:43
They might care a little bit if it proves a credential, uh, that you're actually legitimate.
1:00:48
But all they care about is how is this gonna make my life better?
1:00:55
And this is the problem that crypto has had.
1:00:59
Um, a lot of crypto companies not all have had the problem of, isn't this cool?
1:00:59
We built this on the blockchain.
1:01:04
And most people are like, I don't care if it's on the blockchain.
1:01:10
I don't care if it's web three.
1:01:10
Is it gonna make my banking easier? How do I use this thing?
1:01:13
And I'm a little worried about some.
1:01:13
Parts of AI falling into this trap too.
1:01:17
Like, oh, it's built on ai, okay, but what is it doing for me?
1:01:21
So that's one thing to remember as you're going through this part of the exercise, the messaging has to be targeted to their receptors and their cultural erogenous zones, the things that they're worried about, the things that they want for themselves.
1:01:33
You have to explain how it does that.
1:01:33
And if there's a gap between what you're offering and what that thing is, you have to, you have to build that bridge.
1:01:37
And then once you have the goal, the audience and the crux of the message, then you need your distribution.
1:01:45
You have to meet them where they are intellectually, like what podcasts are they already listening to?
1:01:50
What uh websites are they reading?
1:01:50
Are they going to conferences or are they are hanging out with friends in some other setting?
1:01:54
Like find where their thoughts are hanging out.
1:01:59
Then show up there with the message and if needed, with the messenger.
1:02:07
So to zoom in on that, the mediums of distribution for you, for example, there are going to be other podcasts that your audience listen to where you can just show up to that audience that's already there, and then give them the gateway drug.
1:02:21
Hey, if you like a, you'll probably like B.
1:02:21
So identify the podcast that they're listening to.
1:02:26
Podcast advertising is really good, r o i.
1:02:26
So I would spend some money on just advertising on those podcasts.
1:02:31
And then even better get yourself as a guest on their podcast to talk about what you are building and why it makes sense.
1:02:39
So that's, you know, free advertising.
1:02:39
You put everything in the show notes.
1:02:39
Um, people who are interested in writing are probably following a lot of cks.
1:02:43
They're probably following a lot of blogs.
1:02:47
They might be following, um, uh, people who, other people who write about writing.
1:02:54
And so forging partnerships, you always wanna go approach somebody, um, in a, in a.
1:03:01
In a way that you're offering something as opposed to asking for something. Sure.
1:03:04
If you need to ask for something, you can, but ideally you go and offer them something.
1:03:07
So what I would do is find who posts the podcast, whose listeners you want to be your listeners, and invite them on so that they'll promote that they were on this podcast to their audience, and then they might invite you back.
1:03:24
One of the things that I see with Write of Passage students all the time where they get stuck, it's very hard.
1:03:27
To explain who you are to other people, and I bet that you're doing this with companies.
1:03:32
I bet you do this in your own writing.
1:03:37
Like how do you think about that?
1:03:37
The more you know something, the harder it is to describe it, right?
1:03:41
Because the more burdened you are by excess knowledge, that's irrelevant to people. Yeah.
1:03:45
So you have to actually, you have the challenge of cutting through 99% of things that they don't care about at all to identify the thing that they do.
1:03:54
And, and, you know, you know too much about yourself.
1:03:54
If you only knew four things about yourself, you could pick the one out four.
1:04:01
But, you know, 10,000 things and picking out the one outta 10,000 is really hard.
1:04:01
And so instead of thinking about who am I?
1:04:04
Like, I'm imagining the Zoolander scene, who am I, you're thinking about who am I to this person and what is this person looking for?
1:04:16
You know, you, you might be, uh, a brother, a son, a friend, a, you know, war hammer, hobbyist, anything but this person.
1:04:24
Has a set of things that they're looking for.
1:04:30
They might be looking for friendship that's not you.
1:04:30
They might be looking for a, you know, fitness coach. That's not you.
1:04:35
But if one of the things they're looking for is a writing coach and a motivator and a teacher, then bingo, there's a match that is you.
1:04:39
And then once you're there, it's like, what kind of teacher, what kind of coach?
1:04:51
And obviously it has to be real.
1:04:51
It can't just be, here's what they want, so I'm gonna become that thing.
1:04:56
It has to be, here's what they want, here's what I am.
1:04:56
And then find the overlap in the Venn diagram as somebody who's using the internet to grow myself, our listeners, like what can we learn from Bitcoin?
1:05:08
It seems like Bitcoin is this really interesting project where you have a pseudonymous founder, you have a religious cult, and you have all these disciples.
1:05:14
It has a lot of the ingredients that you've spoken about for the last hour or so. Yeah, three things.
1:05:19
So one is, Bitcoin has no head of communications. Yeah.
1:05:24
It is not only decentralizing the technology, but decentralized in its messaging.
1:05:30
Um, there is a source, you know, you could read the white paper.
1:05:35
There is a source of truth, but what people perceive Bitcoin to be is sort of the average of the people and the messages that they see spread around.
1:05:38
And so what's powerful about that is that people identify as a Bitcoin evangelist and believing in this thing is part of who they are and therefore you don't need to pay them.
1:05:54
There's no bitcoin comms department paying them for like advertising.
1:05:54
What they get is the reward of publicizing this part of their identity.
1:06:01
So what you would wanna, so the lesson from that, what you would wanna latch onto is people who wanna publicize that they're a writer.
1:06:10
They're proud of being a writer.
1:06:10
They're proud of being on a writing journey.
1:06:14
They're proud of being someone who is learning their entire life and wanna be part of that community.
1:06:19
And that gives them the incentive to bring people into the community and to do that outreach.
1:06:23
Because the reward is not you paying them.
1:06:23
The reward is, it feeds into the thing they're aspiring to be in a sense of identity. Yeah. Uh, and community too. Yeah.
1:06:30
And two, and, and community makes identity more sticky.
1:06:36
This is the one thing I learned from K-Pop fandoms, which is that you become more of a fan if you wanna fit in with other fans.
1:06:39
Because being a fan is actually fun on like a meta level.
1:06:45
And so there's how much you like the band, and then there's like how much you enjoy being part of the fandom.
1:06:49
And if you wanna be a higher ranking part of the fandom, you have to increase how much you're a fan of the band.
1:06:53
Two is the people who like a thing can make you like the thing more or less. Yes, of course.
1:06:59
So veganism is fine, but if you meet a bunch of annoying vegans, You're gonna, there's like nothing inherently wrong with veganism, but if you meet a bunch of annoying vegans, or if you find them annoying, you're gonna not like veganism as much.
1:07:18
Um, so you wanna choose who you want your evangelists to be.
1:07:18
You want to have people who are going to be aspirational for the next circle of people because they will make you look better or worse by how funny, cool, accomplished or annoying they are, right?
1:07:41
It's like at the end of the day, people devolve into ad hominem attacks or praises. Yeah.
1:07:46
But your brand, you know, that you're trying to build is actually you, David, as a person, plus the company and the organization write a passage plus the other person who's telling their friend about it.
1:07:58
It's the average of those three things that becomes the impression that the receiving person has of rite of passage.
1:08:11
And some people don't like Bitcoin or don't like crypto because they've seen some of these scammy people who do and they're like, well, it must be scammy 'cause that guy seems scammy.
1:08:18
Of course, the third thing is a cautionary tale, and I alluded to this earlier, but a lot of people into Bitcoin and crypto and I'm, I'm a fan of Bitcoin and crypto, but a lot of people who are get so excited about the technology that they focus on the technology and the fact that it's crypto as opposed to the actual benefit that it would bring to people.
1:08:39
And that's why you end up with the trope of crypto has no use case block.
1:08:42
Blockchain has no use case.
1:08:42
I don't believe that's true, but it's easy to say that because all these companies launch and their banner on the website is, we're a web three company. Nobody caress.
1:08:52
You might as well be like, this blog is on WordPress.
1:08:56
Nobody caress what it's hosted on.
1:08:56
Just what is the thing it's gonna do for me.
1:08:59
And so that would be a cautionary tale, I think for anybody.
1:09:03
Um, the way it would look for you is to make sure that you're, you're less like, here's the next step in my entrepreneurial journey.
1:09:09
I'm excited that I've gotten to launch this thing because I've always wanted to do this. No. Right.
1:09:15
And I don't think you're in danger of falling into this 'cause you have these instincts, but it is, you have been looking for this and here's your existing stack of resources and here's the gap in it, and here's the thing that fits into that gap.
1:09:26
Last question, what about writing has compelled you to spend your career doing it?
1:09:36
I mean, you're not just a writer, but it seems like writing is the foundational aspect of your job in terms of how you communicate, in terms of how you.
1:09:42
Even show up in the world.
1:09:46
I never thought I would be doing this. But it is compelling.
1:09:46
I think the reason it's compelling is that you take these very prosaic building blocks and you can build structures with them that become palaces over time.
1:09:57
It becomes something that is an artifact that lives on forever.
1:10:04
I'm, I'm not doing anything this grandiose, but that's the potential, uh, is the potential of it.
1:10:10
And it is a challenge because you have to think about strategy.
1:10:18
You have to think about, in my case, business and finance, you have to think about how are these words gonna translate to revenue?
1:10:23
And you have to think about human psychology too.
1:10:28
So you have a discipline that combines like five other disciplines and it feels like a puzzle to solve.
1:10:35
Like sometimes I even think of it like a math equation.
1:10:35
And if you can solve that puzzle, then you can spark something really magical or it can go really wrong.
1:10:46
And that's part of the thrill too, right?
1:10:46
And if you mess up there, there are stakes. It, it can go wrong. You can make mistakes.
1:10:49
And I have made mistakes, but I think that's why it is so interesting and exciting.
1:10:53
You're profoundly changing corporate communications and I never thought I'd be inspired by somebody in your position, which is sort of the ultimate