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David SenraDavid Senra

The Comms Strategist Behind Anduril, Shopify & Cognition | Lulu Cheng Meservey

Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder of Rostra and one of the world's most trusted communication strategists, supporting companies such as Anduril, Shopify, Cognition, and Coinbase. In 2016, she co-founded TrailRunner International with Jim Wilkinson, who had just run corporate affairs for Alibaba's record IPO. She had never done comms in her life. One of her first clients was Anduril, in the company's first year, when Palmer Luckey had just been pushed out of Facebook, and no reporter would give him a fair hearing. So they stopped asking. They went to Quantico, to Camp Pendleton, to the CIA, and showed people the technology directly. She left to run communications at Substack, then joined the board of Activision Blizzard—and in October 2022 stepped off the board and into the company as chief communications officer. Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition was under attack from the FTC. She fought back in public, under her own name, which almost no executive in a deal that size is willing to do. It closed in October 2023. In March 2024, she started her own firm, Rostra, and published Go Direct: The Manifesto. The first project out the door was Cognition's launch of Devin, the first AI software engineer. Shopify put her on its board that June. In December 2025, she raised a $40 million fund to back founders she believes in. She takes about a dozen clients at a time and has a waiting list of hundreds. She named the firm after the Rostra, the speaker's platform in Rome, where a man could climb up while the city believed one thing and step down after it believed another. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/lulu-cheng-meservey Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com Deel: ⁠https://deel.com/senra AppLovin: ⁠https://applovin.com/senra David Senra Website: https://www.davidsenra.com X: https://x.com/davidsenra Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsenra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsenra Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senrashow Threads: https://www.threads.com/@davidsenra Spotify: https://spti.fi/TVrr557 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4msoZtb Lulu Cheng Meservey Website: https://rostra.co X: https://x.com/lulumeservey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lulu-cheng-meservey Chapters 00:00:00 From China to America 00:02:08 Learning to Read the Room 00:06:18 Building a Movement 00:07:30 Learning Comms by Doing 00:10:50 Anduril as an Insurgent 00:15:07 The Power of a Manifesto 00:18:47 Go Direct 00:26:45 Conviction Over Charisma 00:31:30 Why Rostra Exists 00:33:23 How AI Leaders Lose Trust 00:40:40 Tell a Better Story 00:47:55 Do Things That Can’t Be Faked 00:50:55 The Return to Beauty 00:57:11 Originality Over Templates 01:04:02 Do What Only You Can Do 01:07:14 The Jetsons Rule 01:10:41 Trust Yourself 01:12:29 Why Humans Crave Stories

David SenrahostLulu Cheng Meserveyguest
Aug 12, 20261h 17mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:08

    From China to America

    1. DS

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

    2. LM

      Yes. I was born in rural China. I was born in a little village where I think, um, my mom didn't even know whether I would come out a boy or a girl, or in six months or 12 months, or there was very little knowledge. And so I emerged, and we were able to leave China because my father was sent to Germany to get his PhD in astrophysics. I think at that time, the number of people who wanted to leave China far exceeded the number of people who were allowed to. So technically, we were supposed to stay behind as a kind of collateral to make sure that he came back. However, dot, dot, dot, we end up settling in Germany. My mom and I actually do go to join my father at the University of Heidelberg, where he was getting, uh, his PhD, and we started moving around to different universities where he would study at, like, University of X to work at the observatory. And so University of Oslo is one of the places where he, uh, was sent to work on astrophysics, and that's where I did a lot of my growing up and went to public school, and I just became a little bit Norwegian.

    3. DS

      How many different countries did you live in then?

    4. LM

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

    5. DS

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

    6. LM

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

  2. 2:08 – 6:18

    Learning to Read the Room

    1. DS

      I consider you a very singular, like, player on the board.

    2. LM

      Mm.

    3. DS

      Uh, I don't know anybody else that has a business like yours. You do the comms for some of the greatest tech founders in the world. You have anywhere, you know, from, like, 10, let's say 10 to 12 clients at a time, but you have a wait list of, you know, 1,000 companies that wanna work with you.

    4. LM

      A little less.

    5. DS

      Yeah, a little less.

    6. LM

      [laughs]

    7. DS

      That, that wanna work with you, but it's always, like, the elite of the elite, and a few of these people have been on the show, for example, and I've talked to them, uh, in private about you. So i- it's, uh, an unlikely story. I happen to know this because we've spent a bunch of time together the last year and a half. But can you explain, okay, you go to college, what do you think you were gonna do when you were in school?

    8. LM

      I did not know what to do. You and I have talked about friends of ours who've known maybe from an early age that they wanted to go in a certain direction. I did not know, and I think because the thing that I'm doing actually has not existed until I started doing it. And there are many other things like this out there that don't exist until someone starts doing it, so I think there's a lesson there. But what I really was forced to do, and then enjoyed doing, was some version of super-duper reading the room, and then figuring out how to become and speak as someone that the room would accept. And as a kid moving around and always being the weird kid with the weird accent and the weird clothes, it's, uh, it's a forced almost survival mechanism. I'll tell you a story about, uh, in Norway in a second, how I learned this, and when I got to Canada, I actually learned English from a book called English. [laughs] It literally was, like, a green and blue book. I could, I could picture it. It looked like a Greyhound bus seat type of design-

    9. DS

      Mm-hmm

    10. LM

      ... called English. I read it, and I was like Neo waking up from the Matrix. I was like, "I know English."

    11. DS

      [laughs]

    12. LM

      I thought I knew English. I actually did not, because English, there's, like, the book English, and then there's the how people actually use it English. So while I was in college, I did, uh, a, an interview with BCG or something that the career office funnels you towards, and thank goodness I did not get this role. Part of the reason I didn't get the role was they asked me if I had any experience doing something. And I said, "Yeah, I, I have, have quite a bit of experience below the belt." [laughs]

    13. DS

      [laughs]

    14. LM

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

    15. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    16. LM

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

    17. DS

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

    18. LM

      I'll tell you the story.

    19. DS

      In, yeah.

    20. LM

      I'm in Norway, and I'm just desperately trying to fit in and be a normal kid. When you, when you get to, um, the public schools in Oslo, they have something called motaksklassen, which is like welcome class. So it's like a transition halfway house for immigrants who can't speak Norwegian. And once they think you're ready enough, they transition you out. So I'm in this classroom, and it's, uh, like October, and I'm trying to fit in. We had talked about Halloween. Halloween was coming up. And in the US, you wear your costume to school, then you have a little parade, and it's awesome. In Norway, they knew what this was. So I show up to school in a full body rabbit costume, and I mean, it's got the gloves.

    21. DS

      [laughs]

    22. LM

      It's got a tail, like, everything. And nobody else is wearing any costume whatsoever.

    23. DS

      [laughs]

    24. LM

      So I'm the new ki- it's, like, the only thing worse than my normal clothes was a full body rabbit costume. I sat there, you know, I had to hold my pencils like this, like, the whole-

    25. DS

      [laughs]

    26. LM

      ... time in class. And it just turned out that it was not customary to wear these things to school. So how would I have known that from any of the conversations-

    27. DS

      Mm

    28. LM

      ... that I'd had where people knew the date? I thought we were all on the same page, guys. Like, it's October 31st. [laughs] We talked about this. And it just wasn't a thing you did at school. So the, the takeaway is that there's a lot that is unspoken. There's a lot of context that people just assume that you might have, and if you do- ... think you do and you actually don't, it will be exposed in sometimes very dramatic

  3. 6:18 – 7:30

    Building a Movement

    1. LM

      ways.

    2. DS

      Okay, so let's like jump in what, to exactly what you do today and why you think it is m- needed more than ever.

    3. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    4. DS

      If I walk up to you, I didn't know you at all, and I say, "Hey, nice to meet you, Lulu. What do you do?" How do you describe what you do?

    5. LM

      What I describe is I help founders build a movement to help their company succeed. If you are building like the seventh B2B SaaS in a, in a, a pretty crowded category, I'm not sure that's the most relevant for you, and it's not necessarily the thing that brings me joy. But if you are building something like we've talked about Anduril, uh, it's sort of easy to talk about because it's such a perfect case study from the past, but we've talked about Ramp or General Matter, these... You, you need to build a movement of people to believe something counterintuitive because you are essentially creating something new that if it were obvious, it would've been done. By virtue of it not being done, you now have to break through all of the existing biases and rally people to you, and these are people who have lots of great options that they have to say no to to come join you on this quest, and that is building a movement.

  4. 7:30 – 10:50

    Learning Comms by Doing

    1. DS

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

    2. LM

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

    3. DS

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

    4. LM

      For grad school, I studied diplomacy within which I studied international security, within which I studied counterinsurgency. So I really wanted to work in and for the government and, and on security issues, and I could not because I was not a citizen at the time, so it was difficult. So I ended up in Washington, DC doing what felt like a pretty close thing, which was political risk, i.e., if, uh, Google is entering into Egypt and there's a coup, what do you do? It's not a normal business situation. Or if Alibaba is having its biggest IPO in the US, um, the things that they have to overcome are not just normal business things. There's like fears about China, which to this day continue, and many are warranted, and, um, about data privacy and all these things. Anyway, I was working on political risk and ended up partnering with the man who was helping Jack Ma run their IPO, and he was born and bred Texan, had worked in government, had now become, um, the head of corporate affairs for Alibaba. After the successful IPO, he decided to start a firm, and he asked me to go and do it with him. Jim Wilkinson, one... someone that I consider a great mentor and teacher, took a bet on me, someone who has never done this before, and he said, "I think you can figure this out." I didn't know if I agreed, but I went with him, and so here I was, the co-founder and COO of a comms firm, and I was googling like, "What is PR?" [laughs]

    5. DS

      [laughs]

    6. LM

      "What is communications? What is this?" And I would learn, uh, essentially by embarrassing myself. We would go into meetings, and again, credit to Jim for just throwing me into these situations, but we would go into meetings with leaders of like Citadel and major serious operations, S&P Global. I would say things. Sometimes they landed. Other times, somebody would pull me aside at the end of the meeting and be like, "You know, maybe fewer like Power Rangers references [laughs] next time."

    7. DS

      [laughs]

    8. LM

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

    9. DS

      Your clients, in this case, they wanted like traditional PR, correct?

    10. LM

      Yes.

    11. DS

      Which is not what you do at all today.

    12. LM

      Currently, it's not what I do.

    13. DS

      Yeah.

    14. LM

      When I was learning traditional comms, it was very much wipe on, wipe off, what am I doing here? And I didn't have any credentials. You know, like I'm nobody. Nobody would answer my emails. People didn't wanna deal with me. Reporters didn't take me seriously, as they probably should not have. So all understandable. But then I get to know Matt Steckman, now president of Anduril, and Trey, chairman of Anduril. We were all in DC at the time, and, uh, Trey recommended me to the team to handle their comms, uh, and they had talked to a

  5. 10:50 – 15:07

    Anduril as an Insurgent

    1. LM

      bunch of people about this.

    2. DS

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

    3. LM

      It was pretty early. It was in the first year of the company. Our company was founded around the same time as them. Of course, our PR firm didn't become Anduril, but it was around the same age at that point, and they were in the process of defining what the company was. They had actually been in semi-stealth the whole time, where there was the website, and the website provided just enough fodder for all these conspiracy theories about what w- what is Palmer doing, but not enough information to... It wasn't like today where you do your launch moment and you have your cinematic launch video. It was just like the company existed, and there was rumors and gossip about it, but not fully defined, and they, to their credit, recognized that it was time to really define it.

    4. DS

      And you would compare their idea at this time-

    5. LM

      Yeah

    6. DS

      ... in history to a counterinsurgency, correct?

    7. LM

      I believe that they were very much like an insurgent.

    8. DS

      Okay.

    9. LM

      They were going-

    10. DS

      Can you say why?

    11. LM

      Yeah. They had a smaller team than the people that they were up against, like imagine Boeing or Raytheon. Um, they were going against the grain of their community. So especially in Silicon Valley, it was super-duper not cool to work with the government. That- that's when Google had employees walking out, protesting any involvement in Project Maven with the DoD, and they didn't have access to mainstream information propagation networks. For example, the media just hated Palmer. This was when he was kind of persona non grata in tech and mainstream for supporting Trump and not supporting Hillary while he was at Facebook. So it was pretty soon after he was pushed out, fired for political beliefs at Facebook, which is kind of mind-blowing to think today. But at the time, it was like, "Of course he should be. Of course he should be a pariah. This is, this is unacceptable for someone to hold these political beliefs." And so this was the situation that they were in, and they rightfully decided that they were gonna take matters into their own hands and create their own stories and create their own ways to get it out there. So they took a massive Bet on me really changed my life because Palmer sometimes very kindly is like, "You helped us with comms." And we're like, "Actually, he helped me with comms." You know, I, I learned how to do comms by working with Palmer and Trey and Brian and Matt.

    12. DS

      I, I have a question for you. The way Palmer is now, where, like, he takes the fight to them-

    13. LM

      Mm-hmm

    14. DS

      ... he goes direct. I know that's part of your manifesto. Was he like that back then?

    15. LM

      He still had that same fighting spirit. Now, the environment was different, and so it would land differently, and his audience was a little bit different, so it would've looked different on the surface, but I think the, the fighting spirit and the instinct was there, and that's why I had this wonderful opportunity to work with these great guys at a time when I was objectively really underqualified. They could've gotten, you know, best of the best. They could've gotten anybody, um, and I will always be so grateful. Th- this is why I, I talk all the time about being so grateful to these guys. It's like you don't understand. People, people don't understand. They enabled me to learn how to do comms. I would not be in this position. I would be, like, at a regular PR agency doing regular PR agency things if it hadn't been for this.

    16. DS

      Do you really believe that, though? And, uh, I definitely believe that, the influence and your appreciation-

    17. LM

      Mm

    18. DS

      ... for them, but I, I've known you too much. Your personality type would not... Your personality would not allow you to be a normal person working in a normal company. Even the way the structure of your company is incredibly-

    19. LM

      Yeah

    20. DS

      ... rare. I, I actually don't believe that you believe that.

    21. LM

      Yeah. I don't know what I would be doing.

    22. DS

      You, do you-

    23. LM

      Maybe I would've ended up here-

    24. DS

      It m-

    25. LM

      ... by some other means, but if-

    26. DS

      Doesn't mean you would've found this path-

    27. LM

      Yeah

    28. DS

      ... but you would've... You're too singular of an individual.

    29. LM

      I would've bridge-built [laughs] and ended up somewhere else.

    30. DS

      Yeah, for sure.

  6. 15:07 – 18:47

    The Power of a Manifesto

    1. LM

      go.

    2. DS

      So explain the, the... I love this idea of yours. Like, explain the similarities between somebody that has an idea to start a company or a movement, which I love, the, the, the phrase you use, and a counterinsurgent and what they have in common.

    3. LM

      When I was studying counterinsurgency, they made us pretend to be a terrorist group, 'cause the best way to study the thing that you're fighting is to understand the thing that you're fighting. And so they had us create these mock terrorist groups, and you had to come up with your mission and vision. You had to create your manifesto. We can talk about the importance of a good manifesto. This is when I got really manifesto-pilled. I think we're maybe now overdoing it. Maybe it's, part of that is my fault, but the value of a good manifesto cannot be overstated. So-

    4. DS

      What makes a good manifesto?

    5. LM

      A good manifesto looks at the world and says, "The people that we're fighting or trying to replace, they have more numbers than us, they have more money than us, they have more force than us, and today they have more legitimacy than us. But we are going to beat all of that with more intensity." There's a quote that's maybe apocryphal that says, "One man plus the truth is a majority," and I think that applies to insurgent movements, where a small number of people who are willing to die for the cause, in this case literally, and have that intensity, intensity can overcome everything. There's no amount of money or incumbency that can overcome somebody who wants it so much more. The purpose of a manifesto is to make concrete that intensity and paint for people a vision of what the world could be, such that when they see it, they are willing to leave their jobs, families, security, everything to go and make that happen. And a good manifesto is, once you see it, you can't get it out of your head. You have to go do it. So the manifesto is the magnet, and if you don't have that, you have no right to go up to someone and say, "Leave your comfortable job and leave your beautiful family and come with me on what is probably a death mission." Who do you think you are? You have no right unless you have articulated that.

    6. DS

      I wanna tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%, and one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling cost can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise, and we see that in the Ramp data too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com.

  7. 18:47 – 26:45

    Go Direct

    1. DS

      So you've written a great manifesto. It's called Go Direct.

    2. LM

      Yes.

    3. DS

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

    4. LM

      I remember trying to name the manifesto- Spent like days and days, and then we ended up with Go Direct: The Manifesto.

    5. DS

      Hmm.

    6. LM

      It was one of these things that you toil over for weeks, maybe months, and then end up writing it in like two hours. The key idea in the manifesto is that traditional PR as we know it is dead. Maybe you can see the body, but it doesn't have a pulse. And it's a good thing because traditional PR meant that you would have to filter your message through somebody else's prism. You would have to be dependent on somebody else to have the goodwill and the alignment and the means to faithfully portray to the world what you want to say. That actually very rarely happens. If you're doing something pretty uncontroversial and well understood, that can go fairly smoothly 'cause it won't be distorted that much. But if you're doing something unconventional, far outside the mainstream, unpopular, then you do not want this to be filtered through somebody else's prism. And the second thing is, I believe that there's a lot of virtue in being self-reliant for its own sake, for its own sake, even if nothing is on the line. We are sovereign human beings. We should be in control of our destinies. We should be in control of our narrative destinies and the stories that help us achieve the destiny. This is narrative sovereignty. You never just want to be depending on someone else. And so the manifesto was a way of giving founders permission and exhortation that nobody's going to do this for you, and that's good. It is in some way scary, but it is in some way liberating because you're the guy. There's no other guy who's gonna go do this for you. And the same amount of seriousness that you apply to the product or the code or the hiring, you have to be applying to your story, and you're the only person who can say it. You're the only person who can do it that effectively because you have, at the beginning especially, not a lot of evidence to back you up. You have your word, and you're gonna back it up with your personal reputation, right? The, the greatest founders that we know go to the people that they know and say, "I know this sounds crazy. Hear me out. I'm gonna do this. We're gonna do this together." And the other person's like, "All right. Okay, David Senra. This seems okay because you're doing it, and I, and I trust you." So there's just no other way around it.

    7. DS

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

    8. LM

      Yes.

    9. DS

      And so like i- when I, when I'm reading your manifesto on your website, I'm like, oh, this is like Julius Caesar. This is like Napoleon. This is like-

    10. LM

      Yeah

    11. DS

      ... Churchill. This is like Abraham Lincoln. You're just applying it to, in many cases, like the, the legendary tech founders of today.

    12. LM

      Yeah. The reason the company is called Rostra is because Rostra was the speaker's platform in Rome from which place history was changed. And there were many times when the mood in the city was A, somebody hauled themselves up there and stood to face the crowd, and then they stepped down, and the mood was B. And this happened after Caesar's murder. You know, the city completely turned in its perception of what had just happened and who was the good guy and who was the bad guy and who had legitimacy because of words spoken from the Rostra. So I think that we have figured out how to relate to and move and rally and gather other people a long time ago, and some of that has, some of that art has been lost, um, in recent times because we're just like distracted, and our attention spans are shot. But these are all things that we figured out a long time ago.

    13. DS

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

    14. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    15. DS

      Okay. How did the work were you doing with Anduril and Palmer Luckey shape-

    16. LM

      Mm-hmm

    17. DS

      ... this, this manifesto that's gonna come a few years later?

    18. LM

      This is necessity is the mother of invention.

    19. DS

      Okay.

    20. LM

      And a lot of companies now that consider going direct as a default, I believe have Anduril and Palmer and Matt, Brian, and Trey to thank for this because going not direct was actually just not an option. You're gonna call some mainstream reporter and say, "Hey, the guy who got fired from Facebook for supporting Trump, that you hate, uh, is doing a thing, and you should hear him out," which is very hard to do. There were a really small number of reporters who were fair during that time that I remember, but it, it just wasn't the way. And so we were not going the traditional path of TechCrunch or what Palmer calls trying to get the coolest startup award at one of these conferences. We were going directly to Quantico, speaking to the Marines there. Um, Palmer went to Camp Pendleton, um, going to speak at National Defense University, going to speak to the CIA, just going to the people directly, like literally walking into their building and speaking to them and then showing them the thing. And then same for recruiting. Instead of letting, uh, some hostile outlet-

    21. DS

      Yeah, you, you said this before. Like, okay.

    22. LM

      Yeah.

    23. DS

      You go to, whatever, I'm just gonna make it up-

    24. LM

      Mm-hmm

    25. DS

      ... New York Times-

    26. LM

      Yeah

    27. DS

      ... to get a message out. To get to the actual like two hundred people you want to reach, you're just assuming, hey, maybe five hundred thousand people read the story, and hopefully, the two hundred people you want to reach that actually matter to what you're trying to-- the impact you're trying to have in the world get to that. And we're just like, well, let's just-

    28. LM

      Just tell them

    29. DS

      ... cut that out. Just go directly to them.

    30. LM

      Just tell them.

  8. 26:45 – 31:30

    Conviction Over Charisma

    1. DS

      Does this require... Because, like, I can't tell the, the, the conditions in which this occurred, but I had the craziest experience where I wound up spending, like, eight straight hours with Palmer, and I found him... I've never met, like, a mind that was like him. Unbelievably charismatic, crazy storytelling, but, like, he is an inexhaustible mind, in my opinion.

    2. LM

      He's incredible.

    3. DS

      I couldn't reach the bottom of him saying interesting shit that is un-

    4. LM

      You tapped out.

    5. DS

      That is-

    6. LM

      Wait, is this when you had to call emergency backup podcasters- [laughs]

    7. DS

      Okay

    8. LM

      ... to come help? [laughs]

    9. DS

      I've told you a story before.

    10. LM

      You had to call a friend.

    11. DS

      So no, we just happened to be with-

    12. LM

      Oh

    13. DS

      ... it was a weird circumstance. I can't even tell you details, but just there happened to be other podcasters, and I was just like, "Dude," after three hours, I was like, "You gotta start asking questions," 'cause, like, I can't... It was so wildly entertaining, and it's, it's similar to, like, I would say Toby Luike, in a different way. It's like you can't predict what his response to your statement's going to be, and that makes him very fascinating. But in this case, it was like, "Holy shit, I gotta, like, tap out on this." But he's also one of the most charismatic people on the planet. So does going direct only work with that kind of founder?

    14. LM

      No. Um, it works better with that kind of founder. But you don't have to have traditional personal charisma. You can be more quiet, more introverted. You can, you can have a whole range of personality types, but you have to have intensity of belief in the idea. So the idea has to be fleshed out and coherent, and then your belief in it needs to be unassailable.

    15. DS

      So how much of your work is working with the founder to make their thinking clear enough? Because there's that idea that Steve Jobs would, would say, "The simpler the idea, the more it'll spread."

    16. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    17. DS

      Right? And so he would spend unbeli- there's actually a book on this, entire book on this. There's two books called... One's called Insanely Simple. The other one's called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. I've read both of them. And, you know, it was like he's such a clear thinker-

    18. LM

      Mm-hmm

    19. DS

      ... and look at the way he describes his products and the way he does an interview. It's like there's so much work behind the scenes that you're not seeing-

    20. LM

      Mm-hmm

    21. DS

      ... for him to distill his thinking down to that. Is like, is that a lot of the work that you're doing with these founders?

    22. LM

      Yeah, so I'll give you an example of a, a, of a founder that I met at an event. I actually don't remember his company. We don't work together, but that's what makes him a good example. We spoke for maybe seven minutes, and for six of the minutes he's saying, "Okay, I have a business where anybody can become their own cloud kitchen. You know, there's all these people at home who know how to cook really good food, and there's people who want more variety than the stuff they get on DoorDash, and I'm connecting them, and there's a network of a..." And, and there's a lot there, and we had to distill it down. And I'm listening to this, and I thought, "Okay, so you're turning a cook into a chef." And he said, "That's it," and he ran with it. Sometimes it's just having somebody who's not necessarily smarter than you, and I don't know more about the topic, especially some of these AI founders who are just, like, technical geniuses. But sometimes someone sitting across from you can take your word cloud of thoughts and ideas and suggest for you a synthesis, and for you to see that coming from someone else makes you recognize that that actually is the core of your idea. And now you have the compressed simple thing that you can share and spread.

    23. DS

      Okay, so you have a simple idea-

    24. LM

      Mm

    25. DS

      ... that can spread.

    26. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DS

      You have to have either you're starting a movement, therefore, you have to have some kind of, like, passion or very, like... It's almost like a, you're mission-driven. How many clients do you have at this moment?

    28. LM

      Over a dozen.

    29. DS

      Okay, so, oh, now we're expanding. Okay. So to know you're, you're expanding your company.

    30. LM

      [laughs] Yeah.

  9. 31:30 – 33:23

    Why Rostra Exists

    1. DS

      I think this is a perfect opportunity. Articulate why you're doing this. Like, what is... Why even start the company? Why... You work like a dog, like-

    2. LM

      Mm

    3. DS

      ... seven days a week. I call you, like, 11:00 at night on the East Coast and you pick up, like, and you have a bunch of kids, and, like, you have this crazy life.

    4. LM

      Yeah. [laughs]

    5. DS

      So why are you... Like, what is your mission? Like, why even do this?

    6. LM

      I think the world is better when we allow new technologies to take root and flourish. And in my opinion, building the technology is often not as hard as getting people to use the technology. It is not if you build it, they will come. Which, by the way, originated from Field of Dreams. Did you know this?

    7. DS

      No.

    8. LM

      That's the origin of that quote.

    9. DS

      [laughs]

    10. LM

      I thought it was from, like, the Bible or something.

    11. DS

      [laughs] No.

    12. LM

      It's from Field of Dreams. [laughs] If you build it, they will come. They're talking about a stadium. It is not if you build it, they will come. It's you might build it, maybe nobody uses it. Maybe it gets regulated out of existence. And maybe nobody wants to come work on this thing, and you get overtaken. So in my opinion, the greatest and most underestimated barrier between technology existing and actually having an impact is people understanding it, welcoming it into their lives, and wanting to go work on it. And so there are a lot of really brilliant people working on the engineering and in the building. I don't think there's a commensurate amount of effort and thought being put into the second part, the human part of the equation, of convincing people to want it, and use it, and work on it. You see that with AI today, right? We can build the AI. Is the government gonna allow it to be released? Are people going to use it? We can build data centers. We know how to build a data center. What are you gonna do when there's a moratorium because

  10. 33:23 – 40:40

    How AI Leaders Lose Trust

    1. LM

      people don't want it?

    2. DS

      This is a perfect example. AI right now has the worst reputation. It's, like, the worst favorability rating of almost anything. You've seen people talk about AI at commencement addresses, and they're getting booed out of the room. What would you do differently? Explain the problem they have right now, what they're doing, and then how you would approach it differently.

    3. LM

      A lot of the CEOs are describing that AI will cause massive job loss. Most people will look at that and say, "Don't say that it causes massive job loss." I look at it a little bit differently. If you believe that it'll cause massive job loss, and you're in that rare position, I think you do have an obligation to warn people and to try to get us to prepare for it. But the really small but really important thing is, don't look happy when you're saying it. Don't be smiling when you say there's gonna be a 50% unemployment rate in a year. Eric Schmidt doing that commencement speech-

    4. DS

      Explain the context of that in case people haven't seen it, and then what he did, and then what you would do differently, 'cause I'd like to hear your response to this.

    5. LM

      Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address, and a- among other things that were totally fine, he said that AI will change the world, and the question is whether you will help to build it, and that it's going to disrupt all of these jobs, and it will, uh, change the landscape. And I, I forget his exact words, but the vibe of it was, "It is taking away jobs. Deal with it, and get on the train or you're on the tracks." Two things. One is at the center of his story, the protagonist wasn't the human, and it wasn't the person he was speaking to. He wasn't saying, "You can go change the world, and you have the world's most miraculous technology to use. Think of what you could do with this." Instead, he said, "The technology," the protagonist, "is coming whether you like it or not. You are potentially in its way, or you can get on the bandwagon with me." Which is just, like, the, the wrong framing. And then the second is when he was talking about the possibility of AI essentially taking half the jobs of, of these anxious graduates in the audience, he didn't seem upset. He didn't share what fear, anxiety, or didn't recognize what it would be. He dismissed any potential anxiety that would arise from that. He sounded completely secure and blase about this happening. And so a lot of people have opined on, um, the messaging of how you're gonna talk about job displacement. Are you feel- are you doomer? Are you over-optimistic? And all of this aside, a human talking to another human should recognize the other human's reaction to that news. And if I'm telling you that you are potentially going to lose status, purpose, income, and security, and I seem just fine, and I'm smiling as I say it, automatically there's no trust between us. You don't even think of me as, barely as, like, the same species, but you don't think of me as being on your side. And you don't assume that other things I say are things that you would agree with or relate to. So the same way that, like, if you and I are disagreeing, and we're fighting, and we don't know if we can ever get on the same page, the best tactic for me is to find something that you and I agree on, and to lay that as the foundation. It can be some anodyne thing, like you and I both really like that hot chocolate. You d- uh, didn't. Completely unrelatable to me. So it would be something else.

    6. DS

      People don't understand. She has hot chocolate in that cup every time I see you.

    7. LM

      It's what fuels me.

    8. DS

      It's inappropriate as an adult.

    9. LM

      It's what fuels me.

    10. DS

      You are a grown adult.

    11. LM

      It's what fuels me, and that's why-

    12. DS

      At every restaurant I'm out with you-

    13. LM

      There's alpha in the fact that others don't recognize the potential of this as a performance beverage.

    14. DS

      You're a grown-up.

    15. LM

      See, this is why-

    16. DS

      You have... You should not be having hot chocolate every dinner. [laughs]

    17. LM

      Well, this is why I don't have to spray my nose with the zinc stuff, because I-

    18. DS

      It's not my nose. It's my throat-

    19. LM

      Yeah, well-

    20. DS

      ... 'cause I talk a lot

    21. LM

      ... the hot chocolate is helping me.

    22. DS

      I speak for a living.

    23. LM

      If we were arguing and I wanted to get us back on the same page-

    24. DS

      This was an argument

    25. LM

      ... I would say so. Yeah.

    26. DS

      Yeah.

    27. LM

      Well, now we have to reconcile.

    28. DS

      Yeah.

    29. LM

      So now we have to be like, "This is a really beautiful place. I'm glad we're here."

    30. DS

      Thank you for the Aman New York for letting us shoot here, by the way.

  11. 40:40 – 47:55

    Tell a Better Story

    1. DS

      I think like the, the, the other story, you don't displace... You can't just like say, "Oh, communism sucks. Look at all the people that have died. Look what happened in Cuba. Look what happened to all these countries." You have to tell a better story. You have to give them a better alternative. I feel the people in AI, I use AI every day. It seems miraculous to me. We use it for the podcast. I use it for learning. I use it for entertainment, all these other things. They're not putting forth like a better story.

    2. LM

      They're not doing it in the right way also. There are people who have painted really wonderful, optimistic visions of what AI could create in the future, but it feels like PR, and people write it off, and it feels heavy-handed. The last time there was a really effective techno-optimist message was The Jetsons, and it's because they weren't beating you over the head with, "Technology's gonna make your life great." The show was about other stuff. I don't know. They'd go around, they'd go about their day.

    3. DS

      The family dynamic, everything else.

    4. LM

      It's like a family sitcom.

    5. DS

      But you have a robot in your house doing all your work. You have a flying car.

    6. LM

      It was in the background.

    7. DS

      Yeah.

    8. LM

      It was ambient. It was ambient-

    9. DS

      That's a great point

    10. LM

      ... and assumed. Everything techno-pessimist, the tech is in the foreground, and it's about the tech, so Terminator or Blade Runner, anything where there's a future that you potentially don't want.

    11. DS

      Dystopian.

    12. LM

      It's a- the dystopian stories about te- the tech, the tech is the thing people focus on. But the utopian stories about tech, when you make tech the thing people focus on, they write it off as PR. And so I think what we want is for the utopian stories about tech or the optimistic stories about tech to have it in the background, just be ambient. A lot of people have read sci-fi novels or... And sci-fi novel- novels are usually not about the technology its- itself. It's about a story. Like Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is about Nell and her family, and, um, Seveneves is about the people being sent to space, and the fact that they have technology to preserve the human race is in the background as an enabler. And these are the types of stories that make people so inspired that they have now started companies. You and I have talked to many founders who have started companies based on being inspired by sci-fi. Palmer's obviously one of them. And it's not because they're bludgeoning you over the head with one specific invention. It's because they're showing the better world and the human stories within it with technology in the ambiance.

    13. DS

      I feel like if people went back and studied like David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins-

    14. LM

      Mm-hmm

    15. DS

      ... Albert Lasker, some of the greatest copywriters and some of the greatest, uh, founders of these, the, the heyday, like the Madison Avenue of these-

    16. LM

      Yeah

    17. DS

      ... advertising agencies, they, they just all say the same shit over and over again. They're just like, "Show the benefit."

    18. LM

      Yeah.

    19. DS

      "Show what you're-"

    20. LM

      Yeah.

    21. DS

      "Not- don't show your product. Show the change it enables."

    22. LM

      Yeah.

    23. DS

      I think one of the best examples of this is if you heard the story when Steve Jobs was really young, I think he was like in his 20s, and he's like the... He, he tells a story of, uh, the, the most efficient, uh, like locomotion for any, you know, uh, any creature on Earth. And, uh, it's like, you know- Uh, a man is really s- like, low on that compared to other animals. But you put a man on a bike, and he's way more effi-

    24. LM

      See, I'm not 'cause I drink chocolate milk. [laughs]

    25. DS

      But he's way more efficient than even, like, the condor, I think-

    26. LM

      Mm-hmm

    27. DS

      ... is the, the, the, the what he, the animal that, um, he, that Steve Jobs compares it to. But he said, "But if you put him on, like, the bicycle," he goes, "So what I'm creating is the bicycle for the mind." And then you're like, "Oh, I want a computer because-

    28. LM

      Mm-hmm

    29. DS

      ... this is now makes me more efficient. It makes me, takes me from this slow-footed human-

    30. LM

      Mm-hmm

  12. 47:55 – 50:55

    Do Things That Can’t Be Faked

    1. DS

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

    2. LM

      This is my Philippiad for the year, which is this tirade I've been g- I've been going on, which is that everything seems fake now. Everything is fake. Everything is fake. You, you go to some of these launches. First of all, every launch uses the same, like, slop cinematic video, same template. It was original a few times, and now it's just like they're all doing it, and then half of them, you go to the engagement, it's completely fake. You, you saw, um, one from today, I think you said, that it had, like-

    3. DS

      It has, like, h- 100 likes but 4,700 retweets.

    4. LM

      Yeah. [laughs]

    5. DS

      It's like, why are you paying for retweets?

    6. LM

      Yeah. There was another one from a couple weeks ago, and then another one from the week after that. And the reason we know is because you and I have the eye to look for it, and also, I know who some of these agencies are. I get the messages, you know, pitching the paid promotions. I know the people who get the messages, and you can just start to tell after a while that, number one, the amount of engagement this thing has is completely disproportionate to how interesting it actually is, and then number two, when you look through the people who are engaging with it, it's all, like, some random account in a developing country [laughs]

    7. DS

      Yeah

    8. LM

      ... that has no other tweets, uh, that are, than, um, shilling products like this. When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake. I don't think this was a fake video or fake engagement. I think to myself, "It's a fake company with a fake founder." I will never buy their product, do business with them. I would never recommend somebody go work with them. The whole thing is fake.

    9. DS

      What is the advice that you have in the essay for, to do? Like, what would you do today?

    10. LM

      You can do things that can't be faked. So first of all, it's better to put out something that truly represents the best version of what you are doing that might get lower engagement But the people who are engaging are actually real people, and they care. So it's better to get 50 people who feel like this is speaking to them than to get the 4,700 retweets or whatever that you saw that seems obviously fake. Two is there are things that the fakes can't replicate, and these things are relationships with other humans. You should make sure to be telling your friends about it, telling your contacts, and, um, partnering with the people that you've known and trusted for a long time. That can't be faked by one of these fake companies. Another is doing things in the real world, um, where you might just bring people over to your house and talk about it. Fake company can't do that. There's a sense of taste and discernment and beauty-

    11. DS

      Yeah, you keep, you, you-

    12. LM

      ... that I don't see in these fake things.

    13. DS

      Yeah, you keep s-

    14. LM

      They're not made with love.

  13. 50:55 – 57:11

    The Return to Beauty

    1. DS

      Yeah, you keep saying this, they're gonna be like a return to beauty. What does that mean?

    2. LM

      There is a return to beauty.

    3. DS

      What does that mean?

    4. LM

      People are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things again. We had probably a decade or the better part of a decade where we had to take this aesthetic relativistic view of everything is beautiful in someone's eyes, and this piece of art that is, like, clearly trash is just as beautiful as one of the great masters, or somebody who is clearly unhealthy and unhappy is just as beautiful as someone who takes really good care of themselves and-

    5. DS

      You're talking about putting obese women on, like, the front of a magazine?

    6. LM

      Uh, yes, like, um, like the Victoria's Secret had this phase of, like, obese women and men. Men, Victor's Secret. It became [laughs]

    7. DS

      [laughs]

    8. LM

      This isn't Victor's Secret.

    9. DS

      Yeah.

    10. LM

      But it was for a while. Like, why, why are we all pretending? It was like the emperor's new clothes, the emperor's new lingerie. Like, we're all pretending that this is still sexy, and we're pretending that this still looks good. Anyway, coming off of the back of that, people are allowed now to say, "This is more beautiful than this," and a beautiful building is more beautiful than an ugly building, and a beautiful website is worth creating. This is what Joe Gebbia and the National Design Studio team are doing is saying, "We believe that more beautiful experiences on the internet reflect the dignity of being an American citizen, and that is what we want, so we're going to put in effort from the best talent in the private sector to go make that for you because it's worth something. We're not going to pretend that a website has to be ugly." And anything big or small or glamorous or very pedestrian, like a simple government website, can be made more beautiful, and when it is, people appreciate it so much more because we do have this inherent yearning for beauty. And going back to real versus fake things, the fake things don't have beauty. They're orphans in a way.

    11. DS

      So you think a-

    12. LM

      Nobody loves them.

    13. DS

      So you think an appreciation for beauty is universal?

    14. LM

      Yes.

    15. DS

      It's interesting. I just read this book. Um, it seems, it's the memoir of this guy named Kelly Johnson, who's the one that st- uh, started Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin.

    16. LM

      Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    17. DS

      And he, he talked about that. Like, he, um, he worked so much and worked so d- like, his, his work was so stressful and difficult, he wound up having to, like, have part of his... He got ulcers, had to have part of his stomach cut out, just under unbelievable pressure that he put himself in. He had to find a way to, to literally take him out of his work, so he'd like to spend time outdoors, and he became a rancher. And he said, you know, one of the most important things that ever happened in his life is just the fact that he liked watching the sunset every night.

    18. LM

      Mm.

    19. DS

      And he's just like, "There's nothing more beautiful on the planet than a sunset," and he's writing those words 40 years ago. He's been dead for, you know, 30 years-

    20. LM

      Mm-hmm

    21. DS

      ... 35 years, and it's just like, that's still true today.

    22. LM

      It is.

    23. DS

      It was still true in the time of Julius Caesar. Explain to me the connection because you, y- you, you talk about everything's fake, which I agree with, and at the same time, you talk about taste and beauty. So explain how those things connect, like, almost like taste and beauty. I think the way you described taste was taste is the recognition of beauty.

    24. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    25. DS

      So explain how taste and beauty is an anecdote to everything being fake.

    26. LM

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

    27. DS

      Yeah

    28. LM

      ... to paraphrase Cicero.

    29. DS

      Mm-hmm. [laughs]

    30. LM

      You know, he, he would say, he would say something akin to it, "It's a, it's a great, um, joy to be looking at the beautiful stars tonight, but even better to be looking at them with you." Cicero in 50 BC wrote the last great treatise on friendship, and we've been underestimating the importance of it ever since. And so one of the other things on the list of things that are real that can't be faked is friendship and having your friends come along for the journey and support you. Now, as to the question of why taste, beauty, discernment, elegance are antithetical to fake things, it's because fake things are not beautiful. It sounds like something that isn't necessarily true. You're like, well, in theory, someone could create something that's fake, and it could be beautiful. In theory, yes, but it hasn't been done. In practice, I have not seen a company or a project that wasn't real that was also beautiful. So I can't explain the mechanism, but empirically, it is the case that fake things do not turn out beautiful, and I think it's because no one has put that love and care into them because why would you put the love and care if you are just going to buy the engagement anyway? On the flip side, it's that beautiful things can't be faked. You know, beauty is a scoreboard. It's a very obvious scoreboard. Someone who's healthy, who takes care of themselves, you see it right there. You can't pretend. And so I think beauty is sort of like a stamp of authenticity.

  14. 57:11 – 1:04:02

    Originality Over Templates

    1. DS

      Or, or even worse-

    2. LM

      ... feel from it

    3. DS

      ... use a template.

    4. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DS

      You're anti-template. I've heard-

    6. LM

      I'm anti-template.

    7. DS

      Ex- ex- this is one of the most interesting ideas. Explain this.

    8. LM

      Can... I do not use templates.

    9. DS

      Okay, but people come to you and they're like, "Okay, well, I'm a company."

    10. LM

      Yeah.

    11. DS

      You work with other companies. They had this problem. I'm sure you have some kind of template for this problem. You're like, "No, we're gonna start from a blank sheet of paper." Explain your thinking on this.

    12. LM

      Two reasons. One is, yeah, I do get asked for templates a lot, and I always say I don't have templates. I actually have to resist the temptation. I have to pass the marshmallow test to save myself time by using templates. I can make my life easier and have 20 more minutes at night to read by using more templates, and the reason I resist it is, number one, no two situations are the same, and by pretending that they are, we miss that texture. At the beginning of this conversation, we talked about context and texture and respecting that, and I think that alpha comes from the little cracks in reality that only you can see and that you can exploit. And if you are just plastering over that with a templated version of something else, you are sacrificing the opportunity to be better. And I am sacrificing the opportunity to be better than my own work of six months ago. Why do I wanna settle for the schlubby nonsense of the thing that I did when I was six months dumber than I am now? I'm not gonna do that. So I don't use templates. The second reason is we've talked about things that are inherently valuable. Inherently valuable to me is the idea that everything deserves originality and that there's a shortage of it in the world. Anything worth doing deserves originality. Now, if there's, like, a founder that I literally didn't care about, or just I, you know, by definition I would never work with, maybe I would toss them a template, but anybody that I care about, I would be insulting them by taking the shortcut and discounting their originality, and I would be insulting my own ability to continue generating new ideas.

    13. DS

      I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are fullscreen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water, and you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you wanna get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. I don't know if you're gonna remember this, but hearing you speak right now, there's actually templates in communication too, which you see this with, like, there can be auto-complete, 'cause we just say the same stuff over and over again. So you and I were at, uh... We were doing this event. Cognition is a, a, a customer of yours. I'm friends with two of the founders. They asked me to come to... This is actually the, by pure chance, this same hotel we're in today.

    14. LM

      Oh, this, was this the thing where I sent that email?

    15. DS

      I'm gonna get to there.

    16. LM

      Oh.

    17. DS

      Exactly. This ex- this-

    18. LM

      Oh, okay.

    19. DS

      Good, you do remember this.

    20. LM

      Okay, okay, I remember.

    21. DS

      So they're like, "Hey, will you come to this event and, like, interview two founders for us?" I'm like, "Yeah, I love you guys. That's fine." And I don't check my email. Like, I push everything to text, and my email is just like, I literally just don't read it. And I just happened to see, like, one pop up, and it says Lulu, and I'm like, "Oh, I'll read Lulu's email." I'm like, "I'm not reading this other stuff." And in this email, this had gone back and forth for, like, I missed the thread, and I guess this other founder's normal PR person had sent over, like, a list of questions. Like, this is the questions that David, we want David to ask the founder, which is like, first of all, you're fucking crazy if you think you, like, you can put, like, control what's gonna come outta my mouth. And you, I jump in this, you're like, "These questions suck, and David's, David would never ask these questions. These aren't good enough." But I realize, and then you read them, it's just, like, the most bland, boring-

    22. LM

      They were terrible

    23. DS

      ... templated shit that you've ever seen. It's like I, I think there is something... Why, why are we attracted to people like a Palmer Luckey? We had Marc Andreessen on this, uh, this podcast, and I was like, I think the two best podcast guests, at least in business-wise, in terms of, like, what comes out of their mouth and how they're able to, to speak is, like I told Mark, it's like you and Palmer Luckey, because it's like they're so fascinating and entertaining to, uh, to, like, hear speak.

    24. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    25. DS

      And it's be- a part of it is because they're not... They're... It's impossible to say that either of them, or any of the good communicati- co- co- communicators, even Elon or anyb- el- else like that, is, like, speaking in template form.

    26. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DS

      They are truly unique and kind of leaning into what makes them unique.

    28. LM

      When you use a template You are giving up on the possibility that you could be better. And I say this sometimes about AI writing. You know, AI is a wonderful tool. I use it all the time. But if you are relying on AI to write for you and to generate ideas for you, you are putting yourself at sea level, or you're putting yourself at the level of anyone else in the population who wants to pay fractions of a cent for a token to get the same out- you know, s- similar output from the same shared brain. So if you are far below average, you should do that because average is better than you. But if you believe that you can be even a little bit better than average, you would be robbing yourself to do that. And actually, Ralph Waldo Emerson calls it a form of suicide because in imitating others, which is what a template is, you are killing your own ideas. You know, what are we? What are we, if not a unique combination of beliefs, ideas, feelings? Like, if you were really to unpack the soul that we have, it's these things. I believe that there's a, you know, s- more special spark of life, too, but if you take that and you mute it, you are killing a really sacred part of yourself. So I can understand why he would say imitation is suicide, and using templates is robbing yourself of the possibility that you could ever be better than the last thing, and that's a shame.

  15. 1:04:02 – 1:07:14

    Do What Only You Can Do

    1. DS

      Okay, so you're the world's leading expert in terms of founder, CEO comms, right? You also do crisis comms for-

    2. LM

      Mm-hmm

    3. DS

      ... the same companies as well. So I need to make sure I understand the way you think about this based on not only the work you've done in the past and the cust- the clients that I know of, but also this essay that you wrote where... Is the proper reading of that essay, that everything is fake, is that you need to lean into the more distinct parts of yourself?

    4. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DS

      Is that what you're doing with your customers? Or your clients, rather.

    6. LM

      Yeah. I am leaning into things that only I can do. And there are people, many of them, who are smarter than me or more sophisticated or better connected or have more experience or whatever it is, but the combination of things that together I feel uniquely suited to do, I need to do as much of that as possible, and it has to be me. There's a million ways you could get something else from not me, but if you want to build a movement around a technology that has civilizational importance, this is what I'm here to do. This is what I live to do. You know, it's sort of like your thing. You've got the one thing. I'm not trying to compete with other people doing other things. It's like this specific thing. And any of the founders that we're talking about, they have been put on earth to do a thing that needs doing. They're the ones. Why would you ever put yourself on the same level as something that can be faked? And now that we are inundated with all of this fake bullshit, it is really important to stand out so that you can attract your people. You kind of have to fight your way through the fray and through the noise to even get their attention, and that's another part of it, too.

    7. DS

      Do you know who Dana White is?

    8. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    9. DS

      Okay.

    10. LM

      Yeah, I saw your-

    11. DS

      Yeah, I think he's a, a perfect example of this. Like, I, I would tell a, a lot of founders, like, you should just go watch his press conferences.

    12. LM

      Okay.

    13. DS

      I don't care if you don't like fighting, that's fine.

    14. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    15. DS

      Just watch the press conferences he does after the fights, and, like, that's how you should communicate. There's two things that came to mind when you were just speaking. One, he has this idea where, like, the most important thing is, like, you have to know who you are. That's step one. He's like, "Don't do anything else until you figure out who the hell, who you truly are." Then two, figure out what you truly want to do in life, and he goes, "Once you make those two decisions," he's got, like, this simple genius, "so then you just wake up every day and get after it."

    16. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    17. DS

      Like, you already, you know who you are and what you want to do, so you just do that every day and you never stop.

    18. LM

      Mm.

    19. DS

      And I think those two things, like knowing exactly who you are, what you want to do, and then finding that opportunity that only you can do-

    20. LM

      Mm-hmm

    21. DS

      ... that is the most important thing if you're trying to do great things and distinct things in the world. You have to do those first.

    22. LM

      Yeah. And sometimes when you see repeat entrepreneurs who are successful, it is a version of that company. So William Hockey, who did Plaid, now doing Column, feels like a natural evolution of one big mission for his life. I think that it's possible to have multiple companies, but one meta company, if you will.

    23. DS

      I always ask these kind of founders-

    24. LM

      Yeah

    25. DS

      ... like what's the last company?

    26. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DS

      Because y- y- yeah, there's all, like, you can see it in a lot of these examples. Like, you had to go through these experiences, but there's, like, one company-

    28. LM

      Yeah

    29. DS

      ... that just, like, you wouldn't sell. There's just n- this is the last thing I work on.

    30. LM

      Mm-hmm.

  16. 1:07:14 – 1:10:41

    The Jetsons Rule

    1. DS

      mission.

    2. LM

      What you said about Dana White reminds me of something, which is I actually use Dana White, shout out Dana, as an example of what we talked about earlier, where you're not hitting people over the head with the overt PR messaging that they're going to write off. You have the human story, and then the thing that you're trying to sell is sort of in the background. So, um, maybe we call this, like, the Jetsons Rule.

    3. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    4. LM

      He did this with MMA. That was the reality show. Before watching MMA was mainstream, humans being interested in the lives and striving of other humans was mainstream. It always has been. And so the reality show gave us a way to follow along on the human journey of people training for these fights, and MMA was ambiently in the background. And if you watched a season of this, you got to know MMA. It's like people who watch, I guess, F1, they just get to know-

    5. DS

      The Netflix-

    6. LM

      ... the, the, the show

    7. DS

      ... the Netflix-

    8. LM

      The show

    9. DS

      ... yeah, whatever it's called.

    10. LM

      The series.

    11. DS

      Driving to s- whatever.

    12. LM

      Yeah. [laughs]

    13. DS

      I, I watched it.

    14. LM

      Yeah, yeah.

    15. DS

      I can't remember.

    16. LM

      But you learn-

    17. DS

      That got me into F1. Yeah, I didn't care about F1 until I watched it.

    18. LM

      You learn, yeah. This is why I learned drug dealing from The Wire.

    19. DS

      Yeah.

    20. LM

      It's in the background.

    21. DS

      Yeah, yeah.

    22. LM

      I'm kidding. I'm not a drug dealer.

    23. DS

      No, no.

    24. LM

      Many examples of this, where you actually become interested in a thing and absorb it because it's around the other stuff that you're interested in.

    25. DS

      The thing with Dana was interesting. We talked about this off-camera, I think, after we recorded, but w- you and I just had lunch, and, and we talked about the fact that learning from history is a form of leverage, and that time is really the only filter you can trust, and that if you wanted to know about persuasion or starting a movement, go read Cicero.

    26. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DS

      There's just, like, these ideas, everything has been, like, kind of solved. You just have to go find them. One thing that Dana told me that was interesting is, like, everybody told him, like, "This isn't gonna work. No one's gonna watch these people fighting," and he's just like, "It's gonna go everywhere, because if for all of human history, they've-

    28. LM

      We love watching people fighting

    29. DS

      ... for, go back thousands of years, it's like, there, if there's, you have two men, usually two men, like, they're going to come to some kind of combat.

    30. LM

      Mm-hmm.

  17. 1:10:41 – 1:12:29

    Trust Yourself

    1. DS

      Okay, so I have these conversations selfishly, because I get to sit across from, like, world-class experts and essentially just pepper them with questions, and I'm looking for ideas that I can then just apply to my business, and then the people listening hopefully do the same. So, uh, usually, people are building, great founders build their careers off a handful of ideas. It's not fucking 20. It's five or four or three. So when I think about you, I'm thinking about, okay, uh, let me summarize your, your, your handful of ideas, and you tell me if I'm missing some or if I'm wrong on any. Number one, lean into what makes you distinctive.

    2. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    3. DS

      Two, go direct, and not in any particular order. Three, uh, you have to simplify your message so it, it spreads, right? And then four, you have to have some kind of mission.

    4. LM

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DS

      What am I missing?

    6. LM

      Trust yourself. This sounds very self-help, kind of cheesy, but this is the message that you need to believe in yourself versus 100 other people, 1,000 other people, millions of other people. You need to have the actually insane confidence in your idea that you're willing to trust one person over everybody else. That is very hard to do, right? If you're looking at any kind of scenario, and there's one guy saying this and a million people saying it can't be done, you might wanna side with the million people, but like we said, one man plus the truth is a majority, and you have to believe that you're that person and that what you're seeing is the truth, and you have to pursue it. And then you have to stay with it, because you can't compound something that changes. The way compounding works is that it has to be a set principle that then compounds, and if you change what that thing is, you start the clock again. You start the compounding over again. It's not compounding. Compounding is incompatible with changing the thing that you're compounding. So I, I would say that that's the fifth ques- that's the, um,

  18. 1:12:29 – 1:17:30

    Why Humans Crave Stories

    1. LM

      fifth point. And then one other, I'll tell you what the takeaway is, but I'll actually illustrate it for you. I'm gonna tell you about a sequence of events, and then you're gonna react to it. There's a man and a woman, sort of older, and they're immigrants from Europe. Um, they're living in the US, um, I forget where, but they don't have a lot of money. Their son is in an insane asylum, and, uh, it's his birthday. He's, he's been put in this asylum because he has a, um, he's suicidal. He has this mental illness, a form of schizophrenia or something adjacent. It's called referential mania, and so he's, like, super paranoid. It, it means that he thinks that everything that happens has something to do with him, and he sees conspiracies everywhere, and so, um, he is tortured by this. It's his birthday, and so they go and they buy him a birthday gift, and they're trying to figure out what to get him. So they get these, like, jellies, and they go to take it to him, and, um, the asylum won't let them come in. They say, "I'm sorry. He's had another attempt recently. He doesn't want to see you." So they go home, and that night they're thinking about their memories, and the father says, "We have to get him out of there." So they're, they're at the kitchen table. It's really late. It's, like, midnight or something, and, um, the phone rings, and they're surprised. The woman picks it up, and there's a little girl. The little girl says, "Charlie? I'm looking for Charlie." And the woman says, um, "No, sorry, you must have dialed the wrong number," and she, she hangs it up, and she and the man continue their conversation, and she says, "In the morning, we'll go get him out." And then the phone rings again, and it's the end of the story.

    2. DS

      What do you want me to do with this? [laughs]

    3. LM

      Tell me your reactions to the story.

    4. DS

      I don't have one.

    5. LM

      What are your questions? What are your thoughts?

    6. DS

      It's incomplete. Like, who's, like, who was the little girl? What, who's the person that called back? Was it the same little girl? What happens to their son?

    7. LM

      It's not incomplete. It's a complete story It's a story called Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov, and I think the message from that story is if we don't have a coher- a coherent story, we desperately try to fill it in. If we're not given a story, we try to make a story out of it. What I told you was a bunch of facts, each of which could have stood alone. You know, wrong numbers happen all the time. W- who do we care who's the little girl? It's just a wrong number.

    8. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    9. LM

      W- what happens to the son? I mean, either he lives or he dies or what... I just told you, like, a, a bunch of information. Just take that information and go. But we can't. I read that story before bed, and I stayed up thinking about all of the possible things it could mean, and in the story, there's way more detail. You can pick at things like the color of the jellies, and-

    10. DS

      Hmm

    11. LM

      ... he forgot the keys and all of this. And what it says to me is that we all have a form of referential mania. You know, we actually have what in this young man was a severe mental illness, but we have a version of it, which is we need to believe that things around us are pointing to something, and if we're not told what that is, we will try to fill it in ourselves because our brains crave a story. So if you're a founder and you're giving people a bunch of information, "This is what we do. I hired this person. We're opening an office here. Here's some current events. We fundraised," people will weave that into a narrative whether you want them to or not. So that's not in your control. The thing in your control is whether you get to decide what that story is and fill it in for them and give them a sense of satisfaction and completion and feeling like, "Okay, I understand it. Here's where this is going. Therefore, here's what likely comes next." You know, if I had told you this story in a slightly different form, you would have maybe assumed... I could have told you the same facts in a different way that would make you assume that the son was going to meet a bad end or that there would be a happy ending or whatever. I could have made you believe any of those things with the same set of facts. And this is what the founders often are not paying enough attention to. It's the space in between the facts that ties them into a story that is our responsibility to fill in because if you let people fill it in haphazardly, they might end up with any conclusion that you don't control.

    12. DS

      I think it's a perfect place to end. Lulu, thanks for doing this.

    13. LM

      Thank you.

    14. DS

      I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders. [electronic sound]

Episode duration: 1:17:31

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