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- [00:00]
A
One important thing for people to remember is if you are trying to, if you are trying to do both things at once, it is not that you're pleasing both sides, it is that you're pissing off both sides. That's always the way it goes. If you are trying to make nobody mad, you end up making everybody mad. That's always how it goes. And you're better off picking who's going to be mad at you and for what.
- [00:27]
B
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. We talk a lot about how the media landscape has fundamentally transformed over the last 25 years. But I don't think we reflect enough about how as a result, the communications landscape has fundamentally transformed. It used to be that if you want to let people know about some great invention you have, some great product you have, or you want to be a political communicator, you would really think about how to get earned media in the mainstream, how you could have the New York Times cover your amazing new product, or how you would make sure that your 5, 6 second, 10 second sound bite plays on the evening news. Well, now that we live in a world of much more chaotic, much more multifaceted communication, that by and large isn't really how things work anymore. And my guest today has a manifesto which says that if you want to communicate, you have to go direct. You have to communicate directly from the voice of the person it's coming from. Be much less politic in how you express yourself. And that guest is, I think, the most interesting communications professional in the United States today. I've known Lulu Moserve since she was the communications person for Substack, and she has since gone on to found her own PR shop called Rostra. In today's conversation we talked about these structural changes to the communications landscape and what they mean about people who want to communicate the message to a wider audience. We talked about good and bad advice for how to talk on radio and television. Why it is that Lulu says that most people are far too media trained for their own good. What that can tell us about recent political flops like that of Abigail Spanberger. We talk about why often when you go direct, which is Lulu's mantra, it doesn't matter if some people dislike you, why divisive brand is often more was necessary for the success of your project. While Bari Weiss is very smart at communicating, not despite the fact that some people dislike her, but because she has both a fan club and a set of people who view her critically. And finally, in the last part of this conversation, which I'M going to try to communicate this clearly and directly is reserved for those of you who are supporting this project, who are making these podcasts possible. We talk about why it is that moderate candidates like Kamala Harris really struggle while more radical ones, whether in the form of Donald Trump or in the very different form of Zoran Mandami, succeed. And I press Lulu to give us political moderates advice on how it is that we can push our seemingly boring, seemingly complicated message in a much more clear, muscular, radical way. If you want to listen to that part of a conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamonk.substack.com yashamonk.substack dot com you get access to all of our episodes for about the cost of a dollar a week without interruptions, without having to listen to me giving you these appeals, without some of those jingle ads that you get. Please go to yashamonk.samsung.com. Lulu Mesovi welcome to podcast.
- [04:17]
A
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
- [04:18]
B
So I've been following you for a long time online and you're really interesting in having understood earlier than most that the old fashioned communications playbook doesn't work anymore because the old fashioned structure of media doesn't exist anymore. Perhaps let's take a step back. What would somebody who is at the top of the comms game have suggested 25, 20 years ago to a company when they're launching a big new product or when they're dealing with a critical media story? What would the advice have been about what they should do under those circumstances?
- [04:54]
A
Back then, communications was very centralized. You hear people reminiscing about there were three TV channels. That was more than 25 years ago, but still there were many fewer TV channels, many fewer online channels. YouTube was not what it was, Twitter is not what it is. And so you had to go to the gatekeepers. And the game is if you can win over the gatekeepers who have the audiences, then you can essentially borrow their audience for a moment while they tell their audience something good about you. Because they have the people, they have the following, and they have the trust. And so the game is to find the 10 people there, win them over, and then they basically vouch for you to the audience. And then there was this.
- [05:37]
B
So your lunch and dine, the beat reporter, the New York Times columnist, sort of all of those traditional journalists, and you hope that they're going to tell your story for you.
- [05:47]
A
Yes. And today, even when you, when you talk to people who are sort of eminence Gris, I say this in a respectful way. In the, in the PR world who know everybody have been doing this for a long time, their go to move is still to go wine and dine the editors or to put you in front of an editorial board. I learned about this thing called desk sides, which is, I guess it originates from you just popping up on the side of someone's desk and trying to become friends with them. But.
- [06:17]
B
But apparently how do you do that?
- [06:20]
A
You have your handler take you around and essentially meet with all of these people and try to earn their favor.
- [06:28]
B
Interesting.
- [06:29]
A
Yeah.
- [06:29]
B
And so that was effective in a different kind of media landscape. Why do you think that that isn't effective anymore? That if you're trying to launch a product, you're trying to get your startup better known, you're trying to get word out there, it still feels like it'll be pretty useful to have a favorable mention of your product or of your company in the New York Times. Surely that still makes a differ. Why is that no longer by and large the kind of game you should play?
- [06:55]
A
Yeah, well, first of all, doing that is a nice to have. You know, having people on your side is always better than not. And having friends is always better than not. I am not one of these people who says that the New York Times is completely irrelevant. No, there's some relevance and especially with specific audiences, if you're selling to government or if you're about to ipo, there certainly is relevant. So it is a nice to have. You don't have to burn those boats in order to go do something else. However, the something else that we're about to talk to is a lot more effective. That something else is now decentralized. Going from you to many. Now there are still people in your audience who are more influential than others. There are people who are literal influencers or creators or whose voices just carry a lot of weight. But there are still very, very many of them compared to 25 years ago or a decade ago. So it's more decentralized. You're going one to many. It's much more dependent on trust and credibility than it was before. Because it's not just you win over one person and they trust you and then they vouch for you. This is. You have to be earning that trust over and over with so many people in so many quarters constantly. And then lastly, what's, what's emerging is there's this lut of AI slope and it's coming from people and it's also coming from companies. And you See, companies put things out there that are indistinguishable from like ChatGPT when it was GPT 3.5. And that just doesn't cut it anymore. So the bar for cutting through and the bar for quality is a lot higher. So on the topic of many to many, by the way, here's an important caveat which is, or it's a note which is that it's no longer just one person speaking on behalf of the entire enterprise. It's not just the CEO speaking on behalf of the company, or just the candidate speaking on behalf of the campaign. Now you have employees weighing in, or employees of the campaign, or people who belong to that political movement weighing in. And so it truly is many, many, many to many, where sometimes the voices of employees are actually more important than what the CEO is saying. So for example, you have employees speaking out about workplace conditions or about doubts over the company, or disgruntled employees who leave. What they're saying can actually make much more of an impact than release or an announcement from the company. And so if you are the CEO of the company, you need to know that you have tens or hundreds of minor spokespeople, or not even minor, like alternate spokespeople working in your company, and they need to all be aligned. It's not something where you just speak for everybody and they all stay silent.
- [09:35]
B
Yeah, I'm thinking of this book that Clay Shirky wrote a long time ago where he distinguished between a world of one to many communication and the world we're now in of many to many communication. So in the old world, there just weren't a lot of people around who could reach a large audience. And so if you wanted to reach a large audience, you basically were dependent on those desk sites or on those lunches or on those dinners, because the number of people who could say, hey, there's this amazing new tech product where the tech editor of the New York Times and of Wired and perhaps of 60 Minutes or something like that, and unless you were able to get one of them to tell you a story, you would have had to rely based on word of mouth. Now, for some kinds of products, word of mouth might work, right? They are so addictive, they are so convincing that you just give it in the hands of 100 people and like a virus, it spreads to lots and lots of people. But that's going to be a really limited number of products that has those properties. And I guess now we're in a world of many to many communication where the set of people who can reach a wide audience is hugely expanded, both because a lot of people have significant social media followings and that if you can create content on social media that is sufficiently viral that it ends up taking off, then all of a word of mouth can happen on those social media platforms. It doesn't have to be in person, word of mouth. And so that just creates these new kind of avenues of communication.
- [11:06]
A
Yeah, I think the lazy way to approach this is to say it doesn't matter too much how interesting we are. If we can just get in front of people, we will force them to see us. You know, they read the Wall Street Journal and we will get in the Wall Street Journal somehow through these relationships and then we will non consensually force our news into their eyeballs and they're going to like it that this is a caricature. But that's the extreme version of laziness where you're not trying to be particularly interesting, you're just like, we've got news. We're going to force it into your feed or into your paper. The, the other, the other way to do this, which I think is much, much better, is it's harder. You have to challenge yourself to be so fascinating and for your news to be so arresting that you could whisper it to 10 people and they couldn't help but each tell 10 other people. And those people can't help but tell 10 other people. And so if you put in the extra work up for front, you're basically putting a multiplier or you're putting leverage behind the message. And mathematically, if each person wants to tell a bunch of other people, you're much better off for obvious reasons than for you. You know, for you to tell five people and then have them each want to tell a bunch of people is much better than you telling a thousand people up front and then call it a day because it's so boring that they're not going to talk about it anymore.
- [12:28]
B
Yeah, I think that people always underestimate the importance of having the right viral message and overestimate the importance of doing it in the right way and perhaps even having the right advice. I mean, I'm thinking about times when I've published books and I've heard this from friends as well, where if you're publishing a book that for whatever reason speaks to that moment that has a message that people want to be hearing and most of the time when your book is really successful, it's because it has a message that people already want to be hearing, which is a Little depressing, then you're gonna end up thinking that your PR person, usually it's a marketing professional at your publisher, perhaps sometimes you've hired one yourself is really amazing because they're booking you on all these great shows and they're making all of these things happen for you. And if you have a book that might be a good book, might be a more interesting book, but that doesn't have that product market fit, that doesn't really fit into that moment, what people want to be hearing or what producer want to be hearing, to start getting frustrated with your PR professional, if you're a marketing person saying, oh, you know, the last one was much better, you know, they could get me on whatever show and this person is not getting me on that show, and they must have worse contacts or they must not be putting as much work in. But most likely, you know, I mean, obviously there are differences between very good people and less good people, but most likely it's not actually the difference in that person. Sometimes it's the same damn person doing the same damn thing. It's the difference in what you're selling and whether your message happens to have demand at that time or not.
- [14:03]
A
Yeah, I would say the person reaching out or the medium, the shows that you choose or the tweets that you write, these things matter. They're not nothing. But their importance pales, really, really pales in comparison to how interesting the message actually is. People do not think enough about making themselves interesting and relevant to other people. The challenge would be, can you describe this in a way that someone who hears this is going to tell their family about it over dinner, and they're gonna know how to describe it and they're going to want to bring it up. And if not, you failed the test. Like, if nobody wants to pass it on, if they don't know how to talk about it, you fail the test. You reach however many people you reach with the first volley. You force yourself into their feed. They have to listen to it. Maybe you trick them into listening to it because they're scrolling past it, and then there's just no legs after that. So I think that's true laziness if you're focusing on the medium of, like, how do I get on the show? And then you're on the show, and then you say something that is so bland and insignificant that nobody wants to ever revisit it ever again. So same with books, same with ideas, companies, product launches, you name it.
- [15:18]
B
What about because you're talking about the message. Once you're on the show. I find that the few times that I've had media training, it's not clear to me that it gave the right advice. Because basically what it said was, you go into the show and you have three points that you want to make, and whatever happens, you bring those points in and you're really extremely disciplined about bringing in those points. And you have this battle plan for the conversation, the purpose of which is to get those talking points out. And I think perhaps it depends a little bit on what you're trying to do, right? I mean, if you're launching a product, I can understand how you got to save a day in which it goes on sale whatever happens. Or there's one particular selling point of this product. You got to make sure that it somehow comes up for my purposes where I want to sell a book or I want people to become paying subscribers of my substack yashamunk.substack.com if you still haven't Dear Listener, even though I keep saying it every damn episode, sure, I can see that. But I find that if I'm too focused on getting across the points that I want to make, I become inauthentic. I become kind of weird. It can be jarring because even if you're doing it relatively elegantly and subtly, people can smell that you're just trying to bring the conversation back to the thing you're trying to do. And probably the person I'm having a conversation with is thinking, oh, this guest isn't great because they're not actually answering my questions. They're just going back to their talking points important. So do you think that that is one of the pieces of conventional wisdom that people should question?
- [16:54]
A
Most people are excessively media trained, and what's happening is not that you're training sophistication into the person, it's actually that you're training personality out of them and you're training the edge out of them. And so I'm a big believer in not excessively media training somebody because the vibes of the person are much more important than the specific words that they say. People are left with an impression of you as a person. And that impression is, well, according to some studies, over 90% based on your vibes, your aura, your body language, your tone of voice, your appearance, rather than the actual words that you say. And so if you have to make that trade off of am I going to sacrifice some of my vibes and personality and sparkle in order to say the right words? That's a horrible trade off. Now there's probably 50 people alive who don't have to make that trade off. Maybe there's 50 people in America who don't have to make that trade off. If you're Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, maybe if you're Donald Trump, I don't know if you're Pete Buttigieg. These people who have extreme talent for weaving talking points in while making it seem pretty natural, then great, it's not a trade off. You can do both. But for the vast majority of people, there is some trade off there. So you'd have to be very, very careful how much of that you trade. And the other thing to remember is for most cases, the product is the person. So if you're trying to promote your book or your substack, the product is actually you. It's not the one specific book or the one specific piece of writing. It is your thoughts and you as a person. So, for example, Bari Weiss and the Free Press and now going to cbs, the predominant source of trust or credibility around the Free Press was whether you liked or trusted Barry. Right? She as a person represented the product. I don't know anyone who hates Bari Weiss. There's a lot of people who hate Bari Weiss, but I don't know anybody who hate her but love the Free Press. And so you represent the product, you represent the company, and if you show up as some clunky, inauthentic poser, then that casts appall over the whole company. So one of my favorite people in tech, Scott Wu, who is the leader of a company called Cognition, which creates a coding agent. And he is somebody who is most comfortable just in front of a computer and not trying to hold forth. But he has gone on podcasts because he wants to tell people about their product. Devin and the feedback that I've gotten is the best podcast he ever did was one where he was severely sleep deprived and truly and sort of undisciplined in a way, you know, just a little bit like impatient and very raw. And people loved it because it was the closest that they got to the real Scott, that when you he's a great hang, but then when he's in front of a camera, he's usually a little bit uncomfortable.
- [19:59]
B
So this is the advice that I got before I did my first ever television interview, which was a CNN interview about doping, of all things. And what somebody told me is if you want to be good on tv, you just have to be yourself. Which sounds similar to what you're saying. Of course, the ironic thing is that that's the thing that it's impossible to do when you're starting to do tv. I think by now I can more or less do it. I've done enough broadcasting, the podcast and media appearances and so on. But I'm not fully myself. But I'm close to being myself. But that takes a lot of practice. That takes a lot of hours. Because it's a very unnatural situation to be in a room with somebody or nowadays as likely as not on zoom with somebody and pretend like we're just having a conversation, knowing that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people are listening in on you. So do you think that that's the right advice? That actually to be good and tv you just have to be yourself? Does that hold for everybody? Or are there some people who really shouldn't damn be themselves on television? And how do you accomplish being yourself?
- [21:04]
A
So one of the best pieces of advice that I've gotten is nobody gives a shit about you. People don't care about you that much. And if you go out there and flop and it doesn't go well, people will just move on. Nobody's thinking about you that much. Now for some people, you know, if you're Sam Altman and you go on an interview and you flop, it might get played a lot. And it's more consequential because your company's more consequential. But for the vast majority of people, it is just not big, not that big of a deal. I think that it.
- [21:37]
B
That depends on whether you flop or you flop. Right. Like. Like if you, like, I think even if you're a no name person and you have a meltdown on air, right. You have like 30 seconds of complete blankness in which you suddenly can't speak. That's gonna go viral even if you're nobody. Right. And I think that's the fear that people have.
- [21:56]
A
That's an edge case. Yeah, that's an edge case. I think you can sort of control whether you're going to have a screaming meltdown, hopefully.
- [22:08]
B
And if you can't, perhaps you shouldn't go on tv.
- [22:10]
A
Not everyone. There's the Katie Porter examples that we've been seeing recently. Yeah. But for most people, the range of outcomes is pretty tame. You'll have a maybe mediocre interview where you wanted to say some things and forgot and just don't spit so much about it. People are a little bit like electrons in that way. Once you observe them, they change in the process of being observed. And so once the cameras are on, it's Nearly impossible to just be our normal natural selves. So like, I pre gamed for this. Like, I get nervous for these things. Even though I know that we're friendly and you're not trying to like secretly destroy me with a gotcha question, I still am a little nervous. I was like walk around and just remind myself that if it doesn't go well, it's not a big deal. So for most people, it does take a lot of practice. You know how people will say the presence of so many fashion models gives us unrealistic expectations about bodies and even
- [23:06]
B
the presence of like, you know, TV professionals gives you unrealistic expectations.
- [23:11]
A
So many influencers, so many extremely gorgeous and charismatic people on TikTok and with podcasts, and it gives us unrealistic expectations for how we're gonna be in front of the camera. And if we try to emulate that, then most of us actually fall into this uncanny valley where we're not ourselves anymore, but we're also not Jake Paul or whatever. And so what are we actually in? It's this weird in between space that doesn't appeal to people as much as if you had just tried to stay put and stay you.
- [23:40]
B
That's very interesting. Yeah. To go back to the point about excessive media training, I was thinking about that not with Katie Porter, who perhaps could do with a little bit more media training or just with more hiding her true personality, but with don't be yourself, Katie. Yes. In this particular case, both Abigail Spanberger. I saw clips of her debate with Winsome Sears the other day, and she was in this situation where she knew she was going to be asked about something that's kind of. She's just in a bind. So the person running as Lieutenant governor, who in a sense is running for the position independently but is obviously kind of on her slate. Right. Who is running to be the Democrat Lieutenant governor, was discovered to have sent these text messages which were meant to go to a friend of his, but went to a Republican instead, basically saying that this moderate Republican who had said something positive about a moderate Democrat deserved to be killed and his kids deserved to be killed. Those little fascists or something like that, he said, and Those kids were 2 and 4 years old. How should somebody like Spanberger play this? So number one is she thinks that for whatever reasons, she can't distance herself too clearly from that lieutenant governor candidate, either because she thinks that other Democrats are going to be mad at her if she does that, or perhaps because she thinks it's going to be hard for her to govern if she wins the governor's race and she has a Republican lieutenant governor. But that means that she knows this debate is coming up and in the debate she's going to be asked about this. And so she comes up with this kind of slightly wooden set of talking points that she keeps sticking to that is, I don't approve of those messages. Everybody's running as an individual. I think I'm going to be a great governor of Virginia or something along those lines. What would you have advised her is the key point here? Just you have to be on the right side of this and you just have to go into the debate having taken your distance from that candidate. I'm not talking morally now. Right. I'm talking just of student. Is the only way to win this comps battle to have a leg you can stand on and the only way you can have a leg to stand on is to say I disavow this. I don't want to be governing with him. This is terrible. If not, is there some way to get around this? Because what I think she ended up doing just looks so unnatural and so rehearsed and so media trained that it's just deeply, deeply off put in.
- [26:10]
A
So first of all, I think that guy sucks. So this isn't sincere advice of trying to help them, but I do think it's useful to use this as a case study. So one important thing for people to remember is if you are trying to, if you're trying to do both things at once, it is not that you're pleasing both sides, it is that you're pissing off both sides. That's always the way it goes. If you're trying to make nobody mad, you end up making everybody mad. That's always how it goes. And you're better off picking who's going to be mad at you and for what than trying to make nobody mad at you. Because again, everybody will be mad at you. And people are so fed up with these wishy washy, cowardly half measure things that they see right through it and they're actually looking for it. You saw this with like the initial cracker Bell rebrand response. Anytime there's anything from a person or company to people are looking for them to take a stance. Now you can take a stance and have some people be bad. That's better than everybody in bed. So going back to this situation, in this situation it's not an option to try to give a non answer. You have to have a view on this. The clearly correct view on this is that it's unacceptable. I don't think there's any world in which you can defend it. However, there's two levels of unacceptable. One is the action was unacceptable, but the action doesn't represent the entire person and the other merits of the entire person outweigh this. Or the action was operation. You could try to argue that the other level is this action does represent the entire person and is illuminating something within them that is. That is unsalvageable. And so opponents would say the latter. This action represents the person and it shows us something deep inside of his soul that is just, like, spoiled. If she wants to defend him without defending the action, then you would clearly condemn the action and say, I don't stand by this. No one reasonable would stand by this. But I also think that he doesn't stand by this because what I know of him as a person is bump, bump, bump. And what I believe that he's going to do in office is blah, blah, blah. And therefore, while this thing is completely reprehensible and unacceptable, I believe that he has now tasted what it is like to lash out in a moment of anger. And perhaps he's become more empathetic because you have to squirt some.
- [28:45]
B
Why is it. And by the way, I agree with you, but I'm not sure that the candidate is salvageable and probably both morally and politically. The smartest route would be to just distance herself completely. But why is it that in three minutes you've come up like, if a constraint is for whatever political reason, let's just take it as a hard constraint, you can't completely distance yourself from this candidate? Why is it that in three minutes you've come up with something that, to me, seems better politically, but also, frankly, less reprehensible morally than this addiction to not saying anything? Why is it that a politician can't be trained into going there and saying, look, these text messages are disgusting, they're reprehensible, but look, I know this person, and this is not what represents. You might even say, look, all of us have said something really of color at some point, and it doesn't always represent who we are. This is completely unacceptable, what he said. But I know him. I know this does not, in fact represent who he is. And I think on the policies that matter, he's going to do a better job for Virginia, whatever. That seems to me the line you just gave, again, it may not be the right line, but it's a line that somehow you can do. Why is it that instead she is advised to go out there and use this wooden, legalistic language that basically avoids. And by the way, this is not a single case. So in the same debate, there was a debate about trans girls having access to female changing rooms in Virginia schools and other questions like that. And again, the response was the same kind of non response response. What Abigail Spanberger said on those issues is this is just a decision for local districts and local parents and teachers to make, which just doesn't take any kind of substantial stance on the thing. And as you're saying earlier, I feel like that's going to piss off both sides because people who think that we absolutely should be fighting for those kind of rights for trans people are going to say you're not actually standing up for them. And most people are going to smell that it's just a way to not own the deeply unpopular position while actually defending the deeply unpopular position. So you may as well take that position, or you can go where the majority of people are, but you end up in this middle pace. And I'm thinking of the congressional hearing of university presidents in which Claudine Gayle of Harvard and the president of Columbia at the time, the president of University of Pennsylvania at the time, I think they're all now out of office, just could not actually defend in a substantial way what the missionary was. So why is it that the advice so often seems to be don't really say anything at all, even though it seems to be quite ineffective?
- [31:24]
A
There's two types of public figures. One type is their own person. And everybody else has to deal with that and work with that. John Fetterman is an example. Palmer Lucky is an example. They are who they are. And if you want to work with them, you just need to figure out how to work with them, because they're not going to change. You're going to change. Then there are people who are machines that turn consultant advice into public statements. And a lot of politicians are in this category where they just aggregate consultant advice and then echo that. I think that doesn't speak well of them as people, because if you don't have your own views and if you don't have your own personalities and principles when it comes to these statements, then how are we going to trust you to have your own backbone when it comes to anything else? But there's a lot of people who are like this and it comes from a place of fear. Each of the consultants knows that if they advise something that is safe, they're not going to ever get penalized for missed opportunities. They would only get penalized asymmetrically for mistakes. They only get penalized for mistakes of commission, not omission. And, and therefore the best way for them to continue collecting the fees is to avoid mistakes of, to avoid mistakes of commission. So if they can just make sure that you don't say something stupid, it doesn't matter if you miss an opportunity, as long as there's no specific error that can be pinned on them. And so what ends up happening is you have the principal agent problem where they're acting in their own self interest. They're not trying to find the best possible outcome for you, they're trying to find the outcome that leads to them not being fired. And you go along because you don't have the clarity of moral vision or the strength of principle to override them. And that's when you get these weak public figures.
- [33:21]
B
Yeah, this is something striking to me, particularly in the political ecosystem where if you run a consultancy, especially on the Democratic side, where I think the kind of food constraints are stronger, but also on the Republican side in different ways, and you lose an election. Plenty of people lose plenty of elections. The fact that you advise the losing campaign doesn't stop you from being hired again. If your candidate said something that upset the base and that went viral on social media in a negative way, even if perhaps it actually increased the chances that candidate had of being elected, then the next candidate might say, I don't know where we can work with you. You're the people who put out that message that a lot of allies hated. Perhaps some of my staff is going to get upset if I hire you. And so the incentive is actually not to make your candidate win, it's to avoid bad publicity which might hurt your brand as a consultant. And the same, of course, is true. There was reporting that those university presidents had taken extensive advice from law firms. And I think they all took the advice of the same law firm in advance of the congressional hearing. And those lawyers are risk averse. They're not thinking about how do we maximize the chance of a good outcome. They're thinking how do we minimize the chance that you say something that might somehow be of legal relevance. And then obviously you end up being overtrained into not saying anything at all. I want to go to another case I'm thinking of. I informally advised a minor Democratic presidential candidate in the primaries in 2020. And he was very charismatic in person. I mean, big booming personality. And you thought, my God, this person, once he gets on the big stage and people see what he's like, he's going to do really great. And then every time the camera turned on, he was terrible.
- [35:11]
A
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
- [35:13]
B
It's just his personality kind of just went away.
- [35:17]
A
Yeah.
- [35:18]
B
Is that just. Some people are just super charismatic in person and not on tv? Is that something that you think most people are able to overcome? Is it just. There's like one kind of form of charisma that works in a room. There's another form of charisma that works, you know, on a national debate stage. What do you think explains that?
- [35:36]
A
I think there's something innate, which doesn't mean that you can't improve it or work on it. But I do think that people have inherently the mediums that best suit them. And some people are better in a small group. Some people are more charismatic in front of a large crowd. Do you ever see somebody who's hugely charismatic talking to a massive rally, but then one on one, they don't seem that engaged? When I completely.
- [35:59]
B
I did a year in theater after college, and there was an actress at the theater I worked at who, you know, you talk to her in the canteen and she was pretty and, you know, she was smart, actually, but she seemed forgettable. I mean, you would never walk into the canteen and your eyes would never be drawn to her, you know, and then she'd step on stage and she's just magnetic, right? Like in front of a thousand people, she had something that just like attracted your attention and your fascination in this remarkable way. And when you saw her in private, she was perfectly pleasant and, you know, cute, but there was nothing charismatic about her in that context.
- [36:42]
A
People talk about Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. I think that Bill Clinton was more charismatic in front of a large crowd. And I actually think that Hillary Clinton is more charismatic in small groups. When you talk to people who have worked directly with her or interacted with her in a very intimate setting, she can be very charismatic, but in front of this large, in front of a stadium full of people, she's not as charismatic as her husband, who obviously is a once in a generation political talent, but there still is that. The other thing, before we stray too far from this topic of how to give a straight answer and a strong answer without seeming to hedge, I want to just raise the example of Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential debate. Do you remember this? He was asked on stage about the death penalty. And the question was intense. It was, if your wife, Kitty, were to be raped and murdered, would you support the death penalty for the person who did that? This has always bothered me so much. Because I feel like the correct answer, you know, I don't know what he believes, but I feel that the correct answer, politically and strategically, would have been a layoff. So his actual answer was this hem and ha. And this very academic response that made him feel like not even a human being. Like someone just talked about your wife being raped and murdered and you're gonna sit back and go through your talking points. It's actually insane. I think a very good answer, assuming this is what he believes, is if someone in my family were subjected to that, and if this crime were committed against someone in my family, I would want to tear the perpetrator limb from limb. I would want to behead them with my bare hands. I would torture them in a chamber for a year. And that is why you shouldn't leave it up to me to decide in that moment out of emotion. That is why we need as a society to decide in advance the line between punishment and barbarism. So that in the moment we're not making decisions like that. Because I will tell you, if someone ever did that and I met that person, met them in person, I would commit horrendous crimes against them. You know, like, that probably is how it feels. I don't know. That's how I would feel.
- [39:01]
B
Yeah. And that. That. The thing is that there's always the obvious emotion. You feel that somehow in those situations you think you're not allowed to share. Right. That if you want to defend this political position, obviously you can't flip flop, right? Like you're campaigning on not having the death penalty. You can't be like, oh, now when you come up with this hypothetical, let's have a death penalty that makes no sense. And perhaps not being against the death penalty is not a defensible position, but I think it is. And I think actually it's not so clear that 1988 public opinion was such that you couldn't win an election while opposing the death penalty. But you have to still allow yourself to express that human emotion, to say, of course I would want this person to suffer in the worst possible way. But that's precisely why we need to make rules when we're calm, when we're not the person who's affected. So I think that's right. And I think you're right that there's this instinct to. Because Abigail Sparnberger feels like she can't completely distance herself from this other candidate. She feels like she can't express the anger and the disgust over those messages. But in fact, the only way that you can avoid completely distancing yourself from that person is to express the anger and the disgust and then say, having expressed all of this, here's why. I still think they're going to be better for the state of Virginia than the alternative or whatever it is. I want to go to a broader question of what this means for communication today. So if we are no longer in this world of one to many communication, if we're in a world of many to many communication, and we've taken this kind of detour, thinking about how you do well in media and so on, what is the right strategy for a company launching a new product or for somebody having some important message to communicate? You've talked a lot about the importance of directly communicating with your audience. What does that entail and why do you think that that's a big part of your answer?
- [41:14]
A
Well, direct can mean a few things, and I mean all of them. So one meaning of direct is to build your own audience and share directly with them, not just through middleman or through gatekeepers. Another meaning of direct is like, you and I are having a direct conversation. It's a frank and candid conversation. And that's what people want as well. And that's the advice that Dukakis should have taken before going into this, which is like, speak directly without mincing your words and just say what you mean. So people do not have the patience to sit through a bunch of PR slob and corporate pablum to try to figure out what you're actually saying. And then another way of being direct is for the person or the people directly responsible to have the message come from them, from themselves, as opposed to filtered through a bunch of layers. And so again, I mean all of these things. So if you are a founder or a CEO and you're starting something new today, or if you're a political candidate, which is you're the founder of this movement to get you elected, right, you're the chief executive of this vision that you're trying to sell to voters. Number one, you need to have it come directly from you. It doesn't mean that you have to personally star in all of the videos. And it has to be a shot of your face, but it has to be your words and your ideas, not the average idea of 17 lawyers and 14 PR people, because people can tell. Two is it has to be presented directly and forcefully and without a lot of dancing around. Just get to the point. So even on short videos, for example, people post these videos on X, the drop off after 30 seconds is probably like 90%. I don't remember exact numbers, but it just falls off of a cliff. People's attention doesn't sustain, especially if you haven't earned their continued attention in the first few minutes. So you need to just say it up front as a opposed to dancing around and building up to it. And then lastly, history is long. It's never about just this one moment. And politicians would do well to remember this. It's not just about this one election. It's not just about this one statement. There are many, many things in the future. CS Lewis, in a different context, said that every small win is a strategic point from which a thousand more victories can be gained. Something like this. And it's true. It's not just about winning this specific thing. It is about building for the long term. And whether that's building trust or relationship with voters or if you're a company, building an audience so that you can continue to do this in the future. So what I hate to see is when people create something great and genuinely interesting and they give it away to somebody else to donate engagement to them. So if you're starting a company and you have created something genuinely viral, genuinely engaging, and you were too scared and didn't believe in yourself enough to put it out from you, and you didn't have the confidence that this thing could blow up even if you have a smaller account now you have a much bigger account than me, but let's pretend, okay? And I am a big influencer and you're giving it to me and it blows up when I post it. There's a chance that you just donated a bunch of engagement and audience to me. No reason. Out of fear, right? So I hate to see companies doing this.
- [44:23]
B
So what are some. We've talked about a bunch of examples in politics, and perhaps a little bit outside of politics, of people doing comms badly. What are some examples of people pulling comms off brilliantly? I mean, what are the kind of things that we should emulate, given the
- [44:40]
A
news of last week? And since I already shouted out Barry in this podcast, I'll use her as an example. There are many things that Bari Weiss has done that are brilliant comms. Even though a lot of people are mad at her or don't like her, in fact, I would say that's part of the package. A lot of people think that in order to have good communications and to win people over, they need to be as bland as possible so that nobody gets mad. And what they're doing is they're protecting the Downside, but they're capping their upside. So it's like bit of a higher floor and a tremendously low ceiling. What she has done, which I think is the right way to do it, is to elicit strong feelings within your tribe and get your people to be die hards. And if others are mad about it, it either doesn't matter or it actually helps you. So a lot of the vitriol directed at Barry and there's a lot, and some of it is anti Semitic and some of it is just cruel and it's not pleasant. Like, if I were her reading through the mentions, I think I would be probably having a mental breakdown. And she's much stronger in that sense than most people. So I'm sure it's not fun strategically for what she's trying to build. It's not the worst thing. It shows what she stands for and what she's not willing to back down from, even in the face of all of this anger. So that's one is actually taking a stand and being willing to say you are going to be part of this movement and you are not. We don't see eye to eye. And that's okay.
- [46:12]
B
That's a hard trade off because it depends, I think, how much you care about the success of your enterprise versus having a pleasant life. And I think that Bari is fantastically successful. I think having the knowledge at any room you walk into, there's going to be some people who genuinely like and admire you, but also there's going to be some people who are snarkily texting their friend, being, can you imagine who I'm in a room with right now? It has a high cost. So I think you're right that that is the right strategy and it's one of the reasons why the free press has been successful. And certainly there's a basic rule of politics that whatever you're for, some people are going to be against it. And so whenever you embrace a cause, you're building a coalition, but you're also building your anti coalition. And I think trying to avoid that leads to a form of indeterminateness where perhaps nobody dislikes you, but also nobody's going to like you, nobody has a reason to trust and follow you and so on. But I do think that the personal costs that are involved in that are not trivial. And it actually makes people who are willing to bear those costs, whether you agree with them or not, quite admirable because there's this persistent charge that always gets thrown around about anybody with whom people disagree of saying they're grifter. And I think nearly always that's wrong. Because the easy thing, the convenient thing, is not to break with your political tribe, is not to say things that are controversial, is to try to minimize the hate you get online. That is nearly always the easier choice. And to not do that, I think, is rarely. I think it's actually nearly always driven by having genuine beliefs because the cost of it is significant. And I think most people would rather get along with their friends and be able to go to every dinner party without people asking critical questions and have a standard media job and make some amount of money than be Barry.
- [48:21]
A
And that's why most people won't be great. You know, that's leadership. And it's not for everybody being willing to suffer costs that fall disproportionately on you personally for the good of the enterprise so that you can build something enduring that outlasts yourself. That's leadership. And so I'm biased here because Barry's a friend, but I also think even if you are ideologically on the total opposite side of what she's doing, the principle still stands that you have to be willing to say, these are not my people in order to, through contrast, to say these people are. And that's the movement that I'm going to build. So I think it just requires stepping up and having that courage. Because leaders do things all the time that are really crappy for themselves personally. They will see their children less than their employees do. They will get less sleep than their employees do. They will get more death threats than their employees do. Like, all of these things are part of being the tip of the spear for the movement that you're trying to build. So I think absolutely, it sucks to be the person facing that, but also somebody's got to do it. And there is no movement without a leader of the movement who's willing to bear that.
- [49:36]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of his conversations, Lulu explains to us why it is that the very different political figures of Donald Trump and Zoran Mamdani come across as authentic, but moderates like Kamala Harris do not. And she gives some advice for how moderates can change that. She explains why it is that moderates can seem authentic, can seem like they're passionate, can seem like they have ideas that are radical in a good way without giving up on those moderate principles. To listen to that part of the conversation, to listen to the broad range of conversations we have here on the Good fight and have full access to that. And most importantly, to support this project, Please go to jasamunk.substat.com.
- [50:33]
A
Sam.