00:02:37 · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Ty Morse
But the first few, the only way to do this, and there is no shortcut, is to sit across from someone, be willing to sound like a madman. And to be so committed to the bit that you're going to look them in the eyes, and you're going to essentially swear on your life, that the thing you're telling them is possible can be done, must be done, and will be done by you. So it's it's not a normal undertaking. It's very unnatural. [00:03:02] S0: What makes a really good cult leader?
00:03:04 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:03:04] S1: So some people... I'll tell you what it's not. Some people think it has to be traditional charisma. I would say someone like Palmer has traditional charisma. He walks into the room, like you walk into a room behind you, you feel it. President Trump has this. I was at an event with President Trump, the first time he ran when nobody took his candidacy seriously. And he walked into a room, and I realized he was in the room without seeing him. I was seeing the other people, and I realized he had entered. There's that. But there are different types of charisma. So for example, Reiner Pope, who runs MatX, and if he watches this will be totally mortified, has has a really quiet but deep and substantive kind of charisma that if you are listening to him talk about this mission, you walk away completely convinced that it's real, without the flashiness and without any of the salesmanship. Another type of charisma is just being extremely high integrity and trustworthy. Scott Wu, in the very early days, you know, kid looked even younger than he was, pretty introverted and quiet. And the thing he was setting out to build was so ambitious that even after he had built it, people didn't think it existed. But yet, every tiny thing he said he would do, he always like over delivered, not just on the product, but on, you know, personal things, matters of business, kind of like old school Sam Walton would do. There are these types of nontraditional charisma that make people believe that their future and livelihood will be safe in your hands.
00:04:42 · Ty Morse
[00:04:42] S0: How do you think when you look at someone like Palmer coming out of Oculus, how did you basically try to lean into what made him great and allow him to basically build that cult of personality that allowed Anduril to succeed?
00:04:56 · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Ty Morse
[00:04:56] S1: You kind of don't have a choice. People are themselves because who the hell else could you possibly be? Sometimes you see someone try, and it's like, that's really cute. Yeah. This might be fun for a little bit, but it's not gonna work. It's never worked. I just don't think it's ever worked because it's not sustainable. You can't lie to everybody around the clock forever. It slips, you know. But what you can do is be yourself but more. You can really unleash yourself. And if you unleash yourself, it might not be popular at that time and in that place. But eventually, it's like if you put a magnet in a bunch of filings, it doesn't immediately just, you know, everything attaches things like gradually orient themselves the right way. And then the things that were going to come start to come and take some that that's how it is with your people and your following. Palmer early on was exactly how he was at probably 15. And how he is now. And what people change over the course of their lives, but like the core of them, I think doesn't really change past a certain age. And his audience wasn't really right. It was just a bunch of random people. It included a bunch of random people who are following Facebook or what and and we're really giving them a hard time. Today, you can see Palmer expressing the most explosively incorrect, politically incorrect opinions. [00:06:23] S0: People should be having children at 14.
00:06:23 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:06:23] S0: People should be having children at 14. [00:06:24] S1: Have children at eight. If you wait till it's 10, and if you wait till you're 10, it's over. But his audience now has been kind of curated over time where gradually the people who do agree and do align come to him. This happened with Roy Lee. He exploded onto the internet, and it was this mix of whoever was there and people who liked him and hated him or, like me, were very skeptical. What is this? And then over time, he just kept being him. He got abandoned by a lot of his co founders, which I thought was kind of crappy of them to leave as soon as it got difficult. And he just kept at it, which I really respect. And over time, the Roy appreciators kind of came out. And so whether you're, like, a head of state or a founder or someone starting out, like, it doesn't matter. The same thing applies, which is you really have no choice but to be you. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can start collecting the people and the audience that actually belong to you. Every day that you pretend to be somebody else is a day that you are delaying the compounding of finding your people.
00:07:34 · Ty Morse
[00:07:34] S0: There's this idea that I've come to recently, which is basically it is not helpful in most cases, if you want to, like, change the world to be predictable. And if people can predict you, then there's kind of an issue. And Elon is like the goat at this, where anytime someone thinks that they understand one of his businesses, he basically just throws in a huge amount of chaos. You know, if they're like, Okay, we can extrapolate Starlink and say this is how much Starlink is going to be worth, and like, use a discounted cash flow analysis to value the company. Suddenly, he's like, Data center's in space, and in fact, we're going go, like, colonize the moon and build like a, you know, 100 terawatts or whatever of power generation, something like this. And he's very good at constantly resetting the bounds so that he's always like undervalued in people's eyes, where they can't really predict like, here's how good he is, right? And here's like the level of his ambition. How does that kind of play in resetting people's like view on you of your level of ambition and craziness?