00:35:36 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:35:36] S1: Yeah. Ernest Shackleton, when he was with his men, and they were taking turns rowing, and everybody was like frostbitten and miserable, and they tried to give him easier shifts, he actually demanded that he not be given different treatment. And that is what makes people go above the letter and follow the spirit is that they feel that from you. So it sounds very like touchy feely, Oprah, but the way you communicate is through what you say, what you do. And then also visuals, we can talk about that, like the visuals of something stay with with people for a long time. And that can be an act of leadership or inspiration. So like when the German Chancellor, Willy Brandt went to visit Warsaw, and he went to see the monument honoring the Jewish people who risen up. He stood there, and then he just silently dropped to his knees, and then he just kneeled there. And it is called the genuflection. And that statement said so much about him representing the German people and how they viewed the Nazis' actions then. And I think really helped to reshape relationships between Germany and Poland. It did so much. And it was just the visual of this man on his knees saying nothing. You can combine these things. So you can use words to paint visuals. So there's like visuals, visuals, I gave you the Willy Brandt example, which is like a very extreme and lofty example. There's also Steve Jobs, and the MacBook Air. And this was when he was on stage, I think it was 2008, and he just had the envelope. And it was like was like a secret Manila envelope. And he takes it out.
00:37:25 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:37:25] S0: Same thing that he did with the original iPod, where he's like, this is, know, this is your pocket for like a pen or a phone. And then he's like, what the fuck is this pocket for? And it's just he just pulls out this little device. And he's like, this is what goes in there. [00:37:37] S1: The visual stay with you. [00:37:38] S0: Sometimes,
00:37:42 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:37:42] S1: it's not a visual of an image, but sometimes it is imagining a thing that feels so vivid. So like when Jensen was unveiling the DGX-1, there were a lot of technical specs that they did share eventually. But what really stood out for me is that he talked about time to train AlexNet. This is a made up metric. Like, time to train AlexNet is not a standard metric used anywhere. But it's the thing that I remember. And he said that if you were using Intel equipment, that training AlexNet would take one hundred and fifty hours, whereas using his gear, it would take two hours. Now, I think he could have actually drummed it up a little bit more. I think he could have said like, with Intel, it would take over six days. And with us, it takes two hours. And then just leave people with just the perception that this is a completely different category. Oh, the same launch announcing the DGX-1. And he called it a data center in a box. Now, there are all of these technical specs that he could have gone into, and they did. But data center in a box just shortcut through all of that. It became the thing that people remember, the thing that I remembered. That is so much more powerful than saying, we are faster, we're better, all of these subjective things that people just discount, again, because it's you saying it about yourself. Now, somebody else saying that about you might carry more weight. But if you're going to say it about yourself, people assume that you are hyping yourself up and you are going to make yourself look good. And so you have to use these images and analogies and be really concrete to give people the thing to imagine.
00:39:36 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:39:36] S0: How do you make yourself someone that people want to root for? In the sense of, you know that you shouldn't be congratulating yourself, no one likes But having other people that are like, trusted tweet, you know, I really like Ty, or I really like Lulu, is very powerful. So how do you actually design yourself to be someone that people want to celebrate and help? [00:39:55] S1: People have no reason to root for Thai. Per Thai. You know, you as a person represent things that people like, and that is why they root for you. I'll speak about me because I root for you. And here are the reasons. [00:40:12] S0: Thank you, Lulu.
00:40:13 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:40:13] S1: Yes, you're welcome. Here are the reasons. You do things that I would like to see more of in the world. So you are a vector for something that I want. And that's, it's a normative good, but it also comes back to self interest in the sense that I like when people are not transactional and form long term relationships and put positive things out into the world and are willing to make the first move of putting something positive into the world and not waiting until someone does it for them first. And you do that, and you become a symbol of this happening. And I like that. Also, I root for you because when you succeed at turning this podcast into something that people care deeply about, it tells me that they care about something that I also care about, which is I want people to be thinking about the power of stories and being inspired by the stories of others and having that actually altered their own energy and morale and behavior. Everything I think is inherently selfish in that way. But it's because I relate to you and I see elements of what I would like to be in you. And because what you do represents something that I want to see more of, it's not like I see you sitting there as a guy and I'm like, I'm just gonna root for this guy. So I think at the end of the day, people root for things that they want, things that they like, and things that remind them of them. And if you are that, they'll root for you. You know the probably apocryphal story of President Kennedy visiting NASA? He had announced we're going to go to the moon, and he goes to pay a visit, and it's after hours. And there's a janitor just cleaning, and he greets him and says, what do you do here? And he says, Mr. President, I'm helping us get to the moon. So if people understand, this also goes back to you want people to understand the spirit and not the letter. And you want people to sign up for the spirit and not the letter. And so if you're recruiting someone for a job at a startup, that job is objectively worse than being a janitor in every way. Like being an early employee at a startup is incredibly grueling and hopefully it pays off, but you have no guarantee that it will.
00:42:41 · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Ty Morse
And the only way to make someone be genuinely super excited about that and not be doing tiny things to cut corners in ways that you'll never see and performing tiny acts of disloyalty that you'll never find out about is for them to be fully bought in, that they are helping to get to the moon, and that their work is needed in that. [00:43:03] S0: It's the same situation, I think, at Boeing versus SpaceX, where Boeing, you know, you ask some random engineer, you're like, what are you working on? And it's like, I'm working on some space capsule. And you ask someone random at SpaceX. And it's like, what are you working on? What are you about? And they're like, we are making life multiplanetary.