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.
00:43:19 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:43:19] S1: Mhmm. There are three levels to to a story for a company. The first level, and these are like in ascending order of difficulty as well, but the first level is just literally what are you even doing? Half of startups and half of startup founders probably can't even articulate just that. What is this thing? Level two is what does that represent? What is the upshot of you doing this successfully? And then level three is what is the shape of the dent in the universe and in society if this works? Like, this actually works. And so for SpaceX, level one might be we're building a rocket. Pretty cool, not maximum cool. Level two is we're building a rocket to restore American spaceflight from the private sector to revive an industry that's been stagnant for decades. More inspiring, not final form. Level three would be we're restoring spaceflight from America, humanity's last best hope, because we need to make mankind an interplanetary species. And so the levels of this, they're all true. They're all as realistic. You know, if one happens, then two will probably happen, then three might happen. Know, like, These three levels correspond to the quality of talent you can get and how hard they'll work for you. So A minus talent will work A minus hard for the first thing, but A plus plus talent will dedicate their lives and sacrifice sleep and food and hobbies for the third thing. So a lot of founders, and when you talk about starting a cult, what do you need? You need the vision for the cult. That first level is not cult level. The second level on the edge, but the third level, that's the cult level. So you need to have going more like assembling the ingredients for a cult as we go along. One is you need the cult leader. You need to be willing, ready and able. And you need to be able to build the relationships and the personal trust and loyalty to do it. Two is you need that big mission. And the mission is that level three of story of what people are trying to achieve. Something that I've been thinking about is, right now, today, everybody is so worried about distribution. Everyone is obsessed with distribution. And in a way, I'm happy because part of that is what going direct was meant to do is build your own distribution. But distribution raises the question of what are you distributing? What are you distributing?
00:46:04 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:46:04] S0: It like clavicular where I mean, know, you may get like 2,000,000,000 views last month, but then you ask like, what what is the thing that you want in the world? And I can't tell you [00:46:14] S1: what comes of it. And now now for him, if his goal is exposure and to get people to think about Look, Matt and Looks, Max saying maybe he actually did achieve his goal. Whether that's our goal or not is indifferent. Achieved, let's say his goal. But think of it like a complete story, like a dish. And first, you've got the ingredients, you have to pick what you're cooking, and you have to get the ingredients. Then you have the preparation. And then you have the plating. Distribution is the plating. And so if it's plated crappy, people are not going to want it. That can undermine a really good dish. But if the dish is good enough, it can overcome good plating and good plating can't save a bad dish. So like the first part on ingredients is what actually is the story? And do you have the facts to back it up? Do the facts match the story that you're trying to tell? So today, a couple hours before I came here, I attempted to design my own sushi roll. I don't recommend it. I went to a restaurant, and it was super well reviewed. And I saw the sushi chef, and he seemed like he was really good. And I was like, I'm just gonna. [00:47:28] S0: How hard can it be?
00:47:28 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:47:28] S0: How hard can it be? [00:47:29] S1: I'm gonna just do things. I'm gonna be high agency and design my own sushi roll. And the waitress is like, okay. I'm like, here I go. And I listed, like, stuff I like. And I just made a list of things that I like. And she was like, Okay. [00:47:45] S0: We will put this together. [00:47:48] S1: Highly inadvisable. It was like that pizza that has like the M and M's and the rotisserie chicken. That was my sushi roll. I ate like half of it. The plating was [00:48:00] S0: beautiful. The [00:48:02] S1: preparation was very skillful. But no amount of skill no pair of skilled hands could have saved the list that I gave to that waitress and could have overcome like my judgment. And so the cartoon of Waldo from Where's Waldo Sitting at a And he's like, nobody ever asks, how's Waldo? People are always asking, what podcast can we go on? How do we get our message out? How do we make our tweet go viral? And very rarely do people ask, what are we trying to say? And if your message sucks, the ingredients are bad, and the dish is inherently not good, right? If your message sucks, you could have a two minute Super Bowl commercial, you could go on Joe Rogan, you can have a billboard in Times Square, and nobody is going to care because it's not about distribution if your message is not good. [00:49:00] S0: Yeah, there's also this amazing... Did you ever watch the Simon Sinek talk where he was talking about the why, how, and then what? [00:49:07] S1: Yeah, the start So it's of
00:49:09 · Ty Morse
[00:49:09] S0: just this amazing... So basically, like these concentric circles, and at the center, it's the why. And like, why do you do what you do? And then it's how, how do you do it? And then what are you actually doing? And he said the best storytellers, like Steve Jobs, he's like, he starts with a why, and he's saying, you know, this is what, you know, like, this is why we do what we do at Apple, which is why we wake up in the morning. We are, you know, for Elon, it's like, we are making life multiplanetary, that is our mission, that is why we wake up in the morning, and then it's like, how do we make life multiplanetary? That might be we build rockets that are reusable and all this stuff, and then it's like, What do we do? And it's like, I'm, you know, soldering something. And I think most, you know, when I have most interactions with people at, like, a party, I will say, you know, Who are you? And they will basically start with the what. They will be like, I am building AI spreadsheets, and I'm like, I don't really care. If you start with, and then the best storytellers, like, they don't do that. They start with, Here's why, like, I am not doing a podcast, I am trying to help. You know, if I look at like my mission, it's like, I want to help the highest leverage people in society, our founders. And so how do you get more founders to start companies in the right companies? And it's like, Okay, we need, you know, for me, it's I want more people to even realize that they can start companies, is the first thing. And then two, I want the people that do start companies to work on more important missions. And so then it's like, okay, well, that's our why, then we're gonna probably do a bunch of interviews that are not, like, directionally they won't get a million views, but they do kind of show like, okay, go work on nuclear reactors, or go do cloud seeding, or all these other things, because that is, like, directionally correct. And over time, you'll just build this brand of, you know, there's all these other podcasters, and then there's like Relentless, and they're like celebrating, you know, great founders and great companies. And like, if I'm directionally, you know, associated with that, and I believe in the idea that we want great companies and more great founders, then I like, I'm aligned with Relentless.