00:52:29 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:52:29] S0: Go on. [00:52:31] S1: I made these signs, I laminated them, and I put them in the bathrooms. And the signs said, times are tight, everyone has to do their part. We ask that you participate in the cost of maintaining this bathroom. Every square of toilet paper so stupid. Every square of toilet paper costs $0.10 Every pump of soap costs $0.15 Every paper towel costs a 0.25. What's that? [00:53:00] S0: Someone smells woke. [00:53:02] S1: Well, and then I put these like collection boxes. I didn't want you know, I wasn't trying to get $0.45 or whatever. I just wanted to see what would happen. And I went back the next day. I waited till after hours, and I put these up everywhere. I went back the next day, and there was like real money inside. [00:53:23] S0: Like a few $100 or something? Or like a few tens of dollars? [00:53:26] S1: A few tens. [00:53:27] S0: And
00:53:27 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:53:27] S1: it's like this completely nonsensical request. What are we Americans or what? Like, what do you mean you're going to look at this sign that requests you to pay for your toilet paper? There's like absurd on its face, undignified, and completely unnecessary requests from JPMorgan, the corporation. Like, nothing about it made sense. And yet, people put money into the box, which makes me feel like people have an overwhelming bias to just do the thing they feel like they're supposed to do. And that is actually a pro social instinct. Like, we shouldn't be trying to decide our own Bart fares or something. But then when the moment calls for it, and you, as a founder or as a cult leader, see that there is just a quarter turn to be made that leads us to a more glorious future, but everybody has to get on board, It is your job to look inside your mental dictionary of language and identify 500 to 1,000, it's not that many words in the right order, that is going to jailbreak people and reprogram them to come and join you off the path. And it's very doable. And it has been done again and again, in big ways. And in small ways. It's been done to convince an entire nation to continue fighting a war. It's been done to convince racists to consider the possibility of allowing civil rights. It's been done to inspire a nation to go to the moon. I mean, these things, we've seen them, we just don't really recognize them for what they are, which is packaging 1,000 words in the right order in combination with the right curation, and delivering them such that they jailbreak people at scale. It's so doable.
00:55:25 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:55:25] S0: So like the Napoleon situation, where if you give the facts, you are going to go guard this place. And these cannons are going to shoot at you. And every single person that has previously gone here has gotten shot. And if you give those facts, probably not very many people are like, Yes, I want to be suicidal. But then suddenly, give it in slightly different order, and people are lining up, you know, voluntarily joining. What other examples are there in situations that you've seen, where people rephrased a set of facts, and like, not even facts, but almost feelings and reasons for doing things, [00:56:01] S1: in [00:56:02] S0: order to get people to take irrational action?
00:56:05 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:56:05] S1: Cicero. Cicero's political career should have ended before it began. He was a new man, didn't have a lot of money. He was not liked by the patricians, by the most powerful men of his time. He had the gift of oratory. He was considered the second best orator after this other senator called Hortensius, who was like the man. And Cicero was like second banana. And Cicero took on this case that seemed absolutely impossible. Not impossible because of the facts, but impossible because of whom he needed to convince. Cicero's job was to get a jury to find guilty the governor of Sicily, who had abused his power blatantly and engaged in corruption, theft, violence, or just a total thug. The reason that this would be very difficult is that the jury who would decide would be made up of people who hated Cicero, loved the guy, or were friends with him, the governor of Verres, and had also been bribed. So he had to get these people to find him guilty. Now, everything's about incentives, right? So all the incentives have gone in the other direction. What can Cicero do or say to break those incentives? What he did was he used his speeches to turn it into a trial of the jury. He said, this is not about trying this man. Everyone knows he's guilty. Who's on trial is you. And it's whether you can be bought. And it's whether you will let innocence suffer so that you can protect your friends. That's what's on trial. And he completely flipped the incentives for them. Now they're voting for themselves. Right? So I think that's a really good example, maybe from a long time ago. But things don't change that much. Humans haven't changed that much. We have answers to a lot of our questions, if we're willing to look back more than like ten minutes ago.
00:58:11 · Ty Morse
[00:58:11] S0: So you brought up this idea of if you are on the attack, you always want to focus the point of attack as small as you possibly can. And instead of saying, you know, I'm attacking like Anduril, you want to say like, I am attacking Palmer Luckey, and it's this one character that people can kind of get behind in a narrative that they can believe in. If you are on the defense, then you want to, you know, if you're a journalist and you're getting attacked, you don't want to say, Oh man, I'm getting attacked. You want to be like, You are attacking journalism itself. And so suddenly you have this like army of people that are like, I agree that journalism should be free and open, and people should be able to share whatever they want to share and do research. And so suddenly, it's like a greater cause than yourself. How's... Tell me about the difference between those two things and how they marry together.
00:58:55 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:58:55] S1: Yeah, it's like the concept of pressure in physics, which is when you want to apply pressure, so when you're on offense, pressure is force over surface area, right? P equals FA. So if you want to apply maximum pressure, let's say that the amount of force that you have to bring to bear is constant, you are going to decrease the surface area. So if I wanted to attack you, I'll recap a little bit what you already described here, but I'm not going to attack like podcasters. I wouldn't even attack you, the person. Because you've got friends, you have a good reputation. I would attack one really specific thing that you have done that if that's true, unravels so much else about you. So for example, let's say, right, Ty pretends to be a nice guy who cares about others. But I have discovered that last month, he received a Bitcoin payment from the Saudis. And now, I don't have to say he's corrupt, he's a liar, he's not actually nice. I don't have to get people to believe all of those things. But if they believe that you got a Bitcoin payment from the Saudis, then they will ask themselves, why is that? Is it a bribe? Can I trust what he's saying? Which of those interviews is actually fake? Is he lying when he says he wasn't a spy? Is he a liar? Does he have a political agenda? Are his interviews fake? All these things, they're now asking themselves. Whereas if I had said that, if I said, hey, everybody, all his interviews are fake and he's a liar, wouldn't land. Okay? If you're on defense, you want to diffuse the pressure so that there's less on you. The amount of force that they're applying, you don't get to change. But what you can do is you can spread the surface area. And that does a couple of things. One is you diffuse it so that not as much of it is about you, and it's sort of like distracting. But two is, remember we said earlier, what makes someone root for you is that you represent something they like, something they want, or something they see in themselves. So in that moment, if you morph yourself into the thing people like or the thing people are rooting for, like if you break into your constituent parts the reasons that people would root for you and remind people about that.