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.
01:01:26 · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Ty Morse
If I'm attacking you, you would say she is attacking young entrepreneurs who are trying to make a run at creating something new in the media because she's on the side of the gatekeepers. And she doesn't want us to succeed. If you can convince people of that, now you have other pod podcasters and other young entrepreneurs being on your side, not necessarily because they care about you and your Saudi Bitcoin payment, but because you've reminded them about the thing you represent that is now under threat, that if you get hurt, all of them get hurt. It's a little bit human shield. It's a little bit, hey, if if they get me, they're going to get all of you too. So you better fight for me. But subtly. And so and so that can be wildly effective. [01:02:17] S0: It almost seems like the best example that I can think of where there's a specific thing that someone has done, and thus you can believe all the terrible things that you've heard about them. It's like, you went to Jeffrey Epstein's island. Thus, all the terrible things that I've ever heard about you align with that. Like, if you would do this one thing, then you must have been willing to do all those other things. [01:02:37] S1: Like your crave and your... Although that list is now so long that it sort of lost its potency. And like the optimal amount of being connected to Epstein is not zero. [01:02:48] S0: You want to be two connections. Yeah. You were in the know, but not directly connected.
01:02:48 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[01:02:48] S0: You want to be two connections. Yeah. You were in the know, but not directly connected. [01:02:54] S1: Yeah. You want to be like, who was it? Was it Jim Simons? You want to be like, he tried to get you and you said no. That's like, [01:03:01] S0: you have extreme moral [01:03:02] S1: character or lying on the ground. I think I think there's a quote from the Soviet Union, maybe during political upheaval that was like, we saw power just lying on the ground, and we picked it up. Or lying on the ground just for free, you know, if you get invited, and you don't go. So I don't know if that is the best example. But picture I don't want to give people a roadmap to ruining somebody's reputation. But if you have to fight, picture a piece of cloth, and it is very difficult to tear a piece of cloth with your bare hands. But if there's a nick in it, then the whole thing can tear open, right? Like when you see pro wrestlers You target [01:03:36] S0: that nick [01:03:36] S1: and it's little nick. Tear apart. Yeah. So, you know, tip for anyone who ever needs to rip their shirt off on camera, that's make sure you have the nick. [01:03:44] S0: When you think about building an aura, think building an aura is similar to you've done all these kind of steps that you talked about in this interview successfully over the course of many months or maybe even multiple years. And suddenly people will just default, you know, have this vision of who you are in their mind, and they will like auto support you or auto not want to support you. How do you actually build an aura for yourself?
01:03:44 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[01:03:44] S0: When you think about building an aura, think building an aura is similar to you've done all these kind of steps that you talked about in this interview successfully over the course of many months or maybe even multiple years. And suddenly people will just default, you know, have this vision of who you are in their mind, and they will like auto support you or auto not want to support you. How do you actually build an aura for yourself? [01:04:09] S1: I think that we do talk a little bit too much about aura. And there's a concept that I would like to bring back, that I would like to advocate for, which is the Roman concept of Auctoritas. It is a combination of authority and aura and influence and presence. It's more durable than just aura. Aura to me is connected to something evanescent and current that is happening right now. Aura today doesn't translate to aura tomorrow. It's sometimes tied to an event, but it's pretty fleeting. Whereas, auctoritas is you becoming the authority on something, domain or knowledge or something moral, where people look to you for something that is enduring. You also have a personal magnetism and presence, but that's not the real core of it. The core of it is what you stand for. And the delivery of it and your presence and your charisma, all of that is the plating or the preparation. But there has to be an iron core of what you stand for that is enduring and important. So I think we should reframe the quest for aura to a quest for auctoritas.