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?
00:08:29 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:08:29] S1: So a couple things on being unpredictable and chaotic. Chaotic is what people call you when they don't understand what's going on. It has no bearing on whether you understand what's going on. So if we were to decide to do something else with this space, which we wouldn't probably because it's so lovely. But, if you decided to just move in here and make this your studio, if you wanted to keep it as it was and add some cosmetic fixes, you could maybe put another plant or something. But if you wanted to turn this into a cathedral to podcasting and you wanted to really make it yours, that doesn't happen without a phase where it looks like you have destroyed this place. Doesn't happen. There's no path from A to B that doesn't go through something that looks like a pile of rubble where you've taken a really beautiful, lovely, totally functional room and wrecked it. Right? And people in the moment always forget that. What can help? If you care that people know that there's a destination, sometimes you do have to care because you have shareholders or your employees need to not freak out or sometimes you do have to care about other people. If you care about reminding people that from here to there, there is an ultimate destination past the chaos phase, I strongly recommend giving people the Domino's Pizza Tracker. You have to tell them what is the finished pizza. And you have to remind them constantly. So I, as a Pizza Tracker super user, find great comfort in being like, oh, they're just sprinkling the peppers on. They didn't forget about me. But in the moment, people forget about everything else. We're just trained to react to what's going on around us, which already gives us information overload, we don't have time to emotionally connect that back to the thing that we remember it's supposed to go towards. So just constantly remind people, we are here. This is the finished pizza. This is the finished podcast studio. This is the finished rocket. This is the finished plant, whatever it is. And here's where we are and give them constant updates on where you are.
00:10:41 · Ty Morse
[00:10:41] S0: Yeah, there's this fun thing where acquisitions are basically like organ transplants, and sometimes they take and sometimes they don't. I was listening to the Walter Isaacson biography of Elon on the right over here. And they were, basically I was listening to the moment where Elon took over X, you know, formerly Twitter, and at the time there was these like rounds of layoffs and cuts and they cut super deep, and then at one point, in order to kind of cull the herd into the people that actually wanted to be there and make sure that they were just all killers, they were thinking about sending out this email, and it was basically like, Here are our core values, and if you don't want to be a part of it, click this box and you'll get three months of severance and then you're out. And then right at the eleventh hour, Elon swapped it and was like, No, you have to opt in. You have to opt in to the hardcore culture that we're building. Why was that so important?
00:11:27 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:11:27] S1: Everything compounds and everything is... Everything good is better if it happens earlier. Getting rid of people who feel like a deep state inside your company who are going to be leaking and killing the morale of others and slowing things down and doing everything in that CIA sabotage manual to like wreck an organization from the inside, you want to do that as quickly as possible. And so moving that up front as opposed to letting people just kind of quiet quit later is a good idea. While we're talking about Elon and being unpredictable, though, one thing that always comes up is people say, well, you advocate for going direct. But look at Elon going direct, and he makes so many mistakes, and he puts his foot in his mouth. And the answer is you have to look at the net. The net result of this, you can't look at one tweet in isolation or one incident, there's nothing that gets built, not an audience, not a movement, not a company, there's nothing that doesn't get built with some errors along the way. You just have to bake it in. But having built the largest audience on the most significant social media platform, you're going to tell me that it's not worth it. Because over time along the way, people have gotten upset about things. So now he has got his own platform, not just as the owner, but as the owner of an account, and has a way to contest media narratives written by people who actively loathe him. And how is that possibly not worth it? So the reason I bring this up is because when people think about, Okay, I'm the founder, I'm the cult leader, I need to put myself out there. That feels bad. I'd rather just sit in my room and code. I'd rather just quietly go about my day and not expose myself to the tomato throwers of the global town hall. You can't think of it as how will people react to this thing I say or this thing I do. It is how will people care about what we're doing, if over the next year, five years, ten years, I'm not giving them a reason to follow along with the story.
00:13:42 · Ty Morse
[00:13:42] S0: You mentioned another podcast and the story of Napoleon basically sending people to die, and the language that he used to send people to die made them voluntarily sign up to do it. Do you want to talk about the like power of using the right language and in the context of that story?
00:13:58 · Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:13:58] S1: So what is language? What is language is it is symbols that represent ideas. And because no idea can be perfectly three sixty degrees encapsulated in something, they're a little bit of shorthand. And so the language becomes an association that evokes a mental image that then evokes feelings or ideas or connection, whatever else. So when you give something the right language, it makes people think about the thing, and it makes people think about the thing in a certain way. So in the case of Napoleon, he had these guys guarding a cannon that was within gunshot range of the Austrians. And the people guarding this cannon had 100% casualty rate. Not that they all died, but they all got shot. And so he needed to replenish guys to go guard this cannon. And so imagine you're going go to your troops and be like, who wants that job? It's like something out of the Simpsons is like comically difficult to pitch. And what he did was he gave this group a name, and he called them, means the men without fear. So instead of saying, would you like to go get shot guarding this cannon? He said, who are going to be the next batch of the men without fear? And he filled it with volunteers and people who raised their hands to be part of that. And this is how we get people for difficult missions, whether that is going to the moon or working for a startup, which when you describe what working for a startup is, it sucks. It sucks. And for someone to want that job, they have to picture it as something else, right? They have to picture this as we're bringing nuclear energy back to America. We're making humans an interplanetary species. We're making robots available in every home. That's the thing I'm doing. It's not that I'm sitting in this office for eighteen hours a day eating ramen out of a box. It's not that. It's A not B. So that's the example for language. This has happened, by the way, throughout history where the words we use shape how we see something, including literally. So in a lot of languages around the world, the word blue didn't exist for a long time because there's not a lot of blue in nature. So if you and I are just walking around in our loincloths or whatever Sorry for the image. We would have occasion to say, green, well, actually, sky is blue. So now I'm starting to question but people merged green and blue as one concept.