Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder of Rostra, an advocate of “going direct,” and the writer of Flack.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Lulu Meservey explore why the traditional communications playbook is no longer effective, why so many politicians come across badly on TV, and how to be a great leader.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I’ve been following you for a long time online, and you’re really interesting in having understood earlier than most that the old-fashioned communications playbook doesn’t work anymore because the old-fashioned structure of media doesn’t exist anymore. Perhaps let’s take a step back. What would somebody who was at the top of the comms game have suggested 25 or 20 years ago to a company when they were launching a big new product or when they were dealing with a critical media story? What would the advice have been about what they should do under those circumstances?
Lulu Meservey: Back then, communications were very centralized. You hear people reminiscing that there were three TV channels, and that was more than 25 years ago, but still, there were many fewer TV channels and many fewer online channels. YouTube was not what it is. Twitter is not what it is. So you had to go to the gatekeepers. The game was that if you could win over the gatekeepers who had the audience, then you could essentially borrow their audience for a moment while they told their audience something good about you. They had the people, the following, and the trust. The game was to find the ten people there, win them over, and then they would vouch for you to the audience.
Mounk: So you lunch and dine with the beat reporter, the New York Times columnist, all of those traditional journalists, and you hope that they’re going to tell your story for you.
Meservey: Yes, and today, even when you talk to people who are sort of éminence grise—I say this in a respectful way—in the PR world who know everybody and have been doing this for a long time, their go-to move is still to go wine and dine the editors or to put you in front of an editorial board. I learned about this thing called “desk sides,” which I guess originates from you just popping up on the side of someone’s desk and trying to become friends with them. But apparently, you have your handler take you around and essentially meet with all of these people and try to earn their favor.
Mounk: Huh, interesting. Though it was effective in a different kind of media landscape, why do you think that isn’t effective anymore? If you’re trying to launch a product, get your startup better known, or get the word out there, it still feels like it would be pretty useful to have a favorable mention of your product or your company in the New York Times. Surely that still makes a difference. Why is that no longer, by and large, the kind of game you should play?
Meservey: Yeah, well, first of all, doing that is a “nice-to-have.” Having people on your side is always better than not, and having friends is always better than not. I am not one of those people who says that the New York Times is completely irrelevant. There is some relevance, especially with specific audiences. If you’re selling to the government or if you’re about to IPO, there certainly is relevance. You don’t have to burn those boats in order to go do something else.
However, the something else that we’re about to talk about is a lot more effective. That something else is now decentralized, going from you to many. There are still people in your audience who are more influential than others—people who are literal influencers or creators or whose voices just carry a lot of weight. But there are still very many of them compared to 25 years ago or even a decade ago. So it’s more decentralized. You’re going one-to-many.
It’s much more dependent on trust and credibility than it was before because it’s not just that you win over one person, they trust you, and then they vouch for you. You have to be earning that trust over and over with so many people in so many quarters constantly. Lastly, what’s emerging is this lot of AI slop, and it’s coming from people and from companies. You see companies put things out there that are indistinguishable from ChatGPT when it was GPT-3.5, and that just doesn’t cut it anymore. So the bar for cutting through, and the bar for quality, is a lot higher.
On the topic of many-to-many, by the way, here’s an important caveat: it’s no longer just one person speaking on behalf of the entire enterprise. It’s not just the CEO speaking on behalf of the company or the candidate speaking on behalf of the campaign. Now you have employees weighing in—employees of the campaign or people who belong to that political movement weighing in. Truly is many, many, many-to-many, where sometimes the voices of employees are actually more important than what the CEO is saying.
For example, you have employees speaking out about workplace conditions or doubts about the company or disgruntled employees who leave. What they’re saying can actually make much more of an impact than a press release or an announcement from the company. So if you’re the CEO, you need to know that you have tens or hundreds of alternate spokespeople working in your company, and they all need to be aligned. It’s not something where you just speak for everybody and they all stay silent.
Mounk: Yeah, I’m thinking of this book that Clay Shirky wrote a long time ago, where he distinguished between a world of one-to-many communication and the world we’re now in of many-to-many communication. In the old world, there just weren’t a lot of people around who could reach a large audience. So if you wanted to reach a large audience, you were basically dependent on those desk sides, those lunches, those dinners, because the number of people who could say, hey, this is an amazing new tech product, were the tech editor of the New York Times and of Wired and perhaps of 60 Minutes or something like that. Unless you were able to get one of them to tell your story, you would have had to rely on word of mouth.
Now, for some kinds of products, word of mouth might work—they’re so addictive or so convincing that if you just give them to a hundred people, they spread like a virus to lots and lots of others. But that’s going to be a relatively limited number of products that have those properties.
Now we’re in a world of many-to-many communication, where the set of people who can reach a wide audience has hugely expanded—both because a lot of people have significant social media followings and because, if you can create content on social media that is sufficiently viral, it takes off. All of that word of mouth can happen on social media platforms. It doesn’t have to be in-person word of mouth, and that creates these new avenues of communication.
Meservey: I think the lazy way to approach this is to say, it doesn’t matter too much how interesting we are; if we can just get in front of people, we will force them to see us. They read the Wall Street Journal, and we will get in the Wall Street Journal somehow through these relationships. Then we will non-consensually force our news into their eyeballs, and they’re going to like it. This is a caricature, but it’s the extreme version of laziness, where you’re not trying to be particularly interesting. You’re just saying, we’ve got news, we’re going to force it into your feed or into your paper.
The other way to do this–which I think is much better–is harder. You have to challenge yourself to be so fascinating and for your news to be so arresting that you could whisper it to ten people, and they couldn’t help but each tell ten other people, and those people couldn’t help but tell ten other people. If you put in the extra work upfront, you’re basically putting a multiplier or leverage behind the message. Mathematically, if each person wants to tell a bunch of other people, you’re much better off for obvious reasons than if you tell five people and have them each want to tell a bunch of people. That is much better than you telling a thousand people upfront and calling it a day because it’s so boring that they’re not going to talk about it anymore.
Mounk: I think that people always underestimate the importance of having the right viral message and overestimate the importance of doing it in the right way and perhaps even having the right advice. I’m thinking about times when I’ve published books, and I’ve heard that from friends as well, where if you’re publishing a book that, for whatever reason, speaks to that moment—that has a message that people want to be hearing—then most of the time when your book is really successful, it’s because it has a message that people already want to be hearing, which is a little depressing.
You’re going to end up thinking that your PR person, or usually the marketing professional at your publisher, is really amazing because they’re booking you on all these great shows and making all of these things happen for you. If you have a book that might be a good book, might even be a more interesting book, but that doesn’t have that product-market fit—that doesn’t really fit into that moment or what people want to be hearing or what producers want to be hearing from—you’re going to start getting frustrated with your PR or marketing person, saying the last one was much better. They could get you on whatever show, and this person isn’t getting you on that show, so they must have worse contacts or must not be putting in as much work.
Most likely, there are differences between very good people and less good people, but it’s not actually a difference in that person. Sometimes it’s the same dumb person doing the same damn thing. The difference is in what you’re selling and whether your message happens to have demand at that time.
Meservey: I would say the person reaching out, or the medium—the shows that you choose or the tweets that you write—these things matter. They’re not nothing. But their importance really pales in comparison to how interesting the message actually is. People do not think enough about making themselves interesting and relevant to other people. The challenge would be: can you describe this in a way that someone who hears it is going to tell their family about it over dinner? They’re going to know how to describe it, and they’re going to want to bring it up. If not, you’ve failed the test. If nobody wants to pass it on, if they don’t know how to talk about it, you’ve failed the test. You reach however many people you reach with the first volley. You force yourself into their feed, they have to listen to it. Maybe you tricked them into listening to it because they’re scrolling past it, and then there are just no legs after that.
That’s true laziness if you’re focusing on the medium—like, do I get on the show? Then you’re on the show, and you say something so bland and insignificant that nobody ever wants to revisit it again. The same goes for books, ideas, companies, product launches—you name it.
Mounk: Because you’re talking about the message once you’re on the show, I find that the few times I’ve had media training, it’s not clear to me that it gave the right advice. Basically, what it said was: you go into the show with the three points you want to make, and whatever happens, you bring those points in. You’re extremely disciplined about bringing in those points. You have this battle plan for the conversation, the purpose of which is to get those talking points out.
I think it depends a little on what you’re trying to do. If you’re launching a product, I can understand how you’ve got to save the day on which it goes on sale, whatever happens. Or there’s one particular selling point of this product that you need to make sure somehow comes up. For my purposes, where I want to sell a book or I want people to become paying subscribers of my Substack—sure, I can see that.
But I find that if I’m too focused on getting across the points I want to make, I become inauthentic. I become kind of weird. It can be jarring because, even if you’re doing it relatively elegantly and subtly, people can smell that you’re trying to bring the conversation back to what you want to say. The person I’m having a conversation with is probably thinking, this guest isn’t great because they’re not actually answering my questions; they’re just going back to their talking point.
Do you think that is one of the pieces of conventional wisdom people should question? Should people stick to their talking points, or should they be more authentic?
Meservey: Most people are excessively media trained. What’s happening is not that you’re training sophistication into the person, but that you’re training personality out of them and training the edge out of them. I’m a big believer in not excessively media training somebody because the vibes of the person are much more important than the specific words they say. People are left with an impression of you as a person.
According to some studies, over 90% of that impression is based on your vibes, aura, body language, tone of voice, and appearance rather than the actual words you say. So if you have to make the trade-off of sacrificing some of your vibes, personality, and sparkle in order to say the right words, that’s a horrible trade-off. There are probably 50 people alive who don’t have to make that trade-off. Maybe there are 50 people in America who don’t have to make it. If you’re Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, maybe if you’re Donald Trump or Pete Buttigieg—people who have extreme talent for weaving talking points in while making it seem natural—then great. It’s not a trade-off; you can do both.
For the vast majority of people, there is some trade-off. You have to be very careful how much of that you trade. The other thing to remember is that, in most cases, the product is the person. If you’re trying to promote your book or your Substack, the product is actually you. It’s not the one specific book or piece of writing; it’s your thoughts and you as a person.
For example, Bari Weiss and The Free Press—now going to CBS—the predominant source of trust or credibility around The Free Press was whether you liked or trusted Bari. She as a person represented the product. There are a lot of people who hate Bari Weiss, but I don’t know anybody who hates her but loves The Free Press.
You represent the product; you represent the company. If you show up as a clunky, inauthentic poser, that casts a pall over the whole company. One of my favorite people in tech, Scott Wu, is the leader of a company called Cognition, which creates a coding agent. He’s someone who is most comfortable in front of a computer and not trying to hold forth, but he has gone on podcasts because he wants to tell people about their product, Devin. The feedback I’ve gotten is that the best podcast he ever did was one where he was severely sleep-deprived and undisciplined, a little impatient and very raw. People loved it because it was the closest they got to the real Scott. When you hang out with him, he’s a great hang, but when he’s in front of a camera, he’s usually a little uncomfortable.
Mounk: This is the advice I got before I did my first ever television interview, which was a CNN interview about doping, of all things. Someone told me that if you want to be good on TV, you just have to be yourself, which sounds similar to what you’re saying. The ironic thing is that it’s the one thing that’s impossible to do when you’re starting out on TV.
I think by now I can more or less do it. I’ve done enough broadcasting, podcasting, and media appearances that I’m not fully myself, but I’m close. That takes a lot of practice and a lot of hours because it’s a very unnatural situation—to be in a room with someone, or nowadays as likely as not on Zoom, and pretend that you’re just having a conversation while knowing that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people are listening to you.
Do you think that’s the right advice—that to be good on TV, you just have to be yourself? Does that hold for everybody, or are there some people who really shouldn’t be themselves on television? How do you accomplish being yourself?
Meservey: One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten is that nobody gives a shit about you. People don’t care about you that much. If you go out there and flop and it doesn’t go well, people will just move on. Nobody is thinking about you that much.
For some people, if you’re Sam Altman and you go on an interview and flop, it might get replayed a lot, and it’s more consequential because your company is more consequential. For the vast majority of people, it is just not that big of a deal.
Mounk: That depends on whether you flop or you flop. Even if you’re a no-name person and you have a meltdown on air—thirty seconds of complete blankness where you suddenly can’t speak—that’s going to go viral even if you’re nobody. I think that’s the fear that people have.
Meservey: That’s an edge case. I think you can control whether you’re going to have a screaming meltdown. Not everyone can, but there are the Katie Porter examples we’ve been seeing recently.
For most people, the range of outcomes is pretty tame. You might have a mediocre interview where you wanted to say some things and forgot. Just don’t stress so much about it. People are a little like electrons in that way—once you observe them, they change in the process of being observed. Once the cameras are on, it’s nearly impossible to be your normal, natural self.
I pregame for this. I get nervous about these things, even though I know we’re friendly and you’re not trying to secretly destroy me with a gotcha question. I’m still a little nervous. I just walk around and remind myself that if it doesn’t go well, it’s not a big deal. For most people, it takes a lot of practice. People say the presence of so many fashion models gives us unrealistic expectations about bodies.
So many influencers, so many extremely gorgeous and charismatic people on TikTok and with podcasts give us unrealistic expectations for how we’re going to be in front of the camera. If we try to emulate that, most of us fall into this uncanny valley where we’re not ourselves anymore, but we’re also not Jake Paul or whatever. What are we then? It’s this strange in-between space that doesn’t appeal to people as much as if you had just stayed put and stayed yourself.
Mounk: That’s very interesting. To go back to the point about excessive media training, I was thinking about that not with Katie Porter—who perhaps could use a little more media training or just more hiding of her true personality—but with Abigail Spanberger. I saw clips of her debate with Winsome Earle-Sears the other day. She was in a situation where she knew she was going to be asked about something that put her in a bind.
The person running as lieutenant governor, who in a sense was running for the position independently but was obviously on her slate, was discovered to have sent text messages meant for a friend but sent to a Republican instead. The messages said that this moderate Republican, who had said something positive about a moderate Democrat, deserved to be killed, and his kids deserved to be killed—“those little fascists,” he said. The kids were two and four years old.
How should someone like Spanberger play this? She might think that, for whatever reason, she can’t distance herself too clearly from that lieutenant governor candidate—either because other Democrats would be mad if she did, or because she thinks it would be hard to govern if she won the governor’s race and had a Republican lieutenant governor. That means she knows this debate is coming up and that she’s going to be asked about it.
She came up with a slightly wooden set of talking points that she kept sticking to: “I don’t approve of those messages. Everybody’s running as an individual. I think I’m going to be a great governor of Virginia,” or something along those lines. What would you have advised her? Is the key point that you just have to be on the right side of this—that you have to go into the debate having taken your distance from that candidate?
I’m not talking morally here but strategically. Is the only way to win this comms battle to have a leg to stand on, and the only way to have a leg to stand on is to disavow it—to say, I don’t want to be governing with him; this is terrible? If not, is there some way to get around this? Because what she ended up doing just looked so unnatural, so rehearsed, and so media trained that it was deeply, deeply off-putting.
Meservey: First of all, I think that guy sucks. This isn’t sincere advice meant to help them, but it’s useful as a case study. One important thing to remember is that if you’re trying to do both things at once, it’s not that you’re pleasing both sides—it’s that you’re pissing off both sides. That’s always how it goes. If you’re trying to make nobody mad, you end up making everybody mad. You’re better off picking who’s going to be mad at you and for what than trying to make nobody mad, because again, everybody will be mad at you.
People are so fed up with wishy-washy, cowardly, half-measure responses that they see right through them and actually look for them. You saw this with the initial Cracker Barrel rebrand response. Anytime there’s a statement from a person or a company, people are looking for them to take a stance. You can take a stance and have some people be mad; that’s better than everybody being mad.
In this situation, it’s not an option to give a non-answer. You have to have a view on it. The clearly correct view is that it’s unacceptable. There’s no world in which you can defend it. However, there are two levels of “unacceptable.” One is that the action was unacceptable, but it doesn’t represent the entire person, and the other merits of that person outweigh this. The other is that the action represents the entire person and reveals something within them that is unsalvageable. Opponents would argue the latter—that this action represents the person and shows something deep inside his soul that is spoiled. If she wants to defend him without defending the action, she should clearly condemn the action and say, I don’t stand by this. No one reasonable would stand by this. But I also think he doesn’t stand by this, because what I know of him as a person is… and then continue with the positive framing. What I believe he’s going to do in office is… and so on.
Therefore, while this act is completely reprehensible and unacceptable, she could argue that he has now tasted what it is like to lash out in a moment of anger and perhaps has become more empathetic because of it. You have to score it somehow.
Mounk: Yeah, why is that? I agree with you, though I’m not sure the candidate is salvageable. Morally and politically, the smartest route would probably be to distance herself completely. But why is it that in three minutes you’ve come up with something that seems both better politically and less reprehensible morally than this addiction to not saying anything?
If a constraint exists for whatever political reason—let’s take it as a hard constraint—you can’t completely distance yourself from this candidate. Why can’t a politician be trained to go out there and say, these text messages are disgusting and reprehensible, but I know this person, and this is not what they represent? They might even say, all of us have said something off-color at some point, and it doesn’t always represent who we are. This was completely unacceptable, but I know him. I know this doesn’t represent who he is, and I think on the policies that matter, he’s going to do a better job for Virginia.
That line might not be perfect, but it’s something you can work with. Why, instead, are they advised to go out there and use wooden, legalistic language that avoids saying anything at all? This isn’t an isolated case. In the same debate, there was a question about trans girls having access to female changing rooms in Virginia schools and other related issues. The response was the same kind of non-response. Abigail Spanberger said, this is a decision for local districts and local parents and teachers to make, which doesn’t take any real stance.
As you said earlier, that approach ends up pissing off both sides. People who believe we should be fighting for those rights will say she’s not standing up for them, and others will sense she’s just trying to not own an unpopular position while still defending it. You may as well take a position outright, or go where the majority of people are, but instead you end up stuck in this middle ground.
I’m reminded of the congressional hearing with university presidents—Claudine Gay of Harvard and the presidents of Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania—who all failed to defend their institutions’ missions in a substantial way. They’re all now out of office. Why is it that the advice so often seems to be: don’t really say anything at all, even though it’s clearly ineffective?
Meservey: There are two types of public figures. One type is their own person, and everyone else has to deal with that and work with that. John Fetterman is an example. Palmer Luckey is an example. They are who they are. If you want to work with them, you need to figure out how to work with them because they are not going to change. You are going to change.
Then there are people who are machines that turn consultant advice into public statements. A lot of politicians are in this category, where they just aggregate consultant advice and then echo it. That doesn’t speak well of them as people because if you don’t have your own views, personality, and principles when it comes to these statements, how are we going to trust you to have your own backbone when it comes to anything else?
A lot of people are like this, and it comes from a place of fear. Each consultant knows that if they advise something safe, they will never be penalized for missed opportunities. They will only be penalized asymmetrically for mistakes. They are penalized for mistakes of commission, not omission. Therefore, the best way for them to continue collecting fees is to avoid mistakes of commission. If they can make sure you don’t say something stupid, it doesn’t matter if you miss an opportunity, as long as there is no specific error that can be pinned on them.
What ends up happening is a principal-agent problem where they act in their own self-interest. They are not trying to find the best possible outcome for you; they are trying to find the outcome that keeps them from being fired. You go along because you don’t have the clarity of moral vision or the strength of principle to override them. That is how you end up with weak public figures.
Mounk: This is something striking to me, particularly in the political ecosystem where, if you run a consultancy—especially on the Democratic side, where the thought constraints are stronger, but also on the Republican side in different ways—and you lose an election, plenty of people lose plenty of elections. The fact that you advised the losing campaign doesn’t stop you from being hired again.
If your candidate said something that upset the base and went viral on social media in a negative way, even if it actually increased that candidate’s chances of being elected, the next candidate might say, I don’t know if we can work with you. You are the people who put out that message a lot of allies hated. Some of my staff might get upset if I hire you. The incentive is not to make your candidate win; it’s to avoid bad publicity that might hurt your brand as a consultant.
The same is true in other cases. There was reporting that those university presidents had taken extensive advice from law firms, and I think they all took the advice of the same law firm before the congressional hearing. Those lawyers are risk-averse. They are not thinking about how to maximize the chance of a good outcome; they are thinking about how to minimize the chance that you say something that might have legal relevance. The result is that you end up being overtrained into not saying anything at all.
I want to go to another case I’m thinking of. I informally advised a minor Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 primaries. He was very charismatic in person, a big, booming personality. You thought, my God, once this person gets on the big stage and people see what he’s like, he’s going to do great. Then every time the camera turned on, he was terrible. His personality just disappeared.
Is that because some people are simply charismatic in person but not on TV? Is that something most people can overcome? Is there one kind of charisma that works in a room and another that works on a national debate stage? What do you think explains that?
Meservey: I think there’s something innate, which doesn’t mean that you can’t improve it or work on it, but I do think that people inherently have the mediums that best suit them. Some people are better in a small group. Some people are more charismatic in front of a large crowd. You ever see somebody who’s hugely charismatic talking to a massive rally, but then one-on-one they don’t seem that engaged?
Moun: I did a year in theater after college, and there was an actress at the theater I worked at who, if you talked to her in the canteen, was pretty and smart, but she seemed forgettable. You would never walk into the canteen and have your eyes drawn to her. Then she’d step on stage, and she was just magnetic. In front of a thousand people, she had something that attracted your attention and fascination in a remarkable way. When you saw her in private, she was perfectly pleasant and cute, but there was nothing charismatic about her in that context.
Meservey: I think Bill Clinton was more charismatic in front of a large crowd. I actually think Hillary Clinton is more charismatic in small groups. When you talk to people who have worked directly with her or interacted with her in an intimate setting, she can be very charismatic. In front of a stadium full of people, she’s not as charismatic as her husband, who obviously is a once-in-a-generation political talent.
Before we stray too far from this topic of how to give a straight answer and a strong answer without seeming to hedge, I want to raise the example of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential debate. Do you remember this? He was asked on stage about the death penalty, and the question was intense: if your wife, Kitty, were to be raped and murdered, would you support the death penalty for the person who did that? This has always bothered me so much because I feel like the correct answer, politically and strategically, would have been a layup.
His actual answer was this hemming and hawing and very academic response that made him seem not even human. Someone just talked about your wife being raped and murdered, and you’re going to sit back and go through your talking points? It’s insane. A very good answer, assuming this is what he believes, would have been: If someone in my family were subjected to that, and if this crime were committed against someone in my family, I would want to tear the perpetrator limb from limb. I would want to behead them with my bare hands. I would torture them in a chamber for a year. That is why you shouldn’t leave it up to me to decide in that moment out of emotion. That is why we need, as a society, to decide in advance the line between punishment and barbarism so that in the moment we’re not making decisions like that. Because if someone ever did that and I met them in person, I would commit horrendous crimes against them.
Mounk: There’s always the obvious emotion you feel that somehow, in those situations, you think you’re not allowed to share. If you want to defend this political position, obviously you can’t flip-flop. You’re campaigning on not having the death penalty. You can’t suddenly say, when someone brings up this hypothetical, let’s have the death penalty. That makes no sense.
Being against the death penalty is a defensible position. I think it is, and it’s not so clear that 1988 public opinion was such that you couldn’t win an election while opposing the death penalty. You still have to allow yourself to express human emotion—to say, of course I would want this person to suffer in the worst possible way. But that’s precisely why we need to make rules when we’re not the person who’s affected.
I think that’s right. You’re right that there’s this instinct because Abigail Spanberger feels she can’t completely distance herself from this other candidate. She feels she can’t express the anger and disgust over those messages. The only way you can avoid completely distancing yourself from that person is to express the anger and the disgust and then say, having expressed all of this, here’s why I still think they’re going to be better for the state of Virginia than the alternative.
I want to go to a broader question of what this means for communication today. If we are no longer in a world of one-to-many communication, if we’re in a world of many-to-many communication, and we’ve taken this detour of thinking about how to do well in media, what is the right strategy for a company launching a new product or for someone with an important message to communicate? You’ve talked a lot about the importance of directly communicating with your audience. What does that entail, and why do you think that’s a big part of the answer?
Meservey: Direct can mean a few things, and I mean all of them. One meaning of direct is to build your own audience and share directly with them, not just through middlemen or gatekeepers. Another meaning of direct is like you and I having a direct conversation—a frank and candid conversation. That is what people want as well. That is the advice Dukakis should have taken before going into that debate: speak directly, without mincing your words, and just say what you mean. People do not have the patience to sit through PR slop and corporate pablum to figure out what you are actually saying.
Another way of being direct is for the person or people directly responsible to have the message come from themselves, instead of filtering it through multiple layers. I mean all of these things. If you are a founder or a CEO starting something new today, or a political candidate—the founder of a movement to get yourself elected, the chief executive of the vision you are selling to voters—you need to have the message come directly from you. That does not mean you have to personally star in every video or show your face in every clip, but it must be your words and your ideas, not the average idea of seventeen lawyers and fourteen PR people. People can tell the difference.
It also has to be presented directly and forcefully, without dancing around. Get to the point. Even on short videos, for example, people post clips on X where the drop-off after thirty seconds is probably around ninety percent. I do not remember the exact numbers, but it falls off a cliff. People’s attention does not sustain, especially if you have not earned it in the first few moments. You need to say it upfront instead of dancing around and building up to it.
History is long. It is never about just one moment. Politicians would do well to remember this. It is not just about one election or one statement. There are many things ahead. C. S. Lewis, in a different context, said that every small win is a strategic point from which a thousand more victories can be gained. That is true. It is not just about winning one specific thing; it is about building for the long term—whether that is building trust or relationships with voters, or, if you are a company, building an audience so that you can continue to grow in the future.
What I hate to see is when people create something great and genuinely interesting and then give it away to someone else—donating engagement to them. If you are starting a company and have created something genuinely viral and engaging, but you were too scared and did not believe in yourself enough to put it out under your own name, you may have donated that success to someone else. If you hand it to an influencer and it blows up when they post it, you have just donated a bunch of engagement and audience to them for no reason other than fear. I hate to see companies do this.
Mounk: What are some examples of people pulling communications off brilliantly? We have talked about several examples in politics and a few outside of politics where people did communications badly. What are the kinds of things we should emulate?
Meservey: Given the news of last week, and since I already mentioned Bari in this podcast, I’ll use her as an example. There are many things Bari Weiss has done that are brilliant communications, even though a lot of people are mad at her or don’t like her. In fact, that is part of the package.
A lot of people think that to have good communications and win people over, they need to be as bland as possible so that nobody gets mad. What they are doing is protecting the downside but capping the upside. It is a higher floor and a tremendously low ceiling. What she has done, which I think is the right way to do it, is elicit strong feelings within your tribe and get your people to be diehards. If others are mad about it, it either does not matter or it actually helps you.
A lot of the vitriol directed at Bari—and there is a lot, some of it antisemitic and some of it simply cruel—is not pleasant. If I were her, reading through the mentions, I think I would probably have a mental breakdown. She is much stronger in that sense than most people. I am sure it is not fun, but strategically, for what she is trying to build, it is not the worst thing. It shows what she stands for and what she is not willing to back down from, even in the face of anger.
That is one example: taking a stand and being willing to say, you are going to be part of this movement, and you are not. We do not see eye to eye, and that is okay.
Mounk: That’s a hard trade-off because it depends on how much you care about the success of your enterprise versus having a pleasant life. Bari is fantastically successful, but having the knowledge that in any room you walk into there will be people who genuinely like and admire you, and also people who are snarkily texting their friends saying, can you imagine who I’m in a room with right now?—that has a high cost.
You’re right that it is the right strategy, and it is one of the reasons The Free Press has been successful. There is a basic rule of politics that whatever you are for, some people will be against it. Whenever you embrace a cause, you are building a coalition, but you are also building your anti-coalition. Trying to avoid that leads to a kind of indeterminateness where perhaps nobody dislikes you, but nobody likes you either. Nobody has a reason to trust or follow you.
The personal costs involved in this are not trivial, and it makes people who are willing to bear those costs—whether you agree with them or not—quite admirable. There is this persistent charge that gets thrown around about anyone people disagree with, calling them a grifter. Nearly always, that is wrong. The easy thing, the convenient thing, is not to break with your political tribe, not to say things that are controversial, and to minimize the hate you get online. That is almost always the easier choice.
Not doing that is rarely, if ever, driven by cynicism. It is nearly always driven by genuine belief because the cost is significant. Most people would rather get along with their friends, go to dinner parties without being asked critical questions, have a standard media job, and make some amount of money than be Bari.
Meservey: That’s why most people won’t be great. That is leadership, and it’s not for everybody.
Leadership is being willing to suffer costs that fall disproportionately on you personally for the good of the enterprise, so you can build something enduring that outlasts yourself. I’m biased here because Bari is a friend, but even if you are ideologically on the total opposite side of what she is doing, the principle still stands. You have to be willing to say, these are not my people, in order to say through contrast, these people are. That is the movement you are going to build.
It requires stepping up and having that courage because leaders do things all the time that are terrible for themselves personally. They see their children less than their employees do. They get less sleep than their employees do. They get more death threats than their employees do. All of these things are part of being the tip of the spear for the movement you are trying to build.
It absolutely sucks to be the person facing that, but somebody has to do it, and there is no movement without a leader willing to bear it.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Lulu discuss why moderates are struggling to communicate well, how Substack became a competitor for the New York Times, and how to make a boring idea sound radical. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
